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Posts tagged ‘ryan quinn’

Mar 31

A Few Words with Mitchell Cushman – The 2013 Paprika Festival

Ryan Quinn: So, I’m here with Mitchell Cushman! The 2013 Paprika Festival is well underway. We’ve been hearing some exciting things about the new work being presented and expansive programming this year. Would you like to tell me a bit about the festival as a whole and what your role as Director of Artistic Programs means for the process?

Mitchell Cushman: Sure. The Paprika Festival is currently in its twelfth year of operations. I was actually in the second year as a participant, when the festival was a much smaller thing. Back then, there were just three programs going on, there was no mentorship, no auxiliary. Most of the aspects that make Paprika what it is now have come along in the past four or five years under the artistic production of Rob Kempson. He’s in his fourth and final year with the festival. He’s really expanded Paprika, so as opposed to it being a festival that happens once a year, there’s also eight months of programming leading up to it. There are now seven productions, which function at a distance from the festival. We select them all but then they rehearse on their own. It’s also a juried festival. We collect applications from high school and university students for shows, pick the ones we’re most excited about, and then offer mentor support, pairing each group with a professional artist who works with them over the year. Finally we give them a great place to present their pieces, the Tarragon extra space.

Aside from that, we also offer two weekly programs; the Creators’ Unit and the Resident Company. Those are both groups that people apply to as individuals, we then create ensembles through those applications, then we pair them up with professional mentors as directors and facilitators.

We have a playwright-in-residence program, whose individual plays will culminate in readings during the festival. We’re also offering mini-mentorships, which is kind of a junior version of that. We also have an Olde Spice program for people over 21. Our cutoff age for Paprika is usually 21, but this is more of an alumni program for people who’ve worked with us previously, and now we’re supporting their later work.

There’s also one more program that’s new this year called the Advisory Board, that’s a steering committee of people between the ages of 14 and 25 who are interested in producing.  They’ve been involved with the production of the festival. They’re running our studio cabaret late night series, so every night after the festival, there is some fantastic late-night programming courtesy of the advisory board.

R: So the festival seems to really help young artists trying to break into any aspect of production.

M: Absolutely. I think that’s the exciting way the festival has expanded, by really offering mentorship opportunities to people in every area, as you say. I think the festival really stands out because all of our productions are application-based and juried, so as much as it is a training program, we truly believe in the excellence we’re putting forward on stage as well. We look at it as “What’s the highest quality work we can present?”.

R: How does the experience change, then, when working with young people as opposed to working with people who’ve been in the theatre a longer time?

M: I think you get surprised more often. I mean, the fact that they’re fresh and new, and yet we’re blown away by the work they do. Especially this year, I think it’s the strongest year for Paprika. Everyone is coming from these places…I really feel like there are some strong new voices at work. There’s a fantastic piece being presented called This Play is Like, and on the surface it’s a play about a peanut allergy, but it’s really about how people can be allergic to their environments. It has a whole narrative shadow puppet show that compliments the main story. It’s one of the things that really blew me away when we were looking at all of the works this year.

R: As you mentioned before, the festival is expanding and adding new programs every year, gaining notoriety. Ideally, in ten years, what would the festival look like?

M: There are things that we’re doing in a small way now, that if we had the resources, we’d love to do in a bigger way for the future. Last year we hosted a school, where some of the productions went to schools and actually played for them, which was a perfect fit because they were playing to their peers. We’d love to do that in a bigger way and go to more schools. We’d also love to increase our outreach. Most of our participants hear about us through their schools but there are more and more who don’t. We’ve also talked about the idea of reaching out to other cities. For the first time this year, we have a group from out of the city, from Ottawa, who have been commuting in from there, if you can believe that! So, we love the idea of Paprika festivals in other places in Ontario, or even further, that we could partner with.

R: That sounds amazing. Well, thanks so much for your time and break a leg with this last week of Paprika!

M: Thanks!

The 12 Annual Paprika Festival runs March 27th – April 6th at the Tarragon Theatre Extra Space.
For complete show descriptions & a detailed calendar of their productions and events check out the Paprika Festival website: paprikafestival.com 
For tickets go to the Tarragon Theatre website. Shows have been selling out so catch them while you can!
 

Mar 13

Ryan Recommends: Death and the King’s Horseman

Wole Soyinka – Death and the King’s Horseman

In this examination of Nigerian colonialism and what follows it, a man meant to sacrifice himself for the passing of a great king is interrupted by British forces who seek to save his life without knowing the symbolic nature of the death. This beautifully written piece is relevant to both the ever present climate of “colony-vs-colonized” unrest in Canada; and to the continuing Westernization of media and history. In that sense, it reminded me a lot of another great work from Nigeria, Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart. In this piece as well, we have not only a hero doomed to tragedy, but an entire way of life and a culture doomed to tragedy because of the dominating force of Western influence. What I find most interesting, though, is that neither of these works is interested in specifically choosing a side. Neither explicitly tells us that the entrance of the Western people is a force for good or bad, simply that it puts into motion a paradigm shift that is very alienating for the Nigerian people.

The dialogue is quite difficult, repetitive and ritualistic at the beginning, but this transforms into a very easy-to-understand drama that can provoke a great discussion. It is almost as if the play itself is forced to adapt to colonization, as its form turns from a sort of dance ceremony into nearly becoming a conventional well-made play. However, I believe something is lost in that transformation. We move from lyricism to plot. We move from forces to characters. We move from summoning to staging. Both of these halves of the play have their own merits and worth, but in the midst of one, I found myself yearning for the other. To me, that means the show has really done its job. Incredibly highly recommended, and I’d love to see a staging of it.

Casting: 3F, 9M plus singers and dancers

Feb 27

Strong Shows in Small Spaces – Rarely Pure Theatre Opens The Pillowman

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I sat down with Ryan Quinn and David DiFrancesco, director and actor of Rarely Pure Theatre’s The Pillowman running from Wednesday February 27th to Sunday March 3rd at the Propeller Gallery. Over hot chocolate and croissants, we talk about the show, get to know these gentlemen, discuss the benefit of strong shows in small spaces and explore the challenges and benefits when working with those you know so well. We even get a little playlist to listen to before the show!

The Pillowman – Trailer

Hallie Seline: Tell me a little bit about Rarely Pure Theatre and something that we might not know about the company?

David DiFrancesco: Rarely Pure Theatre was started around last January by a group of people from the University of Windsor. Essentially, its function is to be a hub that artists can come to when they want to put on work and Rarely Pure will help them do it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be people we have worked with either. When someone has an idea for a show they can just throw it at us and we’ll work on all of the ins and outs to help put it on.

Ryan Quinn: This is our second production with Rarely Pure Theatre and as for something you might not know, we are now doing a dinner theatre in Erin Ontario!

HS: Tell me about that.

DD: We are going up to Erin Ontario, which is just outside of Brampton to do two performances of The Pillowman before our Toronto run. It’s going to be a dinner theatre feel at an inn location. It’s a small town that doesn’t get a lot of theatre, so they are very excited to have us up there and if all goes well, it may be something that we can continue doing with Rarely Pure.

RQ: Yeah, and I think what’s interesting is that with a lot of dinner theatre, the dinner becomes part of the theatre, whereas this is going to be more like you sit down for dinner then after you see a show. It will definitely be interesting to gauge the reactions of our dinner theatre audience who may think they are coming for a certain kind of theatre and will be getting, I believe, something quite different and a little more hard-hitting and real.

DD: The Pillowman has some dark themes to say the least.

RQ: Oh yeah. Reading The Pillowman, at times, still makes me feel uncomfortable but I believe at its heart, it has a very beautiful story. That’s what captures me every time. I read it, I get caught up in it, I feel disgusted with what the characters do and with what they say, but at the end it’s rewarding and actually kind of heartwarming.

HS: What is one thing that we might not know about you?

DD: Well, this is Ryan’s first full directorial show that he’s taking up all on his own, which is really exciting.

RQ: Last year I had the chance to work with Lee Wilson, assistant directing on The Merry Wives of Windsor up at Theatre By The Bay. This year I really wanted to do some of my own work and then maybe go back to assistant directing and hopefully continue to go back and forth to really develop both skills at once.

This has been a really big undertaking but it has been incredibly rewarding so far.

RQ: I’ve also started doing a little bit of stand-up comedy.

HS: Oh, that’s fun! And what about you, David?

DD: I’ve got nothing…

We all have a good chuckle about that.

HS: We’ll leave David as a Man of Mystery. So, why The Pillowman?

RQ: It’s a show we’ve been talking about doing since we were in second-year University. It came up in Scene Study and all of us were completely taken by it. The aspect that I still love about The Pillowman is how it still surprises me. I go through the script and I write things down like ‘Ok, I know the show is about this, and trying to talk about this,’ and then I read it again and I can come out with something completely different. It is a show that poses a lot of questions and doesn’t necessarily assert answers.

DD: Because it has been such a fantasy project for us, we never thought that it was actually going to happen. One of our main actors, Davydd Cook (who plays Tupolski), moved to Greece and we just figured it was never going to happen with just the few of us but he sent us a message saying he’d be back for the Christmas holidays and a few months after so we jumped at the opportunity. We just decided that it was now or never.

HS: What has been the most interesting or the most challenging aspect about working on this play as an actor, for you David, and as a director, Ryan?

DD: I think for me, the most challenging aspect has been finding my character Michal’s mentality. Because the character is slow, having severe mental damage from being beaten by his parents for several years, it has been interesting and a challenge trying to get into his mindset, figuring out where his thoughts are coming from and really attempting to speak through the truth of the character.

RQ: For me, it has been working with people who I know so well and their processes, which I also know so well, and still making sure they challenge each other. It can be tempting to say that something is good enough or to say ‘that’s what I thought you would bring to the table’. I needed to make sure that we kept the rehearsal process fresh and challenging in hopes of achieving the best from everyone involved. And they’re so good at that, leaving the years of experience that they have with each other at the door, getting in the space and really trying to affect one another. For something that I thought would be a bigger challenge, it has turned out to be a great benefit in many ways. We can regroup quicker and dive into the material, working relationships a lot more smoothly without the reserve there is at times when actors are meeting for the first time.

DD: I think that is the most exciting part about it too. Getting to work with these guys on our own project. We’ve never gotten to work just the five of us outside of school on something we were all really passionate about. It’s great.

HS: What should people hope to expect when coming to see The Pillowman?

RQ: Well, it’s at the Propeller Gallery (Queen Street West & Ossington), which is a small, intimate space and it is a very emotionally and physically violent play, so I think that audiences can expect to be taken for quite the ride and really feel the heart of this story. Some of the best shows that I have seen in Toronto have been in small, intimate spaces with shows that pull the audience in and make them feel complicit. I think that’s really what we’re going to do with this show – make the audience question what they’re watching, question why they’re enjoying it and question the nature of violence in theatre or in art.

DD: We have commissioned a couple of artists who have devised paintings for our play and they will be showcased around the gallery for the week, as it still needs to function as a gallery space. I think with all of the elements that we’ve employed, from the actors, to the projections we’ll be utilizing throughout the show, to the images showcased in the gallery, it will make for a very overwhelming show, to say the least.

HS: If someone from the audience could have a playlist to listen to before coming to see The Pillowman, what would you recommend they include on it?

RQ: This is the best question.

Gustav Holst – The Planets Suite. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHVsszW7Nds
It’s just a very emotional and god-like suite. It is very intense but also very gentle at times

Aphex Twin – “Selected Ambient Works 85-92”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw5AiRVqfqk
This is a really great album of ambient music, which is also very slow and droning.

Set Fire to Flames – “Sings Reign Rebuilder & Telegraphs in Negative”, “Mouths Trapped in Static” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPc26RnZij4
They are a group of improvisational musicians from Montreal who locked themselves in a house and starved themselves until they could write an entire album. It is the most raw, human thing I have ever heard because they just wanted to get it out there and to get out of the house, while still working to make something they could be proud of. It’s a little sadistic but it really made me think of the play.

Finally, there’s a great album by The Mountain Goats called “The Sunset Tree” or there’s a stripped-down acoustic version called “Come, Come to the Sunset Tree”, and it comes out of the lead singer’s experiences as an abused child. What I love about the album is how optimistic, child-like and full of wonder it is but always with that underlying darkness. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa-DWtGsl8I

DD: For me, there is a song by The Tallest Man on Earth called “Kids on the Run”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfYu4MEuQuQ
It’s about just looking back on life and not really being able to move forward, which is a lot of what my character deals with in the show.

270802_503688596348597_969923593_nHS: Now a little word association, for fun.

HS: Story-telling:

DD: The Pillowman
RQ: Danger

HS: Toronto:

DD: Crazy
RQ: Community

HS: Theatre:

DD: Awesome
RQ: Danger

HS: Pillow:

DD: Comfort
RQ: Smother

HS: Emerging Artist:

DD: Rarely Pure
RQ: Rarely Pure

HS: Favourite Spot in Toronto:

DD: The Stockyards (St. Clair Avenue West & Christie)
RQ: The Distillery District (Just south of Parliament & Front)

HS: Any last words?

DD: The seats for the show are very limited because we’re in a small art gallery and we can only fit approximately forty people, so there’s the possibility that there won’t be tickets available at the door. Advanced tickets are available at www.ticketbreak.com. Search The Pillowman. Other than that, I’m just very excited for this show and we can’t wait to put it out there for you all.

RQ: Yeah, I’m really excited about the show. Every single person that we are working with in design, illustration, music, lighting, is so talented and so ‘on-the-ball’ with this piece. It really blows me away how beautiful the show has become and how much everyone has been able to contribute to our final product. We can’t wait for people to see it.

The Pillowman opens tonight until Sunday March 3rd.
 
Breakdown: Katurian the writer stays in and writes stories. That’s it. Brilliant but often grotesque tales, shaped by a twisted childhood experiment conducted by his own parents towards his brother, Michal, heard through the cracks in the wall separating the siblings. Now Katurian has been blindfolded and taken out of his home to face questioning at the hands of two brutal detectives, representatives of an ominous totalitarian state. His stories have put them on the trail of a serial child killer, and several lives hang in the balance as Katurian wrestles with his responsibilities to (and for) his art. Martin McDonagh’s play is a harrowing and blackly funny meditation on the tricky power of words to shape the world.
 
Where: Propeller Gallery (984 Queen W)
When: Wednesday, February 27th to Sunday March 3rd
Time: 8pm
Tickets: $10 and can be bought online here:

http://www.ticketbreak.com/Pages/Search.aspx?search=rarely+pure+theatre

For more on Rarely Pure Theatre: http://rarelypuretheatre.com/ https://www.facebook.com/RarelyPureTheatre

Jan 23

A Few Words with Hart House’s Jeremy Hutton

By: Ryan Quinn

RQ: So, Robin Hood started as collective creation at Shakespeare by the Sea, correct?

JH: Yeah, 2005.

RQ: Would you like to tell me a little about how that came together?

JH: Shakespeare by the Sea had been doing created family shows for a bunch of years. Very, very kid oriented. Very silly. A lot of them featured pool noodle props and costumes. In 2004, I went to Shakespeare by the Sea and did one of those, it was a Snow White, and I got along really well with Jesse MacLean, who was one of the directors there at the time. I was also doing fight direction for them, and music, and acting. So, we started talking for that next season of doing something a little bigger than the regular family show. I wouldn’t call it “serious”, but there was a little more substance to it than what they had been doing. So I wrote maybe two songs before I got there. I rolled in and we had three weeks to throw together something. Back then, it was before Jesse or myself had really mastered the collective creation. I mean, we did it again this past year with an Alice in Wonderland, and it was a lot smoother process than when we did Robin Hood. It was literally like, we got our casting, and then went off in various groups and they just started improvising their way through the very loose structure that they had set up for us. So, some of that material was awesome. The sheriff and Prince John, a lot of their material remains today pretty much unchanged. Then there were other scenes like Robin Hood and the merry men, where you had ten people trying to improvise onstage at once. By the time we got to opening night on that, we were lucky that we had three quarters of the script done. We just made up the rest as we went along. But, it was hugely successful. It was sloppy but it was hugely successful.

RQ: At what point did it solidify? Is it still being changed? I know you’re in runs, so I assume it’s pretty set in stone.

JH: You’d be surprised, actually.

RQ: Are you still in the process of workshopping the script and the songs?

JH: Yeah, I spent two years after the first run rewriting almost all of the songs. There are only two songs left from the original production. One of those was a four-bar snippet that is now a full song. So, I wrote a lot of new music, and I brought on Kieran MacMillan once I thought that it needed a bit more of a quality composer as opposed to myself. I’m a decent one, but he’s fantastic. Then, there were two productions of it at the Toronto Youth Theatre, and it kept developing over that time. In 2011, I went back to Shakespeare by the Sea with all the new material, and we had to decide, Jesse and I, between the new material and the old material, what we wanted. There were two very different shows at that point. We literally had two different Robin Hood shows. So, we solidified a lot of that, but there was still a lot of stuff, especially music, that wasn’t quite ready yet. Shakespeare by the Sea is more or less a capalla, and you have to write the music to fit that, whereas here, we were rewriting songs throughout the rehearsal process for this. I think that last song we finished writing was on…December 19th. That was “Generosity”, the last song Robin Hood sings in the first half. The closing number we finished about a week before that. It was kind of intense. Even now, there are new orchestrations for the band on a daily basis. It’s mostly done, but we’re still adding minute details.

RQ: So that’s been your role in the Hart House production, you kept adapting and growing the script, the book, the music, etc.

JH: Yeah, exactly. And, I’m also the fight director. Also, the music director, Kieran, was off doing another show so while he was gone, myself and Tara Litvak who was the assistant music director, we taught everybody the music and sort of sat there waiting for Kieran to send us the new pages. Even if the song was written, a lot of it wasn’t on the page. So, there was an intense process of them transferring things to us, and us teaching it. We kept the fights almost identical to how they were in Halifax, so he would have a chance to score them musically. So, that was kind of nice, not having to rebuild all that from scratch. But then again, Robin Hood had an extra five goons to kill in the opening scene, so…

RQ: This is a really personal work of yours because you’ve been so close to it the whole time, was it difficult to let some of that control go when you got to Hart House?

JH: I don’t think that really happened. It was nice for Jesse to have a chance to direct it. He’s never directed it indoors before. He’s never directed it with a female Will Scarlet before, it’s always been a man before. I’m thrilled that I didn’t have to do that because I had enough on my plate. The music, the fights, the rewriting. I don’t think any of us feel like it’s “let go” yet. We’re really close, but you’ll read some reviews that tell you that the show’s a little long and they’re not wrong, so we have to tighten up the content a little bit. The Drowsy Chaperone had fourteen rewrites or something around there before it hit Broadway. We’re at rewrite number eight, so we have a few more to go.

RQ: What drew you to Robin Hood in the first place? Why Robin Hood instead of any of the number of other stories?

JH: I think initially it was that Jesse wanted to do one with a lot of fights in it. They always want to base it on some sort of legend or fairy tale when they’re building a show there. And because they had never really had a fight director before, we all got really excited about adding the possibility of that kind of theatrical magic to the mix. When you’re outside, there’s only certain kinds of theatrical magic you can have. You have costumes, lighting’s not much of an option. You can sing a lot, you can do a lot of acrobatics, you can fight, and those are your theatre magic tricks.

RQ: I want to ask you about Romeo and Juliet as well. You went straight from Romeo and Juliet into this. You must have been working on both at once. How was that experience?

JH: It was intense. Romeo and Juliet is another big, big monster of a production, then Robin Hood started rehearsals two days after Romeo and Juliet opened. So during the rehearsal process for one, I was in auditions for the other, realizing that we still had so much music that was unfinished and I was trying as much as I could to pump out lyrics and melodies. There as a couple actors in this show who were in that one as well, so while Romeo and Juliet was running, Jeremy LaPalme, Dave Difrancesco, these guys were madly rehearsing dances in between.

Dec 3

Cast of Angelwalk’s Ordinary Days chat about Deconstructing Extraordinary Musicals

By: Ryan Quinn

Last week, I spoke with the cast of Adam Gwon’s musical Ordinary Days, which just finished its run in Winnipeg, and is playing for a limited engagement until December 9th at the Toronto Centre for the Arts. Directed by Kayla Gordon and produced by Angelwalk Theatre, Ordinary Days follows four New Yorkers throughout a day as they face their own demons and those of the big city.

This show was originally produced at Roundabout Theatre in New York, but this production features new orchestrations by Joseph Aragon (who also composed Theatre20’s Bloodless) and those orchestrations will become a standard option for all productions of the show in the future.

The show stars Justin Bott as Warren, a frustrated artist who finds a notebook belonging to Deb (Connie Manfredi), a grad student working on her thesis on Virginia Wolfe. The show also stars Jay Davis and Clara Scott as Jason and Claire, a couple on the brink of moving in together, who are experiencing a relationship crisis.

When I spoke to the cast, they had just moved into the Studio Theatre space at the TCA, and remarked that it immediately felt like a perfect place to mount the production. I asked if the show demands a small, conversational space, and Justin Bott replied that when they were performing in Winnipeg, they had to create the illusion of that intimate space in a larger area, but that this space immediately creates that atmosphere.

We also spoke about how approaching a sung-through musical is different than approaching one with more text, and the cast agreed that the approach is nearly the same. Bott remarked on how the challenge is to not have a sung-through show be very “musical-y”, saying: “A lot of these new musicals that are being written are not so much like the old musicals where it’s a dramatic scene launching into an even more dramatic song, everything is on a level of conversational”. He went on to explain that the music is telling the actor some information, and the lyrics are telling the actor some information as well, and that can make the exploration a little easier.

Connie Manfredi noted that in musicals with more dialogue, the challenge is that the spoken text has to lead you to a place where singing is the only option because the character can’t bring themselves to speak anymore, but in a musical like this, it’s heightened to that level from the beginning of the scene, and indeed throughout the play, so that can be difficult. Jay Davis mentioned that when he performed in last year’s production of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, the process was to learn each song note for note, then make it his own emotionally without disrupting or modifying the composition of the songs. In that sense, it’s a two-step process, but the result is a fully realized character that lives within the confines of the musical’s orchestrations, and, in some ways, is freed by them.

You can catch Ordinary Days at the studio theatre at the Toronto Centre for the Arts until December 9th, call (416) 250-3708 or visit http://www.tocentre.com.

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