Theatre review: Assorted Candies at the Centaur not all that tasty

   I've never been a Michel Tremblay fan, although I've only seen one of his plays actually performed in French and enjoyed it. Tonight was the third or fourth I've vidied in English and was tempted to show up with earplugs, wary of another over-the-top screamer about the misery of life in the 50s for French Canadian Montrealers suffering from the Grand Noirceur doldrums. But Assorted Candies - an autobiographical revisit to a childhood among his threadbare matriarchs - errs only on the side of the airy. A young Michel Tremblay, hangs out beneath the table overhearing his mother, grandmother and aunt discussing their problems, while occasionally getting a glimpse of panty which gets unnecessarily described in detail by the narrator.

Leni Parker (photo above) who has done a ton of local theatre since returning from Hollywood after making a few bucks playing an alien in one of those Star Trek type shows for a few years, (where salaries can touch about a quarter mil per annum) gets many of the plumb lines. One soliloquy has her blasting paint off the walls and ears off the young boy - played steadily by Centaur boss Gordon McCall - who's handily something of a Tremblay lookalike. He ably alternates between narration and dumb-eyed childishness.
  The maybe too-loud Parker later gets another showy scene, playing a fairy to impress the young boy, which leads to much unlikely humiliation, clumsily cut by the narrator who suggests that the awkward moment should be forgotten rather than dragged out, but only after it's dragged out, leaving a solid sense of who-cares? into the proceedings.
   Two boozy, roguish male characters show up relatively late in the play, the father - played by the excellent Michel Perron playing yet another variation of his Mambo Italiano chubby old man thing, and a charismatic, carousing old uncle who charms the boy with his yarns. The two end up upstaging the drab female characters who get most of the lines.
   The play kicks off with three women fretting about what to buy a neighbour woman for her wedding gift. Tremblay's mother ultimately sacrifices her prized ornamental bowl. It's not valued by the neighbour, but after much build up the gift issue gets played for laughs and forgotten.
   Granny gets a few scenes discussing her imminent death, a theme which does not return, so much for the adage about showing the gun in the first scene and being obliged to use it by the last.
   Dad gets a scene holding his son's hand watching lightning on the roof. Dat don't go too far beyond the visual guffaw of dad standing on an unseen pedestal appearing much taller than the adult-playing-a-child McCall. Dad's a warmhearted lump. He's been laid off by the printers and refuses to look for work elsewhere. But that doesn't get played up as an issue either.
  The second half of the play (there is no intermission) is set around Christmas where the women worry about decoration and the men get drunk and laugh a lot.
   Those in the 250 seat theatre, (the better one, on the right hand side) laughed and clapped at the right moments but many were later seen in the lobby shrugging and offering less than flattering assessments. Tremblay made an impact on Quebec theatre recounting the bucolic whimsy of the newly-urbanized and subtle political implications of the lives of penury lived by the French speaking commonfolk, but it now seems a bit unclear what message this play is meant to convey to an audience in an entirely different, much faster world 50 years later.
   This plays like a quickie, Christmas special rushed under deadline by Tremblay while overlooking the lake at his cottage.
   There's the usual requisite crazy shouting, without Tremblay's precription doses of over-the-top Quebecois dysfunction. Its one brief moment of tender father-son bonding seems like hollow plot contrivance, another wasted motif on the storyboard floor. None of the frenzied dialogue provokes further insight, the slice-of-life tale fails to ratchet up the drama, which makes this a definitive light play. It's a yarn that fails to enchant, or seduce the audience into empathy for the difficulties of the picaresque underclass of Tremblay's world. The author's series of slick emotional lures fail to reel in the audience with this effort.
   If you're up for some drama, get thee over to the Monument National on the Main and Dorchester for one the 50 seats for the final shows of Neal Bell's Monster. It's only ten bucks but it ends November 5. Every actor in this original play shines: Brad Carmichael as Doc Frankenstein, Adrien Desbiens-Benn in a dual role, Tim Diamond as the dumb little brother and an exquisite turn as a cat, Vanessa Matsui as the horny young chick, John Topor in a dual role, Carolyn-Fe Trinidad as the mother and cleaning lady and Prank Patrol star Andre Simoneau whose acting and make-up as the monster will nab your attention.
   Grab a seat at the very front if possible. The actors are dynamite and it's hard to believe that they're working almost for free. The costumes, make up, vitality and body count will not leave you feeling cheated, it's a steamy, sensational ride... as an added bonus, a studly young anglo TV star does a full frontal in it as well, good stuff for those who like that kind of thing anyway.