Onegin

January 2018

Onegin 

Onegin. By Amiel Gladstone and Veda Hille. Arts Club, Jan. 2018, Max Bell Theatre, Calgary. 

Onegin was touted as one of the best productions of the year, which made me go into it both intrigued and cynical.  Hype can be good for a show, but it can also raise people’s expectations and skew their opinions of it. After seeing Onegin, I understood the hype. It was refreshing in its irreverence, and had a beautiful score. To me, this musical was another example of “the way a story is told is just as important as the story itself,” it was presented as a group of storytellers, jumping between narrating and being the characters in the story, as seamlessly as they jumped about the stage in their beautifully choreographed dance pieces.

 I did enjoy this production, but at the same time I will not remember it. The music was beautiful and the actors sang and danced beautifully. They offered technical precision, but they lacked emotional depth. The music and the party atmosphere was fun, but the actors did not take me on the emotional journey that I hoped for. I see theatre to feel with the actor, to discover something of my humanity through their vulnerability and growth. This show left me feeling nothing.

I walked away from this play feeling that it was about a selfish person who remains selfish and ends up alone. A cautionary tale, and perhaps in Pushkin’s novel there is more of a sense of the tragedy that he created by his choices. Unfortunately, this version did not challenge its audience to change. It left me feeling as if it was actually a celebration of the inability to change, and of the coping mechanisms that we all use to stay exactly where we are.