Even with the success of acts like Lonely Island and Flight of the Conchords, people still tend to view musical comedy with some suspicion, and not without reason. Those high-profile success stories aside, at the club level, musical comedy is too often the province of people who aren’t quite good enough to make it as musicians, but not quite funny enough to make it as comedians.

Two local comics, Robert Keller and Rush Zilla, are out to change that perception with their show, Off Key Comedy, which features a wide variety of acts whose only commonality is that they combine music and comedy in one form or another. The third edition of the monthly show will take place on May 23, at Comedy Bar.

Despite the fact that the last show in Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 2012/2013 season is titled Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical, Lady Gaga herself takes a secondary role. There are no homages to raw-meat dresses and gold-plated wheelchairs here. Instead, writer and director Alistair Newton uses the House of Gaga as a pathway into the history of the notable performance-art stars that came before her in the pantheon of queer iconography, and how she is and isn’t a construct of all of them put together.

Ali Momen (Demetrius) and Sarah Sherman (Helena) in in all their unrequited glory. Photo by Chris Gallow.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
High Park Amphitheatre (1873 Bloor Street West)
June 26 to September 2, Tuesdays to Sundays at 8 p.m.
PWYC

Summer living in Toronto means taking everything we love to do inside—brunching, drinking, watching movies, exercising—and shoving it outside. So it’s no surprise that Canadian Stage’s Shakespeare in High Park (renamed this year from the previous Dream in High Park), the longest-running outdoor theatre event in the country, has had such a good run. This year, it’s celebrating its 30th edition.

To mark the occasion, director Richard Rose (who is also the artistic director of Tarragon Theatre) takes this summer’s play into the past and the future. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a nod to the event’s inaugural production in 1983, but Rose’s interpretation propels it from ancient Athens to modern-day Canada—Mounties, bagpipes, and all. If that sounds gimmicky, it kind of is. Rose uses all the tricks in the book—audience participation, special guests, dramatic entrances and exits, onstage stripping—but it all works, and the result is a constant stream of knee-slappers.

In Rose’s version, the soon-to-be-wedded Theseus (Dmitry Chepovetsky) and Hippolyta (Tamara Podemski)—who pull double-duty as fairy royalty Oberon and Titania—arrive in Ontario cottage country and attempt to settle a dispute between Hermia (Rose Napoli, who is filling in for an injured Sophia Kolinas), her father Egeus (John Dolan), her lover Lysander (Eric Morin), and her betrothed Demetrius (Ali Momen), who Hermia’s friend Helena (Sarah Sherman) is in love with.

As Hermia and Lysander flee into the woods one night, followed by Demetrius and Helena, some tricky fairies (with Gil Garratt as Puck) wreak havoc on the love quadrangle using their magic. All the while, four actors, collectively known as The Mechanicals, try to rehearse a production of Pyramus and Thisbe for Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding. In perhaps the most inspired choice, Rose turns the The Mechanicals into a reflection of today’s multicultural makeup. He gives us Pierre Le Coing (Pierre Simpson) instead of Peter Quince, Tom Chow (Richard Lee) instead of Tom Snout, Francis Filchenkov (Mark Crawford) instead of Francis Flute, and an overeager real estate agent (John Cleland) instead of Nick Bottom. Equally genius is the choice to get double-duty out of this crew by having them play Titania’s fairies.

Morin’s Lysander is a bandana’d rocker whose limitless energy and libido allow him to take his sudden unexplainable lust for Helena to new heights, excellently countered by Sherman’s tortured and insecure Helena (who is used to channelling her unrequited frustrations with jogs through the woods). Napoli’s Hermia has bite when it comes time for her to accuse her friend of stealing her man. Momen’s Demetrius seems like he forgot long ago who or what he actually loves. The standouts are Cleland, Simpson, Lee, and Crawford as the haphazard Mechanicals/fairies. Their play-within-a-play had us doubled over.

Karyn McCallum’s costumes vary haphazardly from modern suits and running gear, to traditional robes and peasant wear. The plants that transport us from the kingdom to the enchanted woods in her set are underwhelming, but we do appreciate how the set embraces the green outdoors rather than working against it.

Rose’s raucous revival of the Shakespeare classic is a milestone for Canadian stage. It could prove that Shakespeare in High Park is still 30 years young.

Technically, there are only three characters in this photo from The Real World?. Photo by Cylla Von Tiedmann.

The Real World?
Tarragon Theatre (30 Bridgman Avenue)
Runs to June 3
Tuesday to Saturday at 8 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 2:30 p.m. matinees
$21–$51

We’ll never quite understand why some audience members aren’t interested in sticking around to ask questions during post-show talkbacks. If your parking’s about to expire, or you have a very early morning, sure. But if you’ve stayed to the end of the play, then you must have questions about what you’ve just seen. This is especially true when the show is as full as secrets as Michel Tremblay’s The Real World?, in English translation by John Van Burek, which director Richard Rose has brought back to the Tarragon Theatre 23 years after his last production of the play there.

More on the talkback in a bit; but first, the plot. Aspiring playwright Claude (Matthew Edison, a successful playwright himself) has arrived at his parents’ house for dinner just as his travelling-salesman father Alex (Tony Nappo) is returning from a business trip. Father and son couldn’t be much more different (the former has a forced jovial manner, the latter is sullen and caustic), so Claude is clearly there for a reason other than his father’s company. When Papa goes for a bath, Claude asks his mother Madeleine (Jane Spidell) if she has read the draft of a new play he had left with her. She has, and she’s deeply upset by the fact that the family he portrays in the manuscript is a thinly disguised version of his own.

As Madeleine explains her many objections to the play, we begin to see alternate versions of her (Meg Tilly) and Alex (Cliff Saunders) performing scenes in the same living room space. So the play within the play (and there may be even more layers than that) takes place simultaneously, and we begin to understand that Claude has poured a lot of resentment and anger into his work. This becomes even clearer when his go-go dancer sister Mariette (played by Sophie Goulet and Cara Gee) arrives for dinner, and more terrible family secrets are slowly revealed.

The talkback after the show addressed many fascinating aspects of The Real World?—at least, for the half of the audience that stuck around post-curtain. While the play seems similar to barely disguised autobiographical family dramas like Euguene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, director Rose explained that The Real World? was actually written as a form of apology from Tremblay to his immediate family, who’d already voiced their opposition to his airing of their dirty laundry in earlier work. Claude is morally conflicted enough over his use of family history that we could buy The Real World? as a mea culpa from Tremblay.

Rose also said that Spidell, who played Claude’s mother in this production, had played Mariette in his 1988–89 staging. Spidell offhandedly mentioned that the earlier production staged “real life” and “play life” on separate sides of the stage. The “new” staging, then, seems to us to be one of the most fascinating aspects of the production. Seeing the two different realities rub up against each other without actually interacting (save for at a few subtle moments) on designer Charlotte Dean’s set—a note-perfect replica of a Quebecois 1970′s home—is never confusing. The connection and similarities between the two plays constantly reveal new truths about the family. And who’s to say there are only two realities? The play leaves open the possibility that its “real world” is just a later version of the play Claude wrote—or that it foreshadows a soon-to-come, differently balanced draft.

Either way, by the end of the show we’ve seen both sides of the debate over accuracy and family loyalty. Spidell’s Madeleine and Edison’s Claude do a creditable job of articulating those points. Nappo’s barely restrained smarminess (and later, shame and fury) shines through, while Saunders manages to instill some humanity in a character written (by Claude) to be irrevocably loathsome. Tilly’s determined Madeleine is an inspiring heroine, before her namesake starts to tear her down. Meanwhile, both Gee and Goulet make impressions with their turns as the strutting Mariette. That it’s still hard to judge right from wrong in the script-within-the-script is a clear sign the production is doing justice to the material.

Trish Lindström eavesdrops on the risqué remedies of David Storch, Elizabeth Saunders, and Melody A. Johnson. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann.

In the Next Room or the vibrator play
Tarragon Theatre
(30 Bridgman Avenue)
September 13 to October 23
Tuesday to Saturday 8 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 2:30 p.m.
$20–$47

As most can probably attest, sex is hardly ever just about sex. With it comes heavier consequences: intimacy issues, fears of inadequacy, assumed roles and expectations, excruciating curiosity and confusion, and other relationship conflicts are brought to light. But, it can also be fun, and if you have the right sense of humour, funny too. And so it is with Tarragon Theatre’s 2011/2012 season opener, In the Next Room or the vibrator play by Sarah Ruhl, a funny and touching script exploring femininity, motherhood, love, romance, sex, and the invention of the electric vibrator.

With some outstanding actors like David Storch and Trish Lindström (who recently thrilled us in Mr. Marmalade and Exit the King, respectively), a pretty hot playwright (as in, talented), the 2011 TIFF debut of a film with a similar concept, and this year’s Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts winner and Tarragon artistic director Richard Rose in the director’s chair, In the Next Room or the vibrator play brings some serious buzz. Set in the 1880s, it happens entirely within the home of Dr. Givings (Storch) and Mrs. Givings (Lindström). As a doctor who treats emotional, weak, tired, and ill women day after day, Dr. Givings is happy to have a young wife as full of energy as Catherine is. But as her own insecurities as a mother, wife, and woman emerge, she becomes more and more curious about the groans and shrieks that emanate from his office and is consumed with the idea of trying the machine out herself. With one of her husband’s patients as a newfound ally, a wise wet nurse as the woman she wishes to be, and a romantic artist as the Casanova she longs for, eventually she realizes that her scientific and painfully logical husband is just as confused by her parlour room as she is by his operating theatre.

The performances all around hit the right spots, and Storch and Lindström are delightful as expected. But what really got our mojo going was Ruhl’s script and Rose’s directing, mixing farce-like energy and joviality, like Melody A. Johnson’s quivering Sabrina Daldry (and we mean that in every sense of the word), and with some really sweet and moving moments, like Marci T. House’s monologue mourning her lost infant son. In this way, Ruhl weaves in the larger implications of female sexual liberation, while keeping the overall atmosphere lighthearted. If this was meant to be an evocative examination of feminism and gender roles, well, it doesn’t come through. Rather, and this is much more likely the intention, at the heart of the play is a breakdown in communication and romance between man and wife—one that we, as an audience with a modern perspective, know can’t be solved by anything battery-operated.

With vibrators now well integrated into modern society, be it in window displays, party activities, or a major plot device in mainstream female-oriented TV comedy series, ignoring female gratification seems as incomprehensible and offensive as calling wet nurses “nine parts Devil and one part cow” or using the term “darkie” (all of which occur in Ruhl’s script, of course, in a bold and sometimes uncomfortable trip back in time and language). But, ultimately, In the Next Room brings up conflicts that persist today, like the correlation between technology and the disappearance of romance and how, just like flipping on a light, sex can illuminate whatever is or isn’t working in a relationship (and that’s not even scratching the surface on all the double-entendres buried in the script, played subtly instead of with over-the-top hokeyness).

Luckily, this show is sending us all the right vibrations.

One minute you’re at the top of your game. The next you can’t get 500 words on bathroom fixtures in the Real Estate section.
There is no lonelier soul than a freelance writer who discovers, belatedly, that he is no longer wanted by the magazines and the newspapers by which he has eked out his living. Angry, funny and cruelly accurate, the play asks the question: how can a man make sense of a life that has never been anything more than yesterday’s paper?

It’s interesting to track the evolution of the play through subsequent press releases.

The next one gave us the name of the protagonist and further details clearly lifted from the life of Macfarlane, whose pretentious columns in the Globe Review section always had to mention the holy trinity of his wife, wine, and opera:

In Fishwrap we meet Kingsley Fitzhenry – a man who always had pretension beyond newspaper and magazine writing, but who, nonetheless, earned his living on Grub Street. He has come to the offices of a newspaper for which he used to write with some regularity in order to pitch an idea for a column, but because nobody really wants to see him, he has been shunted down to a junior editor. He is humiliated by this treatment, but too desperate for work to let it deter him. What unfolds is less a pitch than an avalache of caustic autobiography. Angry, funny, bitter – and cruelly accurate in its portrayal of the lower rungs of print journalism – Fishwrap asks the question: how can a man make sense of a life that has never been anything more than yesterday’s paper?

Now for the latest press release (not online) check out the shift in focus as Macfarlane begins serious work with a dramaturge who seems to be wanting him to make the show more depressing and, apparently, more relevant to the post-9/11 world:

Nothing is forever. Not life. Not love. And certainly not work. In an age of insecurity, few have a more tenuous hold on employment than the freelance newspaper writer. Fewer still have bigger egos. But when the axe falls, even the proudest old hack and the most deluded columnist are obliged to confront what all of us must someday face: no matter how important we believe ourselves to be, there will come a time when there is no space for us anymore.
In Fishwrap, comedy and anger, defiance and lonely bewilderment are woven together in a monologue that continually bursts beyond the confines of a single character. Stuck together in a single room, a blocked writer and his crusty, verbose persona mourn the loss of the only thing that gave their job meaning: an audience. Now, they have nobody to ran to anymore. Except themselves.

Jeez… Sorry, Macfarlane. Now, we feel bad for having ever made fun of you. Repeatedly. And spat our Cheerios at your column. Anytime you want to write for Torontoist, just drop us a line.