Staging of Kite Runner keeps story aloft

                                                                                              Photo by Trudie Lee
The kite flying scene in the Citadel production of the stage adaptation
of the novel The Kite Runner

 

Bill Rankin

One thing that's almost certain is that Yann Martel's Life of Pi will not be adapted for the stage after the cinematically spectacular treatment Ang Lee gave it. Khaled Hosseini's bestseller The Kite Runner, however, has in just ten years been the source of both a successful film and most recently, a stage adaptation, which the Citadel Theatre, in collaboration with Theatre Calgary, is presenting until the end of the month.

Matthew Spangler's play, to give it credit, serves the original, compelling family drama well. The playwright  has planted a narrator in the middle of the drama, which makes following the story of the Afghan religious and class conflicts and the characters' personal challenges pre-and-post Taliban an effortless experience. The audience is told the story as a reader would read a story to an interested listener; the theatrical overlay, however, emerges only intermittently as the central reason for coming to the theatre to experience the undeniable drama of The Kite Runner story. The words, more than the play, are the thing.

In Act One, the narrator, Amir, performed engagingly by Anousha Almanian, tells the story of his youth in Kabul, where he lived an upper-class life with his father, Baba (Michael Peng). In those days, in Afghanistan before Baba and Amir flee their war-torn country for refuge in San Francisco, leaving behind their wealth and social status, the motherless family had a faithful servant whose son, Hassan, was Amir's playmate. The boys played like friends, but Amir's sense of class entitlement prevented him from seeing Hassan (Norman Yeung) as his equal; he was his servant, the kite runner of the title, who fetches the downed competitors' kites during the annual kite fighting competition that Amir participated in with Hassan's assistance.

The dramatic tension of The Kite Runner comes from a moment after the kite-flying episode when Amir betrays Hassan in a cowardly sin of omission. The moral failure is the dramatic centre of The Kite Runner. The boys' relationship is never the same, and eventually they lose touch with each other after Hassan and his father leave Baba's household and Amir and Baba leave Kabul for the States.

There are several effective theatrical scenes in this adaptation, and some very good performances, especially from Peng and in the second act, Gerry Mendicino as Amir's father-in-law. The kite flying tournament captures the aggression and elation in Amir's desperate attempt to be the last kite flying as his somewhat neglectful father had been in his youth. The father's unfatherly ambivilence toward Amir turns out to be a complicating aspect of the plot that becomes clear much later in the play after Amir has grown up and settled into married life in America.

As the narration reveals the story of betrayal and relative redemption, the play the actors control moves in and out of focus. When Spangler gives the actors control of the drama, a night-in-the-theatre experience gets some needed energy.

Often, the secondary role the actors play makes the play seem like a grade-school theatrical, and stage designer Kerem Cetinel's colourful pastel backdrop in the happier scenes of Amir's childhood do elevate the mood of the staging in ways even an effective storyteller can't. The simplicity of the stage design reinforces the skeletal aspects of Spangler's dramatization to great effect. There is a coherence to the understated way the setting is laid out.

However, since the story touches on Afghanistan's violent history during the Soviet invasion and later the maniacal Taliban consolidation of power, some multimedia effects might have intensified the part the back story plays in the domestic drama. We don't need scenes of Taliban execution festivals in the Kabul stadium, but reminders on scrims of the actual Soviet and Taliban effects on Afghan life might have helped us imagine these characters' lives more vividly and reduced the need for a narrator to keep us interested.

Director Eric Rose had a challenge working with this language-heavy adaptation, but his approach to the theatrical aspects of the play is fluid. The scenes in Act Two, when Amir's childhood bully, Assef (Ali Momen) reappears as a Taliban overlord and when the older Amir constructs his new life among the Afghan diaspora in San Francisco, are tightly managed and do empower the actors to tell their version of the story.

This Canadian premiere of Hosseini's story, which has also garnered the attention of a filmmaker, is weakened by the playwright's attachment to the original medium, but the strong story itself, played out in all its disturbing and moderately uplifting aspects in this theatrical version, deserves an audience in whatever medium it comes to it.

Ride the Cyclone to beyond the grave

                                                                                                     Photos by Tim Matheson
Elliott Loran as Ricky Potts in Ride the Cyclone

 

 

 

Since the teenage characters in Atomic Vaudeville's now well-travelled Ride the Cyclone are dead the moment we meet them, the issue of character development doesn't figure much in this very witty reflection on that tiny question, "What is the meaning of an individual life?"
   The structure of Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell's musical is boxy, somewhat like the standard performance of a bebop tune — ensemble support for soloists who bask in the spotlight for a time, one after the other. Everybody plays, but there's only one star at a time at centre stage.
   Another limitation of the musical's premise is that the effect of drawing portraits of each of the individual dead ones, stitched together with the very funny material Richmond gives to Karnak, the all-seeing, all-knowing hirsute stage manager of the essentially grim proceedings, creates a somewhat static dramatic effect. Static but still very funny, like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe crossed with an old Twilight Zone episode.
   Interactions among the characters is limited; the thrust is personal biography. The energy comes from the music and the lyrics, which one expects from any musical, of course, but narrative glue that normally engages an audience in the characters' lives isn't sticky enough in Ride the Cyclone.

   Rielle Braid, left, and Kelly Hudson play Ocean
Rosenberg and Constance Blackwood
in Ride the Cyclone

   Each of the six kids killed on the Cyclone roller coaster in Uranium City, Saskatchewan, has a more or less compelling story, and the young performers in the production do a professional job of transmitting those stories through the tunes and staging they're given. The vehicle they're working with offers a manageable frame in which to display their developing theatrical chops, and none seems out of place on the Maclab stage.
   Some of them are very good singers; none of them is asked to tear up the dance floor. A couple of them have some real presence on stage.
   After the Cyclone goes flying off the rails at the Uranium City amusement park, the six young people arrive on the other side, where Karnak, a hirsute mechanical fortune-teller greets them. Karnak, voiced by Carey Wass, is a sardonic game-show host, offering the freshly dead contestants a second chance at life.      And here's were the premise generates only tenuous dramatic tension. Although the winner of the prize will be the teen everyone agrees deserves a rebirth, there's very little interaction among the contending ghosts, and the game show conceit never really acts as a pivot for the action, such as it is.
   Rielle Braid's character, Ocean Rosenberg, an overachieving girl who feels her superior qualities entitle her to Karak's gift, establishes herself as the least likable member of the group, but none of the other characters show much interest in vying for the singular opportunity Karnak offers.
   Like I said, each character sings in a box; each has unrealized potential they'd like to have fulfilled before their lives were cut short, but except for Ocean, performed with just the right amount of youthful arrogance by Braid, none of them really does their number like it could be their last. Ocean's character is also the only one that could said to develop over the course of the evening.
   None of these reservations about the musical itself are meant to suggest that there aren't some excellent performances in this production. Braid has a strong Broadway belt, and does have material that she uses to make the musical feel like it's going somewhere.
   Noel Gruber, the only gay guy in Uranium City, is exceptional fantasizing himself a beautiful Parisian prostitute, dressed in tacky showgirl inducements. Ricky Potts (Elliott Loran) comes alive after he's dead. In Uranium City, he was trapped in a seriously disabled body, but his imagination was irrepressible. In the afterlife, he's liberated, and Loran conjures a boy who is really ready to live again.
  Kelly Hudson's Constance is perhaps the most sympathetic character in Ride the Cyclone because she is the most pathetic. Overweight and unambitious, she would have lived out her life working at her family's store in dead-end Uranium City if she hadn't be splattered by the roller coaster accident. Hudson is not the strongest singer in the cast, but she does build a character that seems the most small-town genuine of the bunch.
   Jane Doe (Sarah Jane Pelzer) haunts the show. She was on the ride when it derailed and crashed, but no one seems to know her. It hasn't helped that she was decapitated in the accident.
   Pelzer has classical voice training, and it's always nice to hear a legit vocal sound in a Broadway-type musical. Her style adds to the weirdness of her role in the beyond-the-grave proceedings.
   The video sequences, especially the scene capturing the unrequited love of Mischa Bachinsky (Jameson Matthew Parker), a Ukrainian immigrant longing for the girl he left behind, are very imaginatively integrated into the production.
   Special mention must go to the rat-faced band. Stage designer Treen Stubel has the live musicians playing in the dark in what looks like a midway-game booth. The players wear rat masks with red-glowing beady eyes. The effect is otherworldly befitting this contemporary metaphysical musical.
   Ride the Cyclone is very cleverly written and is performed with youthful enthusiasm by a solid cast. It doesn't have the narrative fluidity of Next to Normal or Spring Awakening, which have played in town recently, but scene to scene, Ride the Cyclone does much more than just stay on the rails.
Ride the Cyclone is at the Citadel's MacLab Theatre until March 10.

Water music, near and far

   The Edmonton Symphony performed an eclectic program Friday evening, including a new 25-minute piece by its composer-in-residence Robert Rival entitled Symphony No. 2 "Water". They'll repeat the program Saturday night.
    The orchestra opened with Britten's Four Sea Interludes, collected from the composer's opera Peter Grimes. The small orchestra does "Moonlight" and "Dawn" with refinement and sensitivity, and "Sunday Morning" had the requisite urgency; the brass, woodwinds and timpani conjured the Storm effects, but the strings are always at a disadvantage when the music wants to make a grander, even menacing impression.
   Besides the world premiere of the Rival, the stars of the evening were a couple of violinists from Victoria, Nikki Chooi and his younger brother Timothy. Each had his moment to show off his virtuosity, Timothy with Saint-Saëns' Introduction and Rondo capriccioso and Nikki with Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen, but in the Bach Concerto for Two Violins in D minor that followed the Britten, the young musicians displayed a taut, engaging talent for strong ensemble playing. The piece has no true primo and secundo violin structure. The two violinists and the orchestra in the two outer movements, especially, make music as an ensemble, and they made music with a real sense of together, under the direction of ESO music director Bill Eddins.
   In the slow middle movement the brothers showed they're more than pyrotechnicians, something they definitely demonstrated in the Saint-Saëns and the Saraste.
   Nikki plays a Stradivarius and Timothy a Del Gesu, borrowed from the Canada Council instrument bank, and in the slow movement of the Bach, the audience was treated to violin sound of the highest order. In an after-concert interview, Nikki characterized his instrument as the brighter-sounding, the more delicate of the two, but in the Bach, the effect was undifferentiated sweetness and light.

Robert Rival

   Rival's second symphony is vividly programmatic. The first movement shifts interestingly through a variety of moods; the notion of structure is secondary to the musical ideas that lead the piece to its quiet fade away. In between, Rival creates brief moments of stormy emotion, gentle passages of unanxious longing and short periods of dark, harsher brass and woodwind writing. None of the transitions feel forced; his strength is musical narrative.
The first and third movements also feature snippets of folk themes, the last one in a distinctly Celtic vein.
   The Second Movement suggested to me the caves of ice in Coleridge's Kubla Khan, casting a cool, remote glare on the world. In the middle of the movement Rival has written a small string quartet section where the rest of the orchestra withdraws into the background, mostly in silence. The overall mood of the movement is a blend of prayfulness and gratitude, perhaps. It finishes with subdued viola writing, subdued but not sad.
   The last movement is full of cheerful energy, a pastoral, a dancing day. The harp and horn figure prominently. Muted trumpet and snare together create an optimistic feel, and the echoic effects buzzing about the orchestra conjure images of happy, unself-conscious nature. Short stentorian brass and agitated strings episodes never really presage a descent into anything truly wild and dangerous. Overall, the water theme of the symphony never touches the monstrous aspects of the liquid medium. The last movement finishes with a kind of fanfare for a symphonic conclusion, upbeat and emphatically symphonic.
   Rival is a contemporary composer, in a line of other ESO composers-in-residence like Allan Gilliland and John Estacio, who resist antagonizing experiments in untested musical theories, preferring styles that audiences like to listen to, not music that imposes its experimental aesthetics on them.
   The audience on Friday saluted Rival for his considerate musical inclinations. Throughout the evening, the audience had no qualms about applauding individual movements, a healthy sign that classical music concerts can be occasions for spontaneous expressions of appreciation.  

Andrew Wan to play Beethoven in Edmonton

Andrew Wan, Edmonton-born violinist, now co-concertmaster with the OSM, is coming home this weekend to play a concert at the University of Alberta Convocation Hall with pianist Jacques Desprès, a prof in the U of A's music department and a Naxos recording artist.

Andrew Wan

   On Friday at 8. p.m., the duo will begin what they expect to be a series of three concerts over three years featuring Beethoven's violin sonatas.
   Andrew is the subject of a profile I wrote for La Scèna Musicale last summer. http://www.scena.org/lsm/sm17-9/sm17-9_wan_en.html
Here's a link to the French translation of the article. (The cover picture of Andrew is smaller in the English version.) http://en.calameo.com/read/0002521964127bda5e660
    Andrew also plays in the New Orford String Quartet, which was nominated for a Juno last year. He's become a regular at James Ehnes's Seattle Chamber Music Festival.
Andrew is a brilliant musician, and Edmonton is fortunate he comes home to play occasionally.

A Mellow Messiah

 Bill Rankin

The Messiah I heard at Edmonton's Winspear Centre was verging on mellow. The sounds of malicious scourging and contemptuous expectoration were mainly left out in favour of pleasant, but stolid, performance under the direction of renowned lutenist Stephen Stubbs, who coaxed a gentle Messiah from the Edmonton Symphony (with loads of subs) and a cobbled-together choir anchored by the University of Alberta Madrigal Singers.

Canadian tenor Colin Balzer

  Tenor Colin Balzer, clearly the most experienced of the four soloists, set the tone with wonderfully soothing opening aria, Comfort ye. I'd never heard Balzer before, but he is a singer I could listen to for a whole evening. He reminded me, and not just because of his shiny pate, of Ben Butterfield. Balzer isn't quite as mellifluous as Butterfield, generally, but the UBC-trained Canadian has the qualities that make him an undeniably lyric tenor with considerable vocal character.
  An advantage of Stubbs' approach was that the soloists, and singers overall,l were given plenty of space to express and be heard. The Messiah mezzo, I've found, can be at the mercy of too exuberant an instrumental collaboration, but the young mezzo Wallis Giunta, currently attached to the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at the Metropolitan Opera, has poise, but she will learn, as Balzer has, that the soloists in the Messiah have narrative and dramatic roles that call for more than fine vocal production and a lovely gown. When she sang "He gave His back to the smiters, and His cheeks to them that plucked off His hair: He hid not His face from shame and spitting," she could have mustered more indignation, not to mention an explosive "sp" in "spitting".
  Giunta did show some ambition, though, in colouring her arias with ornaments that sounded improvised. The Baroque period is known as an age of exuberance, and Guinta's impulse to find some of that spirit made her singing exciting when she took a chance or two.
  Bass-baritone Gordon Binter is on he cusp of a career as well. He participated in the 2011 Opera Nuova opera boot camp in Edmonton, and has had some gigs, including an engagement with the Montreal Symphony after winning the Grand Prize in last year’s OSM Standard Life Competition. Binter is more baritone than bass, and so when he declaimed his intentions to shake the heavens and the earth, he delivered the message but not so much the de profundis heft. (Gary Relyea has been my favourite God-imitator in local Messiahs).
Binter makes a beautiful, if not a fully basso impression, but he brought a poised performer's energy to the occasion.
  Soprano Yannick-Muriel Noah made her Edmonton debut as Tosca with Edmonton Opera last season, and she has a dominating presence on stage. It was nice to see her back singing in the city after a strong Edmonton debut in Tosca.
  There were many excellent choruses, including the rocking Amen at the end. However, Stubbs could have drawn a little more drama from the libretto, especially in choruses where the ensemble plays the role of the distainful rabble. Choruses such as "Worthy is the Lamb," though, recreated the pious elements of the text effectively.
  Listening to the holiday staple again made me want to be up there singing. Fortunately for the listeners around me, I restrained myself to mostly mouthing the words, but my wife was a little embarrassed at my sotto voce singalong to the Hallelujah chorus.

Next to Normal crazy good theatre

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 By Bill Rankin

West Side Story has its fatal knife fight. Sweeney Todd gets song and dance routines out of serial murder, dismemberment and prankster cannibalism. The seminal 1927 Kern and Hammerstein II musical Show Boat offers a humfest inspired by the scourge of American racism. The Sound of Music is hardly all sweetness and light: the von Trapps barely survive the imminent Nazi Anschluss. Urinetown makes sewers into sanctuaries. Annie is an abused orphan; even Mary Poppins is lonely spinster without not quite enough magic to get herself a stable domestic arrangement of her own.

So when a new musical comes along that explores a particular form of insanity — bipolarity — no one should be surprised that it draws audiences ready to be bummed out and invaded by earworms at the same time.

The Citadel-Theatre-Calgary co-production of the Brian Yorkey/Tom Kitt 2009 Broadway rock-musical hit Next to Normal is as kinetic as a bipolar patient surging, and as depressing as any story about families in despair, children skidding out of control, hope not just fading but being bashed about mercilessly.

Director Ron Jenkins and the Citadel production team have staged an often hilarious, ultimately maddening musical gallop through the sabotaged life of Diana, a suburban mom desperate for even a little control over her world, thwarted repeatedly by a mental disorder that resists all remedies. Suicide beckons; love has no power to dissuade the morbid comforter.

Kathryn Akin plays Diane

Kathryn Akin is a totally convincing Diane, the disturbed and disturbing central character. In Saturday's first preview performance, Akin exuded the positive energy that the rock musical conventions call for, but when Diane hits the wall and the pall of doom pervades the scenes of bleak medical adventures like electric shock and dead-end talk and drug therapies, Akin was moving. She has the vocal heft and the actor’s experience to command the spotlight convincingly. The part gives her a lot to sing, and except for a few brief spells towards the end where she sounded a little strained, she delivered a strong performance.

 The close to a couple of dozen tunes Yorkey and Kitt have written to propel this unhappy story give each character plenty of challenging musical episodes, and musical director Don Horsburgh and his small cohort of musicians in the pit lifted the characters into the ambiguous world of musical theatre most helpfully.

The production has a nice mix of young, up-and-comers and seasoned pros. Akin has had an interesting career in Britain and Canada, and Réjean Cournoyer (Capt. von Trapp in the last Citadel Sound of Music) sang Dan, Diana’s hopeful, helpless husband, firmly and unaffectedly. He was best in the couple’s more subdued and tender moments; his voice sounded a little dry and tired in the heavy-duty belting tunes.

Sarah Farb crafted the role of Nathalie very intelligently. Nathalie is the daughter left out in the cold as her mother fights toxic brain chemistry and wallows in memories of a dead baby son. The girls seeks refuge first in an obsessive will to be perfect, then in drug-induced oblivion.

Robert Markus plays Gabe, the ghost child; Markus has a strong Broadway-style voice, and in scenes where he haunts the wretched mother, he generated feelings more Mephistophelean than wispy child soul adrift in a sick woman’s mind. The effect the character produces was creepier than anything we see in Diana’s manic-depressive rollercoaster ride.

Nathalie’s boyfriend Henry (Michael Cox), a pot-head with a good heart, doesn’t sing much, but he aced the part, and the scenes he and Farb have together bring the artificial aspects of musical theatre down to the level of just plain affecting theatre.

John Ullyatt is Doctor Madden, Diana’s last hope. Ullyatt is a versatile performer with a decent set of pipes, but his contribution is mainly straight theatrical in this show, and it’s an important contribution. In several scenes, he shifted from comedian to serious actor in a flash. Ullyatt stole the scene when Diana hallucinates her shrink as a raucous rock star one second, an understanding therapist the next.

Next to Normal is a high-energy night of contemporary musical theatre. You wonder how many folks leave a production of Les Miz brooding about the French Revolution. You’ll leave Next to Normal invigorated the way a night of live theatre should make you feel, and probably a little blue because this musical will touch everyone who isn't living a perfectly normal life.

Sorkin's words come alive in Citadel show

 Bill Rankin
Traditional war dramas often hinge on a volatile blend of romance and heroism. The male protagonist endures the tribulations of grim hostilities abroad; back home his gal frets and makes do while she waits and hopes for the best, for life to return to normal.

Aaron Sorkin’s stage play A Few Good Men, which predates the  better-known 1992 film version of his story of macho men cut down to size, military bullies uncovered and properly disgraced, looks at some of the shady culture behind testosterone-fuelled heroics.

                                                   Epic Photography
Lt. Kaffee (Charlie Gallant) and Lt. Cmdr. Galloway
(Lora Brovold) stake out territory in A Few Good Men

Almost no blood is spilled, and there is no romance in Sorkin’s drama. The one woman in the cast, Joanne, a dutifully persistent lawyer, begins as a Marine unit’s relentless nag, and finishes as alone as she starts, but by the end, she basks in the respect she's won from her male colleagues for her moral leadership and professional competence, not her womanhood. The happy ending turns on nobility and a commitment to justice rather than love between the male and female lead. Sorkin is always bound for higher ground, whether he's looking at American political culture in The West Wing or media culture in The Newsroom.

Lora Brovold, playing Joanne, began the first performance of the preview run a little flat. The men around her include greenhorn military lawyer Daniel Kaffee (Charlie Gallant), whose talent in this early stage of his legal career is finding ways to avoid the hard work of really defending his clients. He’s adept at plea bargaining, preferring time-consuming courtroom competition to pickup baseball.

Brovold’s Joanne could be seen as an outsider and therefore sensibly tentative about how she behaves around the men she has a vague sort of authority over; however, I felt Brovold just didn’t present herself as a force to be reckoned with in the early going.

But as her and Kaffee’s professional relationship develops, as they follow Joanne’s intuition that the two marines they’ve been assigned to defend on murder charges may be victims of subterfuge in an apparently trumped up court martial, Brovold got her footing, and the pair generated plenty of dramatic energy in the second act.

Gallant catches the wind of Sorkin’s often-witty writing from the get-go. His evolution from glib novice lawyer to justice crusader is generally compelling. It’s a big role, and he commands the spotlight comfortably.

The rest of the cast is strong. Jeff Strome has the physique of a marine, and his tough yet submissive portrayal of Cpl. Dawson crackled with masculine aggression. Cole Humeny, Dawson’s co-accused PFC Downey, conveyed the weaker soldier’s confusion and insecurity sympathetically. The pathos was palpable.

Paul Essiembre plays the antagonist, Col Jessop, who is behind the phoney prosecution of the two marines. Essiembre will inevitably be compared to Jack Nicholson’s volcanic Col. Jessop in the film version. Sorkin has drawn his character so clearly that perhaps only an eighty-pound weakling cast as this steely dominator could raise doubts about Jessop’s menacing persona. Essiembre musters all the necessary arrogance and indignation the role demands, and the culminating court room scene when he’s trapped and deflated was fine drama indeed.

Director James MacDonald made good use of Michael Gianfrancesco’s austere stage design, especially the rotating platform that helped move props and players in and out. The device created momentum, a benefit in a play in which the action is in the language.

Sorkin’s specialty is argument and soliloquy. This Citadel Theatre/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre production of A Few Good Men definitely brings Sorkin's verbal battleground to life. Seeing justice done is always uplifting.