Back in 2005, Andrea and I headed over to Lac Leamy for fireworks as part of the annual Casino festival. I managed a few pics, but what I am reminded of most with the fireworks is a ride on the bus afterwards. We got on the commuter bus back to Ottawa, and ended up sitting at the very back.
Two young kids ended up sitting next to me, and one fell asleep on the other, with the second one following not too long afterwards, while the two of them were leaning on me. Their mother came to rescue me, but I waved her off, just letting them sleep. One couple even took a picture of them sleeping. But when we stopped at one point, and the mother came to get them, the other couple thought it was hilarious that the kids weren’t even mine! Fun night. But it all started with fireworks.
I love roses in general, and while red ones are impressive, I confess I have more of an affinity for Osiana roses. They are somewhere between orange and pink, with many describing certain strands as peach-coloured. I discovered them at a flower shop in downtown Ottawa back in ’95 when I was working in a very drab office with high walls, twisting corridors, and no windows anywhere near me. Each week or so, I would pick up some flowers to brighten up the office.
Yet I often hesitate to shell out the big bucks for them as gifts. I’d rather go out for dinner than buy something a friend of mine laments are “just going to die”. Valentine’s Day is the law of supply and demand at its worst. High demand, limited supply, very few substitutes for roses = high prices, almost predatory even. I remember sending some to a friend one time when she was feeling down and alone, and at the rate I was charged for Valentine’s Day, she could have had flowers every week for a month in just about any other month of the year.
So Jacob and I occasionally grab simple flowers if we want to give Andrea flowers, or a seasonal plant, perhaps. But back in 2005, Andrea was away for Valentine’s Day, and I wanted to get some flowers for her return. It was a pretty decent bouquet, if I do say so myself. There used to be a flower shop in the mall at work, long gone now. But it met the need that day.
My wife and I enjoy the NAC Orchestra shows, particularly the Pops, and if it wasn’t for simple cost and logistics, we’d sign up for them every year. Instead, we pick and choose the shows we want along with some others. With 17 shows across multiple venues, this was outing #2 this year. The theme for the night? The music of John Williams, namely from all his soundtracks of the greatest hits of films.
Up first was the Main Title from Star Wars (1977), and it’s a great blockbuster opening. From there, they slid into Superman March from Superman (1978). Just those two alone would be worth the price of admission for some people, including me.
After that, they went through The Flight to Neverland from Hook (1991), excerpts from Artificial Intelligence (2001), The Cowboys Overture from The Cowboys (1972), and Theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). They’re all good, and the Cowboys Overture has that big epic Western feel to it. But none are amazing.
The first half ended with Devil’s Dance from the Witches of Eastwick (1987) (aka Dance of the Witches), which I don’t remember being quite so Hallowe’enish in its feel, and then the blockbuster Raider’s March from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Pick these two plus the first two, and I could call it a night.
The second half started off with Liberty Fanfare (1986) which apparently Williams composed as a tribute for the re-inauguration/opening of the Statue of Liberty. Okay, not amazing. Suite from Far and Away (1992), Theme from Schindler’s List (1993), Hedwig’s Theme and Harry’s Wondrous World from Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone (2001) followed, and while they were all good, only Hedwig’s Theme had a bit of innovation in it to keep it interesting. The concert master and first chair violin Yosuke Kawasaki played Schindler’s List, which was a great violin piece, but not really a challenge for the master.
Next up was the Shark Theme from Jaws (1975) and the sound is iconic. Plus conductor Jack Everly played with a hand puppet shark for laughs during the piece, which was fun. I was a bit disappointed with the Main Theme from Jurassic Park (1993), didn’t really excite me, although perhaps that’s because it is from the start of the movie before chaos reigns.
Last on the official programme was the classic “Adventures on Earth” from E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982). It felt great to hear, although that may be partly because we just watched it a week ago with our son.
For an encore, they dusted off another Star Wars one, which was one of the marches from Return of the Jedi, I think, as it has the lighter Ewok theme worked into it a couple of places.
Overall, 17 pieces for the night, although I would have been perfectly happy with just five of them. Six if you include the encore. Still, the rest were all nostalgia for the movies, and enjoyable.
If you’re interested, here’s an Apple Playlist with all the music:
My wife and I went to see the show called “The Wedding Party” at the National Arts Centre this past weekend, and I absolutely loved it. It made me fall in love with professional plays again.
Now you may be thinking, what’s not to love? But I confess that I have a bit of a love / hate relationship with the NAC when it comes to plays. Almost every play that I have seen at the NAC, not a huge number admittedly, have been pretty damn good. And all of them were well-acted. The hate part comes from the fundamental challenge that the artistic director faces each year in selecting plays. An interview a few years ago with one of the new appointees noted that they had to choose between material that was easily accessible to all audiences – almost commercial pablum in some cases – or more culturally risky, artistically challenging, creatively provocative offerings. Most of the ADs opt for the second type, and much of their subscriber base would agree, relegating commercial pablum to “lesser theatres” for the masses, i.e. not appropriate for the, sniff, NAC theatre. Or was that NAC thEATre, with a lilt in the middle and a thrust upwards of the nose?
During the interview, the AD referred to the first type, the commercial pablum, with the example of the play Salt Water Moon by David French. It was an interesting reference because it was one of the plays I had seen there and absolutely LOVED. Yet, every year since then, I review the list of upcoming plays and generally yawn. I’m sure they’re well-acted, but they don’t interest me. Often there’s a Shakespearean era, classical style play. Good but not my favorite style. Historical? I have little interest in a playwright’s view of the relationship between a Prime Minister and his maid, for instance, or the culturally sensitive overview of an minority group’s treatment during the late 1800s. I’m willing to read an article about it, or deal with similar issues at work, but it’s not what I’m looking for in the way of entertainment, preferring lighter fare for a night out. Partly as I often find the nuancing superficial and exploitative, and I’ve seen more provocative insightful pieces in print. But I digress.
Instead, my wife and I often opt for the Ottawa Little Theatre, a play at Centrepointe or Kanata, or more likely still, NAC pop orchestra outings. The plays at OLT are good, and out of 8 or 9 plays in a year, we normally like at least four for acting and script, another two for either one, another one or so for being “okay”, and two that might be simply so-so.
Still, every year I check the NAC English Theatre series announcements, and just about every year I pass. Some are okay sounding, but when you add in the cost, the time commitment for a rare night out, babysitter, etc., “okay” isn’t enough to get me over the purchase hump. Then I saw the description of the Wedding Party:
What do estranged twins, Moldovan circus performers, a Bernese Mountain Dog and several bottles of expensive champagne have in common? In The Wedding Party, the answer is nothing . . . and everything! Save the date for this wild romp through that most stressful and bizarre of rituals – the joyous, hellish and often alcohol-fuelled post-wedding reception. This comedic tour-de-force features regulars from the Stratford and Shaw festivals.
Careening between a shambolic war of compliments, fraying nerves and a mind-blowing, character-swapping cast of dozens, The Wedding Party will have you entirely complicit in the chaos!
If you ignore the normal hyperbole of descriptions, the underlying premise is a “slice of normal life” with something most audiences can relate to – a wedding reception. I find the dynamics of wedding organizing fascinating, from our wedding planning experience all the way through to other people’s weddings we’ve attended or others we just heard about from friends. I was in.
I didn’t quite know what the extra description was all about, but it seemed simple enough. I even liked the setup at the theatre with signs welcoming you to the wedding of Sherry and Jack, and signs directing you to the right (friends/family of the groom) or left (friends/family of the bride). Cute touch. The stage was set up for what looked like a nice open area, kind of like a sitting area just outside a reception hall, etc. Then the play started and a magician came out talking about cheesy disappearing acts and sending people back to the Garden of Eden. WTF? Was I tricked? Was this some whackadoodle of a show?
No, it’s fine. That little vignette disappears, being left unexplained at the time, and the main play starts. You mean a few key characters … the mother of the bride initially, as well as the wedding planner. Guess what, there’s a bit of tension in the air as it becomes clear Sherry’s family is not that well-off and Jack’s family is loaded. As such, Mama of the bride is feeling a bit out of place against a wedding that in her estimate must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (including a last minute addition of a 100 person choir!). You shortly thereafter meet the parents of the groom, and while the mother of the groom is trying to keep things a bit on an even keel, the father of the groom thinks the bride and her family are all embarrassments. Tension mounts, and there’s lots of humour as it goes.
Then you start to notice something, if you haven’t already. A new character comes in, and it’s the same actor playing one of the other parts. Oh, I get it, the actors play multiple parts, cool. Absolutely they do…most have 3 or more roles over the course of the play, making it seem like the actual cast of 6 is more like 15 or more. I know that this approach is quite common, but I’ve usually only seen it with one-actor playing all the roles or one or two doing it, never all of them playing 3 each. My limited experience, I guess.
Three of the combinations are awesome. Tom Rooney plays both the father of the groom, Jack, and his estranged twin brother Tony. Obviously, they can’t be on stage at the same time (or can they?) and there is an in-joke about the photographer wanting a photo of the two brothers together, which Jack responds to dryly with “That’s probably not going to happen”. I don’t want to spoil things, but they do find a way to interact, and it is way better than anything I would have expected.
Equally, Moya O’Connell plays the mother of the groom, and Jack’s wife, plus a “much younger” friend of her son, Alice, who serves as “emcee” for the party. At one point, she complains to another character that she’s upset that her husband called her Alice by mistake, and the “in joke” / meta response is that “Well, in his defense, you do look a lot alike”. The funny thing is that at first I didn’t even realize it was her. Alice is 20 years younger, at least, with glasses, accent, and different hair. She was awesome. It’s funny though, I kept thinking she looked familiar and that couldn’t be because I haven’t seen anything for her to have been in lately. I ran through the list of screen credits too, and missed one – she was in a single episode of the TV show Andromeda that I binge-watched last year. IMDB helped me figure it out, so yes, she did look familiar.
The third one though is a bit “different”. Jason Cadieux plays an uncle of the bride, lawyer for the groom’s company, and get ready for it, grandmother of the bride. Edna is a sparkplug. Think Sophia from Golden Girls with another foot of height, another 100 pounds of heft, hairy chest, a raspy voice, and nowhere near the good health. He was flat-out awesome.
The play continues on with tension between the families over money, alcohol consumption, and control over the look and feel of the wedding reception, and tension within each of the families (Sherry didn’t want her mom to make a speech, Jack’s dealing with the estranged brother and some marital bumps with his wife). All are source for humour, as long as you don’t have to live it. It’s a train wreck of a wedding reception where all of the things that can go wrong emotionally do go off the rails. If you don’t recognize at least a few of the characters from past weddings you have been at, you weren’t paying attention!
I confess there are a couple of scenes that don’t work. One is the magic trick at the start. There’s a reason for it, but it’s not much of a payoff. Equally, a scene involving Kristen Thomas as the playwright, mother of the bride, and a dog where she’s making a speech as the dog and another where she’s talking like she’s the mother of the bride but wearing the dog setup kind of make no sense. But she’s the playwright, hard to argue she has it wrong. And finally a scene where an interaction between two characters ends, one leaves and exits the play, and the other is more or less just left hanging out on the stage, with no “resolution” to his storyline. Not enough to not enjoy the play, but more that it seemed like those scenes still need some tweaking even though it was workshopped repeatedly when they wrote it.
I laughed my ass off at numerous points, something I rarely experience in a play. And my wife and I both agreed it’s the best play we’ve seen in years. I spoke earlier today to a friend who was also at the show and her reaction was “meh”. She liked the acting, and Edna in particular, but the first half didn’t do it for her, and she didn’t find some roles that compelling. Those were ones that were awesome to me, partly as I know people who act exactly like that! 🙂 I had a blast, but art is always subjective.
I just hope the NAC series offers more pablum for the plebes like me in the future.
My wife and I had tickets for the latest NAC Pops show this week, and unlike the odd one last time (NAC Pops – Holiday Swing), this was a bit more their style when it comes to non-orchestral “modern music”. They’ll do Broadway or rock or a host of other “pop” sources for music, stick the orchestra in the back playing the music, and throw some good singers up front. I confess, at times, they bury the orchestra. But it’s still fun.
This one was along that line, with eighteen fantastic songs made popular by female artists. To handle vocals, the program had three female ex-Broadway-calibre performers — Katrina Rose Dideriksen (Hairspray, Rent, Grease, Legally Blonde, etc.), Cassidy Catanzaro (American Songbook, backups for big rock stars, songwriter), and Shayna Steele (Rent, Hairspray, Jesus Christ Superstar, huge backup opportunities with larger stars, etc.). Katrina is the young relative newbie, Cassidy is a bit older and richer voice, and Shayna is a bit older still with more experience and a more vibrant voice. They also portrayed themselves that way throughout the night — Katrina was the “rocker”, Cassidy was the experienced singer, and Shayna was the aging (but not old) master with some down-home funk.
The show opened with Katrina singing “Piece of My Heart” (Janis Joplin), and while it was okay, I found her a bit off-putting. It seemed like she was singing it, not embodying it, and some of her vocal stylings didn’t seem to fit the song. This trend would continue for most of the night.
Next up was Shayna with “Dancing in the Street” (Martha Reeves), and she knocked it out of the park. It’s a bit odd to hear the song with a full orchestra backing it up, but it was great.
Cassidy came out to do “So Far Away” (Carole King) and it was clear this girl could sing. The song didn’t challenge her much, and she was holding back, but it was great.
Then it was back to Katrina to do “Flashdance…What A Feeling” (Irene Cara). If you remember the movie, and the scene where this is sang, you know that it starts off REALLY slow. In fact, I remember reading a short article about how the opening slowness is deliberately meant to represent “holding back”, but while I find it TOO slow in the full recording, this version seemed EVEN slower. And worse, when Katrina was singing the slow or up-tempo portions, there was almost no emotional content in the song. The first part is meant to be pain (“It hurts when there’s nothing…”) followed by the joy of dance and music sending all of that pain into oblivion. If she was a B-stage singer at a concert hall, it would have been fine. In an NAC hall with limited audience reaction and energy, it fell kind of flat. And there was something familiar about her that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. More later.
Shayna came back to do “Both Sides Now” (Joni Mitchell) and I hate to knock her, but it was the wrong choice for her age and voice, in my opinion at least. She did a great job, but the Joni Mitchell version at age 25 captured the innocence in the voice, a youthful spirit. Hearing a 40-something woman with a full rich voice doing it seemed odd to me. Good, but not awesome. By contrast, she followed it up with “Freeway of Love” (Aretha Franklin) and it was AMAZING. In addition, hearing the orchestra come in on the horns section was awe-inspiring. It’s not often you hear an orchestra really do justice to some of the simpler stylings in the rock anthems, but when you need a horn or string sound, these are the guys and gals to do it. Fantastic.
Cassidy came back out for another Carole King song, “Up on the Roof”, and it was solid, but not out of the park.
The last single song for the set was “Love is a Battlefield” (Pat Benatar) done as a ballad. Apparently it was originally a ballad, but Benatar turned it into an uptempo rock anthem, and Holly Knight would only license it to them to do a ballad version in the show. It was interesting, and Katrina did a great job (best one of the half for her), but it was a very strange version to hear. Not a Katrina problem, just a song I didn’t enjoy.
The first half closed off with the three of them doing “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman” (Carole King), and the three of them together are a pretty impressive sight. I was hoping there would be more of that in the second half.
As I mentioned above, often the orchestra doesn’t get a whole lot to do on the nights where there are singers and dancers in front of them. I don’t mean they’re not playing, I just mean they are only lightly showcased. Often the conductor throws them a bone and they do one or two instrumentals to show off, but they aren’t usually true showcases for their talents. Tonight’s “bone” was “Pick Up the Pieces” (The Average White Band), and you’ve heard it a thousand times for TV shows and movies probably without having any idea what it was. Here is a version on Youtube:
But for a “bone”, it was kind of fun to hear the orchestra play it in full.
Katrina did the lead for “I Love Rock and Roll” (Joan Jett) with the other two handling backup duties, and while Katrina was trying to sell herself as the “rocker”, I was still feeling like she was reminding me of someone I’d seen before. And it suddenly hit me, because I’d read her bio at the start of the show. She wasn’t just IN the show “Rent”, she played Mimi. For those of you who aren’t obsessed with the show like I am, Mimi is basically a very young-looking 19 with the possibility that she is lying about her age, dancing in a strip club (it involves a lawn chair and handcuffs apparently), and hooked on drugs. She is extremely immature despite claiming to be otherwise, and her sole purpose in life is to feel good (hence the drugs). Her big number? She is a “cat” who wants to go out and “howl at the moon” — “I want to go oouUUTT tonight”. And one of her signature moves is to dance really hard and shake her legs like she can’t sit still, along with a staccato singing voice. Which is EXACTLY what it looked like Katrina was doing. An older version of Mimi singing rock songs. And why I was seeing her as familiar — I hadn’t seen Katrina before, I was seeing an echo of the Mimi character.
And while I like Mimi, I wouldn’t want to be friends with her. She’s shallow, immature, flighty, etc. Not what you’re looking for in a “power ballad singer”. But I digress.
Next up was a solo for Katrina, “These Dreams” (Heart). The song slows it down a bit, a bit more of a softer ballad. And out of NOWHERE, comes this fantastic voice. She did an AWESOME job of it. No Mimi, no playing like a wannabe 30-something ex-rocker chick, just Katrina singing normal. Freaking awesome version.
The next three were quick hits…Shayna doing an okay job with “Best (Simply The Best)” (Tina Turner), Cassidy doing a good job with “I Feel The Earth Move” (Carole King), and Cassidy again giving a solid rendition of “You’ve Got A Friend” (Carole King) with okay audience sing-along for some of the verses.
Katrina came back out, I was hoping for another awesome song, and we were back to Mimi doing “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” (Pat Benatar). The horns were great in the song, while the string section seemed mostly along for the ride.
Then Shayna closed out the solos with “What’s Love Got To Do With It” (Tina Turner). It wasn’t the best song she did all night, and I wondered if part of it was the repetitive nature of the second half of the song. She just seemed to fizzle a bit. Might just be me.
And then the finale.
All three came out and did “Proud Mary” (Tina Turner) with all three of them taking a turn as lead vocals (Shayna, Cassidy and Katrina). Great way to end, including for the obvious encore.
So overall, a much more enjoyable evening than the last time where we saw a scat version of the Dreidel song. 🙂
