Theatrical Duds

Last week was not a good week in theatre for me.  On Wednesday, I went and saw Frayn's Copenhagen.  As I mentioned before, I didn't think that highly of it, mostly because it is far too static with three souls caught in the underworld going over this mysterious meeting in Copenhagen when Heisenberg may or may not have hinted that he wanted Bohr's help to help develop nuclear energy for Germany (while Denmark was still an occupied territory during WWII).  This caused an irreparable breach between the two scientists.  It was pretty hard to care about any of the characters, since the whole thing was focused on their retrospective careers and they kept replaying and redoing certain scenes, as if they still didn't know what had actually happened to them while alive.  This was a little like Idomeneus from last season (though Copenhagen was written prior to Idomeneus).  For the record I really disliked Idomeneus, and Copenhagen was better than that, but still the stakes were nil.  I saw a fair number of people leaving at the half.  I don't think word of mouth will be very kind (as it feels like a 2.5 hour lecture on atomic physics cribbed from Wikipedia), though it's the sort of play that panders to people and makes them feel smarter than they (probably) are. That's probably ultimately the reason it won so many awards.

Saturday I went to Monsieur d'Eon is a Woman by Mark Brownell. It was unbelievably terrible, just one stereotype after another about the British and the French, and the student actors really took every opportunity to mug and play things broadly.  I probably should have left during the first act but that would have been incredibly rude. But it seemed like an eon until intermission. Unfortunately, in my huff to get out of there, I left a library book, so had to call the house manager and stop back in on my way home from work.  It's a shame, since George Brown started out quite well with Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle and an adequate production of Shaw's You Never Can Tell.  (My views on Shaw have gotten harsher over the years. I think he is drastically over-rated, not least of all by himself.)  One positive is that because I left at intermission, I had time to stop in at the St. Lawrence Art Gallery and check out the show on Toronto women artists.  I'll blog about that shortly.

It doesn't look like I have any theatre scheduled for this weekend.  Next week I am checking out Shakespeare Bash'd's As You Like It (a good play aside from the ending) and Bigre, a wordless farce put on by Canadian Stage.  Also Video Cabaret has a new production in a new studio space near me (Queen and Logan), and I'll probably check that out.  It looks like they will be gearing up for a full season in the fall, and I'm eagerly anticipating that.