Mid-way through Theatre Aquarius’ performance of Elf –The Musical, I realized I could not stop smiling. There’s enough word-play to satisfy the adults with children in hand, and there’s choreography and singing that ranges from the comic to Gee-Wiz! How do they sing and dance, so well, at the same time?!
For Elf novices (which I was before this production), Elf is a love story, wrapped inside a lost and found story. It begins with Buddy the elf (Brent Thiessen) learning from Santa (Neil Barclay), that he is a human, and that his father who lives in New York City is on Santa’s ‘Naughty List’. Buddy does what any lost elf would do; he walks south for 3500 miles to find his father. Fortunately, when he arrives in NYC it’s Christmastime. Not only is he seasonally dressed in his elf clothing, but stores are also decorating and Santas are proliferating. His father, however, has not caught the spirit; he believes that “Christmas always gets in the way.” It becomes Buddy’s mission to help his father and other NewYorkers begin to care about Santa Claus. Without telling more, I will say, “and therein lies the love story.”
The show is supported by a set that combines AV backdrops with traditionally built pieces on flies. The observant, or perhaps obsessive, may have noted that in this production Santa’s sleigh is supposed to be powered by belief, but as we see Santa flying over Manhattan there are reindeer pulling the sleigh. The acting is not only superb, it’s a series of high energy triple-threat performances. And the tap-dancing hearkens back to movies from the 1930s and ’40s.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Theatre Aquarius’ production is Brent Thiessen’s smile. He radiated light, love, and goodwill, which is what the season is supposed to be about. Go see Elf with the whole family!
Elf – The Musical is playing at Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton until December 24, 2018.
Bonnie Lendrum is the author of Autumn’s Grace, the story of how one family manages the experience of palliative care with hope and humour despite sibling conflicts, generational pulls and career demands. Autumn’s Grace is a powerful commentary on the need for well-organized and well-funded palliative care in private homes and in residential hospices.
In short, The Father is a story about a daughter (Raquel Duffy) trying to manage her life as her widowed father (Eric Peterson) slides into cognitive decline. Or is The Father a story about an elderly engineer whose daughter brings strangers into his home — strangers who infantilize him, steal from him, and treat him badly? The situation is not unique. For the daughter there are the conflicting demands of fidelity, a career, a relationship, and geography; for the father there is the accumulation of losses — his watch, his words, his trust, and his recognition. And yes, there is abuse, both verbal and physical. I wondered if we were to also infer the subtleties of financial abuse (Yes. It does happen.) as the set and stage props gradually changed, or whether the set changes were a metaphor for cumulative losses.
We selected Anders’ culinary program thinking that if we could not learn the language then at least we would eat well. The first morning’s task was the preparation of Chiaquiles Verdes y Cecina. When there is real work to accomplish, language learning becomes focused. Within an hour we had acquired, and were using, the appropriate verbs and nouns with a beginning sense that competence could be in sight.
With our market money spent and ingredients stored away we settled into our classroom exercises for a review and prepared to learn the next round of vocabulary. The next morning, when the instructors determined that the tortillas on hand were not quite fresh enough, we went to a Molino y Tortilleria to watch the production of tortillas from corn mash through to finished product. We left with a column of warm tortillas.
By the end of the two weeks we had ordered and eaten meals at two different mercados (Tepoztlán and Medellin), dined on street food, prepared Pozole with fellow students and a professional chef, prepared a recipe of Chiles en Negrada from one of our teacher’s grandmothers, sipped our way through a tequila tasting, dined at a Relais & Châteaux restaurant, managed a weekend trip to Taxco on our own, and consumed several bottles of red wine from Valle de Guadalupe.
The play addresses a period between May and August, 1975, in the Basran family home in the Okanagon Valley. It’s a time fraught with both celebration and anxiety. The matriarch of the family, Loveleen (Pamela Sinha) has just come home from an extended stay in India. (She fled there, abruptly, after the deaths of her husband and son five years before.). Her absence was a source of distress on several levels. Not only did her daughters, Barminder (Krystal Kiran) and Annie (Serena Parmar), her brother Gurjit (Sanjay Talwar) and her father, Kesur (David Adams) mourn her disappearance, the orchard business suffered while she was away. Loveleen had been the family member with the most astute operations head. As the play opens, Loveleen has just returned and the orchard is under threat of foreclosure. Michael (Jeff Meadows), the son of one of their former fruit pickers, has been encouraging the family to cut down the cherry trees and turn the space into an agricultural RV park. He has even offered to purchase the property.
Bonnie Lendrum 