Best Ensemble of 2006
Amid many fine performances in 2006, one cast stands out in Lillian's Groag's sepia memoir The Magic Fire
The Magic Fire, directed by Shaw Festival's Jackie Maxwell was bellissimo. It's the tale of two families -The Bergs and The Guarneris in the Paris of South America,1952.
The Bergs have fled one regime to the next – once Jewish refugees in war-ravaged Austria, now Viannese immigrants living in Eva Peron's tumultuous Argentina. The stanchly Catholic Guarneris have also emigrated from Italy to Argentina in hopes of making their fortune. But Peron is now dying, in a house of cards political climate and both families sense dangerous times are upon them.
Conducted by Otto Berg, these two families choose to escape the outside world with opulent flair – through wine, succulent main course dishes, and vibrant cultural discourse all set to a glorious operatic backdrop.
At times The Magic Fire ( the title inspired by Richard Wagner's Die Walkure) reminded one of The Sopranos – heaping plates of pasta, flowing goblets of red wine, and vivid conversation scored with an ominous underbelly inscribed into the daily routine – crescendos of events unspoken.
As the Bergs and Guarneris argue and discuss all things cultural - Chekhov, Puccini, and Wagner, score sheets often strewn on the lavishly set dining table - young Lise Berg ( Lila-Bata Walsh) asks “What’s a foreskin” and Mamma Nonna promptly replies " It's a useless flap on the penis" as the family shockingly retorts “ Why can’t she ask about geography?"
Life moves in sheltered ¾ time.
Conflicted neighbour / long time cultural kindred spirit and likely member of the secret police General Henri Fontannes (Dan Chameroy) cannot shield this clan much longer. The servant Rosa’s (Eleventh Hour’s Waneta Storms) brother Santo is wanted by the Peronistas, risking everyone's safety while using the Berg household to hide out. It's only a matter of time.
Little Lise Berg is seven and has absolutely no idea of the danger so close in her delightful “paradise lost ”.
Now, decades later, as narrator Lise realizes how different her “reality” was, she asks the question, what was her family’s reality? Little Lise "remembers it safer.”
There is big, passionate, musicality in Lillian Groag’s text and this cast sang an aural symphony of joy, and sorrow - seamless performances from two families who “have a pathological aversion to the ordinary.”
Jennifer Phipps was a show stealer as no-nonsense matriarch Maddalina "Nonna" Guarneri whining, dining, and wise cracking through arias of dinnertime tales. Sharry Flett was powerful as Otto Berg’s long-suffering wife Amalia, (“It stinks of nostalgia in here”)
Shaw stalwarts Michael Ball as bigger then life 'papi', Gianni "Juan" Guarneri, Goldie Semple’s fiery artiste Elena Guarneri, Donna Belleville’s dotty Paula Guarneri, and Patricia’s Hamilton’s stoic Aunt Clara Stepanek aptly spiced Groag's verbal feast. Ric Reid as maestro Otto Berg (“I was never afraid of the Devil”) and Tara Rosling as nostalgic-but-wiser Lise Berg, composed an unforgettable family scrapbook for the ages.
Salute!
