performance – The Writing Life of a Tadpole

My personal progress in 2020

January 1 2021

Frequent readers know that I’m “big” on goal-setting annually, ripping off the New Year’s resolutions bandwagon timeline to do my own version of symbolic timelines, goal-setting and progress reporting. Bullet journals, self-help techniques, the Seinfeld method — I read about them all when I see a new tool. Radical incrementalism is my motto, and I’m willing to steal from any technique that might give me even a 1% improvement in my efficiency.

My overall system is aligned with the fundamental precepts of any good planning system:

A. Know where you’re going;

B. Plan how to get there;

C. Set milestones or markers for yourself along the way;

D. Monitor your progress; and,

E. Regularly restart the process to ensure the original destination is still your true goal.

And just for fun? Remind myself that the destination is not always as important as the journey. Singular focus is great, but just like in video games, side quests are fun too.

So let’s see how I did for the year.

1. I survived

Good news, I extended my streak to 52 years for the number of years I’ve managed to survive on this planet. I’d like to say I “lived”, but as I wrote about earlier (What I tell myself about 2020), it is more like “existing” than thriving and growing.

But it was a tough year, and I survived relatively intact. Financially, emotionally, physically, mentally. All were challenges, all were met. Not all equally, not all “well met”, but met nevertheless. I, and my family, are doing okay. Could we be happier? Sure. Could we be healthier? Sure. Could we exercise more, invest better, learn more, adapt better? Sure.

But given the level of the challenge, I’m calling it an accomplishment to not simply curl up into a ball and not get out of bed. I’ve been THERE before, and oddly enough, despite the challenge, I didn’t really come that close to that stage this year. It was tough, I had other mental and emotional issues going on, but not paralysis.

2. I adapted to working from home

I’d love to say I took to WFH like a duck to water, but I didn’t. Andrea and I started off sharing an office, but that wasn’t working, and I eventually moved everything to the basement. I have a decent setup, but even workflows took a while to get “settled”. I love not commuting and to be candid, I never want to go back to working in an office. But I didn’t really feel like I hit my stride until September when I took on the charitable campaign as my “surge capacity” file in my team, mostly relying on me to be the “surge”. Between regular files and the “extra” files, I accomplished a lot. Some in teams, some alone, all of it “pensionable time” as they say, but I mean productive time. In short, at certain times in the fall, I totally rocked being able to WFH.

I’d like to say I managed the work/life balance better for helping Jacob, but that’s a work in progress. We did have lunch together every day, something that wouldn’t be possible without home-based work and school.

I still want to retire in 5 years, but if I’m still able to WFH then, I’m not as against extending by a year or two, if it helps our finances and I have interesting work. I like my new files, made a small change in job responsibilities in the fall, and I feel like I’m on a good trajectory.

3. Purging and reorganizing

With the lockdowns, I started working on reorganizing a ton of stuff in the house. While I’ve stalled in the last month, I’m probably 75%-80% of the way there. I’m feeling less motivated to finish, but it will get done. It’s taking me way longer than I hoped, but I’ll get there. Hopefully by the end of January. I’ll write about it when I get there.

4. Astro outreach

I had an outreach session set for March 14th before the world shut down, but in the meantime, I’ve done some writing on my blog, outreach online to newbies both generally and with some people directly, and I even did two direct in-person sessions before deciding it was just not distanced enough. More risk than I was comfortable with continuing. Probably not “bad”, but not worth the risk.

5. Website redesign

I undertook a massive redesign of the back-end of my website way back in January / February. WordPress had moved to a new “block” design interface, and I had been resisting making the change-over. Ultimately, I decided the longer I held out against the inevitable change in tide, the more difficult it would be to adjust later, so I bit the bullet and did a deep dive. I had a long list of things to do, and if I was going to “fix” things, I figured that I might as well fix them all. Given the volume of content, this is probably the last time I can make changes to individual layouts myself. If I decide to do something like that in the future, I’ll probably have to pay someone who has better tools and workflows to do it efficiently.

Back in September, I summarized the changes (PolyWogg 5.0 – Ten significant updates to my site) and declared to myself that I was now at version 5.0 of my website. As mentioned, I switched my site from the classic WordPress editor over to using blocks. It was a massive undertaking to do that, some 1300 potential posts and pages to convert, but I bit the bullet and did it. I also improved the look and feel of my site (featured images, signature blocks, a calendar / date out to the left, more mobile friendly, limiting the use of tables, etc.) and figured out a way to better handle book reviews, movie reviews, humour and quotes. I also improved things on the back-end for myself (updated the admin menu, figured out auto-posting to social media, namely FaceBook and Twitter using Buffer again).

Between the reorg, and new blogging this year, I have 416 refreshed or new posts since January 1st last year. Overall, I’ve increased the volume on the site to 1487 posts + 160 pages, for a total of 1,588,374 words. Yep, 1.6M words in total. I find that number staggering, personally. Particularly as I don’t “blog” just to post, I post when I have something to say to myself, others, etc. I know people who blog just to have new content, that’s not me. I also haven’t done much in the way of guest blogs (two from my wife about her hobbies). The rest? All me.

I also did a deep dive on a coding conflict that lots of people with more expertise than me had said “couldn’t be done” easily. And I found a solution. Mostly because I thought outside the box. I was pretty happy with myself for that one. Oddly enough, I’m also doing a bit of support for a couple of new areas (WordPress, the gallery tool I use) for people who are struggling to make it do what they want.

And I added some basic Trivia to the site, while also doing substantial additions on photo gallery management, even if it doesn’t necessarily show on the front end.

6. New writing

Early in the year, I started working on an update to my HR Guide, and while I’m happy with the direction it’s going, I didn’t make a lot of progress. The original plan was that Andrea would serve as my first reader/editor, but it was becoming challenging for timing, layout, etc. to do it in digestible chunks so I think I’m back to just me again. I had hoped multiple times to get it finished by the end of the year, but other life events tended to intervene when I was working on it, and it’s not like there is any formal deadline.

I’ve also been a bit slowed by a weird echo of an earlier decision. I reorganized the website, and I solved one problem that also created several others that I didn’t foresee. In the old layout, a bunch of stuff was spread across posts (not pages) and there were different versions of the posts. The end result was that people trying to get to an individual “page” often went to an old version, rather than the current version, and to a post rather than a page. But there were comments on those posts that I didn’t want to lose even though I wanted them to go to the current page. I ended up merging it all into one big page, along with migrating the comments, but I’m not completely happy with the result. There’s too much content for one long page. And I do see it as chapters that break out nicely. I’ll talk more about this in my plans for the new year, but I’ll likely update the layout to something completely different, partly related to my next item.

Just as I have my HR Guide, a “PolyWogg Guide”, I started a “PolyWogg Guide to Astronomy” too. And when I retire, there will be more PolyWogg Guides as well. Since I know that I’m going to do them, it is getting a bit onerous to keep it all in one website structure. Again, I’ll talk more about this later, but the expanded writing is driving me to make a change regarding my website, and I have a simple solution that doesn’t require a lot of work but DOES look like a significant change. I considered something way more radical, but instead, I can go more simply in a different direction.

I added lots of other new writing this year including book reviews, movie reviews (finally getting them back on the site), music reviews (some new stuff), recipes (mostly reformatted as opposed to new), and television reviews (a new layout on seasonal reviews gives me more options for the future).

I even started some astro writing that is more historical than current, and shared it in our local Centre’s monthly publication.

But probably the biggest contribution on writing was tied to “making choices”. I wrote almost 100 “Today I choose” posts to remind myself that I still have choices each day that affect my outlook on life, even if the big ones like staying home or going out are already made for me by COVID.

7. Building projects

That title sounds more ambitious than what it was. I don’t mean sheds or houses, just legos and kits. We did some Lego this year (the large Millennium Falcon), some wooden dinosaurs, a few other crafts here and there. I’m hoping to do more in the new year, and I even have a new crafting area for some of it. I also have a few projects I want to do in astronomy-related crafting so we’ll see how those turn out.

8. Recipes

We collectively tried a few new recipes throughout the year, including buying a new bread maker and making some new loaves. I need to get into that more in the new year.

9. Dental health

This one is a bit weird to take credit for, I suppose. I had been needing to see the dentist before the lockdown, and when it hit, I figured I would likely end up waiting it out. I needed a full cleaning, plus checking on potential cavities, etc. But I need sedation for it anyway, so waiting was easy enough to do. However, when my root canal happened, and the choice of timing was made for me, I piggybacked on it to make sure I got a cleaning in too.

10. Efforts to socialize

For Christmas, I got Jacob and Andrea lots of things for us to “do” as a family (as did they for me), so internal socializing is covered. Over the last nine months, we managed to go to the cottage and did socially distanced things with Andrea’s parents and our friends Paul and Mary Ellen. I had coffee with my friend Sanden, freezing my butt off in a parking lot, and another coffee in warmer weather on a patio with my friend Roula.

But I think the biggest thing I’ve done is organize some online trivia games for friends. It’s a fair amount of work to keep it interesting and fun, and I might do a “kids night” sometime, but for now it’s mainly adults. If people keep showing up, I’ll keep doing it. Admittedly, it’s not “super social” for me, as I’m the host. It’s more for Andrea, Jacob and the people who show up that week, but I do get a chance to chat before and after with people.

Oh, and I kept the reading challenge going for the year, which has a social component to it, albeit fairly passively.

And that’s my list. It’s not super impressive, but I did manage to keep making progress on some things that are important to me. I hope your year was satisfying in some way too.

Reviews image, music, boy listening to radio

NAC Pops show – 80s Mix Tape

January 12 2020

This was outing #6 of the year (following 1 OLT, 2 NAC, 1 hockey game, and 1 Gladstone) to see the NAC Pops show called “80s Mix Tape” with conductor Stuart Chafetz and singers Julie Reiber and Bryce Ryness. The show was a collection of 21 songs from the 1980s performed by the NAC orchestra, with 8 instrumental versions and 13 with lyrics. The full playlist (with two extra songs) is at the bottom.

The show kicked off with the instrumental version of The Final Countdown (Europe), and it was good, but not amazing. A nice light opening. They then went directly into a song with the female singer, Call Me (Blondie). I felt like she was doing a pop lite version of the song, no real grit, and the version I’m used to from Blondie has more deeper tones behind it. Or so I thought. However, you’ll see in the playlist version below, my memory might be off because it isn’t much darker/deeper in tone than the version I heard last night. It didn’t amaze me.

They then segued to the male singer doing Wake Me Up Before You Go Go (Wham). And I thought we were in trouble. I really like the song, and the energy of the original is enough to keep my toes bouncing if it is on the car stereo or headphones. I remember actually having it on a cassette tape, yes I’m that old, and listening to it on my no-name walkman while doing my paper route. It kept me moving and avoided my mind going numb while doing it. Yet the male artist seemed completely flat. Plus, I’m used to a radio version that is slightly sped up I think, as I consistently hear the CD version and think it is about 10% too slow.

We’ve experienced this before though. The orchestra is always great, but despite hiring Broadway singers to front the songs, the versions often come off somewhere between a theme park summer revue offering, a low-rated Glee episode, or high-end karaoke. One last year with “women of rock” had that problem in places.

Then the guy headed into Careless Whisper (George Michael) as a duet with the woman, and it was decent. At least I thought so, Andrea wasn’t sold.

Back to the female singer, the show moved into True Colors (Cindi Lauper). And suddenly that “deeper” sound that I was looking for in the Blondie song was there. Deep, rich, not poppy, and she was awesome. Andrea thought she was a bit off-tempo, but I loved it. Ironically, this is the second time this week I’ve seen that song performed, although the other time was just on TV. I watched the premiere of the show Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist and it was sung by her father played by Peter Gallagher. The full episode is available on YouTube, not a bad show. Nothing “extraordinary”, more like a Glee replacement. I’ve cued up the Peter Gallagher intro scene although you can jump ahead two minutes to the actual singing (for context, he’s in a catatonic state but she “hears” what’s going on in his head).

Back to the NAC…the next song was Broken Wings (Mr. Mister), and again, another decent version. Maybe we’re back on track? The NAC did three instrumentals following this:

Theme from Chariots of Fire — I have no idea why so many people think this song is amazing, I want to fall asleep for the film, the soundtrack, and well, even the name;
Theme from Ghostbusters — hard to describe, but I felt like the balance was off in the orchestra, maybe needs more strings than brass, I don’t know enough to define, while Andrea thought it was okay but would have been better if sang; and,
Theme from Back to the Future — it was an awesome rendition, with the combo of “old Western” pomp with a bit of Huey Lewis’ infused pop mixed with suspense music from Indiana Jones-style adventure themes.

Continuing the same theme, the last song of the first half was Huey Lewis’ “The Power of Love” — aaaaand we were back to sucking canal water again.

Intermission was great, which I wouldn’t normally mention, but we wandered down by one of the other theatres which is showing Unikkaaqtuat right now from the Indigenous Theatre series. While we were there, we got to see some amazing posters they have put up about the Innu stories featured in the play. Really spectacular imagery provided by Taqqut Productions. Anyway, I digress.

When the second half started, they followed the tradition of the first song of each set being an instrumental, and they went with Everybody Wants to Rule the World (Tears for Fears). Really well done.

They followed it up with the male singer doing In the Air Tonight (Phil Collins) and while I thought it was “okay”, Andrea thought it was really good. Perhaps my reticence is more that I’m not a big fan of the song — I’ll listen to it occasionally, but if I have a skip function, it won’t stay on my playlist long. I am not a big fan of slow ballads, no matter how well done. Doesn’t stop me from singing along if it’s on, but I wouldn’t willingly choose it more than about once a year.

And then we come to the price of admission. Holy snicker doodles. The orchestra did an instrumental version of Smooth Criminal (Michael Jackson), and sure, the overall orchestra part was solid, as always. But the OMG part was that they had the concert master / first chair violin Jessica Linnebach do a showcase for the song. All of the individual artists are good, let’s face it, they are in the NAC’s orchestra. No small feat. And she is the associate concert master for NAC and concert master for most of the Pops series. Sure, we’ve seen the overall concertmaster, Yosuke Kawasaki, perform, usually something to do with more classical pieces specifically for a violin solo. But Jessica? Almost never on her own.

She was absolutely awesome. And was likely exhausted at the end of it. I pulled some videos from YouTube. Here she is after winning a competition in NYC:

And a more classical piece (34 minutes long, so maybe she wasn’t tired after Smooth Criminal!).

Alas, no separate recordings on iTunes to enjoy. Sigh. Hope to see more of her solos in the future. The playlist has a version of the instrumental, but it doesn’t do justice to her violin contributions.

Moving on, we had Alone (Heart) and the female singer did a great job again, leaving me to wonder what happened in the Blondie song at the start…was it just a stylistic choice? Sound levels were off?

Next up was The Spirit of Radio (Rush), performed as an instrumental in memoriam for Neil Peart, the drummer of Rush who passed away on Friday. I’ve included an instrumental as well as the original in the playlist, partly as the song isn’t that familiar to some. But there are some snippets that are frequently sampled by radio stations for their jingles and internal promotions, so you’ll recognize the segments when you hear them.

The orchestra followed up with another instrumental And So It Goes (Billy Joel). Every time I hear this song, either in the original or in instrumental, it makes me think of Newfoundland. There is an almost Irish lilt to the music that goes past the up-tempo beat of Cape Breton, and more of a sweeping landscape song. Really good version. The playlist has both a cheap instrumental version as well as the original by Billy Joel.

They then went on to the wrap-up phase of the concert with five songs with the singers. I didn’t much care for any of the versions:

867-5309 / Jenny (Tommy Tutone) was flat, and the only interesting part was that the orchestra members were singing backup, which I’ve never noticed them do before;
If I Could Turn Back Time (Cher) was okay, certainly clear articulation, and Andrea thought it was good;
Addicted to Love (Robert Palmer) was awful, I have NO IDEA what he was going for in sound, some sort of weird accent thrown in too;
The Heart of Rock and Roll (Huey Lewis) was another bad theme park revue version, or a bad cover band at a fireworks display; and,
Celebration (Kool and the Gang), which while not much better performed, at least had two things going for it — energy and audience participation.

And it is an interesting side-note to the performance. Normally, the average age of the Pops audience hits in the high-50s / low 60s probably. Definitely an older crowd. I’m 51 and I’m younger than most attendees by at least 10 years. Which is common for most orchestras, since the tickets aren’t cheap, we went for dinner, and we had a babysitter for six hours, plus parking. So most goers are either older or have more disposable income, or both.

But last night’s crowd was decidely skewed younger. 30s and 40s, I would say. And the result was LOUD. The NAC got cheers, people singing with the last song, and standing up and dancing. Normally, Ottawa is a sitting crowd. Often a complaint for Bluesfest, folk concerts, and hockey games. But the audience could actually be heard last night. Which was a special feat since the weather kept a lot of people home, with a less-than-capacity crowd.

In the end, my review is probably the same one I will always have for Pops outings — the orchestra is awesome, the singers are hit and miss.

NAC Pops show – The Music of John Williams

October 19 2019

My wife and I enjoy the NAC Orchestra shows, particularly the Pops, and if it wasn’t for simple cost and logistics, we’d sign up for them every year. Instead, we pick and choose the shows we want along with some others. With 17 shows across multiple venues, this was outing #2 this year. The theme for the night? The music of John Williams, namely from all his soundtracks of the greatest hits of films.

Up first was the Main Title from Star Wars (1977), and it’s a great blockbuster opening. From there, they slid into Superman March from Superman (1978). Just those two alone would be worth the price of admission for some people, including me.

After that, they went through The Flight to Neverland from Hook (1991), excerpts from Artificial Intelligence (2001), The Cowboys Overture from The Cowboys (1972), and Theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). They’re all good, and the Cowboys Overture has that big epic Western feel to it. But none are amazing.

The first half ended with Devil’s Dance from the Witches of Eastwick (1987) (aka Dance of the Witches), which I don’t remember being quite so Hallowe’enish in its feel, and then the blockbuster Raider’s March from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Pick these two plus the first two, and I could call it a night.

The second half started off with Liberty Fanfare (1986) which apparently Williams composed as a tribute for the re-inauguration/opening of the Statue of Liberty. Okay, not amazing. Suite from Far and Away (1992), Theme from Schindler’s List (1993), Hedwig’s Theme and Harry’s Wondrous World from Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone (2001) followed, and while they were all good, only Hedwig’s Theme had a bit of innovation in it to keep it interesting. The concert master and first chair violin Yosuke Kawasaki played Schindler’s List, which was a great violin piece, but not really a challenge for the master.

Next up was the Shark Theme from Jaws (1975) and the sound is iconic. Plus conductor Jack Everly played with a hand puppet shark for laughs during the piece, which was fun. I was a bit disappointed with the Main Theme from Jurassic Park (1993), didn’t really excite me, although perhaps that’s because it is from the start of the movie before chaos reigns.

Last on the official programme was the classic “Adventures on Earth” from E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982). It felt great to hear, although that may be partly because we just watched it a week ago with our son.

For an encore, they dusted off another Star Wars one, which was one of the marches from Return of the Jedi, I think, as it has the lighter Ewok theme worked into it a couple of places.

Overall, 17 pieces for the night, although I would have been perfectly happy with just five of them. Six if you include the encore. Still, the rest were all nostalgia for the movies, and enjoyable.

If you’re interested, here’s an Apple Playlist with all the music:

OLT play – The Ladies Foursome

October 8 2019

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 undercover, there would have been SOMETHING. Or add an 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.

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

October 29 2017

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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