Seventh Stage Theatre Productions

Highly Recommended

This one is guaranteed to blow your mind on a variety of levels. It’s an exploration of the troubles a young woman can still find in the glass-ceiling world of business, but it’s told through the framework of Alice in Wonderland, complete with Red Queen, Mad Tea Party and all the rest.

That’s enough to be intriguing, but then add Kelly Staughan’s inventive staging – which keeps tipping from stylized movement into dance and then back to reality – and couple with the fact that the script combines the freshness of ensemble creation with polish (thanks to editor Rachel Blair), and you have something well worth an hour of your time. No, it’s not perfect yet and some of the observations about piggish men, dried-up spinsters and ambitious women are a bit obvious, but the breezy pace and the smart, sassy cast make it work.

Monica Dottor is a briskly attractive Alice and Nicholas Campbell brings an air of 110% reality to his role as an offbeat business executive. I hope this show goes places and I can’t wait to see it again when it does.

– Richard Ouzounian

Photo Credit: Michelle Bailey, Nerdy Girl Designs

The Red Queen Effect
REVIEW BY KAORI FURUE
“It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place,” the Red Queen famously said in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Saw There. Inspired by the story, The Red Queen Effect is a brand new show produced by Seventh Stage Productions that uses elements of Carroll’s classic to present the nightmarish life of a lone female hedge fund associate named Alice. Working with only men, she desperately tries to make herself heard and navigate the underlying power game being played. The main roles are expertly acted, including frustrated Alice (Monica Dottor), her piggish colleague, Travis (Ted Hallett), and her first client/ticket-out-of-obscurity Leo (Gemini Award–winning Nicholas Campbell, best known for DaVinci’s Inquest), but the story itself, while vivid and believable, is a bit cliché. The idea that sexism exists in the workplace—and moreso in male-dominated fields—is hardly surprising. But, the production remains enjoyable due to its talented performers, stark visuals (particularly Melissa-Jane Shaw’s dramatic entrances and exits as the Red Queen), fun dance elements, and clever, obfuscating dialogue.

Photo Credit: Michelle Bailey, Nerdy Girl Designs

Read what NOW Magazine has to say about The Red Queen Effect!

This ensemble-crafted comic critique of corporate life and structure follows recent MBC grad Alice (Monica Dottor)  “down the rabbit hole” into the Kafkaesque world of Toronto finance. Its look at gender discrimination in the workplace (no one takes Alice seriously initially) cleverly points out social contradictions but might go further to expose the roots of these assumptions.

Many thanks for the NNNN’s!!

Photo Credit: Michelle Bailey, Nerdy Girl Designs

We are proud to receive 4 stars* from Christopher Hoile at Eye Weekly for our Next Stage production ‘The Red Queen Effect’ .

*out of a possible 5 stars

Seventh Stage Theatre Productions – Anthony Minghella’s Whale Music
by Paula Citron
Anthony Minghella is best know as an Oscar-winning British film director/writer, but he began as a playwright. A new collective of women is mounting Minghella’s 1981 Whale Music. The play certainly has six plum roles for women and director Rosemary Dunsmore has made the best of their considerable talent.
The surprise about Whale Music is that it is written by a man because it is a very intimate play about the conversations and relationships that women have.
The action is set on the Isle of Wight were the unmarried and pregnant Caroline has come to have the baby she is giving up for adoption. Rallying around her are her free-thinking flat mate, her unhappily-married childhood friend, her Lesbian former teacher, the teacher’s teenage lover, and Caroline’s mother. Every one of the women has her own issues, as well as having strong feelings about Caroline’s predicament.
The result is a sweet and affecting play.
Whale Music continues until May 20.
From the Tarragon Extra Space I’m Paula Citron, arts reviewer for CLASSICAL 96.3 FM.

Photo Credit: Natalie Kauffman, Brown Eyed Girl