Festivals, fracas
and one-offs

Theatre’s high points range from the
Segal Centre to grassroots ventures

AMBITIOUS ANNIVERSARY: Suburban Motel

by NEIL BOYCE

365 days of theatre in 550 words: crowning the year—and maybe the overarching theme for a scrappy 2009—was “l’Affaire Go-Fuck-Yourself,” wherein Théâtre Ste-Catherine owner Eric Amber slagged off puppet group les Sages Fous at the ill-fated Zoofest, inadvertently sparking an “only in Quebec” linguistic brush fire. Amber took the most sensible course of action following the fracas—he moved to New Zealand.

The Segal Centre, if there was any doubt from previous seasons, took over as the major professional English-language theatre in Montreal. Highlights were Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Buried Child in February (notably David Fox’s great performance as an alcoholic grandfather), Karoline Leach’s barbed Edwardian melodrama, Tryst, directed by Diana Leblanc, and their ongoing support of the most dynamic collective in town, SideMart Theatrical Grocery.

Centaur’s best show this year was an out of towner. Vancouverite Nicola Cavendish did a charmer of a solo show about a bored housewife, Shirley Valentine, directed by Roy Surette. Later in the season, Bryden MacDonald’s raw drama With Bated Breath, co-directed by the author and Surette, dug deep into the private lives of Cape Bretoners.

Infinithéâtre began the season with a bang and ended it with a nuclear detonation. The company moved downtown to the St-James United Church in February for Bruce M. Smith’s Blessed Are They, looking at the modern place of religion in the battle between a preacher and a zealot. In November, young playwright Amy Lee Lavoie’s Rabbit Rabbit—party clown paedophile meets 16-year-old prostitute—was the event of the year, carried by gutsy directizon from artistic director Guy Sprung and Lavoie’s astonishing script.

GUTSY AND GRITTY: Rabbit. Rabbit

Tours and indie stage

Two shows arrived from South Africa. In January, Yael Farber’s touring show Molora played at Cinquième Salle, post-apartheid healing retold through Greek tragedy and a nation facing its past. In February, Centaur’s founding artistic director Maurice Podbrey presented Lara Foot Newton’s stunner, Tshepang, at Théâtre la Chapelle. Six men from a poor township are arrested for the gang rape of a child in a play Podbrey called “South Africa’s most significant theatre piece of the past decade.”

Centaur’s Wildside festival in January had Amanda Kellock directing the tough girl gang story, The Shape of a Girl, inspired by the murder of Vancouver Island teen Reena Virk. Alarey Alsip drove the sharp morality tale that toured Montreal schools.

At the Festival TransAmériques, Latvian theatre stole the stage with the wordless musical The Sound of Silence, about the flower power era in the former Soviet Socialist Republic.

Souvenir: A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins—at the Next Wave mini-fest of musical theatre in August—highlighted Nadia Verrucci’s witty performance as a tuneless and clueless singer.

Australian multidisciplinary collective Force Majeure with The Age I’m In, WW2 crooner Till We Meet Again, SideMart’s Dean Martin-esque Whiteman’s Whiskey Comedy Revue all deserve a nod. Other stand-outs include Susan Jeremy at the Fringe under Mary Fulham’s direction for their co-written piece Brazil Nuts; Freestanding Productions opening a tiny theatre on the Main in May; Porte Parole’s two parts of the Sexy béton trilogy; Tableau d’Hôte’s ambitious fifth anniversary Suburban Motel hexalogy; and a Christmas present from SideMart, Haunted Hillbilly.