Countries Shaped Like Stars will charm your socks off
Created by the company. Directed by Patrick Gauthier. A Mi Casa Theatre production. A Neanderthal Arts Festival presentation. At the Cultch’s Vancity Culture Lab on Thursday, July 29. Continues until August 1
If you wear socks to this show, be prepared to have them charmed off. Countries Shaped Like Stars, from Ottawa’s Mi Casa Theatre, gently unhinges language and logic, so that we can play in the spaces between words and bathe in the emotions that underlie reason. Another way of saying this is that Countries Shaped Like Stars makes you feel as openhearted and happy as a kid.
The story is simplicity itself and, in many ways, this production feels like high-quality children’s theatre. A young woman named Gwendolyn Magnificent goes to the market to sell her dragon fruit. There, she meets Bartholomew Spectacular, who is singing about fish popsicles, and they fall in love.
Things don’t go smoothly, of course, but, more than the story, it’s the style that makes this production so enjoyable. The language is chock full of fantastical imagery. Describing Bartholomew, Gwendolyn says, “and in his back pocket, he kept an orphanage for words you wish you’d thought of at the time.”
Nicolas Di Gaetano (Bartholomew) plays the mandolin and he wrote the music for the songs, which are both sophisticated and innocent—a bit like Feist. And the show is full of all sorts of devices that pull you into the present moment: the characters talk on a tin-can telephone, and send whispered secrets through the audience.
If this is all starting to sound a bit too winsome, let me say that both Di Gaetano and Emily Pearlman, who plays Gwendolyn, stay winningly grounded in their clown characters. And they are smart enough writers—they both contributed to the creation of the text—to know that you have to temper the sugar with shots of lemon juice.
And on a warm summer night, what could be more refreshing than a bittersweet concoction like Countries Shaped Like Stars?
Comments
2 Comments
Amy J. Lester
Jul 30, 2010 at 6:09pm
I love you guys! Rock the Neanderthal and I know you're going to blow the roof off of Summerworks.
Congrats!
xx Amy
Nik Black
Jul 31, 2010 at 10:59pm
Countries Shaped Like Stars is a wonderful little show and Colin Thomas hit all the right notes in his review. Especially about the music which IS simple and sophisticated all at the same time. Both actors can sing - and sing well - and they pull off swellegant harmonies that are both in-tune and in-synch. There's something quite magical about this show that it's difficult to put the finger on exactly what it is. Everything works: the concept, the writing, the music, the wholeness and fullness of the realization, and the chemistry between the two performers. We love them.
Although it's a seemingly simple piece, there's great sophistication in what they've accomplished. It's an emotionally satisfying show because the actors/writers clearly believe in what they've made and they've polished it and polished it until it's a shiny diamond set perfectly in the ring. It has Major Hit written all over it; but it's going to take a producer with courage and heart to say "I'm going to give this show a proper run of four weeks at eight-shows-a-week and see what happens". Well, with only two people who do all their own staging tricks, it's hardly an expensive risk. Audiences will love it for all the right reasons. It goes against the grain of what's "edgy" these days and dares to believe that boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl can still be inventive, lovely and touching with ever being saccharine. I predict a wonderful future for this show because it's authentic and confident about what it is and who it's for: anyone who ever believed that theatre has the power to help us see our lives in new and exhilarating ways.
Nicholas Di Gaetano and Emily Pearlman have created a true gem that glistens in the light of a 60 watt bulb. Producers, please, take this show and run it so word of mouth can do it's duty. Audiences far and wide will be enchanted by its magic, its message and its music - humming it all the way home. The Fringe circuit was made for shows like this, but when you've made a show that's outgrown the Fringe - where do you go? Fabulous work!!! Five stars out Five Countries Shaped Like Stars. ?????