Getting High: Robert Lepage’s Needles and Opium

Wellesley Robertson III and Marc Lebrèche in Robert Lepage's Needles and Opium. (Photo by Nicola-Frank Vachon)

Carl Fillion’s set for Needles and Opium, written and directed by the Québecois auteur Robert Lepage and produced by his company Ex Machina – which Boston’s ArtsEmerson series brought to the Cutler Majestic Theatre last week for a four-day run – is an open four-sided figure, like a section of a dollhouse, that hovers and spins above the stage. Most of the time it stands in for a room in the Hotel Louisiane or a recording studio, both in Paris, but depending on how Bruno Matte lights it or how the images designed by Lionel Arnould are projected onto it – and depending, of course, on how it turns – it can become an alleyway outside a nightclub, the interior of an airplane or the backdrop for a nocturnal walk through New York City. And often it emulates the disoriented state of one of its three characters, the French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau (Marc Labrèche), who took opium, the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis (Wellesley Robertson III), who took heroin, and the play’s protagonist, a Québecois actor named Robert (also Labrèche). Robert finds himself in Paris recording the voice-over for a documentary about Davis’s lover Juliette Gréco while trying to deal with a break-up the anguish of which has swallowed him alive, demolishing sleep and leaving him so vulnerable to sentimental triggers that an allusion to Davis and Gréco’s romance in the voice-over script makes him break down in the middle of the recording session. (He’s chosen to stay in Room 9 of the Hotel Louisiane because that’s where Davis and Gréco stayed when he first came to Paris in 1949 – which was also the year Cocteau wrote A Letter to Americans on the flight back to Paris from New York. The Cocteau sections of the piece are derived from that work and from Opium, the Diary of a Cure.) Needles and Opium suggests that Robert’s unmoored mental condition and his romantic addiction is like the drug habits of his heroes. But in Lepage’s brilliantly conceived text, their stories also intersect with Robert’s in terms of love and loss: Cocteau writes about the death, from typhoid fever, of his twenty-year-old protégé, the prodigious writer Raymond Radiguet (the author of the tender romantic novel Devil in the Flesh, published in 1923, the year Radiguet died).

Moving Pictures: Frame by Frame at the National Ballet of Canada

Artists of the National Ballet of Canada in Frame by Frame. (Photo: Karolina Kuras)

Film is a form of dance. – Norman McLaren 

Frame by Frame, a new Canadian ballet about National Film Board animator Norman McLaren, had its world premiere at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts on June 1, and with results as variable as the lines and shapes animating one his low-budget, high-impact films. Masterminded by Canadian theatrical powerhouse Robert Lepage in collaboration with the NFB and National Ballet of Canada dancer and choreographer Guillaume Côté, the 110-minute work (whose final performances are this weekend) features 22 company dancers in addition to film, video and theatricalized special effects. But in addition to all the technological wizardry making this a ballet for the digital age, a small wooden body figure, the kind typically used by art students for figure drawing and appearing both at the beginning and the end of the intermissionless show, absorbs your attention. The bendable mannequin serves several purposes in the work, dramatically and thematically speaking.

First, it early on establishes the art-school roots of the Glasgow-born filmmaker who drew image and sound directly onto celluloid to expand the boundaries of creative animation. Second, it underscores McLaren’s deep-set fascination with the expandable kinetics of the human form and with movement in general, the inspiration behind his award-winning moving pictures. Third, being a kind of toy, it helps elucidate the filmmaker’s playful side. Finally, appearing at the end of the ballet as a stand-in for McLaren, who passed in 1987 at the age of 72, the double-jointed model symbolizes the hyper-flexible mind which shaped his long and arrestingly innovative career. It’s a small prop but it speaks volumes about the late Canadian film pioneer, and how well Lepage has read him in creating this, his first full-length ballet.

Delectable Samples: A 2017 Arts Roundup

Robert Lepage in 887.

Since I rarely write about the arts, I welcome the opportunity to briefly comment upon what I enjoyed most this year, even though several of the pieces below have been reviewed by colleagues at Critics At Large. Apart from, perhaps, television, my sampling from the arts scene is relatively small yet I did experience some wonderful aesthetic moments. – Bob Douglas

Two theatre productions I attended this year were outstanding. Auteur Robert Lepage’s one-man bravura performance in 887 unspools the interplay between the fragmented recollections of his family life and the perils of collective Quebec memory from the 1960s to the present. 887 was the number of the apartment building on Murray Avenue in Quebec City where Lepage spent his formative years. The staging is jaw-dropping: a revolving set showing the interior of his current apartment and the exterior of his childhood home that reveals a doll’s-house replica of that apartment complex, toy cars, puppets and hand shadows. The catalyst for these reveries occurred in 2010 when the organizers of a cultural anniversary invited Lepage to recite by heart a 1968 poem, “Speak White.” He found that he could not learn the lines until he had explored his family history, particularly his relationship with his absent father, and how the personal dynamics intersected with the larger world of nationalist politics.

Faraway Places: The Jungle Book & The Blue Dragon

Mary Zimmerman's The Jungle Book

The new stage adaptation of Disney’s The Jungle Book – presumably bound for Broadway sometime in the future – has been launched at Boston’s Huntington Theatre, which has had a successful relationship with its high-profile director, Mary Zimmerman. (She directed Candide there two years ago as well as two previous productions.) Boston is lucky: the show is spirited, musically exuberant and gorgeous to look at, and children should adore it. As Disney’s 1967 animated feature did, Zimmerman’s adaptation takes considerable liberties with Rudyard Kipling’s stories, which were first published in 1893-94, but the narrative is essentially the same: a pack of wolves adopts a white baby and raises him to become a hybrid – part “man cub,” part jungle creature. Kipling focuses on the boy Mowgli’s coming of age, which prompts a crisis of identity – the wolves don’t want him any longer and he receives a cool reception when he returns to the village where he was born. Zimmerman’s book moves Mowgli back to civilization but deals only superficially with the subject of his mixed heritage. What it borrows from Kipling are the boy’s adventures in the jungle – climaxing in his encounter with the three-legged tiger, Shere Khan (Larry Yando), who has been stalking him since he was a baby – and his friendship with his protector, Bagheera the panther (Usman Ally) and the easygoing Baloo the bear (Kevin Carolan).

Peter Sellars' Hercules and PTSD

Richard Croft, Lucy Crowe (ground), and Kaleb Alexander in Hercules (Photo: Michael Cooper)

The theatre is as much a social act as an aesthetic.

– Peter Sellars

The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.

– Ibsen

The spike-haired and infectiously exuberant operatic director, Peter Sellars, has always put his distinctive personal stamp on all of his productions. He is an iconoclast who is adamant about discarding the old sets and costumes and breaking down the boundaries between art and life that put the audience at a safe distance. His goal is to render the opera modern and immediate. In doing so he has both thrilled and infuriated opera lovers. The latter was upset about the recent Canadian Opera Company’s (COC) production of George Frideric Handel’s Hercules in which the captive, the Princess Iole (Lucy Crowe), is hauled on stage wearing an orange jump suit, her face hooded with a black cloth a la Abu Ghraib, by a machine-gun toting soldier, and by the final scene in which the coffin of Hercules is draped with an American flag. Some viewers regarded these contemporary allusions as gratuitous. But Sellars does not indulge in the gimmickry that his critics suggest even though he concedes that the visuals do present a “weird disjunction.” As a politically engaged artist, he deeply believes that the arts in general and opera specifically should provide a visceral intensity and the space for a contemplative experience, which he believes does not occur in the headlines approach to what is happening in our times. He also cares deeply about the music itself as the distinguished musicologist, Susan McClary, remarked in a recent symposium “Coming Home: Handel’s Hercules” held at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. She contrasted him with another renowned director, Robert Lepage, when she wondered whether the huge “machine” in the New York production of Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, which gave the performers so much trouble, deepened our understanding of the Ring cycle.

Stratford and the Shaw Festival I: Shakespeare

From left: André Sills as Polixenes, Sara Topham as Hermione, and Graham Abbey as Leontes with members of the company of The Winter's Tale. (Photo: David House.)

Shakespeare’s romance The Winter’s Tale is one of the three or four plays I cherish most, and the Canada’s Stratford Festival hits a high mark with Antoni Cimolino’s production at the Tom Patterson Theatre. Cimolino has announced that he will step down from the artistic directorship of the company after one more season, and his Winter’s Tale is so beautiful from start to finish that you can’t help thinking this is the show he would like to be remembered for. He’s staged it on a simple set that the designer, Douglas Paraschuk, has enriched, scene to scene, with lyrical details and Michael Walton has lit exquisitely. One of the most poignant examples is the famous final scene. Paulina (Yanna McIntosh) leads the King of Sicilia, Leontes (Graham Abbey), who has been reunited with his childhood friend Polixenes (André Sills), his former ambassador Camillo (Tom Rooney) and his long-lost daughter Perdita (Marissa Orjalo) into a secret room. There, she tells them all, she has had a sculptor create an astonishingly lifelike statue of Leontes’s queen Hermione (Sara Topham), supposedly dead these sixteen years while Leontes, under Paulina’s guidance, has done penance for the grievous wrongs he committed against her, Polixenes and Perdita (then just an infant). The stage is unilluminated except for three handheld lanterns, so the statue is revealed suddenly, the lantern light painting the darkness. When Paulina works her magic and Hermione moves, the effect is so subtle that at first you wonder if you really saw what you think you saw.

Dancing With Puppets and Pulling the Strings: James Kudelka's Malcolm

 James Kudelka (right), and Malcolm. (Photo: Bruce Zinger)

James Kudelka danced with a puppet this year. Malcolm was his name and while their dance wasn’t quite a pas de deux there was no mistaking theirs was a unique partnership. Kudelka might have seemed in control of the movements, but it was more Malcolm pushing him into new theatrical territory. With a puppet quite literally in his hands, no strings attached, Kudelka has moved beyond the boundaries of traditional dance performance, eschewing the kinetic to focus more on the art form's more subtle, expressive side as well as it's capacity for creating an empathetic relationship with its audience. It's something of an emerging trend right now. On the West Coast, choreographer Crystal Pite has been incorporating puppets into her work of late, including her re-interpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest – The Tempest Replica – which Canadian Stage presented in Toronto in April. In Quebec, Robert Lepage has long used Japanese-inspired puppets in his theatrical productions. On Broadway, War Horse created a sensation last season with machine-driven puppets which helped to tell a story of loss of innocence and the brutality of war. Today's puppets, in other words, aren't just child's play. With Kudelka, to get back to the point, the puppet is a conduit for intimacy, stuffed cloth made substantial, and in more ways than one.

Adieu, Sylvie

Sylvie Guillem performing Technê in Life in Progress, at London's Sadler's Wells Theatre. (Photo: Bill Cooper)

As a seasoned dance critic and author of a history of the ballerina, I am often asked who my favourite dancer is. I never hesitate. The answer is Sylvie Guillem. I saw the goddess of the dance perform in a full-length ballet only once, in 1990 when the Paris-born ballerina was at the peak of her powers. But it was the kind of experience I needed to have only once to know that Guillem was the era’s supreme objet d’art.

The ballet in question was Don Quixote which Guillem’s mentor, the great Rudolf Nureyev, had staged for the Paris Opera using original choreography by Marius Petipa. Guillem was Kitri, the feisty female lead whose elegantly assured dancing is peppered with intricate pointe work, lightening quick jumps and whipping wrists that flutter a fan. Guillem danced the role as if she were born to it, sparking thunderous applause and a standing ovation for herself and her partner, Patrick Dupond.

Nureyev had invited me to this performance and insisted I meet him backstage so he could introduce me to his protégée. I remember that the spitfire I had watched in amazement only moments ago looked shy and retiring in Nureyev’s presence. Clasping her willowy arms behind the back of her tutu and shifting her weight back and forth in satin toe shoes scuffed and bruised from almost two hours of non-stop dancing, she waited anxiously behind-the-scenes to hear what Nureyev had to say.

The Russian devilishly bided his time, letting her squirm. After Nureyev had made her France’s top-ranking dancer, raising her to the position of étoile, the Paris Opera Ballet’s highest position, when she was just 19 years old, Guillem had a year earlier decamped to the Royal Ballet in London to become a principal guest artist. While Nureyev had obviously gotten over his feelings of betrayal, inviting Guillem back to dance in his ballet, he still wanted her to know who was boss.

Her fans crowed around her and she smiled at them but was clearly distracted. Her eyes were always on Nureyev. When he finally but slowly walked up to her everyone went silent. Grabbing hold of her pale hands, he looked Guillem in the eyes and declared in a voice that was barely above a whisper that she had been magnifique. You could feel the nervous tension rushing out of her in an exhalation of relief. She had been great, but she would believe it only when said from on top.

Musicals Round-up Part I: Niagara-on-the-Lake and London

Kristi Frank and Michael Therriault in the Shaw Festival production of Me and My Girl. (Photo: David Cooper)

This article contains reviews of Me and My Girl (Shaw Festival), Dreamgirls (West End), and On the Town (Regent’s Park).

Michael Therriault is so thoroughly winning and energetic in Me and My Girl at the Shaw Festival that you feel he could carry the production on his back if he had to. The musical is built as a vehicle for the performer who plays Bill Snibson, the Lambeth Cockney who discovers he has inherited an earl’s title and is expected to relocate to Mayfair, and the diminutive Therriault, with his pop-eyed charm and apparently elastic body, claims squatter’s rights to every scene he’s in. Therriault is a well-known Canadian musical-theatre actor (he played Gollum in the musical of Lord of the Rings both in Toronto and in the West End), but the only time I’d seen him before this summer was in Studio 180’s production (in Toronto) of Parade, as the Jewish factory owner Leo Frank, framed for the rape and murder of one of his employees in pre-World War One Atlanta. He was superb, but the role was so downbeat that I didn’t immediately make the connection to the song-and-dance man who plays the lovable, insouciant Bill. Therriault’s peculiar gift is for balancing charisma with modesty – like Dick Van Dyke, though his musical-comedy gifts are more extensive than Van Dyke’s and he’s more believable as a Cockney than Van Dyke was in Mary Poppins.