Toronto Star - January 27, 2010

"Cloud 9: Comedy of sexual confusion"
Richard Ouzounian

★ ★ ★ (out of 4)

Picture seven virtuoso musicians attempting to tackle an incredibly complex score while the conductor keeps dropping the baton.

That's the best way to describe the Mirvish production of Cloud 9, which opened at the Panasonic Theatre Tuesday night.

Caryl Churchill's 1979 "comedy of multiple organisms" is no longer quite as shocking or provocative as it was 30 years ago, but it still remains brilliantly theatrical.

It's a pair of one-act plays, which are situated 100 years apart: one in Africa in 1880, the other in England of 1980. Some of the same characters are in both acts, but have only aged 25 years while a whole century has gone by, with Churchill evoking a uniquely British kind of magic realism.

Part of her conceit is that some performers in both acts play roles that don't coincide with their natural genders, a nice objective correlative for the sexual carousel that she plunges us on.

Act I, with stiff-upper-lipped British colonials holding their own against the "black menace" in the African jungle, also finds us in a veritable roundelay of sexual confusion, with adultery, pedophilia, homosexuality and some hidden flashes of fetishism all having their day in the sun.

Evan Buliung is triumphant as the largest, blondest English rose you've ever seen, taking his drag with such solemnity that he actually seems quite fragile and appealing. David Jansen is the perfect bug-eyed paterfamilias, Ben Carlson triumphs as a not-that-noble servant, Blair Williams swaggers with just the right twisted sensuality, Megan Follows dazzles as a repressed lesbian nanny and a nymphomaniacal widow, Ann-Marie MacDonald is charm itself as the perfect schoolboy and Yanna McIntosh anchors it all together as the battleaxe of a mother.

What's missing in this act is the deft feeling of floating through a kind of fever-dream that the best productions of this play can evoke. Director Alisa Palmer knows her actors and makes each scene land, but there's no overarching vision, no sense of flow to this crazy African journey.

The problem becomes more acute in Act II, when the play moves into what was (at the time of its creation) the present.

Churchill is brandishing a fairly strident feminist dialectic in many scenes, which now seems quite dated, and it's hard to find a man worth sympathizing with who doesn't wish he were a woman.

Follows now plays a tough lesbian mother with just the right aggression, McIntosh is incredibly vulnerable as a conflicted bisexual, Buliung is heartbreaking as the sweetest of gay men, Carlson charges the air with electricity as his partner with a penchant for anonymous sex, and Williams does a yeoman job with the chauvinist cartoon he has to portray.

But MacDonald lets down the side by playing the newly liberated mother all for laughs, losing the pathos in her magnificent speech about the glories of masturbation and Jansen plays a dour little girl as pure cartoon.

Palmer brings no mystery to the sublime moments where the past crosses over into the present and the touching final curtain, which should bring tears, falls flat.

So, despite a stellar cast, Cloud 9 never really takes off into the theatrical stratosphere where it ought to be.

Source: Toronto Star

Canoe Jam! Showbiz - January 27, 2010

"'Cloud 9' is a golden comedy "
John Coulbourn, QMI Agency

★ ★ ★ ★ ½ (out of 5)

Forget silver linings. Cloud 9 – Caryl Churchill's sexy '70s gender-bending comedy – has moments that are truly golden.

Subtitled A Comedy Of Multiple Organisms, Cloud 9 – which opened in the Panasonic Theatre Tuesday under the Mirvish umbrella – is unlike most any piece of theatre we've seen.

Sprung perhaps from the same zeitgeist that informed George F. Walker's Beyond Mozambique, it has been shaped, prodded and corseted into an often brilliant and witty commentary on the enduring nature of human passion and compassion, and the changing face of the morals and mores that govern them.

In a first act set in colonial Africa, Churchill offers up a madcap overview of the way we were, encapsulated in a single family living on the very edge of Victorian civilization, at the height of the empire.

Ruled by Clive, an insufferable bore played by David Jansen, that family includes wife Betty (Evan Buliung), son Edward (Ann-Marie MacDonald) and daughter Victoria (played, feminist tongue-in-cheek, by a ragdoll).

And while on the surface they represent the most proper of Victorian sensibilities, underneath they are a steaming caldron of rarely-repressed sensuality. Blair Williams (cast as a wandering adventurer), Megan Follows (double cast as a liberated widow and a repressed nurse) and Ben Carlson (as the faithful native retainer) serve as objects of distraction, while Yanna McIntosh's unbending matriarch Maude looks on.

The second act is set in London, a century on. Many of the same characters, when they reappear, have aged only 25 years – underlining the fact that individuals and societies always change at different rates.

Betty (now played by MacDonald) is on the verge of leaving her husband, while daughter Victoria (now played by McIntosh) is married to a an updated version of her father (Williams) – but is drawn to a friendly lesbian (played by Follows), whose pre-school daughter (Jansen) is a bit of a handful.

Edward (now played by Buliung), meanwhile, has grown into a rather gay man, in love with the predatory Gerry (Carlson), who doesn't like his sex mixed up with love.

It's all Churchill's longish way of saying that the human condition and the human hunger for love is immutable, but in her world getting there is considerably more than half the fun, especially with an A-list cast like this.

Under director Alisa Palmer, this is an evening filled with delicious moments – Williams as a rogue Rhodes, Carslon as a sexual coyote, Jansen as a pre-schooler, Buliung as the flower of Victorian femininity and MacDonald as grande dame lately come to self-pleasure.

Each moment is a tribute to Palmer's vision, and each makes one wish she'd been able to maintain that vision, keeping her entire cast balanced on Churchill's tightrope and not just individual players.

Instead, Palmer contents herself with having all her performers singing from the same song book, while failing to ensure they are all singing the same tune. Jansen's overly self-aware pater familias sits over the first act like a shroud, while other performances on occasion fade in and out of character as though viewed through cheap glasses.

If Palmer had devoted a bit more time to shaping the kind of consistent approach a work like this demands – think Coward, with raunch – it would have been easier, perhaps, to overlook the minor pacing problems (and the clanger of a false ending) that make the first act seem overly long, as well as some of the emotional wool-gathering that mars the second.

But in the final appraisal, this is still a golden production – and, happily, beyond the footlights the difference between 10 carat and 18 carat rarely affects the sparkle.

Source: Canoe Jam! Showbiz

The Globe and Mail - January 28, 2010

"Sex, politics and thesps on wild stage romp: Simplistic politics enlivened by complex performances"
J. Kelly Nestruck

★ ★ ★ (out of 4)

Need a reminder that Canada harbours many of the best stage actors on the planet? Go see Mirvish Productions revival of Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine.

It's a parade of pleasurable performances, with some of the greatest thesps from Ontario theatre's sensational Triple S – Stratford, Shaw and Soulpepper – playing, and playing around, in roles you'd never expect.

In the first act alone, we get to see Ben Carlson, Stratford's recent triumphant Hamlet, don an afro and trade races to play an African Uncle Tom; Evan Buliung put on a dress to play a gentle Victorian housewife who dreams of adventure; and Ann-Marie MacDonald conjure up a cross between Mickey Mouse and Popeye to play an effeminate nine-year-old boy.

Then, in the second half, there's the Shaw Festival's David Jansen as one of the biggest, most rambunctious five-year-old girls you've ever seen.

They're all marvels, as are Megan Follows alternating between a lesbian nanny and a wicked widow; Yanna McIntosh at her imperious best as a Victorian matriarch, and Blair Williams as a pair of comically confused men stuck in the wrong era.

But while Cloud Nine bursts with highly entertaining high-calibre performances, director Alisa Palmer's production doesn't entirely rain success.

Created with Britain's Joint Stock collective in 1979, Churchill's unorthodox comedy examines sexual mores in two different eras. The first act, played as farce, takes place around 1880 in British Africa, where colonial administrator Clive (Jansen) struggles to impose moral order both outside and inside his home. The natives are restless: His wife Betty – that's Buliung, unstintingly sweet, but undeniably big-boned – wants manly adventure, while his son Edward (MacDonald) secretly plays with dolls and his daughter Victoria actually is one.

Clive's explorer friend Harry (Williams) is gay and in the closet, while Edward's governess Ellen (Follows) is a lesbian who doesn't know what that is; Harry's transgressive sexuality is a scandal that must be covered up, while Ellen's hides in plain sight since no one has the words to describe it.

In the second act, history jumps forward 100 years, but the characters only age 25. Betty – now played by MacDonald – has left Clive and is discovering self-reliance and self-pleasure. Edward – now played by Buliung – is a gardener living with his rough-and-tumble lover Gerry (Carlson, sublime), while Victoria (McIntosh) has grown into a woman who reads feminist texts, but is nonetheless stuck in a constraining marriage with sensitive new-age guy Martin (Williams, a stand-out among stand-outs).

Added into the mix are a self-described man-hating lesbian named Lin (Follows) and her five-year-old daughter, Cathy, played with an exquisite lack of grace by Jansen. This cast of characters now struggles to define themselves in an age where the sexual empire has fallen and new rules have yet to arise.

Palmer's production could use a little more order imposed upon it. It suffers from a looseness and inconsistency in style in the first act, where the acting is all over the map from the subtle sadness of Buliung's Betty and Carlson's Joshua to the virtuoso clowning of Williams and MacDonald.

Then there's Jansen, who plays Clive as too much of a caricature and never fully inhabits him. This is unfortunate because he needs to be the anchor in this satirical Victorian world, the baseline others react against; in his absence, Betty's mother Maud, played with imposing reserve by McIntosh, steps up to staunchly defend her society. ("Young women are never happy,” she says dismissively of her daughter's complaints. "Then when they're older they look back and see that comparatively speaking they were ecstatic.”) While the first-half eventually becomes tiresome, the second act, which like the world it portrays is more loosely structured, is quite wonderful with only MacDonald's exuberantly unfettered Betty not entirely meshing. Palmer stages the musical moments particularly well, and Churchill's songs have excellent new settings from Paul Sportelli.

Thirty-odd years down the line, however, Churchill's sexual and gender politics feel almost as distant as the Victorian ones she satirizes in the first act. The connections she draws between sexual repression and political oppression, patriarchy and imperialism, seem particularly simplistic today, when the British military allows homosexual recruits to march in uniform in Gay Pride parades and cites the defence of women's rights as part of the justification for missions to Afghanistan and Iraq.

And what to think about the blurred line between male homosexuality and pedophilia in the first act, and sexual liberation and incest in the second?

To her credit, Palmer doesn't steer her production away from the problems of the play, which remains theatrically thought-provoking. Cloud Nine now seems to be about the impossibility of ever imposing a coherent order on the crazy odily functions and mixed-up emotions within us. Can we ever fully understand sexuality?

Know sex? Please, we're human.

Source: The Globe & Mail

Eye Weekly - January 29, 2010

"Cloud 9: Review"
Christopher Hoile

★ ★ ★ ★ (out of 5)

Toronto hasn't seen a professional production of Caryl Churchill's brilliant 1979 comedy Cloud 9 since 1984. To remedy the situation Mirvish Productions has assembled a flawless all-star cast of leads from Soulpepper and the Stratford and Shaw Festivals directed by Alisa Palmer, who recently helmed Soulpepper's highly acclaimed production of Churchill's Top Girls. Back in 1984 the first act was hilarious and the second did not quite gel. Strangely enough, the reverse is true now.

Churchill's play is about the changing relationships among family members and friends over a 25-year period. Churchill's stunning theatrical audacity sets our first encounter with the characters in Act 1 in British colonial Africa in 1880 and our second in Act 2 in 1980 London. To emphasize that the play is about the construction of identity, the characters we meet in Act 1 are played by entirely different actors in Act 2, and actors are cast in roles regardless of gender, race or age.

Thus, the repressed wife, Betty, is played by Evan Buliung in Act 1 and by Ann-Marie MacDonald in Act 2. Her homosexual son, Edward, is played by MacDonald in Act 1 and by Buliung in Act 2. As such, Churchill forces us to sort out the characters' identities as they sort out their own. In Act 1 everyone knows his place in a hierarchical, male-dominated world where the father as head of the family is like the monarch (paradoxically a Queen) to her Empire and God to his creation. Characters comically uphold or chafe against this supposedly inviolable order. In Act 2 the hierarchy has collapsed though remnants still remain, but now characters comically grope about to construct their own sense of order.

The show is a feast of exquisite acting as one might expect from the likes of Buliung, MacDonald, Ben Carlson, Megan Follows, David Jansen, Yanna McIntosh and Blair Williams, all of whom shine in their dual or triple roles. Under Palmer's direction, Act 2 has precisely the right pacing and sense of cohesion whereas Act 1 misses perfection on both counts. In part, this is because Palmer encourages an exaggerated acting style in Act 1 that only works if the exaggeration is uniform across the cast. Churchill's frank discussions of sexuality no longer shock as they once did, but her satirical yet sympathetic depiction of the difficulty of extricating one's self from the meshes of the past remains as relevant as ever.

Source: EyeWeekly.com

Torontoist - January 29, 2010

"Cloud 9 is a 10"
Johnnie Walker

A couple of seasons back, Soulpepper put on a production of well-respected (if notably unusual) British playwright Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, helmed by talented director Alisa Palmer, and everyone thought it was the bee's knees. So much so, in fact, that it won Palmer that year's Dora Award for Outstanding Direction, and was remounted the following season. Now, a new production of Churchill's surreal sex farce Cloud 9 has opened at the Panasonic Theatre, reuniting Palmer's direction with Churchill's words, and featuring a fantastic cast, including Top Girls alums Megan Follows and Ann-Marie MacDonald. If you enjoyed Top Girls, do yourself a big favour and book a ticket to Cloud 9, which is as smart, funny, and just plain strange as the Soulpepper hit. If you're completely unfamiliar with Churchill's work, it's also definitely worth picking up a ticket, but we feel you should be warned that some aspects of the show might seem jarringly unnatural if you're used to more traditional theatre fare.

How's this for a plot summary: Act One is set in Africa in 1880, focusing on a colonial British family (husband Clive, wife Betty, children Edward and Victoria, grandmother Maud, nanny Ellen, African "boy" servant Joshua, and adventurous neighbours Harry and Mrs. Saunders). Act Two is set in England in 1980, yet features the same family, aged only twenty-five years. Further complicating matters is the casting: in Act One, Betty is played by a man, Edward is played by a woman, Joshua is played by a white actor, Maud by a black one, and Victoria, by a doll. And in Act Two, they all switch. Yet, if you think any of that sounds terribly high concept, perhaps even snobbishly inaccessible, you'd be 100% wrong. Churchill's script is very smart, but it's also very, very funny, and its broad humour is the perfect antidote to any potential inaccessibility. And the casting forces the audience to take a long, hard look at the various inequities that existed in both time periods. Clandestine homosexual encounters are enacted by opposite sex actors. Heterosexual marriage is represented by two men. A woman who needs to "stay in her place" is played by a man in a dress (and Judith Bowden's revealing costume design never allows us to forget that we are, in fact, watching a man in a dress).

This is a wonderful play for actors, and each member of the cast gets to be hilarious in at least two separate roles. Evan Buliung is terribly sympathetic both as matriarch Betty in Act One, and her gay son Edward in Act Two. David Jansen is a riot as domineering father Clive in Act One, and deranged preschooler Cathy in Act Two. But perhaps the most memorable performance comes from Ann-Marie MacDonald, so spry and youthful as Act One's younger Edward, and then so hilarious as Act Two's grandmother Betty, who finally seems to be on the road to self-actualization.

It's rare to see a piece of theatre so brilliantly conceived and perfectly realized. If you can open your mind up to the idea of seeing something that's just a little bit different, you're in for a real treat!

Source: Torontoist

BroadwayWorld.com (Toronto) - January 29, 2010

"Review: 'Cloud 9'"
Mark Andrew Lawrence

It's always interesting to see a play that was considered daring and controversial at its premiere with thirty years of hindsight. Does the latter dull The Edges of the former?

With Caryl Churchill's 1979 play the answer is yes, but it doesn't really hurt the piece. Mostly because Could 9 is a theatrical experiment. A farce, with transsexual casting, it works best as a showcase for both the director and the cast.

For this production, the director Alisa Palmer has assembled a top-notch cast drawn mainly from the companies of the Shaw and Stratford Festivals (they have to do something during the winter!) They very obviously relish the chance to cut loose with such an offbeat piece.

The structure was heralded in its day for presenting a group of characters first in the sexually repressed 1880's, and then 100 years later in the somewhat more liberated late 20th Century. The gimmick is that though a century has passed, the characters are just 25 years older.

The play remains very funny and at times downright lewd. The first half remains a total delight offering pithy comments on human sexuality as seen through reserved Victorian eyes. The second half has lost a lot of its punch since its premiere, and at times it seems to meander, losing focus. Yet every time things start to pall, Churchill pumps it up with a provocative monologue or dialogue.

It's the cast that helps keep things on track here and a better cast could hardly be imagined. David Jansen in his best head-of-the-family attitude portrays Clive, trying to keep order and decorum for his family while indulging in some very improper behavior with a neighbor. In the second half, he has a field day as the unruly four-year old girl, Cathy.

Evan Buliung creates two very distinct characters, spending the first half in a tightly corseTed White dress playing Clive's wife Betty, only to emerge in the second act as their bisexual son Edward.

In a different crossover, Megan Follows has a few moments to shine as the governess Ellen trying unsuccessfully to repress her lesbian urges, only to emerge in the second half with a well rounded portrayal of the out and proud dyke Lin.

Ann-Marie Macdonald gives two of the evening's best performances, first as the youthful Edward just beginning to discover his sexual orientation, and later as the mother Betty who in the final scene tells us about her own experiences discovering the joys of making love alone.

For a play so wrapped up in its character's sexuality, there is surprisingly little heat. The characters go through the motions for little more than their own pleasure. Churchill may be trying to make the comment that over 100 years the basic primal urges have not altered, but the point is unproven by the text.

This leaves Palmer with little room to maneuver in the second half, once the shock value has been utilized to its maximum potential.

Still, with a cast this strong, the play is well worth investigating.

Source: BroadwayWorld.com

Now Magazine - January 29, 2010

"Cloud 9 a fascinating piece of theatre, superbly performed"
Susan G. Cole

Let me start with one pronouncement. I saw Michael Healey's play Courageous last week at the Tarragon and Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9 on Tuesday, and I can say with confidence that Toronto boasts some of the greatest actors on the planet.

Head to the Panasonic to see some of the city's best players, skilfully di-rected by Alisa Palmer. Just be prepared to see them in a play that's flawed and even a little bit dated.

It begins in 1880 in Africa, where British colonials Clive (David Jansen) and wife Betty (Evan Buliung in drag) live with Betty's mother, Maud (Yanna McIntosh), and their two children, Edward (Ann-Marie MacDonald) and Victoria (a cloth doll used to terrific effect), and the nanny Ellen (Megan Follows). They live in mortal fear of the indigenous blacks – except for their black servant, Joshua (Ben Carlson), whom they treat as if he were invisible.

Enter Harry Bagley (Blair Williams), the explorer – both geographical and sexual – who sparks a series of erotic attractions. Both nascent gay boy Edward and neglected Betty are hot for him. Meanwhile, Clive and his neighbour Mrs. Saunders (Follows again) are getting it on, nanny Ellen has a passionate crush on Betty and, before you know it, the goings-on resemble a sex farce.

The 1979 play calls for adults to play children and men to play wo-men, all in an effort to subvert gender expectations. The first act's characters are written as caricatures – patronizing patriarch Clive, wisecracking, bitterly disappointed matriarch Maud, naughty mistress Mrs. Saunders, etc – and the cast does wonders with the broad strokes and one-liners that are jokes only to the audience.

Follows is particularly skilful (my date didn't even realize she was playing two roles), as are Williams as the oily and priapic Bagley and MacDonald as the little boy who can't let go of his doll.

Act II takes us 100 years into the future, to 1980, when the characters, played by different actors, have aged only 25 years. Edward (now Buliung) has come out and is living with his boyfriend, Gerry (Carlson), who still likes anonymous sex in the park. Victoria (McIntosh) is unhappily married to Martin (Williams) and attracted to Lin, mother of little Cathy, hilariously played by Jansen.

The feminist thrust of the piece is even stronger in Act II. This is, after all, Churchill's sex play, and she wants to demonstrate all the possibilities – gay, straight, group, the single life – in an effort to disrupt the oppressive, heterosexual monogamous model. Even Betty (MacDonald) is thinking about divorce.

But paradoxically, the politics in the opening act, set in the past, are way easier to absorb and appreciate, precisely because the tone is so broad. Expressed more naturalistically in a more contemporary context, Churchill's feminism seems almost strident. I never thought I'd use that word to describe a feminist work, but the truth is that ideas that seemed radical, even incendiary, in 1979 don't play that well in 2010.

A scene where Victoria tries to communicate her unhappiness to hus-band Martin demonstrates the point. He takes over the conversation, telling her how he feels, but mostly how she feels, leaving her speechless. The scene ends with him commenting that his next book will be about a failing marriage – from a woman's point of view.

He's an easy target, and the only one so two-dimensionally drawn in the second act, skewing the emotional balance. A playwright today couldn't get away with such a cheap shot.

It might have helped if director Palmer had made the 1980 setting more explicit – some disco maybe, or a signifier in the costumes. Lin does not look like an 80s dyke, for example.

It's still a fascinating piece of theatre, superbly performed.

Source: Now Magazine

The National Post - January 30, 2010

"Love is a battlefield: Megan Follows leads stellar cast in Cloud 9"
Robert Cushman

Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9, first seen in 1979 and now mounted by Mirvish with a tremendous cast, anticipates her slightly later Top Girls in its themes and schemes. Its first act is set in British Africa in 1880. Its second takes us to London a century after, "but for the characters," as the program puts it with unimprovable succinctness, "it is only 25 years later." Philosophically translated, this means that they, and society in general, should have had time to shed their Victorian hang-ups, but haven't.

A few Act One figures make ghostly appearances in Act Two, but only three survive alive; and of these, one, a little girl patriotically christened Victoria, appears in childhood only as a rag doll (and is tossed around with comparable abandon). Her brother, Edward, is very possessive about the doll's own doll, and is played -- in the first act but not the second -- by a woman. This discontinuity is itself continuous; Betty, the children's mother, is a man before the intermission and a woman after. The gender-bending makes a pertinent point about fluid sexual identities, but it mostly registers as good theatrical fun.

It certainly does in Alisa Palmer's production whose first half hits, clear and strong and precise, every mark in a very witty script. In this outpost of the empire, both the natives and the imperialists are restless. Clive, head of the family, is lecherously involved with a fearless neighbour, a Mrs. Saunders. Betty has a passionate thing for Harry Bagley, an explorer who might have stepped out of Boys Own Paper, and who is indeed primarily interested in boys, especially Edward. (Edward reciprocates.) Harry nevertheless ends up married to Ellen, the governess, who would be a lesbian, especially with Betty, if she knew how. Clive urges wedlock on Harry, as an atonement for his "sin." "It isn't a sin," says Harry, gaining our enlightened approval and then promptly losing it by sobbing "it's a disease," an instant reverse that shows Churchill at her quick-witted sharp-edged best. Also encamped is Maud, Betty's dragon mother, ostensibly visiting though as Betty shyly admits, "I think she's living with us." The group is completed by Joshua, the ostensibly and ostentatiously faithful black servant, disowning his own people while making himself available in any capacity his masters may require of him. These permutations are executed in brisk cartoon style and, apart from lingering doubts about the Victorians being an easy target, they are very satisfying.

The doubts linger longer in Act Two, which is set in a London park and now seems more dated than its fantastical predecessor. Victoria, discontentedly married, and her aggressive lesbian friend Lin, watch over their unruly children (one again unseen, and without even a doll to represent him). Edward has grown up gay, and very gentle, with a regular and very promiscuous partner named Gerry. Betty, since her husband's demise, has discovered masturbation and gives a monologue; she is not, even giving all possible hostages to magic realism, remotely recognizable as the same person, which throws the play's whole strategy in question. There's a limit to how much you can change style and preserve content. The play's title, and its title song, refer to a sexual nirvana which Edward, Victoria and Lin try to reach through establishing a) a menage and b) an orgy. The latter leaves them looking silly, which may be the intention, and the play looking scrappy, which probably isn't. The modern setting, and Churchill's command of dialogue, set up expectations of believability that are neither fulfilled nor compensated for. The colonialist theme is mostly abandoned, apart from one bit about Belfast, which now seems, if you'll pardon the expression, dragged in.

But these actors. If there's a first among equals it's Megan Follows, bringing off multiple quick changes as governess and adventuress, and then tripling up as sharp-tongued Lin. Ben Carlson finds chilly hidden depths in Joshua, the only first-act character granted an inner life; the others have secrets, which is different. He's equally commanding as rough-trade Gerry. Evan Buliung is the tallest but most enchanting of expatriate ladies as first-act Betty and a sweet-natured second-act Edward. Yanna McIntosh, bustle in the ascendant, is a resoundingly epigrammatic grand-matriarch, and an even better thoughtful Victoria. Blair Williams, as her husband and as handsome Harry, provides two studies in sexual bafflement. Ann-Marie Mac-Donald, more revue performer than actress, is delightful as child Edward but damagingly far from believability as grown-up Betty whom she makes a comic turn. David Jansen by contrast, is a splendidly brisk cove as Clive; but his sullen little girl left me nostalgic for the delicate skipping of Antony Sher, one of my two abiding memories of the play's first production. My other is of its ending, a musical dying fall for which Palmer's staging substitutes an abrupt full stop.

Source: The National Post

The Hamilton Spectator - February 2, 2010

"Cloud 9 takes viewers on sexy, thoughtful trip"
Gary Smith

Want to watch Canadian theatre stars out act anyone anywhere? Go see Cloud 9.

You'll see seven national treasures nail the vicious undertow in British playwright Caryl Churchill's comedy. It's supposed to be a feminist look at the dying days of the British Empire, and repressed boys and girls rallying round the flag. It's also about sexual freedom and shucking off Puritanism.

In Alisa Palmer's brilliantly directed vision there is sweet vindication for every boy who played with a doll, and encouragement for every woman who fancied her own sex.

In her 1979 burlesque, Churchill equates Old Boys' power with a female need to step up to the plate, to bat the balls. It's a glorious letting go of stupid facades.

Act 1 of her comedy is hilarious. That's when Churchill isn't sticking it to you as vigorously as the actors do to each other.

We're in Africa, circa 1880. A matriarchal female is played by a man (Evan Buliung) and a black servant by a white man (Ben Carlson). A confused, doll-hugging little boy is played by a woman (Ann-Marie MacDonald). And a cool white woman is played with fire by black actress Yanna McIntosh.

Talk about colour-blind casting. Talk about gender-bending theatre. But then, Churchill's always had a dark-hearted way of cutting through the crap.

In Cloud 9 she presents her story as a series of Thurberlike cartoons. Swift, uncomplicated snapshots of characters caught with their pants down prove deliciously irresistible. Their desires, at odds with falsely upright facades, suggest these folk would fit in with any number of politicians forced into the open today. It's as if Churchill reveals truths beneath slick veneers.

The characters you like best here are those in your face. Ferocious little firebrand Megan Follows' predatory lesbian is vulnerable and right. McIntosh's confused wife Victoria finds more tenderness in a lesbian affair than in marriage. And poor discombobulated Edward, who has sex with Ben Carlson's hunky Gerry, likes the warm, female strokes he gets from lesbian friends.

It's a measure of Buliung's immense talent that he makes sweet, mild Edward someone you long to hug.

If I haven't mentioned David Jansen's formidable husband Clive and obnoxious child Cathy, as well as Blair Williams's troubled Harry and Martin, it's not because they're any less dazzling than their costars.

The actors all play two roles with the exception of Follows who manages three.

In Act 2 we fast-forward 100 years to a gritty, rather ugly London, where the same characters reappear, played by different actors.

Only 25 years have gone by in their lives. Perhaps the rigid upbringing they received in colonial Africa has stunted their growth.

As we see characters sit beside the persons they once were we realize how far the world still has to come for equality and unity.

Cloud 9 is intoxicating theatre. Why it isn't part of the Mirvish subscription series I don't know. Oh yes I do: That hallowed ground is reserved for inoffensive musicals such as Little House On The Prairie and infantile Legally Blonde. Too bad.

Source: The Hamilton Spectator