The 2011 Summer Stage Review (Part III)

I guess it’s time to look back a few weeks and catch up on some of my live theatre viewing, as well.

Camelot at the Festival Theatre (Stratford Shakespeare Festival)

The shortest way to discuss Camelot at Stratford is to say that it’s a good production of a bad show. I know that certain people out there (and one who might actually be reading this, in particular) will disagree with me on the latter half of that statement, but the fact remains that if one really looks at the show’s structure, major difficulties become evident. Be that as it may, giving credit where credit is due, the production at Stratford is decent. The cast is the show’s saving grace, with Geraint Wyn Davies bringing a rather modern humour to the text (though his vocals sometimes seemed a bit unenergized in the lackluster music numbers he’s burdened with) and Brent Carver pretty much saving the day every time he’s on stage as Pelinore (probably the best written role in the show, period). Unfortunately, Jonathan Winsby as Lancelot seems to have a French accent that comes and goes with the tide twice daily, and Lucy Peacock is pretty much wasted in the terribly written part of Morgan le Fey, but still the production looks and sounds good and they do their best to keep things moving along. That said, they were still unable to convince me to like Camelot, the show; I still think it’s a hack job of writing. (The original production had many challenges – the first show in Toronto went until nearly one in the morning and major cuts came afterwards, and one can only wonder if at some point they should have said, “Wipe the slate clean. Let’s start from scratch.” – and Loewe didn’t even want to write the music in the first place. Hmmm.)

Next to Normal at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts (Dancap)

More than a show about a family dealing with mental health, Next to Normal is about a family dealing with each other on many levels: dealing with grief, with marriage, with parenthood and childhood, and with the struggles that come when things (and people) don’t live up to expectations. The music serves the story well, though I can’t say one leaves the theatre singing anything in particular – I couldn’t for the life of me hum anything from the show right now – and the writing keeps things moving along without feeling rushed. Though some of the … ahem … people of a certain generation around me expressed some confusion regarding some of the story, I didn’t find it that difficult to follow (and neither did my theatre-viewing companion, who doesn’t even read long books). If I have one complaint about the production, and I do, it’s that Alice Ripley in her Tony-winning role sang horribly. Not just “not that well”, but horribly. Her acting was top-notch, but that singing! Yikes! Her voice was being held somewhere back in her throat, her vowels were all over the place as she created diphthongs where none were to be found, and the result was that it was difficult, at times, to even understand her. Wondering how this could be a Tony-winning performance, I looked up some clips of her on YouTube and something was immediately evident: she had vocal coaches who helped her solve those problems. Evidence of bad habits was to be found in those earlier performances, but there were strategies being applied to overcome them. I can only conclude that, as the tour neared its conclusion, the quality control and vocal coaching had been abandoned. I would have liked to have seen her at her best. Still, at the end of the day, Next to Normal was a show worth seeing.

(It also reminded me of the television show The United States of Tara. There just didn't seem to be a good place to mention it above.)