Or the third screenwriter on the seventeenth episode of The Fringe.
William Shakespeare has been called many things over the past 400 years, from god to fraud. Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col have an entirely new label. To the co-creators of Kill Shakespeare, a new fantasy-adventure comic-book series they are launching in Toronto this week, the Bard is “one of the greatest aggregators in entertainment history.”
Mark Medley has an interesting post about Toronto theatre company Soulpepper’s posters for its productions. I wish everyone cared about the little details this much.
Oh, you lucky Montrealers. Not only do you get to live in Montreal, but you also get to see the stage production of Derek McCormack‘s The Haunted Hillbilly this December. Why, it’s enough to make me want to move to Mont—oh, look, cherry blossoms!
Canadian actors are lobbying for things like collective bargaining rights and the protection of child performers. Outrageous. Next they’ll be wanting the vote.
After a tumultuous couple of years plagued by debt, restructuring and harsh criticism of its increasingly populist programming, the Canadian Stage Company has announced a new artistic director: Matthew Jocelyn.
Plucked from France, where he’s been living for the past two decades, the 51-year-old Toronto native replaces Martin Bragg, who announced his resignation this past spring after 17 seasons.
Judith Thompson was supposed to appear on Q last week to discuss the controversy around the $100,000 Simonovitch Prize, but she couldn’t make it because of the weather. The Globe’s J. Kelly Nestruck got in touch with her to see what she would have said.
I have sat on many juries, and I will admit that, all things being equal, I would rather award a prize to a writer who is not a privileged white male (or female); I would rather award a prize with a cash value to a writer who is struggling, rather than a writer I know to be rich; I would rather award a prize to a writer who has not received any prizes rather than a writer who has received many.
We are cautioned by the Canada Council rep. to ONLY CONSIDER THE WORK and nothing else, but is this possible? Unless it is blind, it may not be possible.
Previously:
The Globe’s Nestruck on Theatre blog points to Daniel MacIvor’s blog for posts on the Siminovitch prize controversy. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, there’s been some concerns about conflict of interest in awarding the $100,000 prize. Here’s MacIvor’s comments on it, and here’s the reaction of Alisa Palmer.
I’m talking about the appearance of conflict of interest, not Leonard using undue influence. The two representatives of the Prize, Leonard the Jury Head, and Andrew the Administrator, are the President and Secretary of Necessary Angel’s Board of Directors. Since they’ve been on NA’s Board, three of the four Prize winners were working with Necessary Angel at the time they won, and the fourth went on to become an associate artist of NA shortly thereafter. It looks bad. The appearance of conflict of interest makes people cynical – makes them question the legitimacy of the people who win.
Canadian theatre hit by claims of conflict of interest in $100,000 Siminovitch Prize.
The close association of several winners of the $100,000 Siminovitch Prize, the richest award in Canadian theatre, to the Toronto theatre company Necessary Angel has led one former finalist to speak out about what she calls the “appearance of a conflict of interest.”
The web of connections between Siminovitch recipients and organizers and Necessary Angel has contributed to “a joking cynicism about the prize and its process,” says Alisa Palmer, a Toronto-based director who was a finalist for the prize in 2004 and 2007.
Palmer’s concerns – which have been echoed by others in the theatre community – centre around Leonard McHardy, who recently finished his sixth tour of duty as chair of the Siminovitch jury (he also assisted former jury chair Bill Glassco the year prior).
In 2005, McHardy, co-owner of TheatreBooks in Toronto, became president of the board at the acclaimed Necessary Angel theatre company. Since then, three of the four Siminovitch recipients – playwrights Daniel MacIvor and John Mighton, as well as designer Dany Lyne – have had Necessary Angel projects in development or on stage at the time they were awarded the prize, which is given to a director, playwright and designer on a three-year cycle.
For more details, check out the Globe’s theatre blog.
Playwright Daniel MacIvor has won the $100,000 Siminovitch Prize, worth $75,000 to him and $25,000 to an artist or artists of his choosing. I love this prize.
MacIvor has chosen a Vancouver-based writing team — Daniel Arnold and Medina Hahn — as his proteges.
Cape Breton-born MacIvor is having a stellar year. He won a $25,000 commission to write a new work from the Banff Centre for the Arts just two weeks ago and has four plays in various stages of production.
His newest play Confession opens in Guysborough, N.S., later this week, How It Works is running in Winnipeg and A Beautiful View is on in Washington. Meanwhile, he is workshopping a followup play to Confession, titled Redemption, at Montreal’s National Theatre School.
The $75,000 that remains in MacIvor’s hands will help him escape the mad pace that has him returning to Montreal on Tuesday to work on Redemption, off to Nova Scotia later in the week to see the Mulgrave Road Theatre Production of Confession, then to Vancouver for a conference, he told CBC News.
Eye Weekly talks to the Old Trout Puppet Workshop about the show Famous Puppet Death Scenes.
Where did the idea for Famous Puppet Death Scenes come from?
We don’t normally do family shows, but we happened to be doing a big Christmas extravaganza family show of Pinocchio. But we decided to do the original Grimm Brothers version that is way more savage: Jiminy Cricket appears very briefly and harasses Pinocchio about his conscience and Pinocchio kills him right off the bat. He appears briefly later on as a ghost, but that’s it for Jiminy Cricket. He’s not the character people know from Disney at all. So we decided we’ll do the old-school style. We killed the cricket in scene two — brutally, because Pinocchio does it with a hammer — and it was just amazing to actually watch all the different emotions people went through watching this cricket die. First there was shock: “Oh my god they’re doing this. What are they doing to Disney?” and “Oh my god, what are they doing to my children?” Then they started to laugh, and then they started to actually feel sad for the little guy. Then there’s the moment when they think, “But it’s a puppet. Why am I feeling sad for a puppet?” It was an incredible rollercoaster; it was a weird bundle of emotions they had almost all at once. With each hammer blow there was a new one. From watching that we thought, “You know what? A puppet death is an extraordinarily affecting moment. What if we just did a show that was entirely puppet deaths and see how that works — and keep it exciting without all the dull bits of plot?”
Previous Old Trout posts:
My specific questions to you are:
1) Should Canadian Stage hire a new artistic producer? Or should they go back to the old structure of having a managing director and artistic director? Or should they hired three artistic directors, who will put together one excellent season before they self-destruct?
2) What should CanStage’s mandate be? Right now it’s to “create and produce the best in Canadian and international contemporary theatre in the country” – but that only dates back to 1998, when the then newly appointed artistic producer Marty Bragg changed it.
3) Who would you like to see run CanStage? Impractical suggestions as welcome as practical ones.
Playwright and actor Andrew Moodie has started the Share the Stage campaign to get the Shaw Festival to embrace colour-blind casting. The idea came to him after a rejection by the Festival:
I had submitted a play to the Festival for consideration and it had been turned down. This didn’t upset me. If you’re a playwright in this country you’re used to rejection letters. What concerned me was the reason. It was made clear to me that they play would never get produced at Shaw because the cast had too many people of colour.
The person who told me this information made it clear that they were disgusted with the policy of the theatre, but she would rather be honest with me, and allow me to find a theatre that would be sincerely interested in working with me. And I did. I was able to get the support I needed to get the play produced. But, what was said to me, haunts me. Does the Festival actually have a policy to exclude people based on race? I decided to pay attention to the amount of diversity on the stage, and season after season I have to say that my concerns have not been put to rest.
If you have read any of his work, you would know that George Bernard Shaw was a staunch critic of discrimination. Canada has become a wonderful multi-ethnic cultural mosaic. Time and time again, this has been considered one of this nations strengths, that so many people, from so many different cultures share the same country in peace and prosperity. I honestly believe that if Shaw were alive today, he, too, would embrace our diversity as a strength and not a weakness. And we are very fortunate to have many, MANY, performers from diverse ethnic backgrounds, who are more than capable of performing lead roles in any of Shaw’s greatest works.
Back in May, near the end of the opening week at the Shaw Festival, I was suddenly struck by how overwhelmingly white the festival’s acting company is.
Ironically enough, this hit me while I was at the festival’s production of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, which is set in the deep South in the year 1900 and deals explicitly with issues of race and racism. Watching actors Lisa Codrington and Richard Stewart as the servants Addie and Cal, I realised the only other actor of colour I had seen all week (outside of the musical) had been playing a maid.
What a time warp. I thought: How would this make me feel if I was a young, non-white actor coming to the Shaw Festival for the first time? Pretty alienated, I imagine.
And so, in my review of The Little Foxes, I noted (though only parenthetically) that: “For better or for worse, colour-blind casting has yet to reach Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.”
Fair comment I thought, but it provoked a defensive email from the Shaw’s artistic director, Jackie Maxwell, in response. She insisted that I had come up with a “very inaccurate head count” (because I ignored the musical, Wonderful Town) and concluded: “I would be happy to talk further to you about this – first waiting, of course, until you have come up with some accurate figures… and maybe ’til you have seen a few more shows too – that might help.”
Well, I’ve seen the rest of the 2008 season now and – what can I say – I’m still not about to nominate the festival for any diversity awards. The contrast with Canada’s other big repertory company is striking. Over at the Stratford Festival, there are actors of colour playing Juliet, Helen of Troy, Christopher Sly, Cleopatra (in a play by Bernard Shaw, no less) and rebellious Fuente Ovejunians, to name just a few. There isn’t a big fuss made about it, either. Maybe it’s because Shakespeare’s characters were originally all played by male actors, but non-traditional casting is just the way Stratford roles. (Apologies.)
Shaw artistic director Jackie Maxwell does seem interested in addressing the situation.
Morgan Jones Phillips’ most popular paramedic story, the one that inspired him to assemble a play about life with Toronto EMS, starts as he is waiting for Chinese food and a call flashes on his pager. “Male, 37, feeling bored, cut off penis and flushed down toilet.”
Two more messages come in quick succession: “Patient will meet you at George’s Chicken,” a fast-food restaurant near Dundas and Sherbourne streets; and then: “Patient has been instructed to stay in his home and not go to George’s Chicken.”
The black comedy is tinged by the fact that the man had in fact cut off his penis with a Mach3 razor and flushed it down because, as he put it, his wife will never go back to him.
When Mr. Phillips first recounted the events to friends, someone said he would gladly pay $5 to hear that story. It sparked an idea for the 37-year-old father of three who has been acting since he was a teenager. He penned and performs in The Emergency Monologues, a 45-minute compilation of stories from the EMS front lines that is part of Toronto’s SummerWorks theatre festival.
Damn — once again I am writing in the wrong medium.
Colleen Murphy, Toronto-based author of The December Man, and Vern Thiessen, Edmonton-based author of Vimy, are among 26 playwrights nominated for the $100,000 Simonovitch Prize.
The Elinore & Lou Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, Canada’s richest theatre prize, alternates among playwrights, directors and theatre designers.
The long list of nominated playwrights released Tuesday is a who’s who of Canadian playwriting talent, including veterans such as Toronto’s Morris Panych, author of Girl in the Goldfish Bowl, and Daniel MacIvor, who wrote A Beautiful View.
Murphy’s The December Man, a story based on the 1989 Montreal massacre, earned her a Governor General’s Award for drama.
Thiessen’s Vimy, about the battle for Vimy Ridge, had its world premiere at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre last October.
Toronto playwright Erin Fleck had difficulty getting stores to accept the poster for her Fringe play How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Abortion.
The openly pro-choice Fleck says she wrote the play in response to what she perceived as a lack of dialogue about the issue, long before the abortion debate resurfaced with Henry Morgentaler’s recent appointment to the Order of Canada.
But when Fleck and her colleagues embarked on the Fringe tradition of blanketing neighbourhoods with posters and stacks of postcards, they discovered how loath many still are to engage in the discussion. Numerous retailers refused the posters, most citing the need to maintain a family-friendly environment. Fleck was surprised at their reluctance, but acknowledges she probably shouldn’t have been.
The cartoon artwork depicts a woman dangling from a bunch of colourful balloons behind the title, the word “abortion” written in capital letters and far larger than any other. “Obviously with Fringe, you’ll get a lot of work put up in Starbucks, Second Cup, that sort of thing,” says Fleck. “They have other Fringe posters up. But when we approached them with ours, they said they weren’t comfortable. Our artwork, it’s a bit racy, a bit cheeky.”
The production, which features 12 “real women,” that is to say, non-actors 45 to 78 years old, telling an interwoven tale of their real-life experiences, was commissioned by soap producer Dove as part of the company’s Campaign for Real Beauty (an award-winning ad campaign) and bears a prominent corporate stamp that is bound to inspire skepticism in theatre purists.
Thompson, 53, remains undaunted by potential detractors and has gone so far as to call the production “the most gratifying and illuminating creative work I have done in my 30-year career” – no mean claim, given her two Governor-General’s Awards for drama and her status as an Officer of the Order of Canada.
“It’s obvious that theatre has always had sponsorship. Shakespeare was sponsored by the monarchy. When you read his plays, there’s clearly pandering, because he had to pander to them so that his theatre would survive. There’s no pandering here,” she said.
Stratford purists are worried about the future of the Festival stage. (Via Arts News Canada.)
But now the days of the historic Festival Theatre stage appear to be numbered. There are growing indications that the playing area conceived by founding artistic director Tyrone Guthrie and brilliantly executed by legendary designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch will be marginalized and will cease to be one of the 55-year-old festival’s internationally recognized symbols.
Current festival management, which is contemplating these changes, denies that the original stage design is headed for the scrap heap. Rather, it simply suggests that the 1,800-seat Festival Theatre must become more adaptable to the wishes of the artists working there.
“I love the original Moiseiwitsch design and we will always return to that whenever it is appropriate,” says Des McAnuff, the festival’s new artistic director. “But I’m interested in creating freedom for artists. .. The thing that’s important to me is to create as much flexibility for directors and designers as possible.”
Martin Knelman writes in the Toronto Star that there’s nothing surprising about the Stratford meltdown (previously).
To veteran witnesses of the Stratford wars, this experiment was always destined to end badly. Members of the festival board especially should have realized from day one this plan could never work.
According to Antoni Cimolino, the festival’s general director, what caused the crisis was that two of the three artistic directors – Marti Maraden and Don Shipley – had suddenly resigned. That left Des McAnuff, a man preoccupied with his globally successful musical Jersey Boys, as the festival’s sole artistic director – even though he is clearly not in a position to make Stratford a full-time job.
But contrary to the festival’s revisionist version of events, the evidence suggests there was nothing sudden about the decision of Maraden and Shipley to step aside, nor was it their idea to make the divorce public now, at the worst possible time, before the season opens, rather than wait until late summer.
The Globe‘s Kate Taylor looks at the perils of arts administration.
The spectacular collapse of the Stratford Festival’s new executive structure this month adds the theatre’s name to a list of performing-arts institutions struggling with issues of succession and leadership. Most notably, the Canadian Opera Company has yet to establish a short list of candidates to replace Richard Bradshaw, the general director who died last August. Little wonder it’s taking a while: Bradshaw was a rare triple threat, acting as chief administrator, artistic director and music director combined. Meanwhile, the Canadian Stage Company is on the hunt for an artistic director after David Storch resigned in January seven months into the job.
The rapid departures at Canadian Stage and at Stratford, where co-artistic directors Marti Maraden and Don Shipley resigned before their first season had even opened, point to the difficulty in deviating from tried-and-true models of artistic administration.
Most Canadian performing-arts companies are jointly run by an artistic director who oversees programming and an executive director who oversees finances, both reporting to the board. It’s a model that has well served groups as diverse as the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., and the Arts Club Theatre Company in Vancouver.
Although neither is the other’s boss, the executive director’s role is usually to play the fiscally prudent handmaid to the art, while the artistic director emerges as the public leader. Most people think of Karen Kain, not executive director Kevin Garland, as the director of the National Ballet of Canada. Before Richard Monette’s retirement in 2007, few people would have identified executive director Antoni Cimolino as his equal at Stratford.
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