Canadian Stage’s Red
We tend to avoid reading other media outlet’s reviews before writing our own, but we did read, with interest, the tete-a-tete between The Globe And Mail and The Toronto Star’s arts sections shortly after the premiere of Red at Canadian Stage. The Globe’s J. Kelly Nestruck came out swinging in defence of Canadian Stage Artistic Director Matthew Jocelyn’s direction for the company, after The Star’s Ouzounian belittled both Red and Canadian Stage’s season to date, as did Star columnist Martin Knelman, whose last two paragraphs of a recent column referred to the St. Lawrence Centre’s primary tenant as “a problem child of the Toronto arts world.”
We’re inclined to agree with Nestruck. Before Jocelyn’s arrival, Canadian Stage was drifting into irrelevancy. It’d lost its crown as Toronto’s most reputable midsize theatre producer to the meteoric rise of Soulpepper, whose constant repertory season and spiffy digs at the Young Centre (not to mention its consistently glowing reviews) had the subscriber base growing by leaps and bounds, while Canadian Stage’s slowly deteriorated. Stuck in a bland middle between Mirvish and DanCap’s mega musicals and Broadway hits and the exciting new work being created locally by the like of Tarragon Theatre and other small independent companies, Canadian Stage’s unfocused seasons in the past few years showed little cohesion or consistency.
That’s changed with Canadian Stage’s recent run of shows—Volcano Theatre’s Another Africa, The Art of Time’s I Send You This Cadmium Red, and Company Theatre’s The Test, which we strongly recommended. These have all been daring and innovative collaborations with strong Toronto-based companies. With Red, Jocelyn and Co. are flying solo, and they’ve not only selected a recent Tony award-winner to debut in Toronto, they’ve also been promoting it in innovative ways, with an online interactive experience featuring lead actor Jim Mezon as the erudite and volatile painter Mark Rothko, and handing out red paintbrushes as a marketing gimmick.
But all the web, social media, and other marketing gimmicks won’t help much if the show isn’t good enough to generate good reviews and word of mouth. So we’re happy to say this production of Red is pretty good, though we’d stop short of great. Mezon is engrossing as the unpredictable and pedantic genius. And, well, he has to be, else the rather pedestrian script, which goes into minute detail about Rothko’s history, methods, and philosophy about art, could bog down the rather long (and intermission-free) show. Co-star David Coomber’s eager and initially star-struck assistant works well as an audience substitute, who starts out meekly absorbing Rothko’s diatribes and gradually begins to rise to the challenge of debating his overbearing boss on issues of art appreciation and commercialism.
The set further impressed us, and filled the deep and high Bluma Appel stage, which many designers find tricky. David Boechler’s screens, on a thrust out to the audience, open and close the giant studio in different time periods, and provide ample opportunity for Alan Brodie’s impressionistic lighting. Simply put, it’s a good-looking show, with talented actors taking full advantage of a simply constructed play about complex ideas. Doing effective service to new work, rather than trying to please longtime subscribers with retreads of musicals and middle-brow fare, it’s a good tack for Canadian Stage. Here’s hoping CS and Jocelyn keep the helm steady. GRADE: B
