by AMY BARRATT

Dear Friends,

With the holidays upon us, it’s time once again to take stock of the triumphs and tragedies of our little theatre family over the past year.

New additions: Many new anglo companies joined the scene, including 6th avenue, Triptych, Small Pond, Dark Horse, Playtime and Tableau d’Hôte. They took their first baby steps in places like the Théâtre Ste-Catherine, Calixa-Lavallée and Geordie Space.

New Jobs: Peter Hinton left Montreal to shake things up as artistic director of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa; Actor Tyrone Benskin took over as AD of Black Theatre Workshop.

A New House: MainLine Theatre (producers of the Fringe festival) got a chance to buy the loft space above Segal’s grocery on the Main, and they took it. They immediately began renting it out at reasonable rates, and will produce their own show there—Johnny Canuck and the Last Burlesque—in January.

A Marriage of Convenience: For the first time, anglo theatregoers were offered an “alternate” season. Six small to medium-sized companies pooled their resources to become MAST. The initiative, which everyone involved hopes will continue beyond this first year, is intended to raise the profile of independent theatre.

A Recovery: Théâtre du Rideau Vert, in a coma for the 2004–05 season, returned in September with a full season programed by new artistic director Denise Filiatrault.

A Trip: When it opened the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde’s season, Antoine et Cléopatre—a singin’ dancin’ adaptation by Lewis Furey—was almost universally panned. (Rad-Can critic Josée Bilodeau put it nicely when she said it gave you an idea of what would have happened if Shakespeare had worked for Disney.) Nevertheless, the show has managed to snag a tour de France in the new year. The omnipresent Sylvie Moreau (is it written somewhere that you can’t make a Québécois film unless you cast her?) and company are bound for Paris at the end of January with dates in Toulouse and other major sausage-producing centres. Furey (né Greenblatt)’s creation, which will play under his original title, A and C Project, ought to go over big with the French, whose tastes run to the tasteless in théâtre musical (Notre Dame de Paris, Les Dix Commandements, and Furey’s own productions of Starmania). Furey and his wife, the sultry Carole Laure, are well known in the City of Light, where they now reside.

A Spat: On Nov. 4, Michel Tremblay, back in the saddle after a summer spent battling cancer, was on Radio Canada’s le Point to discuss his new book, Le cahier bleu. The next day, he had fellow author Victor-Lévy Beaulieu demanding a public apology from both Tremblay and Radio-Canada. Seems Tremblay had taken issue with Beaulieu’s public declaration that (then) PQ hopeful André Boisclair was not fit to govern since he was a former cokehead. Tremblay questioned whether someone who had consumed as much alcohol in his lifetime as Beaulieu had was really qualified to judge someone else (meow). Le Point co-host Céline Galipeau promptly delivered the network’s excuses on the following evening’s program, claiming they went double for Tremblay. Beaulieu would not get anything more public than that from Quebec’s best-known writer.

One more spat: Art and politics got up each other’s noses again in December when the federal Liberals unveiled their campaign commercials in Quebec. Yvon Leduc, a co-founder of the Ligue Nationale d’Improvisation (LNI), the Quebec institution that approaches improv comedy as if it were a hockey match, cried plagiarism over the ads. The response from the office of the Liberals’ Quebec lieutenant, Jean Lapierre, was—and I’m paraphrasing here—“Duh.” They say the spots were shot in the LNI’s own “rink” in their own theatre which had been rented by the Liberal party with the express purpose of making a commercial.

Wishing all of you a happy and healthy holiday season. See you in the lobby in 2006.