Summerfest Daily Report - Friday, August 10

By Jon Kaplan

Finally... the heat wave's broken. But that doesn't mean it's any cooler for a number of actors who are running around, doing multiple duty at shows both in SummerWorks and elsewhere.

Some of that work extended back before the festival began. Eric J. Rose, director of Pagan Love Songs For The Uninitiated, was commuting to Mississauga to rehearse UNI Theatre's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream - he plays Oberon - while he helmed Pagan here in town. Michael Rawley, author and director of the entertaining Unpossible Elevator, is also the musician for The Boy Scout's Manual, so you'll see him rushing back and forth between the Factory Studio, where Elevator is up and running, and Artword, where he Manually plays the piano.

Matthew MacFadzean's multidiscipline richardthesecond relies in part on videos to tell its story. Among the performers appearing onscreen as well as acting in other SummerWorks productions are Marie-Josee Lefebvre (Flight 198), Gord Rand (Five Fingers) and Craig Erickson (Ontario, 2055). There's another cross-over for Flight 198's author, Mike McPhaden, who's also the offstage voice for the captain of the plane; audiences get to see him perform in North, East Side Story.

But the performers most caught up in hustling are Sanjay Talwar and Leanna Brodie, both of whom appear in Shakespeare in the Rough's Measure For Measure, which plays weekend matinees and some evenings in the east end's Withrow Park. Talwar is the execution-bound Claudio and the comic Pompey in the park, while he literally suits up as an expectant father and uptight businessman in The Wait Room at SummerWorks. Brodie is wonderful as Measure's Isabella, a nun-to-be lusted after by a seemingly virtuous judge, and she brings the same intensity and strong characterization to Kris, an secret-laden ESL teacher confronted by a former student as she flees Bangkok in The Malaysia Hotel.

Brodie's two jobs, in fact, forced a change in the SummerWorks schedule just before the festival began. For the first time this year, the producers of Shakespeare in the Rough planned performances Thursday and Friday evenings. They expected the show's running time to be less than two hours, so it wouldn't affect Brodie's work in The Malaysia Hotel. But with intermission and audience response to the play's comedy - it's always hard to gauge how much time laughter adds to a performance's length - Measure clocked in at two and a half hours by the time it opened. One of Brodie's Malaysia shows was set for 9:30 tonight (Friday), but with Measure beginning at 7 pm, there was no way she'd get across town to Factory in time. So The Malaysia Hotel performance was shifted to a blank slot in SummerWorks last Wednesday. A lottery draw gave Sideshow Of The Damned - coincidentally, one of the hits of the festival - an extra time slot in the same venue, the Factory Studio.

And it's not just acting that keeps performers doing two jobs at SummerWorks. You can catch Aviva Armour-Ostroff and Greg Thomas working the bar in the Factory courtyard and then see them onstage, Armour-Ostroff in Sparta and Thomas in The Singular Life Of Albert Nobbs.