Tag Archives: OLT

OLT play – The Ladies Foursome

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

My wife and I have invested heavily in shows for the coming 2019-20 show across multiple venues. For Ottawa Little Theatre, they have nine shows planned for the season, and if we hadn’t went with lots of shows elsewhere, I’d probably have signed up for 5 or 6 of them. Instead, we held ourselves to just two. The first was from Norm Foster, a sequel to a previous golf one called The Foursome which we saw back in ’07. 

Generally, we love Norm Foster comedies. Some funny, some farcical, almost always enjoyable, and most of the castings and shows have worked. He’s probably my second favorite playwright after Dan Needles who created The Letter from Wingfield Farm and six sequels, and my favorite general playwright. I was just looking at his website and he has 52 plays listed. Holy doodle, I had no idea there were that many.

We saw the original show, The Foursome, about four college buddies coming home for a reunion and a round of golf. It was an interesting setup, as the show takes place in front of a backdrop of 18 holes on a golf course as they talk while getting ready to tee off. In effect, it means 18+ scenes. It was funny, I quite enjoyed it, and when it was over, I promptly forgot most of the details. I remember generally that there were old grudges and jealousies about current levels of success, or apparent success, but not the details. But it was positive overall, and when the Ladies Foursome came up as a sequel, it seemed like a no-brainer to get it. We have also liked The Long Weekend (two couples together, 2011), Maggie’s Getting Married (older sister meets groom, only to realize she knows him biblically, 2005), Ned Durango Comes to Big Oak (aging cowboy star in small town, 2004), and Here on the Flight Path (a man gets to know 3 consecutive neighbours on an adjoining balcony, 2003). 

So we like OLT. We like Norm Foster. We like the original Foursome. Should be a no-brainer that we’ll like The Ladies Foursome so it made my list immediately to see. And it crashed.

The quick summary of the show is that every week for 15ish years, four women have played a round of golf together. Except one has died, and the play takes place the day after the funeral. The three surviving members have invited a woman they met at the funeral to join them in her place. And like the Foursome, the Ladies Foursome talks about anything and everything except golf, which is the draw for people who don’t play golf. Golf is just the plot device to get them together. 

The opening bit is two of the women showing up, and starting to talk. Tate is feeling her mortality, and wondering what she’s accomplished in her life. Her friend reassures her that her life isn’t a failure, including mentioning that she has two beautiful children. To which she replies, “I have three children”. She did say “beautiful” children though. The other surviving member shows up, joins the conversation and tells her that she has two beautiful children. Repetition for the laugh. And while it doesn’t ring funny as I’ve explained it here, it is a standard playwright technique that Foster uses well, with callbacks to earlier lines, and it works. For now.

But afterwards, when we didn’t really enjoy the show, I started to wonder what went wrong? What was different?

Well, first of all, there are 20 scenes — 18 holes, plus the 19th hole, plus a little goodbye in the parking lot. That makes for a LOT of transitions and interruptions to the flow. It worked fine for The Foursome, but it was dragging for The Ladies Foursome.

The callbacks also started to grate. There was constant refs to her 2 beautiful children plus her son with the lazy eye as being not beautiful. Separate from just being non-PC or mean, the joke started to wear thin about the fourth call back. It was funny for two lines at the start, and then they flogged it to death. Similarly, there is a revelation that the guest who joins the trio is a gambling addict, and while her trying to make bets with them added some tension, it ultimately went nowhere, it ended up not being much of anything. In or out of the story, it made no difference to the outcome. Which then grated when they referred to it repeatedly long after the realization it wasn’t going to be relevant.

So these were technical, story problems, as the writing wasn’t up to normal standards. But I have to say, I think the cast failed the play too. We saw the second last performance, and by that point, most casts have the show down cold. While lots of people love the excitement of opening night, seeing it near the end of a short run means that timings are better, the cast will rarely miss a line, and if anything wasn’t working, it’s been tweaked. Even though it’s amateur theatre, they are usually nailing it near the end. In a long run, they might get tired, but on three weeks, they’re usually able to pull it off.

In this case, three of the characters flubbed multiple lines. I suspect some of that was technical — there is no real scene change for them from scene to scene, plus they’re really short, with no flow between them (i.e. some could be told out of order with no change in outcome). In other cases, they talked over each other’s lines. 

Yet they also seemed to put emphases in areas where they shouldn’t have been. When they note that Dory, the guest, didn’t know that the deceased had won the lottery a few years before and thus didn’t know EVERYTHING about the dearly departed, the others had a sinister hook to it wondering what she’s up to, and when the gambling is introduced, BADLY as a throw-away line with no meat to it, you’re made to think THAT’s the link. Nope. There isn’t one. But more importantly, two of the characters delay leaving the scene so they can talk privately, and one asks the other, “What does she know? Do you think our friend told her everything? Does she know what we DID?”. Dun dun dun. There’s a hidden secret, a plot development to come that adds some tension. Except it isn’t. The hook is supposed to be what she knows and how deeply about them. But because the cast member emphasized “DID” over “everything”, we all were waiting for the big secret. Did they kill somebody? Rig a lottery? What did they DO? Nothing. They did nothing. And I heard other audience members asking the same head-scratcher as they left, “Wait, what about…”.

I may be a bit biased, as the fourth member of the cast is someone we know, but I felt she did the best job with what she had. I felt a couple of the scenes could have been better, but more better written than better delivered. And as Dory, she has the role of Fifth Business — important information to reveal at the end. Which she does.

Leaving most people in the audience scratching their heads. It is 2019, and spoiler alert, a character being gay isn’t enough to get fired from her teaching job. If they had added a wrinkle of it being the ’80s or if it was a Catholic School Board, SOMETHING, or that Dory herself had been a distant Brokeback Mountain-style lover under cover, there would have been SOMETHING. Or add a estranged husband that was basically a beard. Instead, the revelation just fell flat. And honestly, considering everything else that was shared between the four, it’s hard to believe that the big supportive emotionally available departed friend never shared ANYTHING with any of the other three. She even had a partner she was seeing. Really? Everything you learn about the woman who died does NOT equate to her keeping her sexuality a secret. It just doesn’t seem to fit.

So we were disappointed overall. I think there’s a good story buried in there somewhere, but it drastically needs an editor and a better cast to deliver.

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Reviewing “An Inspector Calls” (as seen at OLT)

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

Back in January, as part of our subscription series for the Ottawa Little Theatre, we went to see “An Inspector Calls”, written by J.B. Priestly. I didn’t get around to reviewing it at the time, partly as it didn’t contribute to my “#50by50” series since I’d already counted a play for that, but I kept the playbill lingering around my desk. The play was first performed back in 1946, and set just prior to the First World War.

Much of the play revolves around noblesse oblige of the wealthy and the fate of the working class, and the gap between the two. The cast is made up generally of a family of five people plus an inspector who calls on them while conducting an enquiry into the death of a young woman by the name of Eva Smith. She appears in shadows as a ghost, but has no lines.

It’s near impossible to review the play without spoilers, and so I won’t try. Essentially, as the night unfolds and the family members individually answer the Inspector’s questions, it moves through Eva’s life (although she was known by different names). All of the events were interconnected by happenstance, not design, and no one was aware of it all, even the girl herself. Over the course of the interrogation, you realize the man of the house, a businessman, used to employ her; the daughter ran into her in a shop; the fiancé of the daughter and the son both interacted with her romantically; and the wife/mother met her through charitable work. In essence, they all treated her badly, partly because they could, and when the girl had nothing left, she committed suicide.

While the plot sounds fantastical, it is the Inspector who sells the story. He is imperious when dealing with them all, insisting on treating them as potential criminals to be interrogated, not aristocrats to be handled nicely. The daughter has lots of angst-filled scenes where she debates the role of women, their collective conscience as a society, the plight of the working class, the out-of-touch nature of her parents, the shame of her fiancé having cheated on her. And ultimately her own guilt. Each member of the family initially denies any responsibility, until in the end, the Inspector verbally leads them to indict themselves. It was very well done.

Then there is a twist, where for a short time, all the guilt appears for nought. They are returning to their regular lives and views of the world, until they get one last shock at the end of the night that’s a bit spooky for them. Twilight Zone almost.

The father, Arthur Birling, was played by Roy Van Hooydonk, and he affected an old English-gentlemen-style of pontification that was mildly endearing and easy to watch, although a trifle slow in the delivery. His wife, Sheila, was played by Katherine Williams and the character was difficult to watch. It was hard to tell if it was the actress or the character, but they were both heavily repressed, and there was little emotional resonance in the performance. There was an okay performance for the fiancé Gerald Croft (played by Guy Newsham), with a bit of a sheepish “boys will be boys” vibe, if only the women would understand. He did a decent job of trying to act/feel like a victim in some places. The character of Eric Birling (played by Jamie Hegland) was relatively minor, and consisted mainly of being surly, drunk and/or childish. Nothing much to watch. I found the role of Sybil Birling, the daughter played by Janet Rice, was a bit too much over-the-top for her angst. Emotionally, she was all over the map as both a character and the actress…it was hard to get a read on her, and some of the dialogue for her went on and on as over-moralizing. Subtlety was not part of the script, apparently.

So you might think I didn’t like the play. Instead, it is all made up for because the role of Inspector Goole (ghoul, get it?) was filled expertly by John Collins. Admittedly he flubbed a line or two in the first half, but considering the number he has, that’s not too surprising. But he had awesome presence. Brutal, foreboding, lurking, dark, imperious, harsh. He’d start off soft in some parts, and then rip the individual to shreds in the interrogation. Digging and digging, poking and prodding until they broke and told him everything, which he already seemed to know anyway (but not in a Columbo sort of way, more like supernaturally). He was fantastic to watch.

I checked out the Internet Movie Database to see if there is a movie version, and there are multiple ones over the years. Including an all-Chinese one a few years ago. Same plot, just different names, and a few small tweaks to the setting, but otherwise the same movie.

In the end, the play was enjoyable, if a little bit heavy-handed on the moralizing in some places, but that is more a reflection of the style of dramas written in the mid-century, and particularly so when set at the turn of the century. The “we know better now” can work quite well by making even one character seem more forward-thinking than the time, but that is not the way the play was designed. Goole plays that role to some extent, but is far too dark to be inspiring. Now, if I can only find it in book form…

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#50by50 #14 – See a play at Ottawa Little Theatre (OLT)

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

I’m not sure I was an unbiased viewer of tonight’s live performance — Arsenic and Old Lace at the Ottawa Little Theatre.

Some of you may remember back in the day when my lovely bride and I were married at that theatre. We had been season’s tickets subscribers in the past, it was near our old neighbourhood, and we were looking for an off-beat venue. It was perfect for us. So we kind of have a special place in our heart for the old girl. And this year we are season’s ticket holders again. We missed the first play, but I really wanted to see this one. So much so that we changed the tickets to a more convenient night as next weekend is a bit busy.

Why was I excited? Because it’s Arsenic and Old Lace, duh.

I know, I know, you probably don’t even know AOL as anything other than an internet provider that old people used to use. Well, no, A&OL is Arsenic and Old Lace. Lots of older people would remember it as an old Cary Grant movie. If they were truly aware, they would know that it was based on a hugely successful Broadway play starring Boris Karloff, who is referenced repeatedly throughout the original play, movie and tonight’s version. But me? I first heard it as an old-time radio broadcast following an “intro” to radio dramas in Grade 9 Canadian History class.

The comedy tonight has three main levels of cast members…tier 3 involves some beat cops, a visitor, a director of a sanitarium. Tier 2 involves a bride-to-be, a plastic surgeon, and three nephews. And tier 1 includes two elderly aunts. As you find out within the first few minutes of the play, Aunt Martha and Aunt Abby have taken to performing acts of charity with lonely old men — they poison them and bury them in the basement.

Now, with the two aunts, the show lives or dies by their delivery. If they’re “on”, the play sings; if they’re not “on”, it suffers. Tonight? Janet Banigan as Aunt Martha and Sarah Hearn as Aunt Abby were downright awesome. They tripped over lines a couple of times, but not egregiously, and they do occupy almost 40% of the play. Entirely believable. Played by Jean Adair and Josephine Hull in both Broadway and film versions, the characters are delicious to watch. Innocently spooky almost. Just don’t drink their elderberry wine.

The three nephews — Mortimer, the normal one; Jonathan, the criminal; and Teddy, the one who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt — were played by Kurt Shantz, Paul Williamson, Dan Desmarais (the roles occupied by Cary Grant, Raymond Massey as a clone of Boris Karloff, and John Alexander in film). Shantz and Williamson were pretty solid, although Shantz looked a bit too much like Dan Ackroyd in Trading Places at times when he was going for “smug”. Williamson was definitely thug-like for his role, a little bit nutty with a strong mean streak.

The Doctor was played by Claude Laroche, and I almost want to see the film version to see Peter Lorre in the role. Can’t even imagine him as Einstein. With Mary Whalen handling the part of Elaine, the girlfriend/bride-to-be (Priscilla Lane in the film in one of her last roles). I’ve seen Whalen before, and she’s hit and miss for some roles — tonight she did great. As did Laroche, in a role that is hard to balance between a little sleazy, a little weak, a little mousy, a little evil.

The rest of the cast is a bit of a wash both in terms of their performance as well as the roles themselves. In the radio drama, most of them don’t even show up — mostly it’s just the three nephews, two aunts, the doctor, and a beat cop. Seven cast members, not the 13 who were in tonight’s version.

I was nervous — I like the play so much and I just wanted them to nail it. Which they did.

One of the best performances Andrea and I have ever seen at the OLT. Great night…

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