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NEWS ARCHIVES TORONTO PLAYS WERE FOREIGN TO US THIS YEAR: IMPORTS GOT HERE LATE, BUT THANK GOODNESS THEY GOT HERE WHEN THEY DID The best new play seen in Toronto this year was Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, which is six years old and British. This has been quite a year for Frayn in Canada, what with Noises Off coming back in delight at Stratford. It has indeed been quite a year for Frayn in North America, with his Democracy triumphing on Broadway. This play about Willy Brandt will undoubtedly get to Canada -- even to this part of Canada, sooner or later, though on recent evidence it will probably be later. Meanwhile, we salivate. The best Canadian play seen in Toronto was Morris Panych's Vigil, which is nine years old. None of the later competition could match it for wit, daring or oddball good-nature. This has also been quite a year for Panych, whose stereoscopic direction of George Walker's Nothing Sacred was one of the events of this year's Shaw Festival. The best other play seen in Toronto was the almost aggressively modest Matt and Ben, which was also -- under the baton of its original New York director, David Warren -- one of the sharpest productions, never missing a beat or a laugh. I readily concede that there are more pressing subjects to be considered than the rise to Hollywood stardom of Damon & Affleck Ltd., and that they could well occasion finer, deeper, more searching plays. The trouble is we didn't see any of them. Very likely they weren't being written. What we got instead was self-importance. The paradigm, if only for its title, may have been Omnium Gatherum, an exchange of pre-packaged positions on the state of the world after 9/11, in which most of the production's and the performers' energies were taken up by the technical demands of a revolving dinner-party. That was American. Our own brand-name playwrights went 'round in circles: Michael Healey with Rune Arlidge, never dull but never finding its focus; Brad Fraser with Cold Meat Party, intermittently funny and sometimes approaching Joe Orton territory, but not ice-hearted enough to be at home there; Judith Thompson with Capture Me; David S. Young with No Great Mischief (after Alistair Macleod); Deanne Taylor's VideoCabaret show City for Sale. These all had worthy aspirations, as of course do most plays. Nobody sets out to be bad, which makes you wonder why so may companies feel compelled to issue manifestoes proclaiming their good intentions; what do they think everybody else has? I noticed over the year, as one home-grown would-be epic succeeded another, a family resemblance between the Tarragon, Toronto's most prestigious independent theatre, and the Artword, one of its least: two households both alike in Worthiness. Worthy one-person plays were, as usual, much in evidence, some of them written by their actors. Two, though, stood above the pack: Daniel MacIvor's Cul-de-sac (I can't share the general enthusiasm for his writing, but as a perfomer he's transfixing) more for its riveting performance than its writing, and Rick Miller's Bigger Than Jesus. These shared a director, Daniel Brooks, who is obviously good at this kind of thing. With them should be ranked Ronnie Burkett's super-puppet-show Provenance, not his best and sometimes frankly boring, but at other times blindingly brilliant. There were promising writing debuts from two other actors; Marjorie Chan with China Doll and especially Gord Rand with Pond Life. Worthiness afflicted the musicals, especially Pelagie at CanStage. It even afflicted the commercial musicals, with Terracotta Warriors and The Last Empress teaching us lessons in Asian history but doing very little else. The most sadly newsworthy event of the year was the failure of the blessedly frivolous Hairspray to sustain a commercial run, despite a terrific home-grown cast. Nor did the slightly edgier Urinetown take this town to the extent that was hoped. Cheeringly, though, the best musical did, on its own terms, the best business; the two-handed The Last 5 Years at CanStage's second space. Now to the companies: The most thrilling performance of the year was Ben Carlson's Jack Tanner, matching velocity to verbosity, in the Shaw Festival's Man and Superman. Listening to it was like watching a high-wire act. The show was also a triumph for Neil Munro, a wildly uneven director here in perfect control. The Shaw's second most exciting night was another musical, Floyd Collins. Stratford came through with a batch of unfamiliar Shakespeares -- Timon of Athens, Henry VIII, King John, Cymbeline -- and scored with them all, in roughly that order of achievement. It also offered more outstanding female performances than seemed plausible. And, come to think of it, it offered, or completed, the biggest and best new Canadian play, Peter Hinton's trilogy The Swanne, which cannot be compared to anything. Soulpepper offered an unbroken run of good productions but no great ones, making it, according to your angle, either their best or worst season to date. Also, apart from ShakespareWorks, whose inititial production belied their name, it was an unusually good summer for alfresco Shakespeare, with David Ferry's Much Ado about Nothing (in Newmarket) and Daryl Cloran's As You Like It (in Barrie) good by any standards. A word, too, for Marek Norman, who composed totally different scores for both this and the High Park As You and was also the ace MD for The Last Five Years. © 2004 National Post. All rights reserved. | ||
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