The winners of the 2009 Brickenden Awards for Theatrical Excellence in London, announced at Monday night’s ceremony:

Outstanding Comedy Production

P.S. Your Cat Is Dead (Pacheco Theatre)

Outstanding Lighting Design

Rob Coles, P.S. Your Cat Is Dead (Pacheco Theatre)

Outstanding Sound Design

Andrew Johnson, The Tempest (The Passionfool Theatre Company)

Outstanding Youth Production

The Boy Friend (Theatre Laurier)

Outstanding Touring Production

The Stories of César Chávez (Fred Blanco, London Fringe Festival)

Outstanding Supporting Actress

Katie Paxman, Doubt, A Parable (Dariusz Entertainment)

Outstanding Original Script

Scenes For A War, Dan Ebbs

Outstanding Set Design

Jordan C. Morris, Mark Piggot, Rob Cousins, Rodel Manoy and Shane Wilcox, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (Iglesia Productions)

Outstanding Costume Design

Brenda Fieldhouse, The Duncombe Rebellion 1837 (Living History Productions)

Chris Doty…

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The nominees for this year’s Brickenden Awards are:

Outstanding Production

• 7 Stories — The Passionfool Theatre Company (The ARTS Project)
• Doubt, A Parable — Dariusz Entertainment (The ARTS Project)
• My Name is Rachel Corrie — Dariusz Entertainment (The ARTS Project)
• P.S. Your Cat Is Dead — Pacheco Theatre (McManus Studio Theatre)
• The Last Days of Judas Iscariot — Iglesia Productions (McManus Studio Theatre)

Outstanding Director

• Dariusz Korbiel, Doubt, A Parable — Dariusz Entertainment (The ARTS Project)
• Eva Blahut, 7 Stories — The Passionfool Theatre Company (The ARTS Project)
• John Gerry, Company — Fountainhead Theatre (McManus Studio Theatre)
• John Pacheco, P.S. Your Cat Is Dead — Pacheco Theatre (McManus Studio Theatre)
• Jordan Morris, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot — Iglesia Productions (McManus…

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The Brickenden Awards are ramping up their annual search for adjudicators. Positions are open on the “core” and touring panels.

As a third-year panellist, I’ve found the experience both rewarding and personally challenging. There’s a lot of very good independent theatre happening in the city and a lot of talented people are involved, so the chance to witness and recognize their work is always welcome.

But I’m not going to lie to you, Marge: it’s not a trivial effort. During the year members of each panel are expected to see all of the productions that are registered in that area; in past years…

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A new year—as many people consider September to mark—means new changes, and this month is no exception. In fact, I’ve had to add to this post a few times because things are coming fast and furious.

Passionfool, who have always considered The ARTS Project home, has become the venue’s resident theatre company. Their first production under the new banner is The Tempest, with Julia Webb taking on the role of Prospero.

After a few years’ hiatus, the Oh Solo Mio festival of one-person performances returns next week. It’s an opportunity to see four of the most celebrated performers on the Fringe circuit today, including…

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Full disclosure: I will be the editor of The Beat On Line. Nevertheless, I believe interviewing the man behind London’s newest arts magazine is an interesting and contrasting piece to my interview with Scene Publisher Bret Downe. Some questioned its place on Theatre in London’s web site. I don’t; picking up the issue of Scene that was published simultaneously with the interview’s posting, I found two theatre articles on local productions. You might need a magnifying glass, but they’re there.

But, you naysayers are all right: it ain’t the arts coverage of years gone by, but what is?

Just what are the publisher’s plans for…

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The first time I met Scene magazine’s publisher Bret Downe was in ‘96.

I was a faithful reader of Scene from its earliest days and after a stint as a reviewer for UWO’s Gazette, I called and asked if they were looking for theatre reviews. Then Scene Arts Editor Jim French said, “No, but you wouldn’t happen to know anything about classical music, would you?”

“Do I know classical music! When do you need me to start?” Well, I listened to it anyway. If Jim had asked me to write cat reviews, I would have said I was an expert on pussies.

Within a short period…

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Although there’s no dearth of theatre happening right now—we’re halfway through the Spriet Summer Sizzler, and there are events scheduled through to the middle of August before a four-week gap—I’ve been meaning to make note of some other theatre readings that have caught my attention over the last few months.

A recent addition to this site is the Theatre Elsewhere section, a collection of pages and links I’ve discovered that seem to be interesting and relevant. Currently there’s a short essay on the theatrical origins of the word fiasco, an obituary of Canadian actor-director Neil Munro, an article about Manitoba Theatre Centre being…

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The results of the 2009 Fringe Ballot, as voted by patrons of the festival, were announced at tonight’s Fringe Fried awards ceremony. In order of presentation, they are:

• Best Film-on-the-Fringe: Jackpot!
• Best VisualFringe Artist: Jerry Vrabec
• Spirit of the Fringe: Fully Insured, for The NO Show
• Most Daring Production: So Many Boo-Boos, written and performed by Dan Ebbs
• Funniest Production: Spilt Milk in, “We Aim To Please!”
• Best Solo Performance: Lydia Zadel, See Bob Run
• Best Performance: Fred Blanco, The Stories of César Chávez
• Best Original Production: Wanderlust, written and performed by Martin Dockery
• Best Production: Never Swim Alone, Passionfool Theatre
• Producer’s Pick, chosen by Executive Producer Kathy Navackas: Passionfool Theatre

Congratulations…

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It’s hard to discuss Love Shack without referencing the B-52s song, so let’s get that out of the way:

Huggin’ and a-kissin’, dancin’ and a lovin’,
wearin’ next to nothing
Cause it’s hot as an oven

Michael Wilmot’s multiple-award-winning script is being remounted at this year’s Fringe festival, featuring the actors who originated the roles at last year’s London One Act Festival, Chris Bancroft and perennial Brickenden (and audience) favourite Martha Zimmerman. Courtesy of one of those writing awards, they’re also taking the show on the road to the Hamilton Fringe next month.

Wilmot, whose voice is familiar to anyone who’s visited the Palace Theatre—he recorded…

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From Fringe Headquarters:

The 2009 London Fringe Festival is proud to announce its selection of shows for this year’s Impresario Series. (Not to be confused with the show called The Impresario. The two things are completely different; it’s just a fluke that it happened this way!) The extra performances take place on Sunday June 28th as follows:

• The One Man Show, 7:30pm, Spriet Theatre (Venue #1)
• The Stories of César Chávez, 7:30pm, The ARTS Project (Venue #2)
• Magical Mystery Tour Rockumentary, 9:00pm, Wolf Performance Hall (Venue #3)
• Never Swim Alone, 9:00pm, McManus Theatre (Venue #5)
• Wanderlust, 6:00pm, Fanshawe College Theatre (Venue #6)

All tickets are $10 (cash…

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I had my first-ever Josh Cottrell experience back in April when I reviewed his slapstick bluegrass musical He Ain’t Heavy as part of the comedy festival. Thought I’d get up close and personal this time around as he remounted the show as part of Fringe, at The Lounge at Tequilla Rose (178 Dundas Street, June 19–28).

1. Donald D’Haene: Your show was a joy to watch unfold. Very clever writing. So, let’s go there — what do you think makes your talent unique?
2. Josh Cottrell: In theatre, you are reaching within and placing it out there for everyone to see. I keep myself brave by…

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Lydia Zadel and Caitlin Murphy call Montreal home, so you’d imagine they’d have some bon mots to share about their Fringe production of See Bob Run. And so they did, in a conversation on the Tuesday night before the festival opened.

I can’t print any of them.

Note to future interviewers: never, never, joke about your audio recorder not working. Especially if you’re not much of a note-taker.

Fortunately they’re a memorable duo, so all’s not lost.

Caitlin and Lydia were discussing rehearsal notes when I arrived to meet them at the Black Shire. It’s been ten months since we last talked—at Caitlin’s first performance of…

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The X-Fringe is out there.

To kick off coverage of the tenth annual Fringe—that’s “London Fringe Theatre Festival” to those of you arriving from other planets—I asked Adam Holowitz, playwright and director of Grimes of the Borough, to talk a bit about his highly-anticipated production.

Adam is the Artistic Director of AlvegoRoot Theatre Company. A former student at The Theatre School, his bona fides include assistant directing work with Jason Rip’s Theatre Nemesis on shows from Grey Days Preferable and Drunheller and Gleiss: A Wicked Brew to Hamlet: ADD; on stage, he has performed in the second and third editions of the Lost Soul Stroll,…

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As well as being Victoria Day, today marks one month until the start of the 2009 London Fringe Theatre Festival. It’s also an appropriate time to put forward an idea that’s been brewing since I adopted this site last year.

One of the things that makes Fringe festivals tick is buzz: What shows do you have to see? Who was just phoning it in? What performer made you laugh until your sides ached—intentionally or not?

The local media, particularly Kathy Rumleski and James Reaney at the Free Press, do a fantastic job of reviewing and publicizing shows. The same goes for Theatre in London’s regular…

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My first attempt at theatre outside of school was a sublime surprise. Trials started the beginning of this year when all theatres in London tossed my resume aside. However, opportunities do…

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Updated May 1 with pictures from the awards ceremony.

The awards for the tenth annual London One Act Festival were handed out on Sunday, April 26 at the Black Shire Pub. Adjudicator Caitlin Murphy, who reviewed the plays over the last three days of the festival, named the following winners:

Outstanding actor

Matthew McKenzie, Outer Space

Outstanding actress

Lyndsay Simmons, On the Menu

Outstanding supporting actor

Chris Bancroft, Beyond Belief

Outstanding supporting actress

Helena Bartholomew, Sisters

Outstanding Director

Rachael Needles, The Chaos Womb

Outstanding original script

Petryna Venuta, Beyond Belief

Outstanding production

On the Menu

Murphy also presented two special adjudicator’s awards. The first went to Jocelyne Rioux for her outstanding dual performances in Just for You and…

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Starting in theatre

1. Jordan Morris: So…were you interested specifically in theatre before you were involved in (your) first show, or did it happen that you found the scene and then were inspired to explore it and take part?
2. Caitlin Murphy: I…hmm… order of events… I… chose to write a play as a thesis project in the last year of my undergrad degree at University… usually people write essays for their thesis projects, but I got permission to write…

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Augusto Boal is a Brazilian theatre director, writer and activist. The following is his 2009 World Theatre Day message, delivered at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France on March 25; you may also hear it read before performances today.

All human societies are “spectacular” in their daily life and produce “spectacles” at special moments. They are “spectacular” as a form of social organization and produce “spectacles” like the one you have come to see.

Even if one is unaware of it, human relationships are structured in a theatrical way. The use of space, body language, choice of words and voice modulation, the confrontation of ideas…

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I love the name used by UWO’s Department of French Studies (Département d’études françaises) for their theatre productions: Le théâtre L’On Donne. A literal translation is “the theatre is given”, and ain’t that the truth.

Next week they’re giving us Michel Tremblay’s Le vrai monde?, a play some consider his greatest work. Written about two decades after Les Belles-soeurs (which Passionfool produced last year—in English—to great acclaim), Le vrai monde?—The Real World?—is also set in the 1960s, and also relates the story of a Québecois family, but the two works diverge significantly after that.

I’m looking forward to seeing the production, not only because…

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Amateur theatre depends on every person involved to commit every skill and resource they have to the project. Because no one is ever paid and amateur companies usually can’t hire professionals, directors are forced to rely on the abilities of an eclectic and hopefully eager cast and crew to complete the project. Just because your title may be “lighting designer” doesn’t mean you won’t end up with…

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Over the last eight months of their excellent Theatre in London On the Air radio show (and podcast) Jeff Culbert and Simon Goodwin have regularly noted that productions of independent plays in London tend to be quite short, lasting for only two weekends in most cases and sometimes only three or four performances. This makes it difficult to generate “buzz”: by the time word of mouth spreads about a particular script or performance, the show has closed. If a show reaches some level of recognition, they posit, wouldn’t it make sense to keep it in the public eye by running it…

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The winners of the 2008 Brickenden Awards for Theatrical Excellence in London, announced at Monday night’s ceremony:

Outstanding Comedy Production

The True Adventures of Robin Hood, Noisy Mime Theatre

Outstanding Lighting Design

Josh Cottrell, Side Dish: A Lone Man Spaghetti Western

Outstanding Sound Design

Tyler Graham, Andrew Luscombe, Rachel Needles, Daniel Chick, Jocelyn Graham, The Principle of Opposites

Outstanding Youth Production

The Music Man, Catholic Central High School

Outstanding Touring Production

Kafka and Son, Theaturtle/Threshold

Outstanding Supporting Actress

Carol Robinson-Todd, Agnes of God

Outstanding Original Script

Jason Rip, Grey Days Preferable

Outstanding Set Design

Vaughn Davis, Les Belles Soeurs

Outstanding Costume Design

Morag Webster-Lesarge, Hamlet A.D.D.

Chris Doty Award

The Natural Broadcasting Company, The Continuing Adventures of the Boneyard Man by…

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Crazy show last night. An audience member jumped on stage in the first ten minutes as I was doing my ramble about what just happened to me before I entered the theatre. He sat on the floor near me and looked up at me and said “What happens next?”

Daniel MacIvor, January 17

It’s the quintessential live theatre experience: something in (or from) the audience disrupts a performance. It could be a cell phone going off at the height of a dramatic scene, it could be an ongoing conversation between two people who apparently think they’re watching television at home, or it…

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This is the second instalment of an ongoing conversation with actress Meaghan Chenosky, a Londoner who’s studying in UBC’s acting program.

1. November 13, 2008

   Hi Meg,

   I haven’t been doing very well at the “extended” part of this “extended interview” thing, have I? Sorry! How’s life at UBC? As I’m ever so fond of asking, what’s new and different?

   Not sure what to tell you from this end. You may not have heard that the ‘Wick is being knocked down after it burned last weekend, which was after the owner partially demolished the second floor a few weeks previous to that, the day before…

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Dariusz Korbiel’s name is a familiar one to southwestern Ontario audiences in St. Thomas, Port Stanley and Grand Bend. As the Brickenden-nominated director of last October’s The Monument, he’s making a strong case for that familiarity to extend to Londoners. His company’s production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a play about events in 2003 which continues to be topical—especially in the last few weeks—opens on Thursday.

1. TiL: What’s your background in theatre?
2. Dariusz Korbiel: My whole life has revolved around theatre, since I was 3. First singing, then acting and dancing, it wasn’t until I got my first professional acting job,…

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Outstanding Production

• Inherit The Wind — London Community Players (Palace Theatre)
• Les Belles Soeurs — The Passionfool Theatre Company (The ARTS Project)
• The Monument — Dariusz Entertainment (The ARTS Project)
• Never Swim Alone — The Passionfool Theatre Company (The ARTS Project)
• Robertson Davies: The Peeled I — Arbitrary Angle (The ARTS Project)

Outstanding Original Script

• Boat Load by Jayson McDonald — Stars And Hearts (The ARTS Project)
• GeekQuest 4.0 by Matt Loop — Channel Surfing Productions (The ARTS Project)
• Grey Days Preferable by Jason Rip — Theatre Nemesis (Museum London)
• Love Shack by Michael Wilmot (Spriet Family Theatre; London One Act Festival)
• Side Dish: A Lone Man Spaghetti Western by Josh Cottrell — Shameless Self Productions (Spriet Family Theatre; London Fringe…

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First up: public voting for the Brickenden awards has started. Make your selections before January 9, then come to the awards ceremony on January 26 at the Wolf to help celebrate the accomplishments of London theatre last year.

And there were a lot of them, including the tenth anniversaries of six theatre groups. Even more encouraging is that there were more than 150 productions put on in London in 2008, with over 30 of them from new local scripts.

Here are some of the more notable events of the past year, as I see them.

• January
  • At the 2007 Brickenden Awards, Wally Duffield received the…

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(Updated December 16)

It’s time to vote!

No, this isn’t a comment on the dilemma the federal government is currently facing. It’s actually a reminder that nominations for the 2008 Brickenden Awards are going to start soon, with final voting following shortly thereafter. Specifically:

1. Public nominations will open on December 15 and close two weeks later on December 30. Nominations can be submitted in any of seventeen award categories. Although the list of eligible registered productions and individuals currently isn’t available on the Brickenden site, I’m assured that it is complete and up-to-date, and will be posted by the 15th; a good approximation can be found…

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I have an ugly little secret: I’m not nearly as well-versed in Gilbert & Sullivan as I should be. So I don’t have anything new to say about MTP’s current production of Iolanthe that isn’t already covered by Wikipedia: that the title character is “the mistress of fairy revels, who [...] committed the capital crime (under fairy law) of marrying a mortal human”, that it’s a satire in which the British government is “lampooned as a bastion of the ineffective, privileged and dim-witted”, and that it inspired Isaac Asimov’s masterwork, the Foundation trilogy. That lack of familiarity is something I plan to…

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Tomorrow night Canadian playwright Dave Carley begins his six-month term as London Public Library’s Playwright-in-Residence with a kickoff event at the Central Library. Also featured is Marcia Johnson, a Toronto-based playwright and librettist.

Carley’s plays have been performed across Canada and around the world, by actors as varied as Gordon Pinsent and C. David Johnson. He’s written works for not only the Stratford and Shaw Festivals but also CBC Radio and the Toronto Fringe, and has even adapted Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman for the stage. Although I don’t see record of any of his plays being performed in London, his work has shown…

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On September 21 I sent the following questions to the candidates in the Elgin–Middlesex–London, London–Fanshawe, London North Centre and London West ridings (with the exception of two who hadn’t published contact information at the time; messages to those campaigns were sent when I received contacts on October 2). I’ll post their answers to theatreinlondon.ca in the order they arrive.

Thanks to the eleven candidates who have responded so far!

Responses updated October 4.

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It be Talk Like a Pirate Day, me hearties, and none too soon: London’s soon to be invaded by me cronies what call themselves the Pirates of Penzance. (Hmm, perhaps I said too much, announcing the invasion… try to act surprised when they come to pillage, ‘k?) They be sharin’ their shanties startin’ Tuesday.

If’n yer lookin’ to see a fine, funny buccaneer—and to lighten yourselves of a few pieces of eight—the Dread Pirate Chris Gibbs is comin’ to Rum Runners (naturally, arr) next Friday for this year’s Fringe Benefit. There be a silent auction of treasures an’ such too.

A group…

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This is the first instalment of an “extended interview” with actress Meaghan Chenosky, a Londoner who’s attending UBC’s BFA in Acting Program. You can read more through the letters-to-london tag.

1. September 11, 2008

   Hi there west-coaster,

   How’s your first full week going/gone? Bored of the mountains yet?

   Cheers,

   Peter J.

2. September 14, 2008

   Hi Peter!!!!

   It’s amazing, and no, I still look like a dorky tourist/first year. Every time I walk past the mountain I stop for just a beat, sometimes causing a pile up of people.

   The first week was good, not too much intense work yet. Mostly getting to know each other and finding our own specific…

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Meaghan Chenosky sits across from me on a downtown patio, almost imperceptibly sipping her tea as she describes her goals in the theatre. “I’d give my eye teeth” to play at Stratford, she says; after all, “you can always get dentures.”

We’re having a brief get-together to discuss a collaboration for theatreinlondon.ca that I’ve dubbed “Theatre in London in BC”. The name reflects the fact that she’s heading to Vancouver in September to start the BFA program at UBC. Meg’s worried: “I do interesting things, but I’m really not that interesting,” she says without a hint of pretension… and then we…

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I’ve added three new items to the sidebar today, based on feedback from some of you on things you’d like to see on the site.

The first is a calendar view of upcoming events, which should provide a more intuitive way of looking at the event listings. This is something that was suggested by Kenneth Chisholm back when Jeff handed over the keys to the site, and which Simon Goodwin also mentioned on a recent edition of the Theatre in London On the Air podcast. It replaces the tiny calendar that was in the sidebar, which I personally didn’t find very useful, but…

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A few years ago, in his column on this site, Jeff Culbert opined about the state of summer theatre in London

I remember hearing it said that common wisdom had it — or was it a curse? — that indoor summer theatre in London was an unlucky kind of venture. With the odd exception, you just can’t get people into the theatres.

The Fringe Festival put that superstition to rest in 2000. It broke the jinx by offering shorter shows for a smaller price, and creating a festival atmosphere with a lot of shows running concurrently.

[...] a play and then a patio…

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And the winners are were:

• Best Show: Wuthering Heights
• Best Original Work: Boat Load
• Best Performance: Alon Nashman, Kafka and Son
• Best Solo Performance: (tie) Catalpa and Kafka and Son
• Funniest Show: Playing with Matches
• Most Daring Show: Side Dish
• Spirit of the Fringe: Jeff Culbert
• Best Visual Fringe Artist: Janice Johnston & Richard Gilmore
• Favourite Film-on-the-Fringe: El Belcho
• Producer’s Pick: Boat Load

Belated congratulations and thanks to everyone involved with the 2008 edition of the London Fringe Festival, including but not limited to:

• the performers and companies, who put on over 250 performances of more than 40 plays
• each venue’s stage techs, who made sure everyone could see and hear the right things at…

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When Rob MacMenamin and Jordan Mechano created Source, they wanted to fulfil what they call their “Tarantino Mandate”: in the film director’s words, “You know a film is good if you see it, and you want to go home and eat some pie and want to talk about it with your friends.” A review on the Fringe forums confirms that they succeeded: “you challenged the audience, really made me think, and my friend and I had a great discussion about the points of view expressed in this work.”

The friends from Whitby wrote their first play at the end of high school…

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Excerpts from recent emails with Sookie Mei and Raven Mullan, who star in Theatre Soup’s Fringe production of Wake.

1. TiL: What drew you to Wake?
2. Sookie Mei: I first saw Wake performed years ago at the South SS Grade 12 final show. I really liked the show, but then forgot all about it. When I was searching for a show to do for this Fringe, my pal (and Theatre Soup co-founder) Anne-Marie Caicco suggested I do Wake, and I liked the idea. I read the play and really enjoyed it, and thought it would be great for the Fringe because of its…

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Translating Shakespeare into English doesn’t seem like a particularly difficult task… until you learn that the source material made its way through a gender-switching commedia dell’arte treatment written in German (Der Widerspänstigen Zähmung) first.

That’s the challenge that Abby Lynch set for herself and Formerly Witty Productions with On the Sly, an adaptation and expansion of The Taming of the Shrew. Two continents and seven festivals later, the “Whitties” from Walla Walla, Washington are finishing their world tour this week in London.

The group—mostly new to Canada—has been exploring the country, albeit in the opposite direction to the general east-to-west trend of the CAFF Fringe…

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“By Committee” isn’t just a name for a theatre company, it’s how the whole production of Playing With Matches worked.

The play, conceived by Tim Condon, Paul Merrifield and Sandy Ross, went through more than twenty-five revisions, based in part on Paul’s “black binder” containing jokes and premises. Contributing to the large number of revisions, Sandy says, was the fact that “we’re rewriters.” Even that wasn’t the final version: Paul explains that “from rehearsals on we made this to be a collaborative process, so we gave the actors room to play around with a little improv and a lot of that stuff…

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Just wanted to note Kathy Rumleski’s great Fringe pieces in the London Free Press, featuring Josh Cottrell’s Side Dish, Theatre Nemesis’s Wuthering Heights, and Frank Wilks’ I Am Not Neil Young. (Subsequent columns: Alon Nashman’s Kafka and Son; Good Game Productions’ Kh!; Oddville Theatre Collective’s Welcome to Oddville; Jason McDonald’s Boat Load; Original Kids’ Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory)

The paper has been pretty good about covering the festival in general, and no fewer than four of the better-known staff are even taking part: Kathy writing articles, James Reaney blogging, Jim Cressman attending performances on behalf of the Brickenden Awards,…

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“It’s a one-woman comedy show about a girl trapped in a board game. It’s a real roller-coaster ride for the audience.”

“It’s not just relating, people are like ‘oh my god it’s me.’”

“I hope that people leave thinking about their own situations, get something out of it.”

Christel Bartelse and Colleen O’Reilly are anything but chaotic as they discuss Chaotica, a “one woman madcap comedy” which sees its Fringe premiere this week. Although they hadn’t worked together before this show—a mutual friend introduced them when she couldn’t do the project—you’d never know it from the way each of them fill in and play…

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I’m a little bummed that there’s only one edition of the London Fringe Press being published this year. The shows are more than making up for any disappointment, though; it’s only the third day and already I’m having a tough time narrowing down the choices for the Fringe ballot!

If you can’t decide what to see, the very best thing to do is to ask people what they recommend, especially the ones who are proudly wearing their Fringe buttons or T-shirts from previous years. The next best might be to watch some of the festival videos that the London Free Press is posting. My one…

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Although performances start August 1, today was the official opening of the 2008 London Fringe, kicked off by the Fringe Callithump parade and performer showcase. It also marked the opening of VisualFringe, featuring more than 20 visual artists and curated by Alison Challis.

Click the Fringe sandwich board to see a gallery of pictures from opening day.

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Newlyweds Michael Paylor and Leigh Fryling may be the hardest working couple in London theatre. They’re certainly the most ambitious.

Michael and Leigh co-founded Noisy Mime Theatre in 2007. A former Original Kid who now works as a director for OKTC, Michael saw that after performing and training with youth theatre groups like Original Kids and LCP’s LYTE there weren’t many opportunities for fifteen-to-25-year-olds to work here. Many talented young performers found it hard to “break in” and left to find experience elsewhere in the country, with very few returning to the city. With its successful inaugural production of Months On End Noisy…

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Ahead of the short-run presentation of Damnée Manon/Sacrée Sandra this week, I asked John Lougheed of The Verve Theatre to talk a bit about the play.

When Pride approached us to do a show, we were extremely honoured. I am a huge fan of gay theatre. The selection process was difficult and we talked about a lot of shows from Mambo Italiano to The Laramie Project to anything written by Sky Gilbert. Finally it was Michel Tremblay’s Damnée Manon/Sacrée Sandra that won.

The show is two intersecting monologues that explore the sacred and the profane. I performed in the play a few years ago at the Fringe…

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The podcast version of this week’s Theatre in London On the Air will be delayed until after I return from the Winnipeg Fringe Festival. However, as always, you can listen to the show live on Tuesday at 11am on CHRW 94.9 FM or download it from chrwradio.com.

(Updated July 26) The show is now online.

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The traditional July theatre lull isn’t quite in full swing, but things have definitely slowed down. There are still things to be seen before the Fringe though, with three separate productions being performed over the next few weeks.

Drunheller & Gleiss: A Wicked Brew—which starts tonight—is at one of the most traditional and yet non-traditional venues in town: Fanshawe Pioneer Village. It’s a return of the Lantern Tours program that Jason Rip started last year, and a good example of the “site-specific” theatre concept that Jeff Culbert wrote about way back in 2005; with May’s Frights of Spring at Grosvenor Lodge and the recurring Lost…

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James Reaney reports today that the “Rush” fundraiser brought in about $8000 for The ARTS Project. Click through for a photographic summary of the event, courtesy of Richard Gilmore.

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Although it’s not quite Canada Day yet, I’d imagine many people are taking an extra-long holiday weekend. (I am… kinda… but maybe more about that later.) Jeff Culbert, Susan Ferley, Art Fidler and Julia Webb will definitely be working on Canada Day, though, on Theatre in London on the Air’s special episode about significant Canadian plays. I count an impressive eight or nine that have been on in London in just the last couple of years, the most recent being Les Belles Soeurs with The Drawer Boy up this October. The discussion airs live on Tuesday, July 1, between 11 and noon.

And…

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The 24 Hour Rush ended tonight in front of a near full house at the Wolf Performance Hall. The five plays which didn’t exist a day ago were as varied as their writers: The Burning Bush, a Pirandellesque comedy from Lynda Martens; Squirrel, Interrupted, Jason Rip’s look into life (wild-, plant- and other) in and around Victoria Park; Jayson McDonald’s post-eco-apocalyptic The Bough Breaks; Sapped Out, Dan Ebbs’ fantastical trip combining druid lore and city politics; and an enviro-horror Dead Teenager Movie from Matt Loop called Firday the 13th: A Nightmare in Elmwood. All were fun, often brash, and occasionally silly,…

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As noted yesterday, at 8pm last night the participants and subject for the 24 Hour Rush for The ARTS Project were announced. The writer/director/actor groups were chosen at random by co-organizer Jeff Werkmeister, followed by a virtual presentation of the topic by James Reaney:

“My idea is this: … the trees are in a rage. … They’re all mad as hell about something, and they’re not going to take it any more. … The ending is yours; the future is ours. Go Arts Project!”

The completed scripts were passed to the performers this morning at 8am. Activities continue at The ARTS Project for the rest…

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The 24 Hour Rush for the Arts Project starts tonight. If you haven’t heard about it yet, it’s a fundraiser for the local theatre/gallery/”arts space” which has recently found itself in a bit of a financial bind.

The event—which actually takes place over 27 hours—starts at 7pm tonight at 203 Dundas St. and continues thusly:

1. 8pm: James Reaney announces the common topic for all playwrights and artists.
2. 9pm: Music and martinis in the front gallery.
3. midnight: Jam session in the theatre.
4. 8am Saturday: Breakfast, with scripts handed over to actors and directors and artwork hung for auction.
5. noon: Silent auction begins. More music, with bag lunches, provided by…

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The UWO English Department’s Summer Shakespeare series continues its twenty-seven-year run with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, on from Tuesday through Saturday night this week. It’s an outdoor production on the hill in front of Western’s University College, although as I write this the forecast shows a good chance of rain. In previous years Conron Hall (inside University College) has been the alternative location, but I haven’t confirmed that yet… perhaps someone in the know can comment? (Update: Conron Hall it is. Thanks Alexandra!)

Coming forward several centuries—or going back a few, depending on your point of reference—is Noisy Mime Theatre’s production of The True…

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Everyone in the theatre community wishes that theatre had a higher media profile in town, so I hope that everyone will be happy to hear that a new theatre-based radio show is to be launched this Tuesday, June 17th between 11 a.m. and noon, on Radio Western, 94.9 FM (CHRW).

Simon Goodwin and Jeff Culbert will be at the helm as this weekly program takes to the air, and their first show will be about the Passionfool production that is currently running at The Arts Project: Daniel MacIvor’s Never Swim Alone. Actors Tyler Parr and Justin Peter Quesnelle will be in…

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The London One Act Festival concluded on Sunday, June 15, with the awards ceremony at the Spriet Family Theatre. Awards were handed out by the adjudicator, Brian Van Norman. The nominees and winners were:

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London’s most celebrated playwright and poet, James Reaney, died peacefully on Wednesday June 11th at 5:55 p.m. at Marian Villa in London.

Nobody brought together the commitment to the local, the awareness of the universal, the sense of fun and the poetic vision as Jamie did. We won’t see his like again, but we will see his influence and inspiration everywhere.

Among his many accolades are three Governor-General’s Awards for poetry and drama, the first of which he won in 1949 at the age of 23 for a collection of poetry, The Red Heart. His famous Donnelly trilogy of plays from…

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Justin Peter Quesnelle is a familiar face on the London stage, and has also made his mark as a director of such productions as The Miracle Worker, Blood Relations and this October’s double bill of Play and One for the Road. With Eva Blahut, he co-artistic directs The Passionfool Theatre Company, and he appears with Tyler Parr and Meaghan Chenosky in Passionfool’s presentation of Never Swim Alone, which opens on Friday.

I had the opportunity last week to ask him a few questions via email about the new company, the next play, and plans for the future.

1. TiL: Although Passionfool as an entity is…

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Updates today on two of the big summer theatre events, the London One Act Festival (LOAF) and the London Ontario Fringe Theatre Festival (London Fringe).

LOAF runs next week with a lineup of nine original short plays, three a night with each performed on two days. I believe LOAF is unique as the only adjudicated festival in London; this year’s adjudicator is Brian Van Norman. Here’s what you’ll see:

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That’s a question both to me and to you.

From my side, I’m reading (and re-reading) all of the old Theatre In London website, including all of the old reviews and articles from 2005 onward, and updating them so they’re all indexed and searchable. I’m also looking at the pre-2005 site to see what can be gleaned from it. And of course there are improvements to be made to the look and feel—the list of upcoming performances in particular isn’t where I want it to be yet. (I’m open to suggestions, by the way.)

I’ve also started incorporating some of the old TheatreNemesis.com articles…

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Well how about that….

Erin Walker, who as I’m typing this is on stage finishing up Bumbletea Theatre’s run of Twicken’s Book, has published the entire script for the play on her website. It’s an interesting read, and the performance at The Arts Project is very faithful to every aspect of it—as one would expect, seeing that she’s also the director.

It would almost certainly (!) please the characters in her absurdist work to know that the fact that Erin was the first person to submit an event listing to the new theatreinlondon.ca website was, ultimately, nothing more than a matter of…

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It’s funny that I should have run into Kathy Navackas at lunch today for the first time in a while. Why? Because I’d just read in the Free Press that she’s today’s Citizen One. Sounds about right to me.

It’s interesting to see that two of the first five “Citizens One”—defined as London’s “standout people”—are from the arts community. (The other is Home County artistic director Catherine McInnes.) It’s almost as if theatre and music (and dance and painting and literature and photography and…) are considered to be important parts of the lives of the people of this city.

I’m just sayin’, y’know?

…

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Perhaps it’s just the crowd I run with, but I don’t often hear people outside the core of London’s theatre supporters talking about local productions. The Grand, occasionally; Fringe gets noticed when it takes over downtown every August (soon June); even mentions of the Stratford Festival are rare. So it was with some surprise that at the grocery store last week I came upon two (young) checkout staff who were talking about Fat Pig. When I showed interest we got into a brief discussion about Les Belles Soeurs and our likes and dislikes about the various seating configurations of The ARTS Project.

One…

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I recently acted in Theatre Nemesis’ production of Hamlet at the Wolf, and it has whet my appetite for more Shakespeare. Here are some excerpts from Playing Shakespeare, a book based on workshops by John Barton of the Royal Shakespeare Company (available at the library). Interesting opinions and advice, not only for directors and actors of Shakespeare’s plays, but for theatre artists in general. Lots of experience and wisdon packed into these words; maybe you’ll find a tip in here that you can use. Enjoy!

I don’t believe most people really listen to Shakespeare in the theatre unless the actors make…

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Here is an update of theatre goings-on that I am working on. (If you don’t want to receive such missives, let me know and I’ll rub you out.)

Opening this Friday: FRIGHTS OF SPRING

The ever-inventive Jason Rip has put together a show that features new ghost stories written by myself, himself, Jayson McDonald and Rod Keith. Each play is about 20 minutes long, and they are performed in four separate rooms of the very atmospheric Grosvenor Lodge (a huge 1853 English Tudor house on the curve of Western Road, beside the married students’ residence at Platt’s Lane).

Every Friday and Saturday night…

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FINAL VOTING FOR THE 2007 BRICKENDEN AWARDS BEGINS JANUARY 3, 2008 AND CLOSES AT MIDNIGHT ON JANUARY 10, 2008.

To find out how to vote online for plays you have seen in 2007, log on to the Brickenden Awards website at http://www.brickenden.org.

Click the TO VOTE link and review the categories, which include: Outstanding Production, Outstanding Director, Outstanding Actor, Outstanding Actress, Outstanding Supporting Actor, Outstanding Supporting Actress, Bravest Production, Outstanding Lighting, Outstanding Set Design, Outstanding Sound, Outstanding Costumes, Outstanding Ballyhoo, Outstanding Original Script, Outstanding Youth Production, Outstanding Touring Production and Outstanding Comedy Production.

THE SIXTH BRICKENDEN AWARDS CEREMONY, WITH JEREMY JOHN DUNTON AS EMCEE,…

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The Brickenden Awards For Theatrical Excellence in London

The curtain is about to go up on the most exciting event in local indie theatre! It’s time to give careful consideration to the plays, actors, directors, set, sound, lighting and costume designers you would like to nominate for the 2007 Brickenden Awards for Theatre Excellence in London. The online nominations procedure will open December 15th and close December 22nd. Final voting begins January 3rd, 2008 and closes at midnight on January 10th, 2008.

To find out how to register your nominations online for plays you have seen in 2007, log on to the…

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It has been quite some time since I updated the site. My apologies - I was lost in Hurricane Facebook and also overwhelmed by the sheer amount of spam I was getting. Let’s just say that if go the penile implant route, I will have no problem doing a price comparison. Recent events in London theatre ( such as the imperilled Arts Project ) have made me realize the importance of providing a soapbox ( however humble ) for discussion.

With reference to The ARTS Project, I will write an entire article about the current kerfuffle and deal with my thoughts…

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1. How did you meet the four people that comprise the rest of the Verve collective?

Well, that’s a mighty good question Mr. Rip. Matthew McKenzie happens to be my fiance (though at the time we were merely dating). Brett McKenzie is Matt’s brother. We like to keep it in the family here at The Verve. Aimee O’Beirn came to us for an audition and we cast her in “The House of Yes” originally. Before the end of the rehearsal process we were all quite in love with her. Heather Watt we knew from friends of ours and from drinking around…

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I’m on a big 19th century high, having just returned home from the sold-out run of “New Blood” at the Fanshawe Pioneer Village. A cast of talented young people infused my script with life and I’d like to thank each one of them: Marshall Lemon, Cody Hanna, Allison Proudfoot, Daniel Chick, Rachel Ross, Paul Visser, Ethan Henning-Harris, Melanie Pyne, Justin Hamilton-Jones, and Kevin O’Neil, as well as their director, Richard Crocker, Sheila Johnson, and the rest of the Fanshawe staff. I had a wonderful time!

This was a trial run of the Lantern Tours concept which will hopefully return next year…

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William Hutt has died in Stratford at age 87. Let the tributes begin!

The following is an article that I wrote for The Londoner after seeing Hutt’s farewell performance as Prospero in Stratford’s 2005 production of The Tempest.

Let your indulgence set me free

Not many actors get to bid a final farewell to their career and their audiences from the stage, but that is exactly what William Hutt is doing this summer in Stratford. In the final speech of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the sorcerer Prospero is alone on stage, addressing the audience directly. He has given up his magical powers, freed his…

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Congratulations to designer David Long, who won a special adjudicator’s award at the Theatre Ontario Festival for his work on LCP’s entry Ethan Claymore. Adjudicator Brian Van Norman said that the award was given “for the careful attention to detail on the set décor that revealed not only a lifestyle, but a life and a character”.

The award for outstanding production went to All My Sons, by Domino Theatre in Kingston.

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Holy roadtrip. Remember Blow This Popsicle Stand, a two-hander by Stephanie Demas about a popsicle in limbo? It’s on its way to the Prague Fringe Festival for a run from May 27th — June 3rd.

In this, its third incarnation, Jayson McDonald plays the grape popsicle that has slipped through the cracks of a variety store freezer. Being in the freezer, he doesn’t melt, but being out of sight, he has no prospects of being bought and whisked away to the great unknown on the Outside. His melancholy is disturbed only when a series of characters, all played by Tyler Parr,…

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I just found out that a short film that my partner Patsy Morgan and I starred in has won the national BEAC Award for Best Comedy by a Canadian Broadcasting Student - the student in question being Diane Jansen, the director / producer of this film, which was based on the morbidly mirthful tale “Death By Scrabble” by Charlie Fish. It’s pretty much the first short story that comes up when you google “Short Stories” so it’s fairly popular for film class assignments. We shot the film in one afternoon. The Awards Presentation will be held in Edmonton where, coincidentally,…

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There are lots of sentence fragments in The Soldier Dreams, by Daniel MacIvor. Lots of um. Really makes you. Not that I. Or. Whatever.

As one of the actors in the show, I have to figure out where those hidden thoughts come from and where they were going before my character abandoned the attempt to put them into words. The task is like that of an archaeologist who has a few bones and is trying to imagine the dinosaur.

It’s a writing style that I associate with David Mamet, who didn’t hesitate to use stilted, modern-day speech patterns in his plays. It…

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CURSE OF THE BURYMORES V: EVERYBODY SHUT UP ON THE WESTERN FRONT!

Wednesday, May 9, 10 PM at Aeolian Hall - Tickets $8 at the Door

Starring Ivan Arneill, Chris Bancroft, Eva Blahut, Meaghan Chenosky, Bill Hill, John Iglesias, Morgan Morris, Jason Rip, & Mike Wilmot

Has all of this Vimy Ridge coverage got you in the mood for some World War One? Turns out Theatrical Hell breaks out into revivals of “The Great War” every third lunar cycle. Come watch the Burymore Family in the mustard gas garnished squalour of the trenches. The best in under-rehearsed excitement, these “classically trained bogies” will…

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Congratulations to Theatre Soup on a fine production of Sharon Pollock’s Blood Relations. The story unfolded in an entirely engaging way, and the cast and director did a great job of showing off the quality of the writing.

Pollock, now in her 70s, is still going strong as a writer, and her latest play, Man Out of Joint, opens in Calgary on May 10th. I got a sneak preview of the script last night, because my brother Tim is acting in the show, and he read excerpts to me over the phone.

She is a very smart and passionate writer, and very…

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It’s been a long, circuitous journey, but John Krisak is finally putting his creative energy into the production of one of his own plays.

The long postponement is not surprising, though; he has been busy raising a family, teaching English at Central Secondary School, writing six English textbooks, playing cello with the Woodstock Strings, logging several thousand miles in a sailboat on the Aegean Sea and founding and directing the Canadian Lyceum of Greece (the only secondary school in Greece that offers credits towards an Ontario high school diploma).

He has always had a passion for theatre though, and amidst all of…

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I hear that the afore-mentioned production of Ethan Claymore is presenting a single performance as a fundraiser for their trip to the Theatre Ontario Festival. May 15th at 8 p.m. — tickets are $14 and $17. So here’s your last chance to see this award-winning London production AND to support LCP to finance their roadtrip. Unless, of course you can make it to the festival itself — see: www.theatreontario.org/content/tofestival2007.htm

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Every year, the Western Ontario Drama League (WODL) holds a festival to showcase community theatre productions from across the region, and this year, the London Community Players scored the big prize. Their production of Ethan Claymore, by Norm Foster, took the M Park Jamieson Memorial Award for Best Production, and that means that they move on to the all-Ontario festival in Newmarket, May 16-19. There, they will be up against Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, presented by Toronto’s East Side Players; Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, by Kingston’s Domino Theatre and another Norm Foster play, Kiss the Moon,…

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To start with, a painful admission: my prolonged quest to become the new London Free Press theatre reviewer has plunged headlong into a sea of editorial apathy. My offer recieved no reply at all from Mr. Berton and his Press Club cabal. My gift of unpaid reportage was allowed to gasp itself to death like a beached bass. This was not the first time my heart has been broken ( cheap ploy for sympathy alert! ) and, luckily, I have a luke-warm cup of coffee in which to collect my tears.

On a more positive note, my audition to play the…

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How important is criticism to theatre? The question has been on my mind recently, because it seems that the theatre community has been all but abandoned by the major media players in town.

In an earlier posting, I mentioned two new theatre companies — Verve Theatre and New Generation Theatre — that offered back-to-back productions in February. Did these up-and-comers get any reviews in print? Nope. Not interested.

Then the London Community Players opened a show — Return Engagement. No review. Until recently, the Free Press reviewed all LCP shows, but apparently, that policy has gone out the window.

The latest was Fountainhead…

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NOTE: A close approximation of this letter was sent to Paul Berton, Editor-in-Chief of The London Free Press, 10 days ago.

Mr. Paul Berton
Editor-In-Chief
London Free Press

Dear Mr. Berton,

My name is Jason Rip and I am writing to offer you my services as The London Free Press’ new dramatic critic. I have been involved with the London theatre scene for a decade now and am an experienced freelance writer with many magazine credits on both the local and national level. I have written many plays about noteworthy London personalities, and London, a “Creative City,” is vital to me and my work.

It is…

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London’s two newest theatre companies have shows running at The Arts Project over the next couple of weeks, so it’s a great chance for theatrephiles to get out to see the up-and-coming talent.

The Verve Theatre (John Lougheed, Artistic Director) is presenting The House of Yes by Wendy McLeod from February 6-10, and then The New Generation Theatre (David Walker, Artistic Director) will stage Nothing Sacred by George F Walker from February 14-17.

A good number of the people involved in these shows are from the first batch of graduates from Fanshawe College’s acting program. They’re picking good plays, they’re full of verve, and…

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1. How did Dufflebag Theatre originate and how long has it been touring?

Okay. DuffleBag started in early 1992 after Pat Finch, then-director of the London Int’l Children’s Festival asked Marcus Lundgren to come up with something to entertain kids and families waiting around in line for the important stuff (like face-painting ).

Marcus then went to TheatreFaux’s Artistic Director at the time, Michael McKinlay, and he conceived of DuffleBag as a ‘chatauqua’-stlye traveling company that would throw their stuff down, gather an audience with amusing antics and then present a twenty-minute fractured fairy-tale, using folks from the audience. Auditions netted two…

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Last year, the London Community Players tried something new. Instead of simply choosing their season and then going out to find directors, they asked directors to come forward to pitch favourite shows that they wanted to direct. Simon Goodwin responded with a proposal for a play that he’s wanted to stage for years, The Petrified Forest, and it’s running at the Palace until February 3rd.

Enthusiasm and passion are the life-blood of theatre, and they really shine through in this case because they have put together an engaging, entertaining and successful production. The story clips along at a good pace and…

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If I leave here tomorrow, will you still remember me? - Lynryd Skynryd “Freebird”

2007 marks the tenth anniversary of my theatre company Theatre Nemesis. It’s also a time to reflect on any contributions to local culture I might have made as a London-based playwright. During the previous decade, I have written twenty-five scripts, including plays about downtown London after dark ( “Core” ), werewolves in London ( “Once Become” ) and biographical dramas about noteworthy Londoners Roy McDonald and Marc Emery. During an attempt to mount the werewolf play in January of this year, I finally came across one too many…

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Best Production Glengarry Glen Ross (Column 13 Actors’ Theatre Productions)
Best Director John Gerry (Citizen Marc: The Adventures of Marc Emery)
Best Actress Rebecca Surman (The Winter’s Tale)
Best Actor Jeff Werkmeister (Citizen Marc: The Adventures of Marc Emery)
Best Supporting Actress Sookie Mei (The Tower Series)
Best Supporting Actor Jeff Culbert (The Cherry Orchard)
Best Set Design Justin P Quesnelle (The Cherry Orchard)
Best Lighting Design Rob Coles (Shadowlands)
Best Costume Design Emily Fuhrman and Sookie Mei (The Cherry Orchard)
Best Sound Design Tony J Fonseca (This Just In)
Best Original Script Jayson McDonald (Giant Invisible Robot)
Best Musical Production HMS Pinafore (Musical Theatre Productions)
Best Comedy Production This Just In…

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It’s PlayWrights Cabaret season again, so another 20 short scripts (about 10 minutes each) will receive staged readings in the Grand’s McManus Studio Theatre. For the first time, the 10-minute scripts will each be performed twice — once over the evenings of Friday and Saturday January 19th and 20th, and then repeated a week later, on January 26th and 27th. The theme this year is “spirit”, and as usual, the pieces chosen range from the goofy to the poetic, and the theme has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways.

The presentations are as follows:
Friday January 19 and Friday January…

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I’ve read that in the first year of the Brickendens, two were awarded in each category: critics’ choice, and people’s choice (A few nominees won both, a notable achievement.) Since then, however, it seems to me that the voice of the “people” has been significantly muted.

For one thing, the “people’s choice” is now just one vote on a committee of six, consisting of five real-life (and presumably more talkative) people plus the (silent) consensus of hoi polloi. The “people’s choice” now counts for approximately 17%, while the “critics’ choice” is worth 83%.

Furthermore, legitimate votes of the people are quite possibly…

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THEATRE NEMESIS.COM celebrates 10,000 visits in under ten months and an average of 22 male performance enhancement spams a day!

2007 marks my tenth year as a London, Ontario playwright / theatre producer. During that time, I have seen twenty-five of my scripts go to the stage. As a point of contrast between then and now, it’s interesting to note that my very first play Hollis Gets The Girl received a much-appreciated half-page spread in the Blackburn-era Free Press way back in June of 1997. This article, written by Ian Gillespie and accompanied by a photo of me and a bald…

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Bernard Hopkins comes up with great little aphorism when he’s giving tips to actors. One memorable quote was “You have to know your lines, but you have to know your thoughts as well.” That, in a nutshell, is one of the big differences between bad actors and good ones.

To figure out a character’s thoughts, though, actors have to have a good understanding of the script, and that means that they have to be good at script analysis. I organized some workshops in script analysis last fall, because I enjoy doing it, and because there isn’t much chance to practice it…

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The Brickenden nominations for 2006 are in — Go to www.brickenden.org and click on “How to Vote”. I wish that I could tell you the voting deadline, but the Brickenden site isn’t very informative at the moment, so my advice is to get your votes in right away. I can tell you, however, that the winners will be announced at the awards ceremony at the Wolf Performance Hall on Monday January 22nd at 7pm.

The six major categories (best production, director, actor and actress and supporting actor and actress) are dominated by Citizen Marc (The Adventures of Marc Emery) and Glengarry Glen…

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Remember P&J: The Original Mock Musical? Big hit at the 2005 London Fringe; won Best Production and Funniest Show? Well, it has been re-worked and revived with a professional company, and it’s running at the Palace on December 21 and 22, at 1 pm and 8 pm each day.

It’s all about a couple whose relationship falls apart when she eats his favourite comfort food, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Writer-composer Joshua Richardson has been workshopping and re-writing the play since the premiere, and the new version includes four new songs. The new production also includes a five-piece orchestra under the…

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amateur

(noun) a person who does something as a pastime rather than as a profession

amateurish

(adjective) inexpert, lacking professional skill

profession

(noun) an occupation

occupation

(noun) one’s employment

A few weeks ago, I submitted an article for this website entitled Scamming the Brickendens. Someone, wishing to be known only as Faceless, took exception to my liberal use of the word “amateur” in describing the productions of the London alternative theatre community. In this article, I will defend my word usage.

If you are a London, Ontario actor, please consider the following questions:

1. Are you an active, card-carrying, dues-paying member of Canadian Actors Equity and do you earn Equity…

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It’s been a while since the last update. I got thrown off my stride by a fast and furious film project that involved many of our local theatre luminaries. Perry Sheppard and Jayson McDonald had entered a competition out of New York that called for a ten-minute film to be made in two weeks. To launch the competition period, emails were sent out to some 67 teams, assigning genres and topics for their films.

The day before the launch, I was asked to join the team as the composer of the soundtrack. My first reaction was that they must have travelled…

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1. What was the first play you wrote and how do you feel about it now?

“P&J” was my first solo piece. I’ve rewritten half of the songs for the show so that kind of reveals the amount of respect I have for it. Our Grade 8 class at Pearson wrote a play entitled “Love Under the Mountain”. It was a merging of Shakespeare and Tolkien. I was gobbled up at the end by an enormous dragon. I actually wrote some songs for it. They weren’t half bad.

2. What’s the writing process like for one of your quirky musicals? Songs first?

The…

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Fountainhead Theatreworks is launching a five-play staged reading series that will offer about one play per month, beginning in November, at the Wolf Performance Hall. The first of these is Angels in America, Part 2 — Perestroika, the sequel to Millenium Approaches (Angels in America, Part 1), which received a full production by Fountainhead last year at the Palace. The reading will be on Nov 24, and coincidentally, Theatre Western is mounting their own production of Millenium Approaches at the McManus from Nov 22-26, so you could see both parts one and two during the same week.

Fountainhead’s play-reading series continues with…

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1. What was your initial introduction to the local theatre scene?

Knowing my sense of humour, my friend Greg Hanbuch kept bugging me to see this thing called “The Boneyard Man” at 123 King. When I finally gave in, I was totally blown away by not only the quality of performance but also the way the crowd was totally into it. I remember thinking that I would love to be up there! At the time I was just a “regular” Londoner and had absolutely no idea that theatre like that even existed…which sort of helped inspire the documentary years later.

2. What…

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The majority of comments generated by this site are from pornography and ringtone providers. I’d really like to get some serious heated discussion going here about the local theatre scene and its colourful cast of characters. Hence, the “Tinderbox,” an opportunity to fan the flames of opinion regarding a London alt-theatre topic. Feel free to agree, disagree, disagree vehemently or throw a textual hissy fit. This segment’s bone of contention: the best London plays of the last decade! Here are my top five choices and I obviously left out everything I had any involvement with whatsoever. Oh, and they are…

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I saw a flurry of shows last weekend, and here are my reactions:

FULLY INSURED at The Last Drop: This is stream-of-consciousness sketch comedy, which means that one sketch slides into another, without any breaks in the action. This troupe has been around for a while, and the writing and the execution are tighter than ever. Not like high ballet or anything. Not that tight. But pretty tight. I think the secret of their success is that it is ideas-driven (while posing as low comedy) and character-driven. Jokes are fine and jokes can be funny, but it’s the characters that make or…

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I dare you downtowners, office personnel, shoppers, stock traders, police officers, coffee drinkers, buskers, social workers: I dare you to enjoy live theatre every Friday at lunchtime! Do It! See real humans talking and being dramatic and funny. For only 5 bucks witness some of London’s best actors and certainly London’s best comic playwright perform original material at the ARTS Project downtown.
The Tower is a string of 30-minute live episodes that, I guarantee, will make you laugh. Instead of retiring your social life, interest in the arts - as well as your senses and your mind watching American TV shows…

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The second annual Lost Soul Stroll opened up on Thursday night. We’ve already had two sell-out crowds on our opening weekend and things look right rosey for an across-the-board swamping of patrons. There are still some tickets left at the Grand Box Office but the little pink squares that signal “sold out” are popping up like small pox all over their calender. Since we don’t have a program in paper form, here are the people to be thanked.

THE LOST SOUL STROLL ( v2.0 )

Written by Jason Rip
Based on Research by Christopher Doty
Directed by Don Fleckser
Costumes by Barbara Hunter
Properties by Morag…

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Have you noticed the parade of classic shows that’s going through London theatres this fall? Before the end of the year, you could take in West Side Story, The Graduate, Jesus Christ Superstar, A Midsummer Nights Dream, HMS Pinafore, Beauty and the Beast, Angels in America, Aida and Cabaret.

There are also lesser-known works by big name writers like George Bernard Shaw (Mrs. Warren’s Profession), Roald Dahl (The Witches) and Edgar Allen Poe (Mortal Terror — a play based on his writings).

Contemporary Canadian playwrights are well represented too, with works by George F Walker (Criminals in Love), John Mighton (Half Life), Diana Flacks…

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When is a tragedy not a tragedy? Before anything tragic happens.

That’s not a joke; it’s just my reaction to the Stratford production of The Duchess of Malfi. Sure it’s a bloodbath in the end, and most of the audience is probably aware before they walk into the theatre that things will get heavy and gruesome over the course of the evening. But why does every aspect of the production have to scream Tragedy from the opening lines? It’s a nicely-written play, with lots of humour and tons of romance. In fact, it’s primarily a romance, really. So show us some…

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This week I found myself back in front of a high school Dramatic Arts classroom for the first time in three years. I have a reasonably sized class of eighteen keen students and everything is really great so far. I look forward to directing some of these energetic youngsters in some future alt. theatre projects. Starting on September 19th, I will also be running a beginning class for adults called “You Can Act” at the Central Library - last time I checked there were only three spots left in the program.

I performed “Dirty Deeds” Friday and Saturday at the St.…

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British playwright Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, and I just came across the speech that he made to mark the event in December. It’s a powerful indicator of his passion for both literature and politics.

He describes his style of creating characters and plays — he starts with a line, a word or an image, and then observes the scene in his head, to see who the people are and what they’re doing. I was really struck by how thoroughly he views his characters from the outside.

As creator, he is trying to discover the truth about…

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Remember Channel Surfing’s production of The UnderAchievers last year? It was based on a new script by Matt Loop about a diverse band of incompetent crooks who try to rob a bank in Wiarton Ontario. A good cast and a good show that scored the Brickenden Award for Best Comedy of 2005.

Behind the scenes. though, another project was in the works — the making of a documentary about the highs and lows of producing do-it-yourself theatre. Not only did the Channel Surfing crew document their own production; they also talked to a wide variety of London theatre-makers, people on the Fringe…

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Sonya Smits is back in London, playing Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate at the Grand! And with Miles Potter directing, this for me is the #1 Show-To-See on the main stage this season.

Ms. Smits, star of stage and small screen was involved in London’s theatre scene way back in the 70s, when she worked with Centre Stage, which was doing great stuff under Artistic Director Ken Livingstone in a space in City Centre Mall.

Miles Potter’s most recent work in London was directing a tremendous two-handed version of The Turn of the Screw — one of my favourite Grand productions in the past…

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John Loughheed just graduated from the Fanshawe College acting program, and he is doing what graduates must do - start theatre companies. Do-it-yourself theatre is alive and well in London, and the arrival of new companies is always heartening, especially when the company shows promise, as in this case. For The Verve Theatre’s inaugural production, Lougheed chose John Steinbeck’s classic Of Mice and Men, and they really captured the heart of the play, especially in showing young, drifting farm-working men (and one woman) trying to fight a culture of individual isolation. It’s beautiful writing, with the characters stripped down to…

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The last three performances of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, produced by Column 13 Actors’ Studio at London’s Aeolian Hall, are August 27, 28 and 29 - that’s Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Go see it!

I don’t say this because I have seen the show — I was away for the opening weekend — but because it’s a really good cast and a tremendous script. Go for the entertainment value, or to see some good acting or to hear Mamet’s influential and ground-breaking approach to dialogue. The script won him a Pulitzer Prize and these guys are more than capable of…

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Evil is both a crying shame and a damn good way of skipping ahead in the line.

That’s the opinion of Jason Rip’s latest stage character, Professor Ron Prickles, who will make his debut in London this August. Dirty Deeds Done to Sheep is a multi-media comedy lecture about humanity’s impulse towards evil, how it drives history, and how to make it work for you.

Designer-photographer Luke Mattar is preparing the visuals for this production, and Jason Rip will play Professor Rickles himself, drawing on his former career as a stand-up comic, which got bumped to the side when he began writing for…

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In honour of Professor Ron Prickles imminent emergence from the portal to Hell, I thought I would post a list of warning signs that you may be an evil entity who is, indeed, “up to no good.” I have also recently learned that the London / St. Thomas area is the honourary tenth circle of Hades. You can tell by all the smoke coming out of the manholes. On an unrelated note, the Theatre Nemesis website ( only in operation since March ) had recently passed 26,000 hits and 2000 visits - this gives me cause to treat myself to…

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In the David Ives version of the Don Juan story, the hero is more of a philosophical ponderer than a lover. But a deal with the devil leaves him obliged to bed a different woman every night or face the fires of Hades. And he does so, starting in Spain in 1599 and culminating in present-day Chicago.

David Ives is an American playwright, now in his 50s, who is best known for his short, hilarious and often bizarre scripts. He is also a favourite of London’s Simply Theatre, which is presenting Don Juan in Chicago at the Spriet Family Theatre from July…

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Here’s a summary of Theatre Nemesis’ Summer and Fall activities, as well as a call for submissions on the theme “A Night of Theatrical Magic.”

Column 13 Actors Company from Toronto ( Jonah Allison’s outfit ) is putting on a high adrenaline version of a high adrenaline play, David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” at The Aeolian Hall August 16 - 18 and 27 - 29 ( 8pm shows - Tickets $15 available at 672-7950 ). Mamet’s taut salesroom drama features a “dream team” of local actors: Mike Wilmot, Jordan Morris, Justin Peter Quesnelle, Scott Holden, Travis Baile, John Iglesias and Jason…

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The Toronto Star asked four theatre professionals to come up with a list of the top ten “essentially Canadian” plays. They said, “These were not necessarily our favourite plays, or even the best, but scripts that helped construct a portrait of this country.’ They are:

The Mercer Plays by David French - five plays (and counting) about a single family from Newfoundland. Salt Water Moon is probably the most famous of this cycle (1972-2003).

The Donnellys by James Reaney - three plays about the Biddulph tragedy (1973-75).

Billy Bishop Goes to War by John Gray and Eric Peterson - self-effacing musical about Canada’s…

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The Drowsy Chaperone (see May 7 entry) just scored big in New York with five Tony Awards. Bob Martin and Don McKellar won the award for their script while Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison won for their musical score. The show was nosed out by Jersey Boys for Best Musical, but they also won for best actress (Beth Leavel), costumes and set in a musical.

This is the first time ever that Canadian writers have snagged the big Broadway prize. In his acceptance speech, Bob Martin gave a nod to the gave a nod to the gang at home who created the whole…

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Did you hear about the new federal government plan to give a tax credit to parents whose kids are playing organized sports? Well, there is a petition circulating that asks why sports activities are getting a boost, but artistic endeavours are not. It asks the government to re-consider the plan, and to extend the tax credit to the latter activities as well.

I’m all for the encouragement of art and creativity in our youngsters, and I encourage everyone who is so inclined to read the petition at http://www.PetitionOnline.com/dbs201bl/ and to sign it if you agree.

I applaud the people who circulated this…

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1. What is your take on the present state of theatre in London? What corrective measures, if any, are needed?

Theatre is flourishing in London. There is a kind of wonderful renaissance. It hasn’t been this good since Ken Livingston left London for Newfoundland in the ‘70s, I think. This city is full of playwrights, actors, directors, stage managers, costume designers, sound people, photographers – all kinds of talented people dedicated to giving their best to theatre. There are so many things going on, in fact, that it is hard to see all of them and people involved often have to…

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Here’s some food for thought:

Imagine a huge federally-funded theatre project that employs 8,000 people and brings free theatre to 25 million people. That’s what happened during the Depression in the United States, in a project called The Federal Theatre. It was a huge experiment in bringing to the masses everything from the classics to new works for the stage.

But the tone and content of some of the plays were called into question, and the project’s director, Hallie Flanagan, was called before the House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities. This is years before the Senator Joe McCarthy fiasco, but the politics…

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On the strength of the 2005 premiere of The Donnelly Trial, which sold out its entire run before opening night, the play will be re-mounted in June of 2006.

The Donnelly Trial was the creation of the late Christopher Doty, whose death in February was a blow to the entire city and its surroundings. Chris’ brother Grant Doty has taken over as producer for the 2006 production, and proceeds from this year’s show will go into a fund in Chris’ name that will support creative projects in London that reflect his interest in theatre, film and local history.

Many of the 2005 cast…

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It looks as though The Drowsy Chaperone, which opened on May 1st at New York’s Marquis Theatre, may be the first Canadian musical to score a hit on Broadway. It’s a quirky homage to 1920s musicals, and the critics and audiences are loving it.

This is a show that started out as a kind of wedding celebration for Toronto Second City comedians Bob Martin and Janet Van De Graff, and the main characters were portrayals of the happy couple. It was performed for guests and friends in the back room of the Rivoli in 1998, but that was so much fun…

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Another London area playwright has been named a finalist in the annual Theatre BC playwrighting contest. This is becoming an annual thing — they must see London as some kind of playwriting powerhouse.

Technically, Stephen Baetz is from St. Jacobs and not London, but he’s in the region, and his play Patches premiered here at the Wolf Performance Hall a couple of years ago, so he’s close enough to be called one of our own.

The jury for this national playwrighting competition, now in its 17th year, picks the best full-length play and the best one-act, and also hands out one “special…

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Isn’t it alarming how Canada’s military adventures abroad have come to look pretty much like baby versions of the US military adventures abroad? We were generally quite proud of ourselves for declining the invitation to join the invasion of Iraq, and we have counted our blessings ever since.

But we’re in Afghanistan, acting a lot like the Americans in Iraq and saying the same things - that we’re killing insurgent terrorists, promoting democracy, refusing to cut and run, supporting our troops 100 percent. And our politicians, even those in opposition, are too chicken to say that it’s misguided and wrong. Again,…

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The Grand’s production of Rock and Roll by John Gray is not bad. It’s just not quite right. The problem is best encapsulated in the portrayal of Screamin’ John McGee, who is meant to epitomize the spirit of Rock and Roll itself. Michael Blake plays him as a pleasant sort of fellow, singing nicely and overseeing the lives of the teenaged heroes like a guardian angel. No no no no, I say. He is supposed to be SCREAMING and CRAZY and DANGEROUS. The spirit of Rock and Roll has to be about the perils and pleasures of living on the…

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Good effort by Theatre Nemesis at The Arts Project. Windego, the latest from Jason Rip, was well-written, well-directed and well-acted. The pivotal character is a man (played by Scott Holden) who has got used to humiliation and submission, but takes a turn for the assertive and finally the psychotic after his encounter with a strange solitary man in the bush. The woodsman (played by Jason Rip) seems to be just a guy with some low-key advice on manhood and what it should be, but his malice becomes more apparent as he drives his victim into committing a violent act of…

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There is a great version of George F Walker’s Escape from Happiness playing in Toronto at the Factory Theatre until May 5th. Walker is one of Canada’s best playwrights ever, and this is a rare chance to see a quality remount of a play that premiered 15 years ago.

I managed to get into a school matinee by volunteering as an usher, so I saw it with a packed house of Toronto high school students. There was big energy and hijinx in the house before the show, but the first scene was a grabber, they were completely hooked and they loved…

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Yikes. It’s a week of scheduling difficulties, if you’re trying to catch the noteworthy plays opening this week, because most of them are only offering very limited runs.

The Arts Project has Windego, a new play by London’s own Jason Rip (April 4-8). The tight cast of four — Scott Holden, Laura Morland, Amelia Does and the playwright — is directed by firebrand Jonah Allison, in from Totonto for the job. The story is about a married couple, both academics, who head off into the Northern Ontario bush, in part to smooth over some bumps in their relationship. One of them…

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WINDEGO opens tonight - we are all very excited and jitter-filled. Hopefully we will get a good turn-out to our macabre little tale of infidelity and demonic possession. I haven’t washed my hair in a week in order to play the creepy mountain man, Gordon Ball - it’s standing up perpindicular from my head like some sort of Dragon Ball Z character. The set looks great - Miro, a designer from Prague, whom I only recently met, has created a dirty cramped cabin on one side of the stage and a web-work of hanging fabric on the other. We’ve got…

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… is in the last week of its run at the Wolf Performance Hall. Wednesday at 1 and 8pm, and then Thursday through Saturday April 1st at 8pm.

The direction and the overall design of the show is by Justin Peter Quesnelle, and he has set it up in a memorable and striking way. When you walk into the space, you see two-dimensional, stylized trees throughout the Wolf auditorium. Yes, you are IN the cherry orchard. The playing area is bordered by door and window frames, including a set of three windows between the audience and the stage, so you feel…

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One Act Attack is back for a second year of new one-act plays, and the playwrights represented this year range from the revered senior fellow James Reaney, to Jayson McDonald and Caitlin Murphy, both established playwrights who emerged in the past ten years, to rookie playwright Kent Miersma. All four have plays running at The Arts Project this week under the title One Act Attack II.

Jayson McDonald’s contribution, The Great Disconnect, sounds pretty exciting. At Super Mario II High School, students are so plugged into their electronic gadgets that their minds are being sucked into cyber-space en masse. The hero…

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Joshua Richardson’s quirky "mock musical" P&J premiered last summer, gaining awards for Best Show and Funniest Show in the Fringe, and Brickenden nominations for Best Musical, Comedy and Original Script.

Now he’s following it up with You, Me and Them, another new musical that will feature a young cast with remarkable experience and talent. Justin Goodhand, Andrew Tribe and Thomas Alderson are still high school students at Beal, but they already have extensive experience in musical theatre, with The Grand’s High School Project, Original Kids, Huron Country Playhouse, London Musical Theatre and lots of other companies. In fact, their combined resumes…

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The Grand has commissioned its first new play in 13 years. A Practical Joke, a political comedy by Londoner Peter Desbarats, runs in the McManus from February 10-18.

Mr. Desbarats had a controversial hit in 2002 with Her Worship, the story of a city mayor who was reminiscent of London’s own Diane Haskett. It struck a chord with Londoners, and played to sold-out houses.

As a veteran political journalist with a life-long interest in theatre, Mr. Desbarats is uniquely situated to bring current issues from the news media to the stage.

Now he has taken another true-life London City Hall story - the…

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Albert Einstein is legendary as a theoretical scientist, but he has also become a cultural icon. And even though his work was used to develop nuclear bomb technology, Einstein is usually seen in a positive light, as a humanitarian who embodied inspiration, imagination and pacificm.

Fritz Haber was another brilliant scientist - a contemporary of Einstein’s - who is well-known to chemists and historians, but was little known outside of those circles until recently. Interest in Haber has shot up, however, with a sudden flurry of new films, books, academic conferences and even an opera called "Zyklon".

Haber’s case is more controversial,…

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Marc Emery is back in town. Christopher Doty is flying him in from Vancouver for the opening of Citizen Marc: The Adventures of Marc Emery, which is running at The Arts Project until February 4th. He will also be visiting the bookstore that he took over as a teenager in the 1970s and renamed City Lights.

Mr. Doty has already made a film documentary about Mr. Emery’s formative years as a libertarian activist in London, when he fought tirelessly for the rights of the individual, both in theory and in practice. Besides business, he tried his hand at politics, civil disobedience,…

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The Grand Theatre is crawling with London playwrights these days. Twenty writers were invited in after their ten-minute scripts were chosen for staged readings at the PlayWrights Cabaret (January 20-21 in the McManus Studio Theatre). There will also be free public readings of longer works by Jayson McDonald and Caitlin Murphy (Jan 26 and 27, respectively), and a full production of A Practical Joke, by Peter Desbarats will premiere in February.

Caitlin Murphy is doing an extended stay at the Grand, writing and reading scripts under a contract as "Playwright in Residence". New-play-developer extraordinaire Gil Garratt is in from the Blyth…

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The Brickenden nominations for outstanding theatre in London for 2005 are in. Of the five shows short-listed this year for Best Production, two are from new scripts by Londoners: Matt Loop’s The UnderAchievers and Christopher Doty’s The Donnelly Trial. Two more are recent American plays: Wit, by Margaret Edson and Angels in America: Millenium Approaches, by Tony Kushner. The other is Retreat From Moscow, by British playwright William Nicholson.

The UnderAchievers and Angels in America racked up the most nominations overall. In addition to the award for Best Production, Angels in America was nominated for director (John Gerry), actress (Eva Blahut),…

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The new year is starting off well for Deborah Hay, a Toronto-based actor with roots here in London. She has been taken on by Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Company for the first two productions of their 2006 season, both opening later this month. It’s quite an accomplishment, not only because of the company’s artistic reputation, but also because it is a fairly tight company with a pool of regular actors that return year after year, so spaces for new actors are relatively few. She will appear in the 1938 American classic Our Town, by Thornton Wilder and in a new adaptation…

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When I consider the role that theatre can play in the culture of a country, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin comes to mind, with playwright Sean O’Casey saying to Lady Gregory, “All the thought in Ireland has come through the Abbey. You have no idea what an education it has been to the country.” I would like to think that Canadian theatre could play a similar role in articulating the issues that are most vital for Canadians. We really must think of Canadian theatre culture as a whole though, including everything from the grassroots amateurs to the best of the…

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It has been a full year since the last Boneyard Man sighting, but on Sunday December 18th, he and his entourage will take the stage of the Wolf Performance Hall for The Boneyard Man Holiday Spectacular. The crime-stopping, skeleton mask-wearing character was created by Jayson McDonald in 1998, and two new episodes were presented every month upstairs at 123 King. Its success was due in part to its serial format; someone could hear about it, miss it, think about going to the next one, miss it again, and then finally catch a show. It was funny stuff too, and at…

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Back in the early 1970s, Elton John was on his way to becoming one of pop music’s biggest solo artists, with hits like “Your Song” and “Rocket Man”, while Tim Rice was gaining fame as the lyricist of Jesus Christ Superstar. In the 90s, they teamed up to write the songs for The Lion King and by 2000, they had taken Aida, the 1871 opera by Guiseppe Verdi, and re-wriiten it using their own words and music. The new Aida won a Tony award for Best Original Score, the sound track won a Grammy and the show ran on Broadway…

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In the late 20th century, just before the turn of the millenium, it was easy to see the world in terms of dynamic transformation - the end of the world as we know it. Whether it was to be a beneficial or catastrophic transformation, however, depended upon one’s point of view. In Millenium Approaching, which is Part One of Angels in America, playwright Tony Kushner tapped into this highly charged feeling of Something Big About to Happen. Using a mixture of humour, grim reality and fantasy, he created what has become a modern classic. Now Fountainhead Theatreworks is bringing the…

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There will be quite a flurry of theatre openings over the next week. The Grand’s Christmas show is Annie (Nov 22- Dec 24), with the title role being shared by Londoners Kaitlyn Parr-Cowan and Sarah Dedyna. This is the 1977 musical based on the classic comic strip “Little Orphan Annie”, which featured an irrepressible orphan girl with a red mop-top and strange vacant white circles for eyes.

Other Londoners in the cast include Jim Doucette, John Turner, Jonathan Ellul and, in her first London show since she left for Toronto, Julie Seip.

Karen Skidmore takes on the juicy role of Miss…

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Lots of people are using the internet to find companions these days, and newspaper ads have brought together many a couple that is now growing old together. But think of the early 1920s, and what it would be like to answer such an ad, and to travel from Toronto to rural Saskatchewan for a blind date that’s supposed to turn into a marriage. It was a common occurrence when the land was opened up for settlement, and playwright Carl Cashin has spun the story of Mail Order Annie out of this phenomenon. The couple’s first face-to-face meeting doesn’t go at…

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Toronto singers Rachel Huys and Hannah Shelton appeared in numerous concerts, musicals, operettas and operas over the years they lived in London, and now they are returning to town for a concert that highlights the compositions of Sir Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) and Stephen Sondheim. Ms. Huys was born and raised in London, singing and playing her way through school, and majoring in voice performance at Western. She hooked up with London Musical Theatre too, appearing on stage as Esther Smith in Meet Me in St. Louis and in LMT Cabarets. She also appeared in Simon Johnston’s…

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The first trick in outdoor theatre is to get good settings. The Lost Soul Stroll, which ran in London’s downtown streets and alleys during the month of October, did a really nice job of showing off interesting places in the core area. The settings, lighting, costumes and acting often combined into unforgettable images. I can still picture Jason Rip as deranged killer Doctor Thomas Neill Cream walking ahead of me into the light at the end of a dark alley, with high brick walls on both sides, his silhouette dominated by a high stovepipe hat, and followed by black bobbing…

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There are lots of intelligent playwrights in the English-speaking world, but none who put ideas front and centre as successfully as Tom Stoppard. Not since George Bernard Shaw has anyone combined such intellectual gymnastics with straight-forward entertainment.

In Stoppard’s Arcadia, one group of characters is living in 1809, while the other group is set in the 1990s. Although the action all takes place in a single large room on an estate in the English coutryside, it alternates between the two time periods, so we get to see the mistakes made by the 20th century scholars as they try to piece together…

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“We can’t help but find each other extremely trying.” So says 81-year-old Judge Francis Biddle to the latest in a string of young secretaries hired to help him organize his records and affairs. He has led a full, high-profile public life, and he is well aware that it is very nearly over: “”The exit light is blinking over the door, and the door is ajar.”

That’s the premise of Trying, by Joanna McLelland Glass, which launches the Grand’s 2005-6 season this week.

The year is 1967, and the winds of change are sweeping through the United States, with organized social movements…

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Annie Oakley (1860 - 1926) was a legendary American sharpshooter who could shoot the ashes off of a cigarette held by her husband in his mouth. She started at a very early age, lifting her widowed mother and family out of poverty with the money from her game-hunting prowess. In her autobiography, she fondly remembers handing her mother the money that would pay off the mortgage on their Ohio farm. She was fifteen. She gained quite a reputation locally, and when a travelling marksman named Frank E Butler came to Cincinnati, Annie was encouraged to go to challenge him to…

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Dan Ebbs’ Home and Native Land is primarily a love story that explores dark deeds from Canada’s past, but it also evokes more general reflection on the actions of states during times of war. With the Canadian Army currently committed to keeping order in parts of Afghanistan, a post-9/11 security alert still in effect in North America, and “enemy combatants” held in legal limbo by the U.S. Army in Guantanemo Bay, a new play about the effects of war on civil liberties is timely indeed. Mr. Ebbs didn’t write it as a commentary on our own times, though, so much…

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London has its pockets of belly dance culture, but some of its proponents, not content to stick with the tradition of dance recitals, are now crossing the line into theatre. The shift began when choregraphers started building their shows thematically, with sets, props and narration used to develop a story. With the upcoming production of Shimmy!, the transition from recital to theatre is complete, because choreographer Sharon Kinsella has brought her playwright husband Paul Kinsella on board to co-create a dance comedy with a full cast of characters and a script. The piece is essentially a one-act musical comedy, but…

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The London Community Players open their season this weekend with Move Over Mrs. Markham, by the British duo Ray Cooney and John Chapman, whose comedies have been popular for fifty years now. John Chapman was an actor who trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His first play, Dry Rot, opened in London England in 1954, and it ran for three and a half years. Ray Cooney was an actor in that production, and soon he decided to give writing a go himself, beginning a playwrighting career that proved to be just as successful as Mr. Chapman’s. Mr. Cooney’s…

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This is generally a column about theatre in London, but it’s nice to look around the country sometimes, to see what the trends are and what may be heading our way. The announcements of the professional theatre awards in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver this summer gives us a chance to do just that. Edmonton is one of Canada’s premiere theatre towns - home of the first Fringe Festival in North America, the major theatre school in Western Canada and many a celebrated playwright. This year the Sterling Award for Outstanding Production of a Play went to Shakespeare’s Will, by…

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London stages are pretty quiet at the moment, but the rehearsal halls are buzzing as companies get ready to launch their new productions and seasons. Here’s an overview of what’s happening in theatre in the coming months.

Annie, Mail Order Annie and Annie Get Your Gun may sound like a sweeping three-part domestic tragedy, but it’s actually just a strange coincidence in the titles of plays presented by London’s three oldest theatre companies this fall.

Annie Oakley is the sharp-shooting star of Annie Get Your Gun (London Musical Theatre), Annie O’Ryan is an Ontario spinster who answers a newspaper ad placed…

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Once again, The Grand Theatre is asking writers from the London region to submit short scripts for the PlayWrights Cabaret, and this year’s participants are being asked to write to the theme, “A Story Retold”. How the individual writers address the theme is entirely up to them, but the results in all their diversity will be on display when the plays are performed in staged readings on January the 20th and 21st in the Grand’s McManus Studio Theatre. Now in its fourth year, the PlayWrights Cabaret has always centred around a two-evening showcase of 20 new scripts that can each…

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There is a new theatre company in town, and for their first production they have chosen a play that is both substantial and entertaining: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Almost Absurd Theatre was created by Melissa Nagy, Brad Visser and Alicia Pairan, all of whom came out of Fanshawe College’s technical theatre program. Unlike most of the other companies in town, however, Almost Absurd is starting out as a touring company. Cuckoo’s Nest opened in Niagara Falls, and after its London run it will move on to Kitchener in September and St. Thomas in October. The London show is…

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Four short new plays will be presented next week at The Arts Project in an evening called One-Act Attack. Each was commissioned through TheatreWORKS, a federal government-sponsored initiative conceived by John White. Now in its second year, TheatreWORKS allows ten participants considered to have “barriers to employment” to learn the wide range of production and performance skills necessary for staging a play. This year, the organizers decided to bring some of London’s playwrights into the program by commissioning short plays for the participants to stage. One-Act Attack will therefore not only be a coming-out celebration for them; it will also…

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I’m handing in my 2005 London Fringe ‘Best of the Fest’ ballot, and here are my votes:

Best Show - Boulevard by Jayson McDonald, because of the characterizations, the acting and the ambition of the script.

Best Original Work - P&J by Joshua Richardson, because it’s a wacky genre of musical that I’ve never seen before, and audiences get it. (Personal bias acknowledged. Next.)

Best Performance - Scott Holden in Boulevard, because of his portayals of desparate people that are struggling to express themselves.

Best Solo Performance - Jorn-Bjorn Fuller-Gee in The Strange Story of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, for a highly…

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The first weekend of the Fringe was a huge success, with sold-out shows and perfect weather and record attendance. This coming weekend it all wraps up, so there are some choices to be made. I managed to see eight shows in addition to the one I’m acting in and I thought I’d give some of my impressions. Here are the plays, in the order that I saw them. Some great stuff!

You Kiss by the Book by Jonathan De Souza (London) The title is a quote from the scene in which Romeo and Juliet first meet. This play twists that scene,…

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Playwright Drew Hayden Taylor is into native humour. He even made a documentary about it and brought it to Western for a screening a few years ago. It’s called “Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew”. He wanted to bring a lot of humour into his playwrighting as well, but it wasn’t easy. Not that he had difficulty writing it; he just felt that there were expectations that native plays were to be heavier and more political. He had already established himself as a political and even polemical writer - one of his early plays was called Education Is Our Right. Would…

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This fall, Jayson McDonald and Lil Malinich are heading to New York City, where they will have two original plays staged at Wings Theatre in Greenwich Village at the end of October. The two London theatre artists have teamed up with the New York company Spiral Inc. to present the plays, which both premiered here in London. The Deluxe Illustrated Body, co-written by Malinich and McDonald, first ran at the Black Lodge in early 2002, and won the very first Brickenden Award for Best Original Script that year.

Victoria Keiden was the Artistic Director for Port Stanley Festival Theatre at…

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The 2005 Fringe schedule is set, the program is out and it’s time to look ahead to this year’s offerings.

There will be lots of music in the air this year; I counted nine musicals, a few dance pieces and a play about the dancer Nijinsky.

About one-third of the 41 Fringe shows are presented by London theatre companies. Local stalwart playwrights Jayson McDonald, Claire McCague and Jonathan De Souza all have contributions this year, Jake Levesque is back with part two of his solo show Original Sins, Diva Productions, Original Kids, Fully Insured and Channel Surfing are all on board…

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James Reaney has been quoted as saying that there are a hundred plays in the Donnelly story. He has written three himself, and the first of the trilogy is Sticks and Stones, which premiered at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre in 1973, and is now running at the Stratford Festival until September. It’s a solid show that’s well worth seeing.

Director Andrey Tarasiuk called it one of the most intimidating scripts that he’d ever attempted. It’s a fact-laden documentary, a poetic soundscape and a blueprint for changing visual metaphors all in one, and it calls for a deep understanding of both the…

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When we moved the rehearsals for The Donnelly Trial into the old courthouse last week, Chris Doty watched the run of the show, and then told the cast, “That was the first time these words have been spoken in this room in 125 years.” During the past few years, Mr. Doty has gone through detailed accounts of exactly what was said in court for the 1880-81 trials of James Carroll for the murder of Johannah Donnelly in Biddulph Township. These were the only trials ever held about the murders of five members of the Donnelly family. Carroll was acquitted and…

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Here’s a challenge for the summer: why doesn’t some independent theatre company in London book one of the theatres in town and give us a show? That may not sound like a revolutionary idea, but it certainly goes against local custom and practice. The fact is that our theatres are dark for most of the summer every year. Is it because Londoners don’t want to go to theatre in the summer? No, because healthy-sized crowds go to the UWO campus for the annual outdoor Summer Shakespeare production every year, and they have also been turning out for Acropolis Theatre’s Shakespeare…

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Since 2002, when the Brickenden Awards for theatre excellence in London were founded, an award has been presented each year to the London playwright who was deemed to have written the best original script. The first one went to Lil Malinich and Jayson McDonald for The Deluxe Illustrated Body, a play which touched upon religion, death, alcoholism and family relations, with interwoven story lines that ran parallel to snippets from one of the character’s anatomy lectures. Three Black Ring produced the play at The Black Lodge in early 2002. In 2003, the Best Original Script award went to Rod Keith…

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David Ferry’s long association with James Reaney goes back to his acting work in Listen to the Wind and the Donnelly trilogy. He remains committed to Reaney’s legacy, and last week he was in town to deliver a paper on the Donnelly story at the Conference on the Humanities, held at UWO, and to lead a workshop on some of Reaney’s theatre techniques. Reaney often organized "Listeners’ Workshops", in which plays are created by a large number of people in a short time. They can take their basic images and inspiration from anywhere, from the book of Genesis to the…

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Not many actors get to bid a final farewell to their career and their audiences from the stage, but that is exactly what William Hutt is doing this summer in Stratford. In the final speech of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the sorcerer Prospero is alone on stage, addressing the audience directly. He has given up his magical powers, freed his servants and forgiven those who had done him wrong. Now, he is asking the audience to free him from their spell - the illusion of the island that the actors and audience have created together with their imaginations. At the beginning…

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Looking off into the future for a minute, here are a few productions that have appeared on the theatre horizon. Home and Native Land, a new play by Dan Ebbs, is about to go into auditions. It`s about Ukranian immigrants to Canada who found themselves forced into internment camps during World War One. The playwright has split his time in recent years between London and Banff, and the story of the interred Ukranian-Canadians caught his interest and became a passion.

He has a long history of studying, teaching, performing and directing in theatre, and can draw on a wide variety…

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While studying economics at Western in the early 70s, David Wasse appeared in a Players’ Guild production of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle. Grand Artistic Director Heiner Pillar saw the show and asked him to join the Grand’s first Young Company. This was an incredibly dynamic and exciting project - a company of young London actors who staged plays in the Mini Theatre (everything small was called ‘mini’ in those days) across from Labatt’s brewery, and then moved up to the Grand’s mainstage when they were ready. David Wasse was lucky enough to be in the right place with the right…

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David Snelgrove is all over the Stratford Festival promotional material this year. There he is in an undershirt, holding a drink at a tipsy angle, with Cynthia Dale leaning on his back with her eyes closed. He’s playing Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams.

And that’s him with the big gash on his cheekbone and the worried look in his eye, as the title character in Edward the Second, by Christopher Marlowe.

On top of those two leading roles, he’ll also be in the revival of Sticks and Stones, the first play of James Reaney’s Donnelly Trilogy.…

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The London One-Act Festival (LOAF) is back for a seventh straight year, and they have lured former Londoner Allan Stratton back home to adjudicate the festivities. Mr. Stratton’s career took off after the enormous success of Nurse Jane Goes to Hawaii, which premiered in 1980, racked up over 300 productions, and is still going strong. The latest will be staged up in Muskoka this summer. Subsequent plays have premiered at Tarragon Theatre (Papers), Theatre Passe Muraille (Bag Babies), Vancouver Playhouse (Bingo!), Theatre Calgary (Joggers), Prairie Theatre Exchange (A Flush of Tories), Phoenix Theatre (Rexy) and the Shaw Festival Mainstage (Friends…

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Margaret Edson is a kindergarten teacher in Atlanta Georgia. Her very first play, Wit, won a Pulitzer Prize and she has no intention of writing another. “This is the play that I wanted to write and I’m committed to teaching now. This is what I’m doing. And if there’s something else I want to say in ten years, then I’ll think about it, but I’m not interested in leaving teaching for anything.”

First produced in 1995, Wit hit the big time in 1999, with lots of major awards in New York and requests for production rights. Now a new production of…

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After almost a decade in show biz, Channel Surfing Productions is hitting the boards with their first full-cast, full-length play, The UnderAchievers. It’s been a long journey, with two major shifts - from TV to live theatre and from sketch comedy to full-length narrative - but with this production, Channel Surfing leaps into the flock of full-fledged London theatre companies. Back in 1998, when so many new companies were springing up in town, Channel Surfing was taking to the airwaves with sketch comedy on Rogers TV. In 2001, they plunged into live theatre for the first time, with a sketch…

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Usually, we think of theatre as something that happens in theatres, but plays can take place anywhere you can get actors and an audience together. Picture, for example, an audience of ten in a motel room, watching three actors perform a full-length play. Up-close and intimate, to say the least. That’s what’s happening for the opening and closing performances of Theatre Soup’s production of Tape, by Stephen Belber. Most of the run of Tape is performed in The Arts Project Theatre (April 13-16), but because the setting of the play is a motel room, Theatre Soup is staging the show…

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Three of London’s biggest theatre companies have openings this week: London Musical Theatre has The Secret Garden (April 7-16), London Community Players opens Midnight Sun (April 8-16) and The Grand presents Oklahoma, the 2005 High School Project (April 5-17). Between them, these plays take you to Iceland during World War II, and England, India and the American West at the beginning of the 20th century. Two of them have military occupation as a backdrop - another case of theatre reflecting our own times?

The Secret Garden is a musical adapted from the Frances Hodgson Burnett novel by Marsha Norman. Her Pulitzer…

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O Solo Mio is a festival of one-person shows presented by the London Fringe people. Last year, it was one of two Canadian festivals devoted exclusively to solo shows, the other being UNO in Victoria BC. Now two more have come on board, in Vancouver and Toronto, suggesting the beginnings of a new circuit for solo performers. This year, a jury selected four acts from a field of over 50 applicants, and they will have two shows each from April 7-9 at the Grand’s McManus Studio Theatre. They come from British Columbia, Quebec, Prince Edward Island and France.

One that is…

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After years of work with DuffleBag Theatre, Rod Keith knows kid’s theatre inside out. The great thing about it, he says, is creating theatrical illusions on stage, so that the kids exercise their imaginations and get a sense of the magic of co-creation with the performers. When he created Chelsea & Boggs, a 70s-style TV cop show for the stage, he wanted to provide that same kind of experience for adults by creating huge props and stunts that give the audience’s grown-up imaginations a workout. That’s why he sometimes thinks of the Chelsea & Boggs series as “a kid’s show…

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London’s entry into the 2005 Western Ontario Drama League (WODL) Festival, Eve, didn’t make it into the final five that get revival productions at the Festival. But Peter Busby’s set got a well-deserved design nomination, Andrew Gibbess’ portrayal of the Hungarian free spirit Johnny Horvath was recognized with a nomination, and he and Jocelyn Rioux were given a special adjudicator’s award - "Memorable Duet". London is hosting the 2005 WODL Festival, so some of the best amateur theatre in the region will be coming to the Palace for one performance each, between March 14th and 18th. This year, they are…

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The final show of the Kickstart Series at the Palace is a sex-and-violence thriller called Kiki’s Room, written and directed by Jordan Morris for the Pink Fish Production Company.

Mr. Morris is primarily known in theatre circles as an actor. He won the 2004 Brickenden Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Fruits Unheard Of. He has also been known to do design work, but this was the first I’d heard of him as a playwright. His inspiration for this project came from the Japanese animated film Perfect Blue.

Kiki was the star of a children’s TV show, Tiki Island,…

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My own company, Ausable Theatre, is up next in the Kickstart series at the Palace Theatre, and I’m fulfilling a hankering to re-visit a couple of one-act shows that Ausable staged a few years ago. One is James Reaney’s One-man Masque, a small masterpiece that showcases Reaney’s humour, drama and poetry in a circular trip through the stages of life and death. The other is Running Rude, a comedy of my own, based on my experiences in environmental activism and politics.

The double bill runs from March 1st to the 5th, with a matinee on the Saturday.

I was always interested in…

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The Grand Theatre has two performance spaces: the magnificent 850-seat theatre upstairs that gets most of the attention and the 150-seat McManus Studio Theatre, down below street level. The latter is where you’ll see shows that either call for an intimate space or lack the mass appeal needed for a run in the big theatres. It is rented out to other theatre companies, or used by the Grand to bring in touring shows or to stage new Grand productions that are rehearsed and premiered locally. When Martha Henry left the position of Artistic Director, the small-stage Grand productions dried up,…

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A Streetcar Named Desire, now running at the Grand, is a beautifully acted, directed and designed show. It really is a great script, too, and I hope that Londoners grab the opportunity to see a good production of one of North America’s best plays ever. One of the highlights of the Grand production was the transition from the magic atmosphere that Blanche Dubois creates to the violence and sex of Stanley Kowalski’s world. There was Blanche, dancing gently to the music on the radio, in a little island of warmly coloured light, with a delighted gentleman who "moves in awkward…

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In one of her five acceptance speeches at the Brickenden Awards Ceremonies on January 31st, Caitlin Murphy said that it was nice that her play Fruits Unheard Of - was getting this recognition, because only about 100 people saw it.

But the Brickenden Committee members were among those who made it out and this short run of an original script about photographer Diane Arbus, landed four major Brickenden Awards: Best Production, Best Original Script, Best Director (shared by the playwright and Kaila Jarmain).and Best Supporting Actor (Jordan Morris, who played 13 characters).

There are lessons here, if we dare to learn…

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This February 3rd marks the 125th anniversary of the murders of five members of the Donnelly family, Irish immigrants who settled in Biddulph Township near Lucan Ontario in the mid-1800s. Ireland was in a sad state of affairs at the time, and County Tipperary was a particularly crime-ridden political hotbed. Waves of Protestants and Catholics from Tipperary emigrated to Biddulph, and the crime and violence emigrated right along with them. The township was a wild place in the late nineteenth century.

Factional fighting within the local parish of the Roman Catholic Church got extremely antagonistic, and enemies of the Donnellys ventured…

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The third annual PlayWrights Cabaret takes place in the Grand’s McManus Theatre this Friday and Saturday, January 21-22, but there is also a new component to this year’s event - free public readings of two newly commissioned works on Monday, January 24th. The Playwrights Cabaret was created by Grand Artistic Director Susan Ferley in 2003, and every year, she has added a new component to the project. The core idea is the presentation of staged readings of twenty ten-minute scripts, covering a wide range of topics and styles from twenty London writers.

In 2004, a dramaturge was brought in for…

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If you’d like to start off the new year with a comedy or a musical, there’s a big-stage production in town for you right now. Norm Foster’s The Foursome is playing at the Grand and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience is on the Talbot Theatre stage at UWO. Both shows run until January 22nd. The Foursome is about old buddies who are up early for a round of golf the morning after a twenty-year school reunion. Over the course of 18 scenes - one for each tee-off - amidst the competition and the banter, we get glimpses of what they think…

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The nominations are in for the 2004 Brickenden Awards for outstanding theatre in London. The picks for Best Production of 2004 (outside of Grand Theatre productions) have been narrowed down to five finalists: Art (The Arts Project), Fruits Unheard Of (Small Pond Productions), Juno and the Paycock (UWO English Department), K2 (Fountainhead Theatreworks) and The Miracle Worker (Theatre Soup). The directors of all five of these productions were nominated for their work, and they are, respectively, Don Fleckser, Caitlin Murphy and Kaila Jarmain, yours truly, John Gerry and Justin Peter Quesnelle.

Going strictly by the number of nominations received, the top…

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The darkest time of the year is upon us, and as we change gears and celebrate holidays and pull down the old calendars, it’s always a good time to reflect on where we’ve been in the past year. As John Lennon put it, “And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?”

That’s one of the great things about the Brickenden Awards - they prompt us to look back over the year in London theatre, remember our favourite productions, and take stock of the state of theatre arts in town.

You can even help to choose the third annual Brickenden…

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The darkest time of the year is upon us, and as we change gears and celebrate holidays and pull down the old calendars, it’s always a good time to reflect on where we’ve been in the past year. As John Lennon put it, “And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?”

That’s one of the great things about the Brickenden Awards — they prompt us to look back over the year in London theatre, remember our favourite productions, and take stock of the state of theatre arts in town.

You can even help to choose the third annual Brickenden Award…

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They seem to like London playwrights out at Theatre BC. Last year Jayson McDonald scooped one of their three main awards for his script Eclipse County Limits. This year, plays by two other London playwrights, Paul Kinsella and Carac Allison, were among seven chosen out of the 118 submissions to their annual competition. They were two of the four “finalists” (as opposed to the three “winners”), but they do get honourable mention, and they have been invited out to participate in the New Play Festival in April. It will take place in Kamloops at the Pavilion Theatre, home to Western…

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Jason Rip and Theatre Nemesis are closing out the year with two new solo shows at The Arts Project: The Ice Cream Man Has Died and Water-Play.

This has been The Year of the Solo Show for Theatre Nemesis; Mr. Rip will have written and performed three of them in 2004. The first was Miss Wisconsin, in which he played a person named Christopher by his parents, who were convinced that they had a boy, but who called herself Tabitha because she felt like a girl. It was an excellent show, and the double bill that is now running under the…

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Theatre Soup is bringing a modern classic to the stage as its contribution to the new Kickstart theatre series at the Palace. The Miracle Worker is based on the true story of Helen Keller, who was a blind, deaf and uncontrollably wild child growing up in Alabama in the 1880s. Her teacher, Annie Sullivan, was determined that Helen would learn how to use language in spite of her handicaps, and the pair developed an intense, dramatic relationship.

When playwright William Gibson read a collection of Ms. Sullivan’s letters, he was inspired to tell the story, and The Miracle Worker was the…

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Theatrically, London has normally been a town of two solitudes — fully professional or fully amateur companies. The past few years, though, have seen a wealth of new theatre activity, and plenty of companies have emerged to work in the space between.

Now five of these companies have joined together to create a full season of plays under the name “Kickstart”. Beginning at the end of November, and running until mid-March, the Kickstart series brings a wide variety of plays to The Palace Theatre, to run in parallel with those of their hosts, The London Community Players.

The companies (and their Artistic…

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It was 1944, and a young woman in Bournemouth England had fallen in love with a Canadian soldier from London Ontario. They sought permission from the army to marry, but regulations required that she be at least 21, so they had to wait for three months. As fate would have it, the date was set for June 5th 1944, the day before the Allied invasion of Europe — D-Day.

Half a century later, at 71 years of age, Londoner Norah Harding captured the spirit of the times in an autobiographical play. This Year, Next Year premiered at the Blyth Festival in 1995…

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K2 is a funny name for a mountain. Why are they letting file clerks name mountains anyhow?

But K2 is a good name for a play, and a production based on the Patrick Meyer script is running until November 13th in the McManus Studio Theatre at the Grand. It’s a brilliant show, so try to see it if you can.

Two “hobby mountaineers”, a lawyer and a scientist, have been caught on a ledge while trying to descend the world’s second-highest mountain. They are in Pakistan, near the border with China, on a mountain known locally as “Chargori”. They know it as “K2″.

The…

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I have been thinking a lot about ticket prices lately, and I’m looking for a little feedback.

For theatre producers, the two old questions come around again and again: How do we get lots of people to our shows, and how do we pay for these productions? Low ticket prices make theatre affordable and accessible, but do they pay the bills? High prices shut out people who would genuinely like to see the show, which seems a shame.

In the long run, maybe the anarchist solution is the ideal — the one whereby everyone can see plays free of charge, but donations…

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Juno and the Paycock, by Sean O’Casey, is a classic play in the great Irish tradition of combining comedy and tragedy.

The Irish seem to be particularly gifted in their ability to combine joy and sorrow in their music and literature. Embedded in many a toe-tapping, spirit-lofting tune is a melancholy thought or a tale of woe. The writers have you laughing one moment and crying the next. It’s all very stimulating over a broad spectrum of emotions, and that’s one of the reasons that Irish music and literature are so revered.

It’s probably partly the result of centuries of desperation and…

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I’m a big fan of Hannah Feiner’s writing. I saw her first play, The Geminis, performed at the year-end show of South Secondary School’s drama class in 2001, her graduating year.

The play was about two lesbians who meet in high school as photographer and model, and then enter into a long-term relationship. Years later, they finally break up, and the play takes us back and forth between the beginning and end of their time together.

Then, for the Youth Fringe that year, she pulled off another interesting production with Supine, which was mainly a series of monologues by three sisters having…

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: somebody still has to write the Great Canadian Hockey Play. Whoever does a decent job of it will go down in history.

It’s not an entirely novel idea. Rugby and soccer plays have been enormously successful in Ireland and the UK; sports and theatre fans both eat them up. Right here in London, the Grand will be following up a curling play (The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon) with a golfing play (The Foursome), so it’s not as though sports on stage don’t work.

I am reminded of this chasm in the Canadian…

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In his novel The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson hit on a classic psychological phenomenon: the split personality; the being that lurks in the dark part of the soul; the hidden demon inside the civilized man. Stevenson gave him the cute but sinister name of “Mr. Hyde”.

Now there’s Jekyll and Hyde: The Musical. It originated as a concept album around 1990, was adapted to the stage in 1994, hit Broadway in 1998 and is about to play in London, thanks to Original Kids.

What is a kids’ theatre troupe doing presenting a show about murder,…

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Theatre Soup had a hit in the 2001 London Fringe with Catholic School Girls, by Casey Kurtti, and they have been hoping to take it to the Toronto Fringe ever since. But demand for participating in that Fringe is so high that they hold a lottery, and acceptance is based on the luck of the draw from a big bin of applicants.

One of the cornerstones of the Fringe approach is that there is no jury to determine who makes the grade. Unknown companies are given the chance to run with the ball and make it on their own merits or…

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Acting had always been Niki Kemeny’s number one theatrical passion. Ever since her days as a teenaged TV star playing the role of Voula on Degrassi Junior High, her place had always been under the stage lights.

She went from Restoration comedies and Shakespeare at UWO to the thick of the recent original theatre movement in London. She is probably best known, however, for her portrayal of Detective April Chelsea, the higher-kicking, smarter and wealthier half of the main duo in Chelsea & Boggs, the 70s cop show parody theatre series by Rod Keith.

Niki took on prop and costume work in…

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It’s the end of an era for the Boneyard Man. The Natural Broadcasting Company is closing down the series after a run of five and a half years.

The first episode, “M-O-I-D-A spells Moida” was staged in October of 1998 at 123 King Street, in the second floor space hosted by Casey Peavoy and his dog Blue. It required a long climb up the wooden stairs, there was only one washroom, and the main architectural feature was a furnace in the middle of the room.

The whole place was a firetrap, really, but everyone loved the funky party/performance atmosphere, and it became…

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Judging by his latest play Outlaw, it would appear that Norm Foster has been thinking a lot about the differences between Canadian and American history and culture. That’s a perennial topic for Canadians, of course, but the issues have been sharpened in recent years, wspecially with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. We are reminded once again that Americans have a different way of doing things and a different way of thinking.

Norm Foster takes the issue right back into the heart of American mythology, however, by plopping a Canadian character down in the heart of the Old West in 1871.…

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What would happen if you took ten talented young people with little or no experience in theatre, gave them crash courses in stagecraft, writing, design and promotion, and asked them to produce an original play from scratch, all within six months?

We’ll soon find out.

April 14th is opening night for Writer’s Block, a new play that is part of a pilot project called Theatreworks. John White, Executive Director of The Arts Project, had the idea, got funding from Human Resources Development Canada, and then hired Jason Rip to co-ordinate the project and draw up the curriculum.

Successful applicants to this program all…

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Coming soon to the Wolf Performance Hall: Need, Excess, Dissonance, Diligence and Ecstasy.

This is not a rock and roll roadshow, but a partial list of the characters in a new play by Claire McCague. Ms. McCague is ostensibly in London to get her PhD in Chemistry, but during her time here, she has developed a formidable distraction: writing for the theatre. The steady stream of new plays that she has produced over the past few years is a testament to her passion for theatre, but London deserves some of the credit too, for providing so many avenues for playwrights to…

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March 27 is World Theatre Day, and every year since 1961, a message has gone around the world from a prominent playwright. The message this year is from Fathia El Assal, from Egypt.

World Theatre Day International Message 2004

Theatre is the father of all arts. This is a truth none can contend, and for this reason it is my one and only passion.

*** *** ***

I have always believed that playwrights distinguish themselves by their noble human feelings. Their message can thus help people to rise above themselves, to free themselves from their frustrations, from exploitation, and thus be able to gain…

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The first students in the new Fanshawe College acting program are now engaged in their coming-out performances, and the program administrators have made a couple of interesting choices for their first productions: back-to-back presentations of hundred-year-old Russian stories. One is a family drama by Maxim Gorky and the other a black comedy by Nikolai Erdman.

Fanshawe already had a technical theatre program, but now, in partnership with The Theatre School, they have started a two-year acting program as well. Practical classes and performances are at Ann and Talbot, in the space that started its theatrical life as the Old Factory Theatre,…

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Jayson McDonald’s latest play Jigsaw is about to premiere at The Arts Project, courtesy of Theatre Soup. This should be a good one to catch, because Jayson is on a bit of a roll.

In April, he will be flying out to Kamloops BC for a workshop of Eclipse County Limits, which won the Special Merit Award from Theatre BC’s National Playwriting Competition.

The Deluxe Illustrated Body, which he co-wrote with Lil Malinich, won the 2002 Brickenden Award for best new script in London, and it was given a second production at Port Stanley Festival Theatre. Now the cast has been invited to…

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Our perceptions of distant countries most often come to us through the news, and that’s a problem. News reports will not typically tell us much about a people — who they are or what they feel — but they will record their pain and suffering when disaster strikes or violence breaks out. The old adage for news reporting is “If it bleeds, it leads; if it thinks, it stinks”. Hardly a recipe for promoting cross-cultural understanding.

I spent some time in Southern Africa at the tail end of the apartheid era. Shortly after I returned home, the long-standing struggle against apartheid…

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With the opening of Cherry Docs at the McManus Studio Theatre on March 3rd, the Grand has brought back an institution that lay dormant for over a decade: in-house productions for their smaller stage. They have even reclaimed the name that was used back in the days when Martha Henry was at the helm by calling their McManus programming The UnderGrand Series.

The McManus has been a busy theatre over the past few years, but the productions were rentals of the space by such local companies as Theatre Soup, Rubberfunk, Ausable Theatre and Theatre Nemesis, or festivals, such as the Fringe and…

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Jason Rip considers himself a genre-driven playwright, to a large extent. He has tried his hand at writing a western (Bob the Teapot), a musical (Core), a mobster chase movie (Mother Mary Molotov), a murder mystery (The Washing Away of Wrongs), a two-hander (To Ashes), a biography (Beard: A Few Moments in the Life of Roy McDonald), a wrestling play (The Brothers Beef), an Elvis movie spoof (Aloha Rodeo) and a handful of others — 17 original plays so far, all of which premiered here in London.

With his latest effort, Miss Wisconsin, he is taking a crack at another new…

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Jim Schaefer has already left quite a theatre legacy in this area: the origins of the Port Stanley Festival Theatre, the heady and intense days of student productions at UWO’s Drama Workshop, Fanshawe College shows in recent years, and the Red Socks Company in St. Jacobs, dedicated to the development of new, commercially viable scripts.

As a director, Schaefer has been working with London stalwart actor John Turner of late, and they are teaming up again for a world premiere at the Wolf Performance Hall, courtesy of Fourth Wall Productions and the London Public Library.

The play is Patches, by Stephen Baetz…

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Q: How many playwrights does it take to change a light bulb? A: I’m not changing nothin’.

That’s an old chestnut, and it’s a good one, but I don’t think that playwrights are really like that, generally. They are protective of their work, sure, but they also appreciate the chance to talk about it, try it out, explore possibilities, sharpen intentions, and generally have others take an interest.

This year, the Grand has expanded the Playwrights’ Cabaret to include a visitor who is well versed in the art of play development. Gil Garratt is an actor, director and playwright who has been…

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The first Brickenden Awards ceremony to honour outstanding theatre in London, held on January 26th at the Wolf Performance Hall, was a great success, setting high standards for years to come.

This was actually the second set of Brickenden Awards — the first being for plays that were staged in 2002. They generated a lot of interest (and controversy), but the whole enterprise took a huge step forward this year with the glitz and glamour of an awards ceremony, and the accompanying sense of occasion.

Paul Soles was a warm and gracious host, plumping his introductions with stories and thoughtful quotes from…

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The arts project called The Arts Project reminds me of the band called The Band and the film called Film. The name alone doesn’t give you much of an idea of what to expect.

Well for the record, one of the art forms that is flourishing these days at The Arts Project downtown is theatre.

In recent years, two serial shows have opened there: The Tower (Jayson McDonald) and The Curse of the Burymores (Jason Rip). Several excellent short plays premiered there as well, including Theseus in the Labyrinth (J.G. De Sousa) and Fire of the Mind (Rod Keith), and full musicals have been staged by…

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NOEL GALLAGHER, Free Press Arts & Entertainment Reporter

Belying its title, Problem Child had no trouble dominating London’s second annual Brickenden Theatre Awards. The Ausable Theatre production won five major awards — including the prize for best production — at last night’s gala in the Wolf Performance Hall.

“The real point of this evening is to celebrate London theatre, so let’s keep doing it and sharing the experience,” said Rachel Holden-Jones, accepting the best actress award for her performance in George F. Walker’s drama about a young couple desperately trying to reclaim their baby from a government social service agency.

Problem Child’s heavy…

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In Christopher Doty’s documentary about the Grand Theatre (Let’s Go to the Grand), there is a clip showing a 1960 theatre awards ceremony in London. Paul Soles had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his work in London Little Theatre’s production of Six Characters in Search of an Author, by Luigi Pirandello. An out-of-town engagement made him late for the ceremony, and just as he poked his head in the door to see how much he’d missed, his name was announced as winner of the award. He was filled with adrenaline from the rush to the theatre, the excitement…

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Herman Goodden has been a constant presence in London’s newsprint media over the past few decades, so most people probably think of him as a columnist. Once, when asked to give a talk on his approach to writing professionally, he called it something like “Venting Your Spleen for Fun and Profit”, and that says a lot about Herman and why he’s lasted as a writer.

But he has had a kick at many literary cans in his day. His first published novel, The Goof, fell into my hands about 25 years ago, and some of the images have stayed with me.…

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Back in the mid-1950s, faculty and students and a few other enthusiasts began performing annual Gilbert and Sullivan operettas up at Western. Fifty years later, that tradition is still going strong, making London the home of one of the longest-running G&S institutions in North America.

This is pretty remarkable, because these are extravagant productions with full pit orchestras, elaborate costumes and vocal music that can be quite demanding, by popular standards. Operettas aren’t exactly the hottest form of entertainment anymore, and given that these pieces are over a hundred years old, you would think that they would be musical theatre curiosities,…

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And so wraps up another outstanding year of theatre in London. Thanks to the diversity of companies out there, London audiences got the chance to see contemporary Canadian plays from Brad Fraser, George F Walker, Jason Sherman, Gail Bowen, Michael Healey and Norm Foster, international hits from David Mamet, Paula Vogel, Henry James, David Ives, Edward Albee and Brian Friel, and roasted chestnuts from Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan and Cole Porter. To name but a few.

Don’t forget to vote on the best London theatre of 2003: www.theatreinlondon.ca — before Jan 1.

But once again, a defining feature of the year in London…

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Looking back over the year, we find that once again, the number of new plays produced in London has risen, making 2003 the most prolific year so far for London playwrights. Over 40 original scripts!

Aside from the sheer number of new plays that emerged, 2003 was an impressive year for London playwrights because of the recognition they are getting outside of the city.

Claire McCague wrote a piece called One and Other, which premiered at Western’s Purple Shorts Festival in January, and then moved on to the London One-Act Festival and the Vancouver Fringe. It was also chosen for a Director’s…

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What was your favourite London theatre production of 2003? Now is the time to think it over, get online and vote, because nominations for the second annual set of Brickenden Awards are now being accepted at www.theatreinlondon.ca.

There you’ll find 17 award categories — for best actors, scripts, designers, directors and various kinds of production, including “bravest production”. You can send in your votes and help choose the winners, and there is also a chance to vote for your favourite mainstage show at the Grand in 2003.

The People’s Choice for each category will count as one vote on a panel of…

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Is it OK to talk about The Devil these days? You’d think so, but according to Peter Desbarats, our society is not nearly as tolerant or secular as it appears on the surface.

He wrote a Christmas play about a devil girl named Lucretia, who lives in Hell with her malevolent family, the Beelzebubs. But Lucretia has a streak of good in her, to the shame of her family, and she is fascinated with Christmas, the one time of the year when devils are not allowed to visit the world of mortals.

How Lucretia Discovered Christmas is a family play, a Christmas play…

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Theatre in London, the definitive on-line source for local live performance, is pleased to announce nominations for the 2003 Brickenden Awards for excellence in local theatre.

This year, the public will have a chance to select the five nominations in each of the 17 categories which include: best local production, director, original script, actor, actress, supporting actor, supporting actress, comedy production, musical production, youth production, lighting, costume, sound, set design, Grand Main Stage production, touring production and bravest production. Votes can be cast using the on-line ballot available at www.theatreinlondon.ca. The popular choice in each category will register as one vote…

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Remember how I raved in this column about a Fringe Festival show by London playwright Jayson McDonald called Eclipse County Limits? Well, the folks out at Theatre British Columbia seem to share my enthusiasm, because they have just given it the Special Merit Award in their National Playwrighting Competition. 126 scripts were submitted from across Canada, and Mr. McDonald’s play was one of three chosen to receive an award.

In April. he gets to fly out for their New Play Festival, which is to be held in Kamloops. As part of the award, the play will be workshopped by professional actors,…

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Is there a better writer in Canadian theatre than George F. Walker? I don’t think so. It’s very funny stuff, fast-moving with lots of action, and he presents characters whose lives are teetering on the edge, facing death or disintegration. So the basic crowd-pleasing elements of comedy and drama are there in spades.

But there is a depth to Walker’s characters and themes that take his work beyond mere entertainment and into the realm of literature and art. His great achievement is the writing of plays that are so rich, and yet so accessible.

In the late 90s, he wrote Suburban Motel,…

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I have often written about the blossoming of theatre in this town – the increasing variety of fare available, the explosion in the number of active theatre companies and the number of new scripts by London playwrights that have been produced in the past few years. But this local theatre boom is part of a wider phenomenon, because Canadian theatre is gaining an international reputation for its quality and vibrancy.

I first became aware of this last year at a conference in Ireland on international theatre exchanges, when Canadian theatre seemed to keep popping up. Three theatres in Glasgow, Scotland were…

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The title of Caitlin Murphy’s latest play, Vinegar to Jam, gives us some pretty good imagery for her writing style in general: a dash of sweetness and a shot of acid.

She came from Sarnia to study English at Western in the late 90s, and started to get involved in theatre as an actor, playing leading roles with London Community Players (Isn’t it Romantic), UWO Summer Shakespeare (Measure for Measure), Ausable Theatre (Novel House), and Rubberfunk (Chelsea & Boggs), to name a few.

In 2000, she proposed to one of her English professors that she submit a play for one of her…

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Up on campus, the UWO English Department is having a bash at the-play-that-must-not-be-mentioned-by-name. In theatres, that is. Saying its name in a theatre is worse than swearing in church, and many a theatrical greenhorn has been pounded for bringing the threat of doom to a production, just by mentioning the title of a bloody play. Outside of theatres, the rule doesn’t apply, and I imagine that, once out on the street, bruised and beaten greenhorns call it out incessantly – “Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth! …” Try reading this column aloud in a theatre, and see if you don’t get punched.

This is…

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Playwright James Reaney once said that the trick-or-treat tradition at Hallowe’en gives us the best theatre event of the year. Although self-organized, it is massive in scale; everyone who wants to can take on a role — and everybody gets paid.

Hallowe’en is inherently theatrical, and it’s no surprise that its ancient themes pop up in our local theatres at this time of year.

Kids love it, of course, and the Original Kids have just launched their season with appropriate fare - a horror-comedy-musical full of classic Hollywood monsters who sing. It’s called I’m Sorry, the Bridge is Out … You’ll have…

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Serge and Igor Saika-Voivod grew up in a household in which recorded music was a rarity. With musical boys everywhere and parents who were professional musicians, the constant in the house was live music — strings, piano, arias and barbershop quartets. Their father, Igor Senior, toured throughout Europe and Canada as an opera singer and their mother Elizabeth worked professionally all over North America as a choral conductor. From them they learned not only high musical standards, but also how to work as a team on musical projects. It’s not entirely surprising, then, that they ended up as musical co-directors…

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Writers! Limber up your fingers, because the Grand has made the call for scripts for this season’s Playwrights’ Cabaret. Twenty to thirty pieces, each under ten minutes in length, will be chosen for readings in the Grand’s McManus Studio Theatre in February. The deadline is November 28, 2003.

Not only will your piece get a staged reading by a crackerjack team of actors, the Grand is paying an honourarium to each playwright whose script is used. Money, fame, and a chance to see your work on the McManus stage – why miss out on that?

The first Playwrights’ Cabaret was last February,…

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How the Circus Vanished, by Londoner John Boc, has just opened at The Arts Project on Dundas Street, and looking back over the history of the play, this was an opening that could be described as “improbable”.

It is one of eight plays that Mr. Boc wrote in the late 70s, and it remained unproduced for a quarter of a century. In 1995, the strains on the playwright’s life, work and relationships due to a long-term mental illness had become so intense that he sought to purge himself of the past by burning all of his writings. For the most part…

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Now that London’s fall theatre season is under way, let’s look over the listings to see what theatre companies are offering between now and the end of the year.

The Grand has already launched its season with Little Shop of Horrors, a comedy-horror musical about an ever-growing plant that craves human blood. They will follow that production up with an adaptation of Henry James’ supernatural suspense story The Turn of the Screw, and a new adaptation of Peter Pan by Gail Bowen, who wrote last season’s Dancing in Poppies. I have always thought that the original story by J.M. Barrie was much…

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Autumn is a time for new beginnings, so we expect to say goodbye to some people and hello to others. But it gives me pause when four talented Londoners, all of them serious about acting, pack up and leave town.

Julie Seip, Tyler Parr, Audrey Davenport and Laura O’Connor are all either gone or heading out soon. They have good reasons for what they are doing, I’m sure, but it does give occasion for reflection.

Is London a good place for actors these days? That depends on how you look at it.

On the affirmative side, worthy productions are always cropping up so…

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The Continuing Adventures of the Boneyard Man has become a London institution of sorts, and as the Boneyard crew prepares to celebrate five years in show biz, their sphere of influence is about to bulge, because it is not only on the road; it’s on TV as well.

After a whirlwind week of taping in August, Rogers Television has ten Boneyard Man episodes in the can. The first of these will air on Tuesday, September 16th at 10:30 p.m., bringing it into basements, bedrooms and bars all over Ontario and in the Maritimes as well.

In the London area, episodes will air no less…

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I managed to see 17 London Fringe shows this year, and when I sit back and take stock, my favourite (excluding the one I was in, of course) was a strange and seedy little tale written and directed by Jayson McDonald entitled Eclipse County Limits. Commissioned by John Turner’s company Streaky Bacon, it featured Laura O’Connor and Turner himself. There was no dazzle to this show, and only a few laughs, but it worked well for me because it successfully explored a particular and peculiar psychological state. The director and actors understood the mood that they were going for, they…

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London’s newest theatre series, The Curse of the Burymores, is about to be launched on Saturday, August 30th at the Arts Project, 203 Dundas Street. Billed as “an evening of comical classic horror”, it’s the latest offering from London playwright Jason Rip. The plan is to present a new episode every month.

Serial theatre has done quite well in London. In the early 90s, weekly presentations of Star Trek episodes built up a following, and more recently, The Continuing Adventures of the Boneyard Man, by Jayson McDonald, has racked up over 75 episodes over five seasons. The Tower, also by Jayson McDonald…

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Happy Birthday, Londoner.

The Londoner was born just as theatre in this city was branching and blossoming into something new and extraordinary. Shortly before the launch of the first issue, I suggested to editor Philip McLeod that solid coverage of London’s theatre scene was just the kind of thing that the Londoner needed. The booming theatre scene included lots of strong new companies and playwrights, but most of the city’s residents were not aware of just how much was being offered to them. While this was newsworthy in and of itself, I argued, there was also the distinction factor. Let the Londoner be…

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If you enter the university campus at the Richmond gates, the road bends to the right just before you cross the river, and then one of the city’s classic sights comes into view. The road ahead conveniently bends away, leaving a homey but majestic effect – a sidewalk up a broad grassy hill, past a lone apple tree and up to one of the oldest buildings on campus, University College (“the one with the flag”).

To the left of the central tower, the building is bigger, because of a hall that is situated on its second floor. Originally used for ceremonial…

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45 Fringe shows are about to be packed into a ten-day festival running from August 8-17. A remarkable total of 24 of these are by London companies, most of them presenting new works by London playwrights.

Caitlin Murphy has written two new comedies for the Fringe: Eek! is produced by Theatre Soup and The Ladies’ Room by her own company, Small Pond Productions. Chris Loblaw’s In the Bushes is his third Fringe offering in as many years. I’ll be performing with Serge Saika-Voivod in To Ashes, which is Jason Rip’s 12th original script to date.

Two Fringe shows were works in progress when they appeared…

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Londoners love festivals. That’s part of the reason that the London Fringe Theatre Festival has become a local theatre success story.

Trying to get mainstream Londoners to come out to see simple, independent, low-budget theatre can be tricky business, but Kathy Navackas and the other organizers and volunteers are charging into their fourth annual Fringe Festival, and it’s working. The overall audience for the inaugural Fringe was 4,000; by last year it was up to 12,000 and projections for the 2003 Fringe take attendance up another notch.

For a successful Fringe, the local theatre companies, volunteers and media all have to be…

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You’re not ever likely to see Sean Wilson on stage, and except for an occasional credit for set painting, you won’t even see his name in a programme. Like the technicians who work behind the scenes of a theatre production, Sean works behind the scenes of the greater theatre community in London.

He approached me in 2001 with the idea of creating a website that would serve the whole theatre community – practitioners and audiences alike. If I would help him gather the information, he would make it available to the London public and to the world via the internet.

July 27th…

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The recent death of Hume Cronyn got me thinking about Londoners who hit the big time in theatre. If we were to create a list of London theatre artists who gained fame in the wider world, Mr. Cronyn would be on it, but who else?

I am open to suggestions, but here are two who should not be overlooked.

Alexander Knox (1907-1995) was born in Strathroy, but his family moved to London when he was six years old, and took up residence on Hyman Street. He began acting when he was a student at Western, and immediately caught the bug. Soon after…

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New scripts by London playwrights aren’t normally available to the public, so they are seldom scrutinized on their own, as pieces of writing, independent of the actors, directors and designers that bring them to life.

Now, with the publication of Ballyhoo 2001: Plays from London Ontario, ten scripts by London playwrights are in print, in public, and ready to take on new lives of their own.

The official launch of Ballyhoo will feature performances from the plays, but in keeping with this script-centred perspective, they will not be performed by the original casts, but by new actors who will put their own stamps…

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The English Department of the University of Western Ontario has produced one outdoor show per year under the banner “Summer Shakespeare” for the past 23 years. The location of the production varies with the taste of the director, but they are generally within a stone’s throw of University College. The comedies have been the most popular choices by Summer Shakespeare producers, especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, each of which has been produced four times.

This year, they are breaking new ground with Henry V, the rousing war story that is best known for Henry’s Saint Crispin’s Day…

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When he was in his early teens, Rod Keith came across a set of drawings of cats in an old Time/Life book called The Mind. The entry was about mental illness and the drawings were chosen because the artist, who suffered from schizophrenia, drew more frightening or disturbing cats as his condition worsened. This was Mr. Keith’s first exposure to the work of Louis Wain (1860–1939) and those cat images have stayed with him ever since.

Years later, he began to research Wain’s troubled life and art in more detail, and he was so impressed with the inherent dramatic possibilities that…

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When it comes to Jewish theatre in Canada, Winnipeg is in a class of its own. Winnipeg Jewish Theatre, now 16 years old, is the only professional Canadian company that produces full seasons of plays having Jewish themes. Part of their success has been in their development of new plays, including None is Too Many and League of Nathans, both by Jason Sherman, and both of which contributed significantly their growth and reputation.

However, there is a company right here in London that has been exploring Jewish theatre since 1999, and it appears to be the only other active company in Canada…

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The London native charmed audiences for decades playing irascible old men.

by NOEL GALLAGHER, Free Press Arts & Entertainment Reporter and news services

The death of London-born actor Hume Cronyn, at 91, ends an award-winning stage and screen career that spanned more than 70 years. Cronyn died Sunday of colon cancer at his home in Fairfield, Conn.

While Cronyn was best known to modern audiences for his roles in the 1980s Cocoon movies, he charmed audiences for decades portraying irascible, old men.

“I don’t mind playing absolute bastards — some of the best parts I’ve had have been heavies,” the actor joked in a 1987…

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The renowned actor never lost touch with his London roots and the inspiration he found here as a young man.

by NOEL GALLAGHER, Free Press Arts & Entertainment Reporter

In 2000, on his last trip to his home town, Hume Cronyn visited the Grand Theatre. It was there, as a London school boy attending plays, that Cronyn had first discovered his love of theatre; where he had performed in the late 1940s and early ’50s and where he had co-starred with his wife, the late Jessica Tandy, in the 1947 production of Jan de Hartog’s play, The Four Poster.

For long minutes during…

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New York Times, June 17, 2003
By MARILYN BERGER

Hume Cronyn, one of the foremost character actors of the American stage and screen for more than 60 years, died on Sunday at his home in Fairfield, Conn. He was 91.

Mr. Cronyn, a compact, restless man who was once an amateur boxer and remained a featherweight 127 pounds all his life, was at home in everything from Shakespeare and Chekhov to Edward Albee and Beckett. Among his notable Broadway successes were “A Delicate Balance,” “The Gin Game” and “Noël Coward in Two Keys.” He was nominated for an Oscar for the 1944 film…

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Four different productions are opening over the course of the next week, so get out your calendars. You don’t want to miss anything.

The latest by London playwright Jason Rip is Mr. Dash, which is now running at The Arts Project, courtesy of Theatre Nemesis. This is the story of a boy (played by Tyler Parr) who adopts the persona of a super-hero, the ultra-speedy Mr. Dash. As he gets older, his mother becomes concerned, because he shows no sign of leaving his fantasy world behind. Finally she turns to mental health professionals, because there must be something wrong with a…

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In 1933, our Governor General was a man blessed with the moniker Sir Vere Brabazon Ponsonby, 9th Earl of Bessborough. He oversaw the creation of the Dominion Drama Festival, which became a kind of vortex for a very impressive network of amateur theatres across the country, including London Little Theatre.

In the subsequent 70 years, professional theatre in Canada emerged and matured to such an extent that a new kind of national festival is now possible. The inaugural presentation of The Magnetic North Theatre Festival will take place from June 11-21 in Ottawa. It will return to Ottawa every other year,…

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by HEATHER ENNIS, London Free Press 2003-05-30

London playwright and UWO student Claire McCague will have her attention focused south of the border this summer as her play One & Other makes its American debut. Her script has been selected for a director’s festival hosted by the Bailiwick Repertory Theatre, a Chicago-based drama company.

“I’m excited to see their interpretation of it,” said McCague, who is hoping to travel to Chicago to see the new rendition. It was an easy choice to grab the play, said Michael Palmer, the director of One & Other’s Chicago run. “The first time I read it, I…

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Prepare for a launching. The new book of scripts by London playwrights, Ballyhoo 2001, will have its official release on July 17th at the Wolf Performance Hall in the downtown library.

In last week’s column, I said a little about the Ballyhoo contributions from Jayson McDonald, Rod Keith, J.G. De Souza, and Leith Peterson. The remaining plays are by Hannah Feiner, Niall Cooke, Jason Rip and me. I also edited the book, and it was published by Virtual E Solved.

Hannah Feiner was in her last year of OAC at South Secondary School when she wrote and directed The Geminis, a play…

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Theatre in London hits another milestone this month, with the publication of Ballyhoo 2001, a collection of ten scripts by our own local playwrights. The book is just in the last stages of printing, and the launch will be held in July.

The output of new plays from London writers in the past five years has been phenomenal, and Ballyhoo 2001 is a selection from those that premiered over the course of a single year — 2001. It encapsulates what London playwrights have been up to, but it also reflects the dynamic theatre community that Londoners have created.

Ballyhoo includes “The Man Behind the…

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I’ve said it before — give Londoners a vehicle for writing original plays and they’ll come through for you. Witness the plethora of new scripts that have come to be written over the past few years because of the existence of the London Fringe Festival, The Playwrights’ Cabaret at the Grand, Purple Shorts — UWO’s festival of new plays and StudiO K’s playwrighting initiatives. All of these projects have come into being since 2000, and playwrights and audiences alike have them to thank for inspiring original writing.

Even before these initiatives, though, there was the London One-Act Festival (LOAF). It was…

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Besides being a musician and playwright, Angela Southern is a teacher, and this gives her license to make diabolical inferences about high schools, teachers and the Thames Valley Board of Education.

Apparently, the Devil is particularly fond of taking the form of a high school teacher, because there, “She can inflict a maximum amount of torture with a minimum of effort”.

This is according to Ms. Southern’s latest play, Hell Hath No Fury, an Original Kids musical that is due to open on May 21st at the Spriet Family Theatre.

It’s the story of Paradise High School and how it mysteriously burned to…

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When a theatre tradition becomes fully mature, a canon emerges — a set of plays of outstanding quality that is commonly studied and produced, and that provides the touchstones for that tradition. In the U.S., the canon would include Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire. In the Irish canon, we would find The Playboy of the Western World and Juno and the Paycock.

Is there a Canadian canon in theatre? Can you name two candidates?

If your response is a series of “ums”, then we might well ask why. It’s not due to a paucity of scripts; Canadian playwrights have been…

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David Mamet is one of the most controversial, celebrated and produced contemporary American playwrights, and Londoners now have the chance to see one of his early plays, American Buffalo, at The Theatre School from April 24th through May 4th.

Mamet is not unknown to London audiences, and I think that this is worth a quiz:

From this list, identify the London theatre companies that have not produced a play by Mamet: The Grand, London Community Players (LCP), Centre Stage, Theatre Soup, Original Kids and the UWO Department of English.

The Grand has. Their production of Glengarry Glen Ross rattled some of their patrons’ sensibilities,…

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The Best of the Best of Ontario Community Theatre

Theatre Ontario and Festival chair Michael Roantree announced the four plays that will be staged at this year’s Theatre Ontario Festival held in Oshawa from Wednesday, May 14 to Sunday, May 18, 2003 at Oshawa Little Theatre. The festival, hosted by Oshawa Little Theatre, ACT-CO (Association of Community Theatres – Central Ontario) and Theatre Ontario, represents the finals of an Ontario wide drama competition comprising the four best theatre productions from each of Ontario’s four drama regions:

Wednesday, May 14, 2003 (8:00 pm) representing the Association of Community Theatres – Central Ontario (ACT-CO),…

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Late in the fall of 2001, I noticed a trend in London’s theatre fare. It seemed that the local playwrights were all doing spoofs.

Rod Keith had been in on the ground floor with Chelsea & Boggs, his ongoing 70s cop show parody; Jayson McDonald had just staged his horror spoof, Creatures; Theatre Soup was working on Caitlin Murphy’s murder-comedy The Good Girls’ Guide to Ungodly Deeds; Jason Rip and Jeff Werkmeister were writing an Elvis-movie parody, Aloha Rodeo, and I myself was appearing regularly in another Jayson McDonald project, The Continuing Adventures of the Boneyard Man, a take-off on The…

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When I first saw The Drawer Boy at the Blythe Festival, I thought that it was destined to become a Canadian classic in the order of Billy Bishop Goes to War, and a staple of amateur and professional theatres across Canada.

It turns out that I underestimated it. Its popularity is already international, with productions popping up all over Canada and the States, and in Europe as well. An upcoming film version will feature one of the play’s biggest champions, John Mahoney, who is best known for his role as Marty, the father on the TV show Frasier.

From April 15–26, the London…

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One of the most telling and lingering impressions that I have of the ordinary people of Baghdad, and what they think of their predicament, is through theatre.

The hit show in Iraq’s capital until recently was a play called No Need to Tell Me, I’ve Seen it for Myself (I hope that it’s a catchier title in Arabic than it is in English). It was written three years ago, and it was well-received in Baghdad, but its popularity soared as the threat of invasion from the U.S. grew closer. Between 600 and 1200 Iraqis attended every performance, and it was very common…

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London’s theatre scene was hopping in the 1930s. Not only were there ambitious and successful productions of imported scripts; London was producing original plays as well.

In 1936, Twenty-Five Cents, by Sarnia native Eric Harris premiered at the Grand and then went on to the Dominion Drama Festival. There, the Londoners won the award for best production, marking the first time that any company received that honour with an original script.

Two years later, Hilda Mary Hooke’s first full-length play, Here Will I Nest, hit the boards. It was based on the life of Colonel Thomas Talbot, founder of the Talbot Settlement…

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A board member from one of the small-town theatres just outside of London once told me that they sell 100% of their tickets — but patrons complain bitterly if the selection of plays strays away from tame comedies and musicals.

That’s what some would call a commercial success and an artistic failure.

The London Community Players (LCP) tend towards the lighter theatre fare as well, but to their credit, they also go after weightier, more literary pieces from time to time. Such is the case with Dancing at Lughnasa, a play that is accessible and entertaining, but more emotionally and thematically ambitious…

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By Maggie Wrobel
Gazette Staff

When Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip sang, “Bring on a brand new renaissance, ’cause I think I’m ready,” he could have been talking about London’s newly revitalized theatre scene.

With established companies like The Grand Theatre and the London Community Players, The Forest City has been home to a tradition of quality theatre for decades. However, in the past, these theatre companies often played it safe by staging dramas and musicals that had been performed many times before.

All of this changed in 1998, with the creation of several production companies that were determined to bring “alternative” theatre…

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London in 2003 is shaping up to be a pretty good place to see a sampling of works by successful contemporary Canadian playwrights.

Ausable Theatre started it off with George F. Walker’s Problem Child and Theatre Soup gave us Brad Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love. The Grand just had a touring production of Joan MacLeod’s The Shape of a Girl in the McManus, and next month, London’s first production of The Drawer Boy, by Michael Healey, will be staged by Arbitrary Angle. Theatre Soup will be back with a Jason Sherman play in June.

Theatre Western has also joined…

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Rod Keith used to play the role of Doctor McCoy in the live Star Trek episodes that charmed and beguiled London audiences in the mid 1990s. These were based on the real scripts, and done with low-tech special effects and enough camp to make them part tribute and part spoof. A few years later, he decided to try the TV spoof idea out again, but this time, he turned away from outer space and towards funky 70s cop shows for his inspiration, and started writing original scripts instead of using ready-mades. The result was Chelsea & Boggs, a live theatre series…

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Next week, sex and violence should be on our minds. Londoners will participate in a world-wide reading of a play about a sex boycott for peace and then Theatre Soup will offer up a sexy play with a serial killer theme.

Unidentified Human Remains

Playwright Brad Fraser grew up in an abusive, alcoholic working-class household in Edmonton and he developed a hard edge and an attitude. He was very much influenced by the punk aesthetic, and he likes his theatre honest, controversial and in-your-face — anything but boring.

Fraser, now 43 years old, says in his personal manifesto, “my experience taught me that…

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Two new plays by Londoner Jason Rip are about to be launched within six weeks of each other: The Washing Away of Wrongs premieres at the Arts Project on February 26th and To Ashes opens at the Grand’s McManus Studio Theatre on April 2nd.

Mr. Rip has been one of London’s most prolific playwrights since 1997, when he staged Hollis Gets the Girl at the Forest City Gallery. That play was based on his experience working at Community Living London, and since that time, he has alternated in his writing between scripts that reflect his own experiences as a Londoner and genre pieces more…

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A lot can happen on stage in ten minutes; an entire world can be created. For the Playwrights’ Cabaret, twenty worlds will be created over a two-night run in the Grand’s McManus Studio Theatre on February 21st and 22nd.

Each of these worlds will be based on a script by a London playwright, whether it be a short play written for this event, a scene from a work in progress, or an excerpt from an unproduced, unpublished play.

Playwrights’ Cabaret is based on a call for scripts that went out from the Grand’s Artistic Director, Susan Ferley. From the submissions, twenty pieces…

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David Auburn’s Proof, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for best play, is now running at the Grand. It premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2000 and then moved to Broadway, where it ran for over two years, just closing last month.

In Proof, a brilliant mathematician and his daughter share a love of mathematics. He has suffered from a mental disorder in his later years, and she is worried that she will experience the same fate.

I’m picking up a theme in the past few shows of the Grand’s season on the main stage — Proof, Schippel…

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Pardon me while I rhapsodize about a play that my own company is putting on.

Problem Child, by George F. Walker, is brilliant. I liked the script right away, and I went to Toronto to catch Londoner Kristen Thompson’s Dora-winning performance at the Factory Theatre in 1997. I’ve wanted to stage it for over five years now and finally, I took the plunge — Ausable Theatre’s production of Problem Child will run at the Grand’s McManus Studio Theatre from January 31st to February 8th (672-8800).

The play is honest and compassionate, and it deals with fundamental human strivings. What makes it truly great…

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The London One-Act Festival (LOAF) and the Fringe Festival are both great for playwrights in town. They provide a structure that makes it relatively easy (emphasis on the word “relatively”, please) to get a new play up in front of an audience. They don’t cater specifically to people with new scripts, but they are certainly used that way.

Now there is another initiative in London that actually commissions new work, and then takes ownership of the production — the 2003 Theatre Series produced by StudiO K.

StudiO K has already commissioned works by Caitlin Murphy (May Contain Nuts) and Jason Rip (three…

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Shippel the Plumber opened at the Grand last week. In the lead role, Bruce Dow is the star on stage, but this production had some impressive moves behind the scenes as well. The story centres around an ultra-conservative, snooty male voice quartet in early 20th Century Imperial Germany. They sing from the classical repertoire — Schubert, Brahms, Mendelssohn and the like — but when they reluctantly take the brilliant but working-class Shippel into the quartet, he inspires them to greater heights of musical artistry.

Director Allan MacInnis decided that there should be significant development in the quartet’s style as a result of…

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Nothing like handing out awards to get everyone’s blood flowing. The first annual Brickenden Awards for outstanding work in London’s theatre community were announced on New Year’s Day, and the interest and controversies generated are further signs that London has come of age as a theatre town.

Critic’s Choices

In the Critic’s Choice category, Christopher Doty, principal reviewer for the Theatre in London website, gave three awards to Fountainhead Theatreworks’ production of The Laramie Project — Best Production, Best Director (John Gerry) and Best Supporting Actor (Justin Peter Quesnelle). The play is an unusual documentary-drama based on interviews done in the wake of…

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From the compelling Laramie Project to the wondrous Wizard of Oz and splendid Fringe offerings, 2002 was the year of the curtain call in local theatre.

By rehgallaG leoN, Free Press Arts & Entertainment Reporter

To the cluttered collection of year-end prizes and endless “best of 2002″ lists, we can now add the Brickenden Awards.

Though only a few days old, their first-ever edition already features a rarity for arts contests — a pretty popular winner.

The Laramie Project was voted the top production in the award process, sponsored by Theatre in London, to honour the outstanding achievements of local stage groups during the last 12…

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Theatre critic Christopher Doty didn’t see every play that was staged in London this year, but his record is impressive. As an end-of-the-year tribute to London theatre artists, he has chosen his top five picks for 2002 in each of ten categories. On January 1st, 2003, his top choice in each category will be announced, and these will be recognized as winners of the first set of Brickenden Awards.

Another set of ten Brickenden Awards will be the people’s choice – selected by a public vote. All theatre-lovers can participate by using the online ballot at www.theatreinlondon.ca.

And now, ladies and gentlemen,…

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This year, for the first time, members of London’s theatre community will be honoured by The Brickenden Awards. Outstanding work from 2002 will be recognized under the categories of best production, best director, best original script, best actor, best actress, best supporting actor, best supporting actress, best comedy, best youth production and best set.

For each category, there will be two winners: one chosen by theatre critic Christopher Doty and the other chosen by public vote, using London’s Theatre website, www.theatreinlondon.ca.

The awards are named after Catharine McCormick Brickenden (1896–1993), who helped found two of London’s earliest theatre groups - the London…

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Now that it’s the season of goodwill and generosity, let’s think for a moment of theatre as a communal event — and about who gets to participate.

Unlike much of the mass media arts/entertainment industry, theatre is inherently local. The connection between live performers and a live audience is direct contact, unmediated by mechanical filters or recording devices - people sharing the same space, the same air and the same energy. In that sense, theatre isn’t just another commodity; it’s also the continuation of a community function that goes back to time immemorial: the public assembly.

When someone puts on a play,…

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Every once in a while, I marvel at the discipline of theatre audiences. It would be so easy for some malevolent soul to ruin a performance by behaving like a stereotypical sports heckler transplanted into a theatre: “Missed your line there, buddy!” or “booooooooo-riiiiiiiiinnnnng”.

But no, it’s a very nice and respectful tradition that we have developed — going into theatres and giving the evening over to the company that is presenting the show. Shutting up for a while, to listen and watch. I like it.

But a new kind of disturbance is undercutting that long tradition. These days, performances are not…

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The last original London play of 2002 — James Reaney’s The Story of the Gentle Rain Food Co-op — is just about to finish its run, so it’s a good time to take stock of this year’s premieres. I counted 34 new plays in total, which has to be unprecedented in the history of home-grown London theatre.

Of the 24 London playwrights produced in 2002, Jayson McDonald continued to be the most prolific, with one full-length play and five one-acts. The Deluxe Illustrated Body, co-written with Lil Malinich “set the standard for the alternative theatre scene in London for 2002” according to…

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Ausable Theatre’s production of two one-act plays by James Reaney is now running at the McManus, and as Artistic Director, one of the great rewards for me has been the chance to pore over the scripts with the playwright, getting first-hand insights into the plays’ origins and meanings. Snippets of Mr. Reaney’s own life, plot fragments lifted from the Bible, images borrowed from Yeats and Spenser and nonsense nuggets all made their way into these works, and it made for some lively and interesting afternoons. He is a soft-spoken and entertaining host, but also a visionary whose contributions to Canadian…

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Their university days are behind them, but the three co-founders of London’s Theatre Soup, Sue Mei, Lil Malinich and Anne-Marie Caicco, still love to try on some of the writers and plays that they first encountered in academia. They have produced intense dramas, comedies, new plays by London writers and a murder mystery, but their latest production, Old Times by Harold Pinter, takes them back to their academic theatre roots.

All three studied Pinter in Western’s now defunct English and Drama program, but Ms. Malinich, for one “wasn’t satisfied with what the critics had to say about the piece”. Now they have…

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James Reaney — not the one who writes for the Free Press, but his dad — is about to be celebrated in London’s major cultural institutions. The Central Library, Museum London and the Grand Theatre are all participating in Reaney Days, beginning on November 14th and running to the end of the month.

James Reaney is from a farm just outside of Stratford Ontario, but London is his adopted home. Locally, he is well-known for his years with the UWO English Department, but nationally and internationally, he is best known for his plays, poems and short stories.

Susan Ferley first encountered his…

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The Grand Theatre has sent out a call for scripts from London playwrights. Artistic Director Susan Ferley is looking for 10-minute pieces, to be performed at a “Playwrights’ Cabaret” in the Grand’s McManus Studio Theatre on February 21 and 22, 2003. The deadline for submissions is November 25th, and details can be found in the classified ads at www.theatreinlondon.ca.

This is an excellent opportunity for playwrights to showcase their work, and for London audiences to sample it — sort of a one-stop shopping for local dramatists.

How big a deal is this for the development of theatre in London? Pretty big, I would…

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Cue sinister organ music …

Cue scruffy but elegant figure in a tux and a skeleton mask, speaking into a plastic toy reverbo-microphone …

“Who knows what sort on creepy carryings-on and macabre malevolence can come to inhabit an otherwise squeaky clean new library? The Boneyard Man do … mu hu hu hu hu hu hu haaaaaaaa!”

So begins a typical episode of The Continuing Adventures of the Boneyard Man, a truly unique theatrical phenomenon that has wormed its way into the hearts of Londoners of all descriptions. On Sunday, October 27th, for one night only, the Boneyard Man crew will hit the…

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There are moments in history when an event occurs, and the event is of such power that it operates as a lightning rod. It brings to the surface all the ideas, the beliefs, and the philosophies that are permeating people’s lives. I feel that the murder of Matthew Shepard was an event of that nature.

If their latest production is any indication, then London’s Fountainhead Theatreworks is moving into a new phase. The Laramie Project, which opens this week, is based on transcripts from over 200 interviews with residents of Laramie, Wyoming, where a young gay man named Matthew Shepard was…

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Oh, the perils of tinkering with the boundaries between fact and fiction in theatre. Controversy swept through Dublin last spring when Hinterland, a new play inspired by a real-life politician premiered at the Abbey Theatre. Charles Houghey was the country’s Toaiseach (the Irish equivalent of our Prime Minister) back some 20 years ago, and playwright Sebastian Barry used some aspects of Houghey’s political career as his dramatic framework. According to Irish Theatre Magazine, however, press reports helped to create the public belief that Hinterland was “about” Houghey in a biographical sense, and “that perception proved difficult to dispel”.

I know the…

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The Dublin Theatre Festival is just getting going and the Dublin Fringe is only about half way through its three-week schedule, but already I’m seeing a few of the trends which distinguish current Irish theatre from what goes on at home in London.

Dublin has had a boom in “physical theatre” over the past few years, and this trend has culminated in the presentation of a hyper-physical play called Risk Reduction as the showcase production which launched this year’s Fringe.

Imagine a circus trapeze-and-acrobatics troupe forging their stunts into a play, complete with characters and plot-line, and you’ll have it about right.

If you…

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The Grand leaps into the fray with their season opener. It’s Artistic Director Susan Ferley’s second season, and the first season in which she picked the shows.

The season opener is Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. How does Noel Coward do it? His shows are still popular — regular fare even — decades after and thousands of miles away from their original productions. Well, head out and see whether the Grand has the answer.

What I’m curious about is how sexy a production this will be. The leading man is happily married to his second wife, but one night while discussing his first…

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London Community Players (LCP) kick off their 29th season this week with Dial M for Murder. London’s longest-standing amateur theatre company, LCP was officially formed back in the 1970s, but this group can lay some claim to being the torch-bearer for the amateur tradition that goes back to the London Little Theatre (LLT) which was formed in the 30s, and came to be considered one of Canada’s best amateur companies.

LCP plays it much safer than the old LLT did, but they always have interesting plays in their line-ups. I’m particularly keen to see what they will do with Brian Friel’s…

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I’m off for Ireland this week, taking a one-man show to the Dublin Fringe Festival for a two-week run. I’m pretty happy about that, but I’m also amazed to find myself part of a remarkable theatre phenomenon connecting Dublin with southwestern Ontario (or “Souwesto”, as our regionalist artists have called it).

Consider:

Londoner Caitlin Murphy visited Dublin this summer for the Irish premiere of her play A is for Everything, produced by Ireland’s Bare Cheek Theatre Company. The two characters in the play are related to Irish literary icons — Lucia Joyce (daughter of James) and Suzanne Beckett (wife of Samuel). The…

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If the Devil wanted back into Heaven, what kind of a case could he make for himself? That’s the question behind The History of the Devil by Clive Barker, which just started a run at the Grand’s McManus Studio Theatre under the banner of Theatre Nemesis.

Barker is best known for writing and directing horror movies, including Hellraiser and Candyman. In The History of the Devil (subtitled Scenes From a Pretended Life), the action alternates between courtroom drama and re-enactments of scenes from throughout history — sort of a Devil’s Greatest Hits.

This production is the brain child of Dawn Penner, who has been a…

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If the people in London’s theatre community have demonstrated anything in the past five years, it’s that they will write and produce lots of plays if you give them the theatre space. The increase in the number of theatre companies, festivals and playwrights has been phenomenal.

When I started to get involved in low-budget, high-adrenalin theatre back in 1995, we worked out of the back room of the Forest City Gallery. Then spaces began to open up — The Old Factory Theatre, 123 King, The Black Lodge, The Arts Project — and festivals popped up — The London One-Act Festival, The…

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