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ENTERTAINMENT
Saturday, March 2, 2013
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A Western Canadian comedy style PRAIRIE WINTER THEATRE PRODUCTION BLOOM OPENS IN NICKLE STUDIO hood with silly hijinks that focus on the more ridiculous aspects of life. Take poor Alice, played by Debby Allan. No sooner has her husband died painfully from cancer than You know you’re living in a tight-knit community, she stumbles across an illicit cannabis operation in says the widow Alice, when you can’t sneak a peek at an abandoned barn on her property. Thinking her the marijuana grow-op in your barn without drawing lay-about son, Darryl, is finally taking some business the whole neighbourhood’s attention. initiative — however misguided — Alice Her friend Olive retorts that Alice is reluctant to get the police involved. would be less conspicuous if she wasn’t Then she notices the pot plants gettiptoeing around the farm in a black ting a little droopy. What’s a supportive trench coat: “This is Stony Valley, not mother with a green thumb to do, other downtown Iran — you stand out!” than add a little fertilizer? This dry exchange was hilariously deThese unorthodox events require Olive livered on Thursday night in Bloom, the (Erna Soderberg) to do what friends do longer of two one-act plays that are part best— zip her lip and pass no judgment. of the Prairie Winter Theatre production While Olive manages the latter, she can’t that opened in the Nickle Studio, upstairs quite get her head around the first part, in Red Deer’s Memorial Centre. cracking wise about everything from the The Central Alberta Theatre presentaplants drying in Alice’s bathroom to the tion about two women who have to reinspecial dessert that turns up at Marge’s vent their lives after losing their spouses LANA come-and-go tea. is one part whimsy and two parts earthy MICHELIN Allan is a poker-face wonder as Alice, humour. This is a particularly Western managing to convey both a recently bereft Canadian comedy style that Saskatchewidow as well as a woman on a rush from wan playwright Leeann Minogue pulled the first real adventure she’s had in years. off to great effect in her full-length play Soderberg is equally good as gossipy Dry Streak, which was successfully mounted by CAT Olive, who despite her tart tongue, proves a true supa couple seasons ago. portive friend. In Bloom, Minogue once again combines underlyDirector Deb O’Brien delivers the right quirky ing messages about friendship, loyalty and parent- tone for this clever, one-hour play. Although a few BY LANA MICHELIN ADVOCATE STAFF
REVIEW
spots could use tightening, the action mostly moves right along and there isn’t a dull moment. Even the set changes are matched with a laughout-loud soundtrack, ranging from Mary Jane by Rick James to Wacky Tobacky from the TV series Weeds. (Who knew there were so many tunes written about what Alice refers to as “the devil’s lettuce?” Sound designer, take a bow.) Prairie Winter Theatre opened with the one-act Prelude to Thirty-Five by Seth Kramer. This comedy, deftly directed by Nicole Leal, is the theatrical equivalent of speed dating as it delivers a whole rom-com in 15 minutes. It seems Rae (Tara Rorke) just had a fight with her boyfriend, Jay, while staying at his parents’ house. After running off in a huff, she’s stubbornly waiting for the train she just missed, wearing only a fleece pullover in a snowstorm. Jay (Jarrett Viscko) delivers her winter coat and gets a bleeding nose in the process. So how exactly is this romantic? Some of it has to do with the chemistry between Rorke and Viscko (their two rather juvenile characters deserve each other), and some of it has to do with the script by Kramer, who understands that in romance, timing is everything. If Prairie Winter Theatre doesn’t make the last stretch of winter a little more bearable for you, it at least guarantees a solid evening’s entertainment. It continues to March 9. (There’s a cash bar). lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com
‘Vikings’ brings ancient Norse warriors to TV BY CASSANDRA SZKLARSKI THE CANADIAN PRESS Cast aside notions of the barbaric, filthy Viking. “Camelot” scribe Michael Hirst is on a mission to rehabilitate that image with a scripted series that portrays the seafaring Scandinavian marauders as not only familyoriented, but rather civilized. “Culturally for us the Vikings are always the other — they’re always the guys who break down your door in the night and rape and pillage and they’re not normally seen as sympathetic or attractive people,” Hirst says in a recent phone interview from
his home, just outside Oxford, England. “Two of the main things about that culture was, one: it was far more democratic than anything in the West — anything in England or France or Ireland. That they had public meetings, that they had pseudodemocratic institutions. And the other thing that really stood out was ... that unlike in the West, women could divorce their husband, they fought with their men, they could rule. They could inherit property. And this was so far away from the sort of cliche of these raping, pillaging guys that I thought, ‘Well that’s a way to start. That takes me in-
to their world.”’ Of course, there’s still plenty of pillaging and plunder going on in Hirst’s nine-part drama, Vikings, an international Irish/Canadian co-production that debuts Sunday on History. The eighth-century action centres on the fearless Norse warrior Ragnar Lothbrok, an ambitious adventurer who urges his corrupt chieftain Earl Haraldson, played by Gabriel Byrne, to explore the undiscovered West. A bloody opening battle establishes Ragnar’s ruthless precision in dispatching enemies, but when back in his tight-knit community, he’s revealed to be a loving husband, father and farmer.
Australian actor Travis Fimmel stars as Ragnar while Toronto-bred Katheryn Winnick plays his warrior wife, Lagertha, and Montreal’s Jessalyn Gilsig play’s Haraldson’s wife Siggy. Gilsig says a deep backstory helps add texture to her calculating character, who comes from an established family and married young, probably around 12. She’s forged a Macbeth-like partnership with Haraldson to rule their community with fear, but along the way they lost two sons in battle. “We are as vulnerable as a family could be in our position — he’s getting older, we don’t have an heir and we have this
really ambitious young man who is curious about a new way of exploring and also a new way of ruling,” says Gilsig, also known from Nip/Tuck and Glee. “It’s not accidental that Siggy comes into the Great Hall and sits beside him. It’s because he needs her to sit beside him, because they have a plan and she needs to keep him focused on that plan and together they build a strategy and had always built a strategy to maintain their position.” They live in a brutal society, but Gilsig notes that punishments are not meted out casually. Vikings debuts Sunday on History.
Bonnie Franklin of ‘One Day At a Time,’ dies at age 69 BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK — Bonnie Franklin, the pert, redheaded actress whom millions came to identify with for her role as divorced mom Ann Romano on the long-running sitcom “One Day at a Time,” has died. She died Friday at her home in Los Angeles due to complications from pancreatic cancer, family members said. She was 69. Her family had announced she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in September. Franklin was a veteran stage and television performer before “One Day At a Time” made her a star. Developed by Norman Lear and co-created by Whitney Blake — herself a former sitcom star and single mother raising future actress Meredith Baxter — the series was groundbreaking for its focus on a young divorced mother seeking independence from a suffocating marriage. It premiered on CBS in December 1975, just five years after the network had balked at having Mary Tyler Moore play a divorced woman on her own comedy series, insisting that newly single Mary Richards be portrayed as having ended her engagement instead. On her own in Indianapolis, Ann Romano was raising two teenage girls — played by Mackenzie Phillips, already famous for the film “American Graffiti,” and a previously unknown Valerie Bertinelli. “One Day At a Time” ran on CBS until 1984, by which time both daughters had grown and married, while Romano had remarried and become a grandmother. During the first seven of its nine seasons on the air, the show was a Top 20 hit. Like other Lear productions such as “All in the Family” and “Good Times,” ”One Day at a Time“ dealt with contemporary issues once absent from TV comedies such as premarital sex, birth control, suicide and sexual harassment — issues that had previously been overlooked by TV comedies whose households were usually headed by a husband and wife or, rarely, a widowed parent. Meanwhile, the series weathered its own crises as Phillips was twice written out of the series to deal with her drug abuse and other personal problems. Writing in her 2009 memoir “High On Arrival,” Phillips remembered Franklin as hardworking and professional, even a perfectionist. “Bonnie felt a responsibility to the character and always gave a million notes on the scripts,” Phillips
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Bonnie Franklin, the pert, redheaded actress whom millions came to identify with for her role as divorced mom Ann Romano on the long-running sitcom “One Day at a Time,” has died. wrote. “Above all, she didn’t want it to be sitcom fluff — she wanted it to deal honestly with the struggles and truths of raising two teenagers as a single mother.” In her 2008 memoir “Losing It,” Bertinelli noted that Franklin, just 31 when the show began, wasn’t old enough to be her real mother. Even so, wrote Bertinelli, “within a few days I recognized her immense talent and felt privileged to work with her. ... She was like a hip, younger complement to my real mom.” The truth of “One Day at a Time” was brought home to Franklin when in 2005 she got together with both TV daughters for a “One Day at a Time” reunion special. She told both actresses, “You are living, in a
sense, Ann Romano’s life — you are single parents raising teenage kids. That is shocking and terrifying to me.” Bertinelli reiterated Friday that Franklin was a “second mother to me” and one of the most important women in her life. “My heart is breaking,” Bertinelli said in a statement. “The years on ’One Day At A Time’ were some of the happiest of my life, and along with Pat and Mackenzie, we were a family in every way. She taught me how to navigate this business and life itself with grace and humour, and to always be true to yourself. I will miss her terribly.” Lear noted that despite tackling some serious subjects in her work, Franklin always stayed cheery and positive. “I was wrong — I thought life forces never die. Bonnie was such a life force,” Lear said in a statement. “Bubbly, always up, the smile never left her face.” Franklin herself was married for 29 years. Her husband, TV producer Marvin Minoff, died in 2009. Born Bonnie Gail Franklin in Santa Monica, Calif., she entered show business at an early age. She was a child tap dancer and actress, and a protege of Donald O’Connor, with whom she performed in the 1950s on NBC’s “Colgate Comedy Hour.” A decade later, she was appearing on such episodic programs as “Mr. Novak,” ”Gidget“ and ”The Man from U.N.C.L.E.“ On stage, Franklin was in the original Broadway production of “Applause,” for which she received a 1970 Tony Award nomination, and other plays including “Dames at Sea” and “A Thousand Clowns.” Franklin’s recent credits include appearances on “The Young and the Restless” and the TV Land comedy “Hot in Cleveland,” which again reunited her with Bertinelli, one of that show’s regulars. Franklin was a “devoted mother, grandmother, daughter, sister, aunt and friend,” her family said in a statement. She also was a longtime activist for a range of charities and civic-oriented issues, among them AIDS care and research and the Stroke Association of Southern California. In 2001, she and her sister Judy Bush founded the non-profit Classic and Contemporary American Plays, an organization that introduces great American plays to inner-city schools’ curriculum. A private memorial will be held next week, her family said.