I’ve said it every single time in doing a show, but I won’t look at reviews while I’m doing a show. our director/lead actor, Mark B. Hall, exposed this to my eyes awhile ago, so I thought I’d post it. I couldn’t resist!
A Review
Category Archives: Review
Includes plays, movies, whatever I want to review. Maybe even reviews about me? Just because you see none, doesn’t mean I left out the bad ones. Not that there were, but then again, I haven’t seen them. DON’T SEND THEM TO ME!
A 2-Year-Old Review
Curling comedy a hacky affair
Good performances, timely topic can’t save sitcom-ish script
By: Randall King
Posted: 2:37 PM CST Friday, Feb. 14, 2020
Lorraine James (from left), Zhaopeng Meng, Sophie Smith-Dostmohamed and Omar Alex Khan add nuanced dimensions to their characters that the script lacks. (Leif Norman)
Sophie Smith-Dostmohamed (from left), Omar Alex Khan, Lorraine James and Zhaopeng Meng bond at a small-town curling club. (Leif Norman)
Sophie Smith-Dostmohamed (left) and Lorraine James. (Leif Norman)
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/2/2020 (814 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Ah, small-town Canada. Land of ice, snow, Tim Hortons, curling clubs and… um.
Ontario playwright Mark Crawford’s comedy The New Canadian Curling Club proceeds on a premise that small-town Canadian culture is a bit of a wasteland. In a show that trades in — pardon the pun — sweeping generalizations, that one may be the most tiresome.
The premise: Four “New Canadians” show up at a small-town Ontario curling club to learn the oddball sport from crusty curling vet Stuart MacPhail (Doug McKeag), a seventh-generation Scot proud of his family’s curling legacy, inscribed for eternity, more or less, on the club’s display of bonspiel trophies.
One of the players, Jamaican-born Charmaine Bailey (Lorraine James), manager of the town’s only Tim Hortons franchise, isn’t really a new Canadian at all. She’s lived in the town for a quarter-century after falling in love with a Dutch-Canadian and following him home.
The Indian emigré Anoopjeet Singh (Omar Alex Khan), aspiring Hortons assistant manager, is also a relatively seasoned resident of seven years. He escaped the horrors of Mississauga, where he and his wife were living a life of indentured servitude to the relatives who sponsored his move to Canada. (Honestly, that detail right there might have been the basis of a better play.) Now he is struggling to make ends meet, supporting his wife and triplet sons.
One of the actual new Canadians, Chinese international medical student Mike (Zhaopeng Meng), has a connection to Stuart: He plans to ask Stuart’s granddaughter to marry him. His ability to form a relationship with Stuart is, in every sense, a test.
Finally, Fatima Al-Sayed (Sophie Smith-Dostmohamed), newly arrived with her parents from a Syrian refugee camp, is seen as one of those teen girls forever attached to her smartphone, with one important distinction: the device is her lifeline to a brother left behind in Syria.
Crawford’s script is written in broad-strokes sitcom style. Indeed, MacPhail seems a slightly less malignant descendant of All in the Family’s bigot-clown Archie Bunker, in that he is fixated on the triumphant heritage of his ancestors, while conveniently forgetting the members of one of those past generations were themselves immigrants.
Director Miles Potter often lands the laughs on Stuart’s politically incorrect observations, to the extent that it becomes difficult to tell if we’re supposed to be laughing at Stuart or with him. Coupled with non-stop references to Tim Hortons coffee and Timbits, one comes to suspect we’re stuck in a stale-dated TV show in which the commercials have been embedded via product placement.
The set by Steve Lucas offers up a realistic looking rink where most of the action takes place, though it’s a barren space to spend two hours and 10 minutes (including an intermission); this might be unintentionally reflective of the barrenness of small-town life as depicted by the playwright. A couple of video screens on either side of the stage might have been better utilized to illustrate Stuart’s belief that curling offers the strategic properties of chess.
One still emerges impressed by the performers, who strive to add some human dimension to their characters that’s lacking in the script. The impressively limber Khan emerges as one of the more successful actors in this regard, deftly sidestepping the clichés of Indian immigrant portrayal. James’s Jamaican accent comes and goes, but she still brings a vitality to the role. Zhaopeng Meng is a young actor whose rawness on the stage serves the character of Mike. And while the role of Fatima is underdeveloped — even new Canadian teen girls can’t stop staring at their phones, ha, ha — Smith-Dostmohamed brings some charm and mettle to the part.
Though his character is problematic, McKeag does solid work, and even has a lovely poignant moment, as the angry old white guy. His performance is right on the button.
Alas, you can’t say the same for the play.
randall.king@freepress.mb.ca
Winnipeg Free Press Review ~ “Passing”
This is three years way too late, but I wanted to keep track of reviews of shows I’ve done.
Passing
★★★ STARS
Although it’s set in 1927 and based on a novel written in 1929, Passing still brims with relevance in 2019.
Two friends, Claire and Irene, reconnect after a long time apart. One embraces her African-American identity, while the other pushes it aside and builds a life based on “passing” as white. These two light-skinned women quickly become entwined, each of them looking upon the other with judgment, jealousy and admiration.
Scenes between the pair of excellent leads crackle with energy. Seeing two mixed-race women speak honestly about racial “boundaries” was rare in 1929 and remains so in 2019.
While the lead performances are laudable, little else about the production is. The supporting actors do not project and are hard to hear. Missed cues and flubbed lines happen often. For some reason there’s an distractingly adorable chihuahua on stage.
But audiences who can look past these rough edges — and the chihuahua — will find plenty of thought-provoking material to chew on.
— Reviewed by Andrew Friesen
Deep cut film festival- 2022 Award Winners
Life & Death ~ Dir. Ashley Coleman, Heather Coleman, & Jason Coleman ~ Valley Village, United States ~ 22:21
This one struck a chord. The filmmakers mentioned on FilmFreeway that this film was born from a 20 year old feature “that never was”…it never made a splash and died on the vine. Two decades later, a copy was found on VHS, and the daughter of the filmmakers thought it would be cool to re-edit the film, so the filmmakers did–with the help of their daughter.
The story struck a chord because I think a lot of indie filmmakers have a film in their past that might haunt them a little. Those unfinished projects, those films that didn’t “go anywhere” and those projects that just sort of sit in the back of your mind in a negative way.
These directors reminded us that nothing is over, and good footage can always find a new life, and sometimes in ways that one could never have imagined. That’s why this one gets an editing award, because they reimagined something that didn’t go the way they thought it would go and created a very cool and entertaining piece of art.
New York civic drama on the unpolished side – Winnipeg Free Press
By: Randall King
Posted: 02/3/2018 3:00 AM |
John Patrick Shanley’s drama Storefront Church feels like an especially topical work, placed as it is in the triple-nexus of politics, commerce and religion.
Alas, this issues-oriented production from the Tara Players has some issues of its own, including a running time that spills well over the 110 minutes promised on the ShanleyFest program. The true length is closer to 130 minutes, although some of those minutes on the opening night may have been the result of actors forgetting their lines.
If there was a spectrum of professionalism when it comes to participating ShanleyFest companies, the Tara Players would appear on the amateur half. But that is not to say they don’t create compelling theatre.
Nor should you assume you won’t see professional quality actors. In this case, your attention will likely be drawn to Vic Unruh, who plays Donaldo Calderon, the president of a Bronx borough association committed to bringing money and business into the benighted New York district.
Donaldo is beseeched by old family friend Jessie Cortez (Lorraine James) to intervene with a local bank that is threatening to foreclose on Jessie’s house. Jessie’s husband Ethan Goldklang (Robert Wall) already has failed to appeal to the humanity of loan officer Reed Van Druyten (Kevin Longfield), suffering a heart attack in the bargain.
Donaldo is good to go to bat, until he learns the reason why Jessie has assumed a crushing debt is because she has rented the storefront space of her property to a Louisiana pastor, Chester (Densfield Green) for use as a church. The trouble is that Chester is not paying rent and is not particularly expedient in his plan to open his church to the public, crippled as he is by depression in the wake of losing his first church in the devastation of hurricane Katrina.
Chester proves intransigent to Donaldo’s efforts to compel him to make good his debt to Jessie.
But he has rather more luck with the bank president, Tom (Bernard Boland), who needs Donaldo onside for a $300-million development planned for the Bronx.
All these characters will meet up at the church, including Reed, a first-time church attendee nonplussed by the religious experience, but not immune to the promise of some kind of salvation.
The dialogue is all-important in a Shanley play, especially when characters are speaking in the specific wiseguy cadences of New York-ese. Unruh does particularly good work at this, and he tends to anchor the drama as a result, abetted by James and Wall as an eccentrically-matched married couple.
As a pastor paralysed by an apparent crisis of faith, Densfield Green submits a problematic performance, speaking Shanley’s lines with a clipped phrasing that is sometimes difficult to understand. As the icy bank loan officer with a crazy-colourful past, Kevin Longfield likewise has a stilted delivery that infringes on the flow of the piece. Boland does good, capable work as the genteel banker with the ominous surname Raidenberg.
The play itself is an interesting examination of the ways in which doing the right thing can go wrong. With that in mind, ShanleyFest pass holders are advised to sample this show later in its run when the actors may have a better command of the material.
Twitter: @FreepKing
Read more by Randall King.
Lorraine James 
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