Ross Petty Productions' Snow White – Review

There's no handsome prince in this fairytale and a dearth of dwarves... but there is a debonair secret agent and a heroic giant-killer who's also something of a lady-killer. Of course, this has got to be Snow White, The Deliciously Dopey Family Musical!, the 17th annual panto from Ross Petty Productions.

Over the years, Petty and company have developed the traditional form of the British Christmas panto into something utterly Canadian, both in personality and in its references to topics dear to the hearts of its audience members of all ages, from Don Cherry  and Movember to the TTC. This year's edition was particularly packed with one-liners – both scripted and ad-libbed – including a few fairly gentle pokes at our potentially departing mayor Rob Ford. The musical numbers are a mashup of current popular hits; expect everything from Katy Perry to Psy.

This year's material is perhaps a little more adult than usual; it includes some near-the-knuckle double entendres like the evil queen's blushworthy opening remark to the audience "I do appreciate a warm hand on my opening." However, these sorts of lines soar right over the heads of the kids, like my ten-year-old niece, who said her favourite part of the show was Snow White's entourage of furry and feathery forest creatures.

Under the apt direction of Tracey Flye, who choreographed the shows for many years, the pace is fast and very funny, beginning at the palace, where the evil queen (Petty in drag, hamming it up to attract the boo-birds as usual) banishes the pure-hearted and lovely Snow White into the dark forest.

From this point on, things take a turn for the decidedly silly, with fairytale characters from other stories popping up to lend a hand to thwart the evil queen and her Eurotrash henchpeople. Among the good guys, Bryn McAuley as a cellphone-wielding Valley Girl of a Red Riding Hood who's keen to become Snowie's BFF is a near show-stealer ("You're the princess?!? Can I tweet that I know you???" she squeals.)

The professionalism and ease of Stratford veteran Graham Abbey is a pleasure to watch; his 007, diving and rolling at the slightest provocation, is a hoot, and he communicates at all times the warm sense that he's enjoying sharing the jokes with the audience. Melissa O'Neil is everything Snow White should be – with vocal chops to boot. Eddie Glen, returning in his longtime role as the heroine's pal, once again endears himself to the crowd with his hapless hilarity.

A true Toronto tradition in a beautiful theatre, this dopey musical is a real treat. Snow White runs until January 5 at the Elgin Theatre.

Photo credit: Racheal McCaig. L-R: Graham Abbey as 007, Bryn McAuley as Red Riding Hood, Billy Lake as Pinocchio, Melissa O'Neill as Snow White, Reid Janisse as Ham and Lindsay Croxall as one of Snow White's forest friends in Ross Petty Productions' Snow White, The Deliciously Dopey Family Musical!

Soulpepper Theatre's 2013 Season Announcement

Soulpepper Theatre has announced its playbill for 2013. The roster includes some returning favourites like Alligator Pie, Kim's Convenience and Parfumerie, and new work – including an intriguing adaptation of The Barber of Seville, to be directed by Martha Ross.   Two sets of linked plays will be produced over the summer and late fall, and they could hardly be more different in tone: Tony Kushner's deeply affecting Angels in America, and Alan Ayckbourn's lighthearted farcical trilogy The Norman Conquests.

• February 7 to March 2: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard
• March 25 to May 4: True West by Sam Shepherd
• March 26 to May 4: La Ronde by Arthur Schnitlzer, adapted by Jason Sherman
• May 9 to June 8: The Barber of Seville by Pierre Beaumarchais and Gioachino Rossinni, adapted by Michael O'Brien and John Millard
• May 23 to June 19: Kim's Convenience by Ins Choi
• July 5 to August 17: Entertaining Mr. Sloane by Joe Orton
• July 6 to August 17: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, adapted by Michael Shamata
• July 19 to September 14: Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part One: Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner
• July 20 to September 14: : Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part Two: Perestroika by Tony Kushner
• September 27 to November 16: The Norman Conquests: Table Manners by Alan Ayckbourn
• September 28 to November 16: The Norman Conquests: Living Together by Alan Ayckbourn
• September 28 to November 16: The Norman Conquests: Round and Round the Garden by Alan Ayckbourn
• October 11 to November 9: Farther West by John Murrell
• November 3 to December 1: Alligator Pie by Dennis Lee, adapt Ins Choi, Raquel Duffy, Ken Mackenzie, Gregory Priest & Mike Ross
• November 27 to December 21: Parfumerie by Miklós László, adapt. Adam Pettle & Brenda Robins

Photo credit: Jason Hudson. Raquel Duffy, Ins Choi, Mike Ross and Ken MacKenzie in Alligator Pie

Soulpepper Theatre's Endgame – Review

As soon as last night's production of Endgame let out, I checked the program to calculate Samuel Beckett's age when he wrote it. I make it out to be 51, which was just what I was expecting. I gather Beckett was never the most lighthearted of playwrights, but this particular play is all about the things that are uppermost in your mind as you pass the Big Five-Oh: the increasing imminence of death, the growing presence of physical pain and the big question: if we're just going to die anyway, is anything worth bothering about at all?

I find it a maddening play. If you don't know it, it's about Hamm (Joseph Ziegler), who's blind and confined to a chair, Clov (Diego Matamoros), who attends to his needs, and Hamm's aged parents Nagg (Eric Peterson) and Nell (Maria Vacratsis), who have been (literally) tossed into the trash, whence they cannot escape.

In the bleakest of indoor settings, painted by set designer Julie Fox in fifty shades of grey – but not the fun kind – Hamm orders Clov about a series of pointless, mundane tasks while waiting for the inevitable end. In Hamm's universe, there is no comfort. It's cold and dirty, and the household has run out of everything nice, including (among other things) sugar plums, painkillers, blankets and bicycle-wheels. The experience of the play is not unlike spending an excruciating day or two in an intensive care ward, where what once seemed "normal" becomes an unattainable delight. ("Yesterday!" rhapsodizes Nell.)

My problem with the show is partly that it's so alien to my way of seeing things. I'm with Woody Allen, who, in Hannah and Her Sisters, confronts the same difficult question, but decides it's all worth it if you can experience a few immortal moments (in his case, when laughing at the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup).

But Endgame is undeniably elegant. It opens with a little riff on Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy from – name no coincidence? – Hamm ("What dreams! Those forests! ... Enough, it's time it ended, in the shelter, too. ... And yet I hesitate, I hesitate to... to end."). The play builds repeating and gradually accruing layers of detail, nuance and reference to flesh out Hamm's utterly hopeless existence; one he nonetheless seems to take some satisfaction in.

Fifty-plus years after its first production, Endgame still rings with eerie connections to life of the moment. I felt a disturbing frisson at one of Clov's very first lines: "I can't be punished any more", because it so closely echoes certain words of Ashley Smith, the young woman who took her own life in a federal prison in 2007, heard in videos released recently as evidence of her treatment while in custody. On two occasions, she can be heard saying more or less the same thing in answer to threats of discipline from the guards; her meaning is plain: "You can't make me feel worse than I already do."

In the absurdist view, human life is so awful that you have to laugh about it, but the world of Endgame seems to have run out of laughter when it ran out of sugar plums. One of the few comic lines is also among the bleakest – and to me sums up the world view of the whole play; it comes when Hamm asks Clov whether his father is still alive. "He's crying," Clov tells him. "Then he's living," says Hamm. It's an either-or proposition: living is weeping; the only end of weeping is death.

But perhaps what I find most maddening is that I'm not sure Beckett isn't just tweaking our noses. "Me to play" says Hamm, at the beginning and end of the piece. It's his chess move, that is; he starts the game. And maybe the whole depressing scenario is Beckett's own game. Are we to believe that life's just an imprisoning dungheap, or is Beckett simply forcing us to confront the possibility in case we may choose to believe something else instead?

Just as the characters of Endgame know they're in a play, and refer to that state from time to time, Beckett gives himself away; after all, he made plays. What's more pointless than that in a meaningless universe? No, Beckett believes in meaning; you might say he's all about it.

Hamm even has a tiny moment that almost resembles the warning of Marley's Ghost in A Christmas Carol, in which he refers, however archly, to one of Christianity's central commandments, one that gives a possible meaning for our mortal existence: "All those I might have helped. ... Helped! ... Saved. ... Saved! ... The place was crawling with them. ... Use your head, can't you, use your head, you're on earth, there's no cure for that! ... Get out of here and love one another! Lick your neighbor as yourself!" What is one to make of that? I'm eternally hopeful; I have my own answer, which may not be yours.

Daniel Brooks' clear and seamless direction, with the enormous energy and focus of Ziegler and Matamoros, bring all this vexing complexity to the stage in its brutal and inexorable rawness. Love it or hate it, Endgame is a brilliant masterwork. It continues at the Young Centre until November 17.

Photo credit: Cylla von Tiedemann. Maria Vacratsis and Eric Peterson in Soulpepper Theatre's production of Endgame.