T.S. Eliot's kind of Spring

Except for all the multisyllabic German names and the harsh cut of the boy's school uniforms, Spring Awakening doesn't make much of a show of its late 19th Century German setting. Considering the 2006 musical version gleefully tampers with Frank Wedekind's play--I doubt the original had bare-butted simulated sex and lines about "My Junk" and being "Totally Fucked"--you wonder why they didn't go all the way and make the thing contemporary or in a more trendy conservative era like the early 1960s of Mad Men. I doubt you have to go back 130 years to find teenagers who believe in the stork stumbling innocently into sex, though I suppose I can more easily imagine young Germans than young Americans stumbling from innocence right into SM sex play.

Duncan Sheik's songs--the same sort of adult-oriented indie pop that made him beloved by critics way back on his debut 1996 album, that got him recognized as a smart songwriter that was perhaps out of sync with the industry's whims--are the show's main selling point. They're emotional without being theatrical, so we see the cast members grab a hand-held mic and break character every time they launch into one. The performances by the young cast are good but, since the soundtrack comes from MOR land, not Broadway, there are few opportunities to punch the audience in the gut.

Spring Awakening's caused some buzz for its racy content. You can see atypical theatre audiences buying into the passion. But as far as stage time goes, "happy sexual discovery," though its the main story line, accounts for about 15 percent. The rest is taken up by revelations of suicide, sexual abuse, pregnancy and abortion, with side trips to masturbation and homosexuality. Though it might claim to be an unexpurgated High School Musical--its teens Barbies moulded with genitalia intact--Spring Awakening actually comes a little closer to Jerry Springer: the Musical.

Chekhov's rebar

Watching the premier of Missing at Factory Theatre last night, I was reminded of the rule of Chekhov's gun: Don't show the audience a rifle if nobody is thinking of firing it. Most of the play's action takes place at the front of the stage which mutates from local diner to farm kitchen to the home of a female cop investigating the case of a missing woman. But near the back there's a huge metal tree, a structure so ugly I figured that it could not possibly be decorative. At a certain point, somebody must climb on it, or it will grow or changes shape or will be inventively lit up. As the characters bickered about this and that--affections and quarrels emerging suddenly from playwright Florence Gibson's ether--I sat quietly waiting for the tree to do something. For someone to at least mention it. Maybe it had something to do with the sugar bush they were talking about. I attributed the branches sticking out of the front of the stage to the sugar bush, so why not the metal tree?

At play's end, the metal tree had played no part in the events and revelations. I went to the afterparty in Factory's lounge and was standing by the door that looked back into the theatre. "I thought the set was cool," said somebody who had been sitting in the front row. "I guess the rebar had something to do with the bypass they were building."

"Rebar?" I said.

"Sticking out of the front of the stage."

"I thought they were branches." But it wasn't till I got home that the other shoe dropped. The metal sculpture wasn't a tree; it referred to the construction of a highway and its accompanying bypass. The thing wasn't a Chokhovian rifle; it was just cryptically ugly.

Mystery solved.

Direct blogging

I'm not sure what I think about director's blogs. Phil Akin at Obsidian does one, which is interesting when it's random--he has an obsession with beautiful pens and comes up with some interesting profiles of the talent--but less so when he's hauling out "process" material when he's working on a show. Same goes for the director's blog for Missing at Factory. David Ferry gives you a sense of the creative flow, but I don't find it does much for "understanding" what the play will be. You wonder who the audience is: Is he using the blog as a backdoor method to coach the actors? If anybody's reading it, it must be them, which makes you wonder if he's holding back funny anecdotes to save everybody some embarrassment, but which would make the blog worth reading.

Preaching to the converted

Seeing Toronto the Good at Factory and Travesties at Soulpepper (by Soulpepper?--do they own the Young Centre?) in the same week left me with debate-play brain freeze.

Andrew Moodie's contemporary work follows a black lawyer who must defend a female cop against charges of racial profiling. He happens to be married to a Franco-Ontario (read: white) woman and the story frequently abandons its legal-procedural core to show her worrying about her jaded students while waiting for street cars. The acting is excellent and some of the lines are quite good, but its left-right axis and middle class focus (the few characters who are on the front lines of the gun-violence issue get little to say though, in fairness, the snooty character who traces his lineage back to the family compact is also given only perfunctory treatment). In trying to balance the classic left-right arguments so perfectly, Moodie leaves out other voices that would have made the debate more dynamic, more unpredictable.

Travesties is a debate about the social usefulness of art that playwright Tom Stoppard has ramped through a vaudeville act that includes singing, dancing and pulling a rabbit out of a hat. I don't buy the arguments that what Travesties has to say about the culture wars is relevant today. Yes, we still debate about art, but the debate has evolved and changed, making Stoppard's main question here--does art have to be socially useful?--largely irrelevant. No, art doesn't have to be socially useful. Art can be anything. Canada's current debate about art is: Given that art doesn't necessarily have to have any social use, should the government fund it? Which makes Travesties seem awfully dated, despite how hard it tries to make us giggle.

Moodie's play might lack the Stoppard's encyclopedic theatre knowledge and self-referential smugness, but at least it's an argument we're having right now.

Springer into action

Jerry Springer - The Musical had its Canadian debut at Hart House Theatre last night, directed by Richard Ouzounian. It's the perfect show for a student production really: a great showcase for the leads and forgiving for weaker voices so long as the the performers really go for it--which they did.

Theatre 'Next' to the heater

A theatre festival in the middle of the winter is a curious thing. Not quite the party of the Fringe, not quite the artsy break from beach time of Summerworks, Next Stage has its own log-cabin vibe. The bar/box office tent in Factory Theatre's courtyard provides warmth while you wait for the doors to open and a pleasant kind of forced socialization--you'd be shivering if you waited by yourself off on the sidewalk, so you might as well have a glass of wine. The performers I've recognized seem more likely to drop by the tent before and after shows. Conversation starters--"You're about to be dripped on"--abound.

As for the theatre--I've been impressed. The four shows I've seen are more developed than Fringe shows (though probably not as ambitious as many Summerworks productions). In its second year, Next Stage's identity isn't fully formed but, considering the black cultural hole this second week in January, there should be lots of room for it to grow.