Theatre

Musical Review: Memphis [2011, Christopher Ashley]

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Ricky in Everything, Theatre | Leave a comment

The gorgeous Toronto Centre of Arts was home to the opening of the award winning Broadway musical Memphis Tuesday night. Now as you know, I don’t general find myself in a theatre setting (or North York) but the lure of watching a Tony winning musical named after a city I am about to visit next March was just too great for me to miss out on.

Memphis is a play loosely based on the life of DJ Dewey Phillips, one of the first DJ’s in America to play black music on white radio. The musical plays out over a course of a few years and chronicles Dewey (renamed Huey…where’s Louie?) as he struggles to play black music on white radio and in the process, he meets and falls in love with a black female singer named Felicia.

The play starts off with Huey strolling into an all black night club, where Felicia is singing and the people in the club are doing crazy dancing (like you used to see in the Gap commercials). I personally, have never entered a club to see people doing choreographed dancing – maybe I am going to the wrong clubs. Anyways, as you would expect, all the black people in the club immediately stop what they are doing and tells Huey to leave (although I would have preferred if one of them said “You get gone, son”). Recognizing the racial tension within the space, Huey proceeds to tell them he is in love with their brand of music (if this happened in 2011, it would obviously be dubbed ‘blackwave’ or something) and that he wants to promote it on the local radio. The club’s owner, and Felicia’s brother has doubt about his character.

The rest of the show plays out like the movie Honey, where Huey struggles to gain acceptance from the black community and at the same time, struggles to put the music on the air. Soon enough he does play some black music on the air and of course, things start rolling. The youth start listening, people start dancing, haters start hatin’ and so on. I won’t spoil the plot but as you would expect, there are struggles, drama and ultimately redemption for the characters involved.

I’m not particularly sure how to review a musical so here are some short notes about Memphis. This way I don’t have to make any attempt in tying them together in some grand scheme.

- If I wasn’t so sure that Memphis took place in Memphis in the 1950s, I woulda swore that everyone on stage was a hipster based on their wardrobe. Cardigans, colorful plaid, skinny trousers, thick rimmed glasses, side parts, sun dresses – it’s like a stroll thru Trinity Bellwoods on a summer afternoon.

- Can’t believe they couldn’t of worked in Ebony and Ivory but for most part, the music was quite good. Who would have known Bon Jovi founding member David Bryan was capable of writing catchy doo-wop tracks. One of the things I liked a lot about the music was that it was catchy and told a tale without treading into typical show-tune territory. Like a night at shake-a-tail, with better dancers.

- Speaking of dancing, everyone on stage was fantastic. The choreography was a nice blend of what I imagine dancing would have been back then mixed with the physicality of dance shows these days. What I mean by that is that everyone on stage was completely too fit and can pull off moves that would normally break a person’s neck.

- One of the things that constantly amaze me at these musicals are the sets. It’s like watching a low grade Transformers movie. It might be a box one minute, but the next thing you know, they pull a few levers, press a button and that little box becomes a freakin piano. I kinda want whoever designed these theatre props to make all the furniture in my house.

- I also appreciated the story of a DJ struggling to play what he wants. As someone who has DJ’ed on various occasions, I can understand the frustration one goes through when you are not allowed to play what you want although in hindsight, I probably shouldn’t of cued up 2Pac’s Hit ‘Em Up at my friend’s wedding.

At a running time of over two hours, the musical might have seemed long for the casual musical goer like myself. However, with funny modern day jokes, good music, a nice story and exceptional dancing, Memphis was quite an enjoyable time. Those looking to dip their toes into this theatre world find Memphis to be a welcoming experience.

Information:
Memphis
Toronto Centre for the Arts, 5040 Yonge Street
December 6-24, 2011
Tuesday – Saturday @ 7:30pm * Saturday and Sunday @ 2pm
Wednesday, December 7 & 14; Tuesday, December 20;
Thursday, December 22 and Friday, December 23 @ 2pm
Saturday, December 24 @ 1pm

Tickets can be purchased online at www.DancapTickets.com

SummerWorks Play Review: Hannah’s Turn, August 9

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Brian in Reviews, Summerworks, Theatre | Leave a comment

Toronto – If you were to make a list of great love affairs of the 20th century, you might not put Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger near the top. But Heidegger, a German philosopher who rather controversially joined and endorsed the Nazi Party in 1933, and Arendt, a Jewish thinker and student of Heidegger’s, had a torrid love affair when both were at the University of Freiburg. We know this in part because they wrote a stack of love letters to one another, which were published in English in 2004 in a book containing their correspondence from 1925 all the way to 1975.

It’s a fascinating story if you like history. Heidegger, one of the greats of 20th century existential and postmodern thought, and Arendt, his student and later a very well known political theorist herself: lovers against the backdrop of the early rise of National Socialism, a movement Heidegger joined, supposedly to try and sway it in scientific and humanitarian ways, and one which eventually forced Jews like Arendt to flee or be killed.

The play takes place both during the early days of their affair at Freiburg and much later, after Arendt moved to America and became a teacher in her own right. A Jewish student working for the University newspaper comes to her to get clarification on some comments she made about Heidegger, primarily her assertion that getting caught up in the Nazi Party was just a mistake, or an “escapade,” as she later calls it. Her defense of a man who seemed like such a strident party member, particularly when he joined, was made rector of the university, and proceeded to talk and write a great deal about Germany’s future under the führer mystifies this student, whose father was in a concentration camp. Arendt tries to show her that things just aren’t that simple, that her ideas of good and evil are just too naive, but never really changes her mind.

Richard Clarkin portrays Heidegger very well, from professor to seducer to party apologist to foregiveness seeker, and Leora Morris is adequately innocent and earnest as the student, Eva. The star is Severn Thompson as Arendt, however, who has no trouble taking her character from ingenue to worldly professor and back again, with numerous stops in between. It’s an intelligent show with a great cast, and one of the best I’ve seen at SummerWorks.

Hannah’s Turn runs through Sunday August 14th as part of SummerWorks. Check the website for schedule and tickets.

SummerWorks Play Review: Eurydice, August 8

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Brian in Reviews, Summerworks, Theatre | Leave a comment

Toronto – Is it weird that there seems to be great interest in ancient plays and myths in SummerWorks? Two years ago it was Gilgamesh, last year it was Iphigenia at Aulis, and this year there’s not one, but three: there’s Hero & Leander (which I haven’t seen but have heard good things about), there’s ONE, and there’s this show, which, like ONE, revisits the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. Rather than being a total re-interpretation, Eurydice tells the story from the point of view of the title character; of course, Eurydice’s most notable feature in this myth is that she’s dead.

She doesn’t start off dead, though, so there’s a handful of scenes at the start of Eurydice about her and Orpheus’s love. Caitlin Driscoll and Justin Rutledge have a nice chemistry as the titular pair, and they certainly seem like a sweet couple. There’s an interesting monologue just before the two are married from Eurydice’s father (Hardee Lineham), who does start off the show dead, and pens some marriage advice, then tries to figure out how to get it to his daughter from down below.

It’s the father-daughter relationship that makes up a lot of the meat of the play, particularly after Eurydice dies, and much of it is very sweet. Through some quirk of fate, Eurydice’s father is the only one in hell who can read and write, and one of the few who remembers much about his life on the surface. Eurydice doesn’t recognize him at first, but eventually his words get through to her. Meanwhile, Orpheus is writing his own letters, and finding ways to get them to his beloved (“I’ll give this letter to a worm. I hope he finds you”).

Like all tellings of Orpheus and Eurydice, it doesn’t end particularly happily. There are some nice touches that make it seem like a hopeful story, though, and the attention to some of the details of the original myth make me smile. Most notable among these is Orpheus as the finest musician in the land, which makes the casting of local Toronto musician Rutledge particularly enjoyable. He favours the audience with a couple of songs, which are some of the highlights of the show.

Even the minor characters, the Lord of the Underworld (Jesse Aaron Dwyre) and the “three stones” (Elliott Loran, Moira Dunphy and Elley-Ray Hennessy) do a nice job with limited stage time. It’s a very well put together show and thoroughly enjoyable.

Eurydice runs through Sunday August 14th as part of SummerWorks. Check the website for schedule and tickets.

SummerWorks Play Review: Third Floor, August 9

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Brian in Reviews, Summerworks, Theatre | Leave a comment

Toronto – I suspect that most people who’ve lived in a condo or apartment building or similar shared space have had a neighbour they don’t really know who does something that bugs them. I actually don’t so much at the building I’m in now, except for the old couple next door who scream at each other in Greek most evenings.

In Third Floor, the problem for the unnamed residents of condo 11 (Kristian Bruun) and condo 12 (Kaitlyn Riordan), respectively, is that the unseen woman who lives in 10 keeps leaving her trash bags out into the hallway. This leads to a series of sitcom-ish interactions between 11 and 12 for the first half of the show as they get to know each other better every time they bump into each other in the hall and debate what to do about the lady and her trash. What to do outside of knocking on the door and talking to her about it, of course, because that would be too easy, and would mean scary direct confrontation.

The two do a bit of bonding watching Alfred Hitchcock movies together, which I suppose is foreshadowing for the Hitchcock-type turn the plot takes in the second half. 11 goes more than a little crazy, 12 gets caught up in it, they end up in a bit of a conspiracy thing together, and no one ends up very happy.

It’s not bad, mostly because Bruun and Riordan do quite well in their respective roles. Director Ashlie Corcoran and playwright Jason Hall would really like the show to be a lot like Rear Window, particularly in the way it shows the passage of time, but there’s just not enough going on here to justify that kind of pacing. Rear Window keeps you guessing and in every scene, even the briefest ones, something happens that makes you wonder “did he do it?” Here, all that happens in the briefest scenes is the lady in condo 10 throws out another bag of trash. The juxtaposition of the quirky, light first half with the tense intrigue of the second works well, but the first half shares the same problem: there’s a lot of scenes with cute Friends-like dialogue, but there’s just not enough going on here to justify all these scenes taking up that much time. Add some kind of subplot or three or delete about a half hour from the show’s 75 minutes run time and this likely becomes a much better show.