Montreal’s Guilty Pleasure – Rover review of Schwartz’s: The Musical

by JAMES GARTLER for Rover Arts

If you’re used to seeing long line-ups outside Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen on The Main, prepare to see them at Centaur Theatre’s box office as well. The love-letter to Montreal that is Schwartz’s The Musical will surely be drawing in crowds both meat-loving and vegetarian, local and visiting, and young and old for one reason and one reason alone: this city’s long overdue for a love-in.

Leading the musical charge are Bowser and Blue, the legendary local duo who have made a career out of poking fun at our political situation and cultural quirks. Along with Director Roy Surette, they’ve adapted Bill Brownstein’s book on the beloved restaurant into a two-act celebration of everything that’s note-worthy about its on-going success. But does it all go down as easy as a smoked meat sandwich and a Cott Black Cherry Soda?

That depends on your tastes (…)

Continue reading on www.roverarts.com/…/

 

Hobo With a Shotgun: madcap movie

The buzz actually began in 2007, when Eisener and his friends threw together a fake trailer for a contest announced on Ain’t It Cool News. Shot on a $150 budget for beer and pizza, their two-minute clip won the competition – co-sponsored by the SXSW Film Festival and Robert Rodriguez – which led to the trailer playing before all Canadian showings of Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s double-feature Grindhouse.

Eisener’s stock rose when his film Treevenge won the audience-voted best short film award at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival in 2008 and received an honourable mention at Sundance.

Read more at: MontrealGazette.com

Viola Léger, 81, returns to the stage

At a book launch more than 30 years ago, Mail-let had her friend Léger get in costume and do a few scenes. The response was through the roof, the part became a stage play, and in over 1,400 performances by Léger through the decades, Maillet’s storytelling gifts never found greater expression.

It returns to Montreal’s Segal Centre in a new translation by Wayne Grady—its last performance here, when the venue was called the Saidye Bronfman, happened in 1979.

Read more at; MontrealMirror.com

Chantefable: Puppetry, storytelling and more

Aucassin and Nicolette live in a time of war. Aucassin is the son of a count. Nicolette is one of the count’s slaves, although we eventually find out she is the daughter of a king and was snatched from her family to be forced into slavery. They come from different cultures, races and rungs on the nobility ladder. Theirs is a forbidden love.

The fathers find it easier to perpetuate hate and misinformation than to risk the rigours of forging common ground. Sound familiar?

And so the two love birds must survive betrayal, kidnapping, attempts on their lives and the sting of hatred and war before finally sealing their commitment with a kiss.

Read more at: MontrealGazette.com

Le Musée McCord a 90 ans : 90 raisons d’y aller

Portrait, qui date de 1786, d'une femme haïtienne longtemps considérée comme l'esclave de l'artiste François Malépart de Beaucourt (1740-1794) en sol québécois. PHOTO: FOURNIE PAR LE MUSÉE MCCORD

Jocelyne Lepage pour La Presse

Le Musée McCord a 90 ans cette année. Pour souligner l’événement, le musée d’histoire de la rue Sherbrooke Ouest a choisi, dans le million et demi d’artefacts que contiennent ses fabuleuses collections, 90 objets qui racontent autant d’histoires, et encore plus.

Le choix des objets exposés au Musée McCord n’a pas été fait au hasard. Le musée a en effet demandé aux six conservateurs des différentes collections de choisir 15 artefacts chacun. On sentait bien lors de la visite de presse cette semaine que chaque conservateur aurait aimé en présenter au moins le double, et même beaucoup plus.

Nous avons fait le tour de l’exposition en compagnie de l’un d’eux, le responsable des archives, François Cartier. Les histoires que nous racontons ici sont surtout les siennes.

M. Davis Ross McCord, avocat de Montréal dans les années 1880, était un grand collectionneur passionné d’histoire. Celle des autochtones, celle des Français qui ont perdu la guerre et des Anglais qui l’ont gagnée en 1760. On retrouve donc, dans une vitrine à l’entrée de l’exposition, trois artefacts représentatifs: un petit panier perlé, un document signé par Frontenac en 1690 et… une mèche de cheveux de Wolfe conservée dans un médaillon.

Larry Tremblay’s play Dragonfly soars — Québécois love-hate relationship with English

By Marianne Ackerman for The Gazette

Tuesday night on St. Laurent Blvd., a gaggle of girls from Dawson College collect in the lobby of Théâtre Espace Go after the performance. Their faces bear the familiar frozen look of spectators newly released from the grip of imagination not their own. It’s a school assignment: imbibe a little francophone culture.

So what did you think of the play? I ask. A dark-haired beauty shrugs, her friends giggle. Intense. Weird. Heads bobbing, yes, they liked it. Not much else to say, but all agree that what they were not expecting from this hyper-modern French theatre deep in the heart of Mile End was to find francophone actors speaking English. A kind of English you don’t hear every day.

“I travel a lot I see a lot of things very different from what we are used to see here of course when we travel we see different things that’s quite sure but I have the feeling to tell it to repeat it why I don’t really know maybe saying it I just want to make contact to keep in touch as we say What a nice expression TO KEEP IN TOUCH I like it I love it I appreciate it so much.”

Thus begins The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi, Larry Tremblay’s hugely popular monologue, written in 1993 and performed more than 100 times by Jean Louis Millette in Montreal, Chicoutimi and Vancouver, a run cut short by the actor’s sudden death in 1999.

This month, a bold new interpretation directed by Claude Poissant at Espace Go turns the monologue into a choral work with five actors playing different aspects of Gaston Talbot, a solitary traveller struck mute by a violent event in adolescence. When he finally recovered his voice, the only words that came out were English, though the syntax and rhythm remained French.

Read the complete review on www.montrealgazette.com/…

The Shape of Things: Review

While working as a security guard, meek and geeky Adam meets a beautiful girl named Evelyn who’s only too eager to remake and remodel him. She gets him a haircut, suggests new clothes and manoeuvres him into dropping his old friends. He’s bewildered but happy about the attention his new image is getting. He likes the new man that, through her tutelage, he’s become. But the creepy feeling of nothing being what it seems pervades the story—a sense fully justified in the shocking payoff that closes the play.

Read more at: MontrealMirror.com

Bobby Bazini is turning heads with mix of soul, country

When Bazini’s parents split up shortly after a family move to Montreal, Bazini returned to Mont Laurier and moved in with his grandmother, basking in the sounds of her Johnny Cash collection. With her encouragement, he found himself playing at the Mont Laurier International Theatre Festival in 2008. In a life-changing moment, CFLO radio station DJ Hugo Sabourin jumped on stage to play drums with him. They played soul and rock covers, sneaking in a few Bazini originals.

Read more at: MontrealGazette.com

Theatre for Thought[ Joel Fishbane: CharPo]

Montreal’s stages are a breeding ground for new theatre, but once the initial production is over, it is a constant challenge for artists to help the new work mature. Our stages are filled with the echoes of the innovative:  Penumbra (Rabbit in a Hat),  Johnny Canuck and the Last Burlesque (Mainline Theatre) and  Life is a Dream (Scapegoat Carnivale) are all examples of recent shows which are each a paradise lost: each deserve further development and each will probably have to go somewhere else to get it.

Although independent artists are starting to make the jump to the mainstream our shows are rarely as fortunate.

Read more at: Charpo.blogspot.com

Festival Edgy Women: Annie et ses femmes

Annie Sprinkle: C’était dans le cadre d’une pièce appelée Post Porn Modernist, où je faisais une «annonce de cervix public» ! J’insérais un spéculum et invitais le public à venir regarder mon cervix (le col de l’utérus) avec une lampe de poche. C’était drôle et intéressant, je suis fière d’avoir conçu une telle performance historique, présentée dans 17 pays, pendant cinq ans, notamment à Montréal, en 1992, où je suis passée plusieurs fois grâce à Claude Chamberlan. Dans les 15 dernières années, je l’ai reprise seulement trois fois, mais c’était toujours aussi intéressant. Oui, je savais que c’était un acte controversé et marquant. Mais ce que j’ai fait après me semble encore plus intéressant: cela s’appelait Legend of The Ancient Sacred Prostitute (présenté à Montréal en 1993) et c’était un rituel magique de masturbation. Je crois que c’était encore plus provocant et puissant.

Q: Au festival Edgy Women, vous allez présenter cette fois Love Art Lab, qu’est-ce que c’est exactement?

Full interview at: Cyberpresse.ca