Talk is Free Theatre’s inventive site-specific staging and two compelling performances bring Ben Page’s darkly comic musical to life.
Talk is Free Theatre (TIFT) brings its production of All The Cows Are Dead to Toronto after its first run in Barrie last year.
Bizarre, electrifying and frequently unnerving, the production establishes its distinctive theatrical personality from the outset.
TIFT has developed a distinctive ability to transform unconventional spaces into imaginative performance environments, demonstrating how creative staging can achieve considerable theatrical impact without relying on elaborate resources.
Staged in the rear unit of Soul Provisions at 68 Tycos Drive in North York, the site-specific production maintains an intimate seating capacity for each performance. This is crucial, as it places audience members mere feet from the action and heightens the story’s immediacy.
The audience sits on three sides of the playing area, watching as Anton (Mike Nadajewski), a domineering butcher, insists on teaching his trade to his apprentice and nephew, Louis (Taylor Garwood). Anton insists on teaching his nephew the artistry of butchery, while Louis quietly seeks artistic fulfilment by writing poetry he hasn’t yet published. Conflict arises from the contrast between Anton’s pragmatic demands that his nephew become a butcher and Louis’s romanticized vision of the poetic life, a far cry from what is being asked of him.
William Dao directs Ben Page’s melodramatic and often outlandish book with exuberant flair and emotive panache. Accompanied by Kyra Crilly’s haunting cello, Ben Page’s assured musical direction heightens the production’s tension and emotional intensity. My only quibble is that I couldn’t hear for a few moments when performers’ backs faced me, but it’s minor.
Designer Alessia Urbani designs a functional alley staging that suggests a butcher shop. Balloons of varying shapes and sizes suggest hanging cured meats, while the configuration allows the actors to move freely through the playing area. The sound effect of a bell dinging (much like one would hear when entering and exiting a butcher shop) aptly places the audience in another world.
Ben Page’s often grotesquely suggestive and extremely clever lyrics become delightful reminders of the delicious wordplay in Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. Several highly effective tableau moments show Nadajewski’s Anton holding the butcher knife in sweeping upward or downward motions.
Why see All the Cows Are Dead?
Very simple – Mike Nadajewski and Taylor Garwood.
They give a masterclass in how actors listen and hear each other. Their timing, phrasing, and pauses for comic or dramatic effect enrich and heighten the moment’s intensity and tension. For example, Nadajewski’s Anton is proud of his artistic craft as a butcher, but he will also lord it, sometimes violently, over Garwood’s Louis. In that same vein, Garwood’s Louis uses his love of poetry to escape Anton’s tyrannical hand.
Nadajewski’s slick black hair and trim moustache, paired with a starch-white shirt and spit-shined shoes, perfectly accentuate his puffed-up, narcissistic sense of self-worth. Dressed in earth-toned colours, with a couple of tiny holes ripped in the back of his shirt, Garwood’s Louis offers a perfect juxtaposition to the unartistic life of a butcher that his uncle wants for his nephew. Their opening song, ‘I Am A Butcher,’ becomes a wonderful send-up of the artistry of killing animals for human consumption, while ‘I’m Sorry,’ near the end, left a few audience members dabbing their eyes (myself included). The play’s passage of time and the on-again, off-again volatile relationship between Anton and Louis culminate in them saying these two words to each other.
In a recent interview with Ludwig van, Page identifies one of the production’s central preoccupations as the relationship between artistry, craftsmanship and personal fulfilment:
“It’s about artistry and mastery of a craft, and how to find meaning in the day-to-day…how do you spend your time in a way that makes you happy?…Why should we try to be happy, at all?”
Although the ending delivers a shocking surprise, Page’s musical ultimately leaves audiences contemplating the relationship between artistic fulfilment, personal happiness and the choices we make in life. TIFT’s Toronto staging brings these questions to life through two compelling performances and an inventive use of space.
Through Anton and Louis, under Dao’s direction, Page examines whether mastery of a practical craft can offer the same fulfilment as artistic expression, and whether personal happiness depends on pursuing one’s own ambitions or accepting the life circumstances imposed by others.
Go see the production and do some shopping and eating at Soul Provisions.
Running time: approximately 90 minutes with no interval/intermission.
The production runs to November 18 at 68 Tycos Drive (rear of building), Toronto. For tickets: tift.ca, call (705) 792-1949 or info@tift.ca.
TALK IS FREE THEATRE presents
All The Cows Are Dead
Book, Music and Lyrics by Ben Page
Directed by William Dao
Music Director: Ben Page. Cello: Kyra Crilly
Set, Costume and Props Design: Alessia Urbani
Fight Direction: Christina Fox
Stage Manager: Sabrina Weinstein
Performers: Mike Nadajewski as Anton and Taylor Garwood as Louis
