bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Interculturalism Light: The Irony of Blues in The Berlin Blues
Authors: Flamme Michelle La
Published: June 2023

Drew Hayden Taylor has been writing plays for years that use comedy and stereotypes to address intercultural issues. Taylor’s fourth play in his Blues quartet, The Berlin Blues, like the preceding three plays – The Bootlegger Blues (1991), The Baby Blues (1999) and Buz’Gem Blues (2002) – contains a thread of physical comedy, word play and revelations that coalesce around the intercultural aspects of negotiating racial divides. In his latest Blues play, we find a somewhat stereotypical German couple, bent on building their German’s fantasy theme park in Ojibway territory. Predictably, this capitalist venture is greeted in the community with both scepticism and optimism. The German’s envision “Ojibway World”(22), complete with the “Medicine Ferris Wheel,” “four directions shuttle service,” “Turtle Island Aquarium,” “Whiskeyjack Pub and Bar” and a hotel called “Haida-way” and the “Weesageechek Water Slide”(19). Considering the German couple’s predilection for indianische anything, this plot-line is to be expected. The other elements of the plot include stampeding buffalo that take revenge, a loosely developed love story and an Aboriginal man’s “buy-in” to this capitalist dream. The carnivalesque elements and the fantasy-world setting are Taylor’s attempts to transcend the normative, but unfortunately, the binaries of Aboriginal/German worked to keep this reader fixated on entrenched cultural stereotypes that lack flexibility.
View and Reviews
Authors: Levin Laura
Published: June 2023

CTR‘s Views and Reviews section traditionally surveys recent publications and performances by Canadians and on Canadian subjects. Yet there are many works on non-Canadian theatre that have special relevance to Canadian performance, enabling us to view this field from a broader, global perspective. This issue takes a look at several of these fascinating case studies of other national theatre traditions that will be of particular interest to Canadian theatre practitioners and scholars. Not only do these works illustrate the importance of reading Canadian performance through a comparative lens but they also enable us to throw conventional understandings of “nation” and “national theatre” into high relief, reminding us that the understandings of national identity described in the pages of CTR are also themselves performances.
1 Bossin’s Home Remedy for Nuclear War
Authors: Filewod Alan , Bossin Bob
Published: June 2023

For several years now singer/songwriter Bob Bossin has been touring Canada with a one-man medicine show. With the acerbic wit familiar to the many Canadians who followed his career with Stringband, Bossin combines a program of musical satire with a medicine-show pitch for his little green bottles of Bossin’s Home Remedy for Nuclear War. The pitch is real, and so is the remedy. Alan Filewod talked with Bob Bossin last summer at the Edmonton Fringe festival.
2 Un-Canadian Carnivals
Authors: Hood Sarah B.
Published: June 2023

When I was a child my family and some of our friends signed up for an annual fair parad e in Delt a, a village in south-east ern Ontario. There were prizes for th e best entry, so we worked hard on a dragon costume. The dragon’s head was mad e of linoleum in a red til e pattern th at did well for scales, and we joined it to a body made of garbage bags, with a jagged linoleum spine that ended in a tail. My mother, wearing a nightgown and sneakers, carried a wand, and with an inverted tin wastebasket on her head, represented the fairy princess leading us on a string.
2 Potted Meat Presents… a few of the best
Authors: Furlong Mack
Published: June 2023

What does it mean to be a performer on radio? What does a performer do that is different from what an actor does? What do I do behind a mike that would make me different from Peter Gzowski or R.H. Thomson?
The Hyper-real Nebula
Authors: Nunn Robert
Published: June 2023

The relation of Canadian theatre to mass culture has been problematic from the beginning of mass culture’s domination of Canadian cultural life, in the latter years of the nineteenth century. By “mass culture” I mean the centralized production of cultural artifacts on the model of industrial production, their wide distribution through mechanical and electronic reproduction, their consumption by large masses of people identified and solicited as target audiences through advertising; the whole complex for the primary purpose of generating profit. Hence the Frankfurt School’s term “the culture industry.”1
Desperate Stages: New Brunswick’s Theatre in the 1840s, The Proceedings of the Theatre in Atlantic Canada Symposium (1986)
Authors: Mullaly Edward , Knowles Richard Paul
Published: June 2023

In his introduction to Desperate Stages, Edward Mullaly states that one of the book’s aims is “to illustrate the … general truth that seldom is history so simple that it can be reduced to mere dates or facts.” His study of the fortunes of Thomas Hill, Henry W.Preston, and Charles Freer in New Brunswick theatre in the 1840s, however, is not without its fair share of dates and facts. Drawing together the known details of these three lesser stars in the theatrical firmament, Mullaly amply redresses their neglect by the mainstream of theatre historians. The work smacks of a researcher thoroughly immersed in his material: Mullaly’s painstaking research, combing the pages of Phelps, Brown, Ireland and others, was clearly a labour of love. Consequently, the book often reads like an exuberant alumni newsletter, so keen is its author to keep us posted on the extra-New Brunswick activities of anyone who came in contact with its three main subjects. By the end, we feel a part of an intricate network that was the theatre of Eastern North America in the nineteenth century, as the names of “old friends” continually pop up in various different locales.
A Few Broad Statements Notes on The First International Women Playwrights Conference
Authors: Ives L. Patricia
Published: June 2023

In October, the State University of New York at Buffalo launched the first International Women Playwrights Conference, bringing together over 300 women playwrights, theatre practitioners, and academics from all over the world. A hugely ambitious project, it was held over six days and combined workshops, staged readings, scholarly papers and panel discussions. Numerous Buffalo theatres mounted productions of plays written by women dramatists which ran throughout the conference. Although the first half of the conference was restricted to playwrights, the second half was open to the public. Given the theatrical and intellectual ferment the brochure offered, I, a non-playwright, eagerly registered for Session II.
Developing A Particular Class of Women
Authors: Feindel Janet
Published: June 2023

A Particular Class of Women is a one-woman show, inspired by my experiences in the striptease industry where I worked on and off, for approximately ten years, between acting gigs. The title of the show comes from the following incident: in 1985 a stripper in Ontario was raped at knife point. The judge gave the rapist a very lenient sentence, saying that one had to bear in mind that the victim belonged to “a particular class of women whose profession it is to promote lust.” The title of the play not only reflects the contempt of the judge’s comments but the fact that strippers come from many walks of life, that no one class is drawn to the profession. But once they do become part of the strip world, they become a class of their own, a subculture with its own set of values and traditions.
Theatre Transcends Issues: David for Queen by John Lazarus
Authors: Veen Jace van der
Published: June 2023

It is graduation night at Selwin High School. On the stage of the gymnasium the King is being crowned by Kopoloff, the principal. In the boys’ washroom, David, elected Runner-Up for Queen, is being fag-bashed by Ratch and his gang. As the Queen is announced and the Runner-Up is requested to come on stage and crown her, David’s bloodied head is being bandaged by Leslie Tamichuk, the 8th grader whose poem David unsuccessfully tried to get published in Selwin High’s school paper, the Sentinel:
Toronto The Rock and the Mainland
Authors: Goldie Terry
Published: June 2023

A short while ago CBC’S The Journal ran one of their two-part documentaries. This time it was about the fortieth anniversary of confederation. No, that’s right, fortieth. For as everyone in Southeast Bight knows, that thing they had, what was it? a hundred and twenty-one years ago? was only a warm up for the real thing, 1949, when at long last the vicious Canadian wolf dragged poor virginal little Newfoundland into its lair. That was why Bruce Garvie, with all of his serious reportorial skill, was sitting on various outport stages as he contemplated the fishermen, NFB film footage and more Joey Smallwood than even an old Liberal could stomach.
Professional Solutions / 3: Three Quebec Approaches Tiens tes rêves Les Productions Ma chère Pauline
Authors: Wakeham Margaret
Published: June 2023

Tiens tes rêves by Sylvain Hétu, Jean Lessard and Sylvie Provost explores the theme of adolescent sexuality with sensitivity, insight, and honesty. Its frankness of language and action pose great challenges for the young audience or performer. The coming of age, the first sexual encounter, and the breaking away from the parental home are sensitive and delicate topics. They beg for sincere and careful interpretation. Caricature and stereotyping are often a likely pitfall. This play attacks the problem successfully by setting the real action against the backdrop of a romantic soap-opera-style novel. The contrast between the novel’s fantasy world of erotic encounters and the actual experiences of teenagers of the play allows the piece to be sincere and honest while humorous and disturbing at the same time. The smooth delicate images of transcontinental trains and luxury hotels are mirrored against a mundane portrait of seedy subways and working-class apartments. Instead of cool confident fictional characters, two clumsy innocents are feigning an uneasy sophistication. This juxtaposition of novel with reality succeeds in demonstrating the instability of the ever colliding worlds of dreams and disillusionments so painfully present in the adolescent search for self. Tiens tes rêves shows itself to be a highly relevant play for all young people caught up in the cruel and unforgiving balancing act of growing up.
Calgary Rites and Wrongs in ATP’s playRites ‘89
Authors: Davis Tracy C.
Published: June 2023

There is a rumour in Alberta that the new definition of “a promising playwright” is someone who can weave a plot involving nude bisexuals, lesbians, gays, serial murderers, sadomasochists, adulterers, prostitutes, and yuppies without seeming gratuitously sensational. Even when successful, such a formula is certain to alienate every corporate sponsor in the oilpatch, for they are attentive to the offence taken by subscription audience members who (presumably) use petrochemicals to maintain their blue rinses. The rumour arises from Brad Fraser’s triumph with Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love, recently featured in Alberta Theatre Projects’ playRites ‘89 festival. This was the only one of four mainstage productions that did not attract a business sponsor and the only one to play to full houses. If ATP is wise it will heed this sign and offer more challenges to its customary audience by expanding on the mandate evident in the regular subscription season.
Toronto Models for the Future: The Space Crisis in Toronto
Authors: Peel Bill
Published: June 2023

No Vacancy, a recent report by the Toronto Arts Council, points to a crisis of major proportions in housing artists and the arts in the city, and calls for immediate action. It warns, “The longer we take to respond to the crisis, the more casualties we will witness.”1 There are numerous casualties already. Many visual artists are fleeing the city, driven out by impossible rent for work and living space. The crisis has yet to reach similar proportions in the theatre, but it may. Jini Stolk, Executive Director of the Toronto Theatre Alliance (TTA), comments, “I don’t think that it’s fair yet to say that there is a mass exodus. There isn’t. But unless something is done very quickly there could be … That would be a disaster for the city of Toronto.”
Salt-Water Moon, Jennie’s Story & Under the Skin
Authors: French David , Lambert Betty , Nunn Robert
Published: June 2023

With the production of 1949 last fall by the Canadian Stage Company, Salt-Water Moon becomes part three in David French’s series of plays about the Mercer family. Since its first performance in 1984 it has become a staple of Canadian theatre, a sure-fire winner, not hurt a bit by its warmth, charm, romantic theme and self-conscious “quaintness” (Jacob Mercer has brought the term back to Newfoundland from Toronto). Nor by the fact that it has a cast of two. If this sounds a bit jaundiced, it is because all that charm eases down some very suspect values.
Around the Festivals / 1: Redefining “the Americas”
Authors: Leonard Paul
Published: June 2023

One of the challenges of mounting an “international theatre festival” is to come up with a conceptual framework that can profitably link diverse shows from a variety of countries. Most frequently, and rather simplistically, artistic directors use “excellence” as the common denominator, and choose “the best” shows that are available, programming a festival with hit shows from other festivals they have attended around the world. When Le Festival de théâtre des Amériques began in Montreal in 1985, the mandate was more precise: as the name implies, the biannual event was to bring together theatre productions from among the 45 nations that constitute “the Americas.” During the first two versions, the festival presented shows from Canada, the USA, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba.
A Public Nuisance: A History of the Mummers Troupe
Authors: Brookes Chris , Knowles Richard Paul
Published: June 2023

In the early pages of A Public Nuisance, describing his tour of Punch and Judy shows around Newfoundland before the founding of the Mummers Troupe and disputing the social value of Aristotelian catharsis (“a kind of projected anguish”), Chris Brookes comments that “if Punch and Judy had met Aristotle, they would have beaten the shit out of him.” If you find this as refreshing and entertaining in a work of theatre history as I do, and your name isn’t Donna Butt, you’ll like this book. Like the Mummers themselves, the comment is much more than irreverent, provocative and witty; in fact it contains the seeds of the book and the kernel of the Mummers’ history.
Local Boy Makes Good: Three Musicals
Authors: Gray John , Nunn Robert
Published: June 2023

Make no mistake about it : these are musicals. In John Gray’s fascinating introduction to the collection, he proposes a theory of the Canadian musical, based on his experience that Canadian audiences behaved like uncomfortable eavesdroppers, “their hands covering their eyes,” when the actors observe the invisible fourthwall conventions of naturalism, and come to life when the perforrrance is openly presentational. Hence the attraction of the musical, in which the songs are alredy presentational, and exert a kind of gravitational pull if you ignore the conventions of the standard Broadway musical.
Issues in Performance
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

The eclecticism of this issue is a departure from CTR’s tradition of theme issues. Our usual focus on theme issues allows us to explore topics in depth but there are times when a more general round-up affords the opportunity to take a look at new trends in the theatre as a whole. The articles in this issue touch on topics as diverse as the marketing of commercial megahits like The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables, the work of a Soviet designer at the Shaw Festival, and a look at the offerings of some of the festivals that have become instrumental in showcasing new performance trends.
Morningside Drama Private Voices/Public Forum
Authors: Goodwin Jill Tomasson
Published: June 2023

For any regular listener of CBC, the title of Peter Gzowski’s recent book, The Private Voice, seems to express more than just the confessional nature of his journal / autobiography. It also expresses the very essence of the radio show he hosts, CBC’s Morningside. Every morning from 9:00 to 12:00 on CBC-AM, Canadians can listen to voices from Tofino to St John’s, from Windsor to Yellow knife, sometimes talking about large-scale national and international issues, sometimes about personal or intimate experiences. But in every case, regardless of the topic and the people interviewed, what emerges from the very public medium of radio are private voices, voices situated in particular regions or localities, capable of addressing national concerns, but always retaining certain cultural inflections that mark each voice as a unique locus of memory, experience, and expectation. Morningside, as Gzowski describes it, is “a kind of village meeting, a place where people who are interested enough can gather to consider the things they hold in common” (321). This distinctly Morningside formulation of Canadian nationalism draws upon the paradoxical nature of the Canadian identity. When Canadians meet in their “national village,” they discover what they have in common: their differences, rooted in regional discourses and identities which distinguish them from other national villagers. Morningside nationalism depends, too, on the inherently paradoxical quality of its medium – radio. Radio is both mass and intimate communication. It reaches the entire village – millions of listeners at once – but with all the intimacy required for reflection and self-disclosure. And it enters the world of the listener in a way that television cannot. Members of the audience might do their ironing to CTV’s Canada AM, but when they drive to their next appointment or ride their tractor over the fields, Morningside follows them into their world or, perhaps more accurately, into their minds.
Saskatoon A Proliferation of Prairie Playwrights
Authors: Page Malcolm
Published: June 2023

Too many playwrights chasing too few theatres? Last August, in Saskatoon’s Bessborough Hotel, Michael Springate (now in the Canada Council Theatre Section, and previously Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal) asks the sixty people gathered in a meeting room, “How many of you here are playwrights?” Then he coaxes “Have ever written a play?” Forty hands go up. Janet Amos describes how Sharon Pollock in New Brunswick was trying to encourage more people to think of writing plays, and the audience groans. This was Playworks, “A Festival of New Plays, a Conference on New Work,” organized by Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre, the funding aided by making it part of the Jeux Canada Games festivities.
A Personal Encounter with the Theatre of Tedd Robinson
Authors: Brask Pei
Published: June 2023

From the autumn of 1984 until the spring of 1990 Tedd Robinson was the artistic director of the Contemporary Dancers. During that time, Winnipeg audiences were treated to a series of explosively theatrical works with titles like Suburban Tango, Entertainment for Dictators, Nothing Past the Swans, Camping Out and Lepidoptera. His work, always dense with provocative images, yielding a multiplicity of meanings, and often drawing on pop culture, was rewarded by a phenomenal growth in the public’s interest in contemporary dance theatre. He also helped found the Festival of Canadian Modern Dance, the sixth of which was completed last May.
Letters
Authors: Munday Lenny , Zylin Svetlana
Published: June 2023

I find myself joining what I am beginning to gather, from various theatre professionals in Nova Scotia, is a large group of people who object to the article which appeared in the Spring 1990 issue of CTR. This article, entitled: “Theatre in Atlantic Canada: Soap on a Rope” by Dawn Rae Downton, seems to have managed to offend many of us who work in theatre in Atlantic Canada.
1949, Bat Masterson’s Last Regular Job, Exile
Authors: French David , Ballantyne Bill , Crail Archie
Published: June 2023

Critics who viewed David French’s three earlier plays about the Mercer family as a “trilogy” will no doubt be expanding it to a “tetralogy” with the appearance of 1949. But this play makes very clear what should have been evident before: the Mercer plays do not constitute a unified saga portraying the fortunes of a single family through time, but are rather a set of variations on a theme, in which French’s family myth is embodied in a series of plays of different styles and involving different characters, although some of these characters share names and a few basic personality traits. The Jacob and Mary of 1949 have some qualities in common with the Jacob and Mary of Leaving Home (which supposedly takes place eight years later), but they are much softer, more insightful people, and they live in a much less harsh environment. Significant details vary considerably from one play to another. Mary’s old beau, Jerome McKenzie, moves from being a prominent St John’s Q.C. to whom Mary constantly alludes in Leaving Home, to a quiet, studious, prematurely-balding schoolteacher who represents security as opposed to sexiness in Salt Water Moon, to a handsome war hero, ladies’ man, and newspaper reporter in 1949, someone whom Mary “hardly ever mentions” (p. 119) because of her awareness of Jacob’s jealousy. These transformations must be attributed, not to time, but to changes in French’s own attitude to his background and his goals as an artist.
England RSC: The End of an Era
Authors: Berry Ralph
Published: June 2023

A deep calm has descended upon the RSC, after the turmoil of last fall. The outgoing artistic director, Terry Hands, closed down the Barbican operation for four months, claiming that the RSC deficit would otherwise become insurmountable (like a miniature version of a Third World debtor nation). There were many cries, in which The Times joined, that this was political grandstanding, a shameless attempt to break the government’s nerve. If so, it has largely succeeded. The word is now that the Arts Council will find an extra 4 million pounds for the RSC (above the normal inflationary increase) over the next three years, and this should slake for a while the insatiate appetites of the RSC management. It is conceded that the RSC has made some poor decisions, of which the five-day wonder of Carrie on Broadway was only the most notorious; but the need for extra funding is now officially recognized. Even so, sponsorship will still be necessary. Meantime, Terry Hands has completed his term of office, and Adrian Noble stands in the wings, planning the new season that will commence with him in April 1991.
Native Interpretive Arts: A Source of Vision and Change
Authors: Durand Yves Sioui , Perez Fernando Hernandez
Published: June 2023

Before, those whom we now call the Natives lived openly on this land, this country.

Before, from the rising to the setting of the sun, on the banks of the great river, each of their gestures, their songs, their dances, each of their tools of stone and bone, belonged to them in their language, in their vision of the world; that used to be the way of life, their culture.
A Plains Nomad – Over the Ocean
Authors: Favel Floyd
Published: June 2023

Like a traveller, I look backward at the road that has taken me to many good places, to many good people. The reserves and urban centres of Western Canada and Southern Ontario, the shores and moors of the Danish West Coast, and the stoney roads and mountains of Italy. Behind me I have left pieces of myself, voluntarily and involuntarily, as offerings and sacrifices, broken and scattered like glass. It is the shattered memories and dreams that I cling to and try to piece together in some semblance of sanity. This is my bundle that I carry with me – my grandmother’s words, a friend’s advice – and each new experience adds to this bundle.
Winnetou’s Snake Oil Show From Wigwam City
Authors: Colorado Hortensia , Sam Wild-Eyed
Published: June 2023

Caution: copyright 1991 by Spiderwoman Theater. This play is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the copyright union and all performances are subject to royalty. Change to the script is expressly forbidden without the written consent of Spiderwoman Theater. Rights to produce, film or record, in whole or in part, in any medium, in any language, by any group, amateur or professional, are retained by Spiderwoman Theater. Interested persons are requested to apply for permission and terms to Spiderwoman Theater, 77 7th Avenue, Apt.8S, New York, New York 10011.
Toronto Quest for Kindling
Authors: Lauzon Jani
Published: June 2023

During his lecture on philosophical anthropology at the University of Konigsberg in 1772, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant was quoted to have stated, “The American Indians have no motive force, for they are without affection and passion. They are incapable of governing themselves” and are “destined for extermination.”
A Solo Voice in Search of a Chorus
Authors: Chislett Anne
Published: June 2023

The Canadian panel was, for me, a great failure as was the conference as a whole. Despite all the well-documented difficulties with many of our guests, in the end I have only myself to blame for the fact that the Canada panel never got around to being what I and others involved had originally envisioned.
Aiming for the Centre
Authors: Barrie Shirley
Published: June 2023

My experience of being a woman writing for the theatre has been coloured and affected by living and working in two different countries. I was born and educated in Canada where I worked as a teacher. Then I went to England, initially for a year, and got involved in theatre, first as an administrator and artistic director, then as a playwright. Six years ago I returned to Canada. In the early ‘80s, when I was an artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre, a playwright and the mother of two young children, I was increasingly upset at the way women were shut out of the theatrical centre, but amazed at how easily a “radical” reputation could be created.
LAURIER: The History of the Village of the Small Huts Part V
Authors: Hollingsworth Michael
Published: June 2023

The History of the Village of the Small Huts – Part V Laurier premièred at Theatre Passe Muraille on 1 July 1991, with the following cast:
The Designer’s Process / 2: Scenography as it stands / The stands of scenography
Authors: Beauchamp Hélène
Published: June 2023

Through all of those years during which theatre has been a most constant companion, I have allowed myself to analyse scripts, even though I am not an author; to appreciate a director’s or an actress’s work, even though I am not a professional; to give my opinion on a company, even though I am not an administrator. But never have I spoken or written about stage design. This field was definitely not mine . . . and I was not good at drawing or choosing colours.
Margaret Anglin, A Stage Life
Authors: Vay John Le
Published: June 2023

Few readers of this review will know the name of Margaret Anglin (1876-1958). This may be a sad comment on the general interest and appreciation of the history of theatre in North America, but such is the reality of an art form that ceases to exist as soon as it is created. Had this long-lived, talented actress and producer made a few films - had she, like Marie Dressler or Ethel Barrymore, moved to Hollywood late in her career - she might now still be a familiar name, because we could see a small piece of her work. She did not; and yet she was, for a time, arguably the most important actress on the continent. Of the many important figures in the history of North American theatre who deserve to be retrieved from obscurity, Margaret Anglin is unquestionably one, both as representative of her time and as an influence on her time.
What More Could You Ask For?
Authors: Manning-Albert Jacqui
Published: June 2023

When CTR invited me to co-edit this issue on Music Theatre, I thought the best opener would be to talk to two of the most experienced professionals in the business of the Canadian musical: David Warrack, a producer and composer who does everything but act in music theatre, and Michael Ayoub, former artistic director of the Muskoka Festival, a producer who started as an actor. I asked them two questions: “How did you ever get into this?” and “Why do you stay in it?” In a moment it was an hour later.
Fireweeds: The Diary of a Dream
Authors: Dewsberry Elise
Published: June 2023

The busy first day hubbub of the Muskoka Festival’s annual Music Theatre Writers’ Colony. As an actress, I will be assigned to two different projects which we will rehearse all week and then present as staged readings with music for an invited audience. None of this is really new to me – this is my fourth season at Muskoka Festival. I know that this will be a busy, hectic, challenging, frustrating and rewarding week. After the usual early morning meet-and-greet with coffee and doughnuts and a welcome from artistic director Michael Ayoub and Colony co-ordinator Patrick Young, my first stop is rehearsal for my main project assignment – a new musical called Fireweeds by a writer I have not met – Cathy Elliott. We have been exiled to a basement room known as the “Grotto” with a tinny sounding electronic keyboard and the ever-present humming of the huge air conditioning units that service the theatre upstairs. No one is very happy about this – least of all our musical director Stephen Woodjetts. Along with director Patrick Young, veteran music theatre performer Diane Stapley and Muskoka Young Company member Robin Zionce, we await the arrival of our playwright / lyricist / composer. I don’t really remember her arrival – just that suddenly she is there – tiny and quiet – with a huge grin flashing out from behind masses of reddish curls. She seems nervous and shy – almost apologetic – until she sits down at the piano to play us some of her music. Her soft chameleon-hazel eyes sparkle alive; her small hands powerfully attack the keys; and the cool musty underground air of our basement room is filled with one of the warmest, richest, and most compelling voices I have ever heard. We read through the rough sketch outline of a half-hour first draft version of Fireweeds, stopping for Cathy to sing song after song. At the end of it all I find myself wanting it to go on and on. I can’t stand for the voice to end – the voice of her songs, the voice of her words, the voice of the soul of this unearthly little being that can reach right down into your heart and take hold and not let go.
It All Begins with a Story: “Skookum Jim’s Frog Helper”
Authors: Sidney Angela
Published: June 2023

To start with, they (Skookum Jim’s family) built a little log house there in Dyea. People used to go there a long time ago, before Skagway was a city. They had only one store there. They stayed there all the time, Skookum Jim’s family. But in fall time the ground is getting frozen already. But it’s coast, you know, that different climate.
Living Still, in Her Stories: Angela Sidney (January 4, 1902 – July 17, 1991)
Authors: Klassen Susan
Published: June 2023

When Angela Sidney was born, a prospector was making his way, on foot, from Coal Creek to Carcross. By the time he reached the village, all was dark and cold except for a light glowing from the tent-frame of Tagish John and his Tlingit wife, Maria. The prospector knocked and was welcomed in to warm himself by the fire.
On Independence and Survival
Authors: Qamaniq David , Cowan Cindy
Published: June 2023

In 1986 a group of eight people formed Tunooniq Theatre in Pond Inlet. They performed their first play, Changes to international audiences at Expo ‘86 in Vancouver. Since then they have become northern Canada’s most famous theatre company. David Qamaniq, one of those eight founding members, is currently writing a new play for Tunooniq. By phone in Pond Inlet to Cindy Cowan in Pangnirtung, he talked with CTR about his work. The interview was recorded with a microphone taped to the extension phone. Transportation and communication – the themes of Expo ‘86 where it all began for Tunooniq – take on a whole new meaning in the north!!
Apprehending the Canadian Landscape: A Profile of Playwright Leslie Hamson
Authors: Flather Patti
Published: June 2023

Playwright Leslie Hamson is sitting down to discuss her work in her cozy, cluttered Whitehorse home when her telephone rings. She takes the call – it’s someone helping her with spellings of Tlingit Indian words for the final draft of Last Rites. Set mainly in a trapper’s cabin in the Yukon bush, it’s the story of a dying woman coming to terms with the unfinished business in her life. The story had audiences in tears during its five-night run in Whitehorse in June. Produced by Nakai Theatre Ensemble and directed by Montrealer Svetlana Zylin, it was the first Yukon play featured at the new 420-seat Yukon Arts Centre in the Yukon capital.
Seduction and The Sydney Front
Authors: Goodall Jane
Published: June 2023

There is music: coloratura gibberish, mashed arias, just recogizably from Don Giovanni. As we enter, we are issued with cheap black plastic masks and told to put them on. The masks cling to the nose and forehead, making it difficult to breath. We move forward into the middle of the space where we stand looking at The Sydney Front who are staring at us. They have taken our seats and cordoned themselves off with barbed wire, leaving us to move awkwardly in the open centre of the studio, fully lit. Unable to rise to the demands of their space, to make a legitimate spectacle of ourselves, we are the dispossessed.
Manitoulin Island: Lessons from the Rainbow Circle
Authors: Crowder Eleanor
Published: June 2023

August, Wikemikong unceded territory, Manitoulin Island: Augusto Boal leads a ten-day workshop – the Rainbow Circle. Mixed Company hosts popular theatre workers from across the country. The native community hosts Mixed Company hosting popular theatre workers... great expectations: a world-famous director. A chance to work together as Canadians to address the issues raised by the constitutional debate. An invitation to work on native land with colleagues grounded in popular theatre techniques. An opportunity to debate the issues raised by working in Theatre of the Oppressed. A place to acknowledge our expertise and answer some of the questions.
The Theatre of Orphans/Native Languages on Stage
Authors: Favel Floyd
Published: June 2023

First of all I have to say that I am not a linguist, or a traditional theatre writing specialist of any sort. I am just someone who went to theatre school for a while, wrote and directed some plays, and acted a bit (albeit not very well), but just enough to count myself among those who have felt the terror, exhilaration and humiliation of that first light cue, not that this gives me any credentials to write selfishly the following pages.
Staging Shakespeare
Authors: Wilson Ann
Published: June 2023

The summer of 1992, remembered in Ontario for the endless dreariness of overcast days, rain and unrelenting cold, seemed to provide less than ideal conditions for a company launching a theatre festival which involved the production of a play in a tent. On the other hand, if you are committed to producing theatre with minimal protection from the harsh elements of nature, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play in which forces of nature are awry – the forgeries of the jealousy between Oberon and Titania – is perhaps as good a choice as any. And yet, this choice is not without implication because, after several hundred years of productions which have fostered endless debates and commentaries, the production of a play by Shakespeare occurs within a particular cultural context rather more obviously than do productions of plays by almost any other playwright. This much, at least is suggested by the company’s name, Another Shakespeare Project, which slyly nods to the proliferation of companies producing Shakespeare.
Weird Wet Snapping Sounds: The Rhythms of Radio Drama
Authors: Jansen Ann
Published: June 2023

Some years ago, CBC Radio’s Morningside presented a sound puzzle to its audience. The tape played was a montage of noises and music without narration or dialogue. Listeners were challenged to identify the story being related by the collection of sounds. The tape begins with music and ends with waves washing up on a beach, after a sequence of sound effects, some eminently recognizable – a child crying, a dog barking – and some more mysterious – a clanking sound, an explosion of some sort. Even the familiar sounds are hard to contextualize: yes, that’s applause, but who is applauding and for what reason? A series of sounds seems clearly related to growing up: a woman gives birth, a boy plays with a dog, wedding bells ring. Another child cries. When the piece was played again with narration, the story assumed one simple shape: an astronaut in a shuttle recalls his life in the moments before the final blow-up. The Challenger disaster.
Deconstructing Dames: Women and a “New Poetics”
Authors: Lamie Trisha
Published: June 2023

Darkness, Light, Hunger, Desire, Waiting are all strongly linked for me in Art, and in creation. The Bible says “In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh”. There is a strong link between the text or the word and the body or the visual, between textuality and sexuality.
Toronto That’s where the passion comes from: More from Eileen O’Toole in conversation with Trisha Lamie
Authors: O’Toole Eileen
Published: June 2023

what am i following? it drives me. that’s where the passion comes from. personality can be faked. it’s a devious thing. drive is the only way that you’ll see soul. i’ve always had a drive to perform. it’s very strange, some are driven to make money or to see extensions of themselves in children. i can’t pinpoint a compulsion to work. i just see it as a blessing. when the muse comes to you it’s a gift and you don’t force it. it presents itself. it’s like a painting, a dream. you can’t insult it by faking your way. Lester’s Girlfriend stuff came as a surprise to me because i spent most of my 20s as an actress learning material and keeping a repetoire of other people’s work. when she, LG, was doing the writing I always had the punch line. the ending i always knew, and it was a race for me to fill the inbetween. I don’t feel it’s schizo, i simply don’t question how much detail my imagination can provide me. I don’t feel I am LG, but I am aware that my observations of life are not mirrored in my work. It’s too confining to say split personality, the imagination is like a bush. like a 24 piece china set. Trish said she really loved LG and eileen said yeah but would you invite her to dinner?
Cosmopolitiks in the Age of LOON
Authors: Jacobson Rose
Published: June 2023

One of my favourite moments at LOON Cafe was the spectacle of five Toronto theatre critics conjuring up instant reviews before a live audience of actors, writers, and theatre directors. It wasn’t just the fantasy of every performer there to witness a moment of mutual vulnerability between critic and artist. It was yet another indication of a genuine movement within Toronto’s theatre community to “deregulate” the boundaries of theatre art.
The Hungry Spirit: Selected Plays and Prose
Authors: Gowan Elsie Park , Day Moira , Lynde Denyse
Published: June 2023

Editor Moira Day has firmly “restored” Elsie Park Gowan “to the canon of woman’s dramatic writing in Western Canada” (p. 32) with the publication of The Hungry Spirit: Selected Plays and Prose. The collection samples Gowan’s writing from her first play, Homestead, written in 1933, to one of her numerous radio dramas, High Green Gate, first broadcast in 1952. Day has chosen judiciously and publishes pieces that indicate the wide range of Gowan’s creative output. Included with the six plays are two examples of Gowan’s prose. The prose selections further illustrate Gowan’s strong liberal feminism and place Gowan’s work firmly within the larger context of social reform.
The Salome Dancer: The Life and Times of Maud Allan
Authors: Cherniavsky Felix , Boone Laurel
Published: June 2023

Of the four American dancers who changed the course of dance history at the turn of the century, only Isadora Duncan and Ruth St Denis remain well-known; Loie Fuller and Maud Allan are all but forgotten. In The Salome Dancer: The Life and Times of Maud Allan, Felix Cherniavsky remedies part of this deficit.
Press Pass: Second City: Giving Them Funny
Authors: Klisivitch Jake , Pounsett Geoff
Published: June 2023

Okay – there’s the occasional rubber chicken,“ Kathryn Greenwood allows, laughing and glancing over to Second City castmate Jonathan Wilson. Sitting at the edge of the stage at Toronto’s Old Firehall Theatre, they are trying to explain what the comedy troupe is all about and, perhaps, they are a little defensive.
A Live Bird in Its Jaws, Urban Myths: Anton & No Cycle
Authors: Delisle Jeanne-Mance , Saint-Piene Yves , Lieblein Leatiote , Standjofski Harry
Published: June 2023

The dramatic work of Jeanne-Mance Delisle deserves to be known by an English-speaking public. Regrettably, Un réel ben beau ben triste (1981), the work on which her reputation as a dramatist was built, remains untranslated. Thus Yves Saint-Pierre’s able rendering of the play for which she received the Governor General’s Award for drama in 1987 is all the more welcome.
Six Canadian Plays, Escape Acts: Seven Canadian One-Acts
Authors: Hamill Tony , Cunan Colleen , Mullaly Edward
Published: June 2023

Short plays – possibly like short stories, their undervalued counterpart in fiction – do not carry much weight in the theatrical main stream. For every Overlaid, there are dozens of shallow dabblings in situation, emotion or character. This is one reason why they seem to find their niche more in high school drama festivals than on the professional main stages.
Actor as Master: The journey away from self
Authors: Lauzon Jani
Published: June 2023

I was never satisfied with mediocrity. I want to be a master. Not for the sake of authority, but for the purpose of honouring the importance of existence. The ultimate expression of creativity is the gift of life. Since the experience in my very first creative movement class when I was six, after what I now deem was a moving, honest portrayal of a chicken hatching from a egg, I began to recognize my starvation for all things creative. My journey from the innocence of child dramatics to my present state of humble simplicity has gone from gluttony to anorexia, leading to what I hope is a nutritionally balanced diet. My task is to leap courageously through concrete walls of fear, to splash about in a rich pool of emotions, so that I may use the language of theatre to invite others to FEEL ALONGSIDE ME. All this is so that we may connect ourselves with our inner knowledge, to discover our individual stories, in relationship to ALL OUR RELATIONS of course.
The Queens, Costumes and Scripts in the Elizabethan Theatres
Authors: Chaurette Normand , Gaboriau Linda , Macintyre Jean , Knowles Richard Paul
Published: June 2023

The Queens, Normand Chaurette’s revisioning “explosion” of the “chorus of women” scene in IV.iv of Shakespeare’s Richard III (“I had an Edward, till a Richard kill’d him,” etc.), is the latest in a series of important Quebec plays to make it into English Canada by way of Linda Gaboriau’s sensitive translations. It is also the latest in a series of plays and productions in both Quebec and English Canada, ranging from Goodnight Desdemona to the Robert Lepage / Michel Garneau Shakespeare trilogy, that use or purposefully misuse Shakespeare as inspiration, point of departure or point of resistance.
The Oil Show
Authors: Amos Janet , Anglin Anne , Cooper Howard , D’Aquila Diane , English Dian , Johns Ted , Peterson Eric , Potter Miles , Savage Booth , Tweed Terry , Johns Ted
Published: June 2023

The spring of 1974 was a heady time. Someone could entertain any number of foolish ideas including the founding of a theatre magazine. At Passe Muraille anything seemed possible and we were doing a pretty good imitation of Stephen Leacock’s horseman who got on his mount and rode off in all directions. My memory of 1974 is so full of events that I’m not sure how they all fit together. We must have done the Donnelly tour just before Christmas because Rachel was conceived at Stratford while we were there playing the Festival stage. And that was why Anne was too pregnant to act in Oil, but could do the music. The 1837 tour must have been that spring because that was the year Eric started working with us. But I don’t think they had the red Dodge pickup for the toursince it was all new and shiny and didn’t get its first real marks of battle before Dian English pranged it in Petrolia. But how did that fit in with The Farm Show tour of Saskatchewan? And where did we find time for the radio and the television adaptations that paid for the truck ($4100)? Somewhere in there CODCO was returning to St John’s and setting up their home base. Somewhere in there Ted Johns wrote his first play. Somewherein there Eaton’s turned the heat off in Trinity Square. and we lost one of the great theatre spaces in Toronto. And somewhere in there we found the time to create a show for the people of Petrolia who wanted to revive their old opera house.
Creatively Treating Actuality: A Conversation with Robert Fothergill
Authors: Bird Kym , Nyman Ed
Published: June 2023

Robert Fothergill was born 1943 in Surrey, England. He emigrated to Canada in 1963, and for the past 31 years has been a professor of Drama at York University in Toronto. Fothergill’s first play, Something To Do (1966) directed by David Bolt, won a Hart House playwriting award. In 1970 CBC television produced his drama Countdown Canada, and in 1987 Detaining Mr Trotsky, directed by Richard Greenblatt, played at Toronto Free Theatre and won a Chalmers runner-up award. At the time this interview was conducted, Public Lies was also a nominee for the 1993 Chalmers Award. Kym Bird and Ed Nyman spoke to Fothergill last April at their usual donut shop.
Christopher Newton: Unsure But Incredibly True
Authors: Rae Lisbie
Published: June 2023

Thirty years ago, in June 1964, a young actor stepped on to a make-shift stage upstairs in the Court House in Niagara-on-the-Lake to play a character auspiciously named “A” in Shaw’s Village Wooing. After a circuitous route through many of the regional theatres in Canada, he returned in 1980 as the Artistic Director destined to set the Shaw Festival on a productive new course. That young man was Christopher Newton, and his career to date spans three of the most interesting decades in Canadian theatre, touching many of the groups that have shaped what Canadian theatre is today — Canadian Players, Manitoba Theatre Centre, Stratford Festival, Theatre Calgary, Vancouver Playhouse. Looking at these thirty years in the life of one actor-director puts a personal face on the recent history of theatre in Canada; listening to his story, frequently told in his own words, we catch some of the great changes that Canadian Theatre Review has documented since 1974.
LA BRUTA INTERFERENCE
Authors: Kurapel Alberto , gaucho le Guanaco
Published: June 2023

Alberto Kurapel le Guanaco gaucho was born in 1946 in Santiago, Chile, and received a degree in theatre from the University of Chile in 1968. He worked with the University of Chile Theatre Institute and as an actor on radio and television until he emigrated to Canada following the 1973 coup d’état. In 1981 he founded La Compagnie des Arts Exilio in Montreal.

Breaking cultural barriers, his works are noted for their striking imagistic performances and their deep commitment to freedom and justice in art and life. His plays have been seen at various festivals in Montreal, Cape Breton, France, Argentina, Peru, Washington, D.C. and, in 1992, in Chile. Four volumes of his theatre work have been published by Editions Humanitas / nouvelle optic.