Results tagged “kennethwelsh”

Continuing the merry trend of importing whatever's been a hit on Broadway or the West End from the past several years, CanStage kicked off its current season with Tom Stoppard's latest effort: Rock'n'Roll. In this show, a decades-spanning epic, Stoppard tells the story of a Cambridge University family who become involved with a visiting scholar from the former Czechoslovakia. It opens shortly after the Prague Spring of 1968 and finishes up at a Rolling Stones concert just after the Velvet Revolution in 1989. The history of communism in Czechoslovakia is interwoven with the history of rock'n'roll music, as well as Czech scholar Jan's interest in civil disobedience (and Czech rock band the Plastic People of the Universe), Marxist Cambridge professor Max's family life, and the mental decline of Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett. If you think that sounds like rather a lot of things to be jammed into a single play, you are absolutely right. In fact, it's far too many.

When Dylan Thomas began writing Under Milk Wood, his famous "play for voices" about the sleepy Welsh community of Llareggub and its inhabitants, he intended it to be performed as a radio play with a full cast of actors. Over the years, the play has been both recorded and performed for stage in a variety of productions (including a film version with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole), sometimes with a cast as large as fifty. The Soulpepper version now playing at the Young Centre, a revival of last year's popular production, features a sole actor, Kenneth Welsh, performing every single role.