REVIEWS
If the venue fits, wear it!
Quality; London boutique hosts shoe-savvy Canadian play
J Kelly Nestruck
National Post
Friday, September 21, 2007
LONDON - On upscale Marylebone Lane, a crowd of Londoners has gathered
around Tracey Neuls' shoe boutique. Peering in the windows past the display
of chic but comfortable footwear, they are observing two female employees in
the middle of a passionate debate over whether they should launch a cut-rate
line and make millions, or keep things the way they are and preserve the
quality and exclusivity of the brand. Listening closely, the gawkers can hear
words filter out into the late summer evening air: "Sales ? sex ? toe cleavage
..."
While the Italian leather on display in the window is real, the argument is
staged. The passersby have stumbled upon Quality, a site-specific play about
women, footwear and selling your sole for success that's currently stopping
(pedestrian) traffic in this fashionable shopping district. Watched by 30
prosecco-sipping audience members crammed into the living-room sized shop
and glimpsed by many more passing strangers every night, Quality is also a
hyper-Canadian production -- written by Vancouver's Elaine Avila, directed by
University of Alberta professor Kathleen Weiss and starring Edmonton's Tracy
Penner and Melissa Thingelstad.
Yes, even the cherry-red high heels are from the Great White North: Canadian
designer Neuls' TN_29 winter collection has a prominent -- one might say
starring-- role in Quality, standing in for the fictional but equally high-end
"Tremenulos" of the play.
Relaxing in an old pair of orange runners after the show is over and the
indoor and outdoor audiences have shuffled away, co-star Penner, 28, explains
how the play mixes treads with treading the boards. "It's two kinds of art
forms coming together to help promote each other," says the Manitoba-born
actress, whose character Pippa has the ability to channel the personality of
pumps and platforms.
Lest you scoff at the idea of shoes as an art form -- though few female
readers will -- know that Neuls has received awards from the Royal Society of
Art and shown her work at the Barcelona Museum of Modern Art. At her cozy
corner boutique in London, her eponymous shoes hang from the ceiling like
paintings or sit on vintage stools like sculpture. "It certainly does set the
stage really well for the argument of the play," says 26-year-old Thingelstad,
originally from Saskatchewan, whose haughty character Roxanne feels she
must protect the Tremenulo name from Pippa's populist ambitions.
Coinciding with London Fashion Week, Quality deals with the whys and
wherefores of what drives your average Jimmy Choo enthusiast. As Pippa and
Roxanne serve their fur-clad customers, the many reasons a woman who
didn't live in a shoe would spend the equivalent of a down payment for a pair
are explored: fashion, status, sex, even revenge.
Penner and Thingelstad first slipped into these two characters' shoes in June at
a Gravity Pope store in Edmonton. There, surrounded by hundreds of brands
of shoes, Pippa's argument for the democratization of style had a bit of an
edge. In the elegant surroundings of Tracey Neuls shop in London, however,
where the shoes are brought out in boxes that open like secret compartments
in a jewellery box (and priced well out of the budget of independent actors
from Edmonton), Roxanne's argument has the advantage. In fact, after seeing
a preview in London, the playwright strengthened Pippa's lines to rebalance
the show.
Penner agrees with her character that a woman's choice of moccasin says a lot
more about her than just about what she wears to protect her feet from the
street. "I feel like a totally different person depending on what shoes I'm
wearing," says the actress, whose favourite footwear is a pair of black Fluevog
boots.
When Thingelstad first read the script, however, she wondered if perhaps
Quality was overstating things here and there. In particular, she was uncertain
about what the actresses call the "orgasm scene," wherein Pippa and Roxanne
roll around in ecstasy as they get the first glimpse of Tremendulo's new
collection. But when rehearsals moved into Gravity Pope, Thingelstad learned
that she too was capable of going weak at the knees for a nice pair of thigh-
high boots. "I walked in," she recalls, "and saw this shoe and went ? [Here
Thingelstad lets out her orgasmic noise followed by a shuddering sound that is
difficult to render as onomatopoeia, at least in a family newspaper]?literally,
that came out of my mouth." She laughs. "Shoes are art."
And Quality has become a bit of an art installation itself. Penner and
Thingelstad are thrilled by the excitement added to the play by the second
audience -- the passersby who stop and laugh, or snap pictures on their
cellphones. (At Gravity Pope, the production was not visible from the street.)
Sometimes they literally become part of the show. "Are you still open?" one
woman asked innocently, the other day, walking in on the middle of a scene.
Tonight, two men stopped Penner as her character Pippa left the show to take
her low-cost shoe designs to Los Angeles. "They were just fascinated by it,"
says Penner, who offered them a flyer and told them to come back. "One
said, 'Do you do Christmas parties?' I said, 'I'm from Canada.' He said, 'I don't
care where you're from.' "
Well, perhaps they'll just have to come back to London, then. There's no
business like shoe business, right? - Quality continues at Tracey Neuls Shoe
details.
© National Post 2007
Play opens a Pandora's shoebox of possibilities
Liz Nicholls, The Edmonton Journal
Published: Wednesday, June 27, 2007
SHOE!
Theatre: Theatre of Invention
Written by: Elaine Avila
Directed by: Kathleen Weiss
Starring: Melissa Thingelstad, Tracy Penner
Where: Gravity Pope, 10442 82nd Ave.
Running: Through July 3 (Saturdays and Sundays at 8 p.m., weeknights at 9:30 p.m.)
Tickets: Tix on the Square (420-1757)
- - -
EDMONTON - Trying on Shoe! is a bit like slipping into the proverbial "something more comfortable" and finding out it's barbed in unexpected places.
That's the fun of Elaine Avila's subversive little black comedy, now running at (more like through) Gravity Pope, the famous Whyte Avenue shoe emporium. It won't give you blisters, but it's full of surprises.
When it starts, you'd swear Shoe! was going to fit your foot like an open-toed satire -- of the snobs who wear high-end designer shoes and the snobs who sell them. Roxanne (Melissa Thingelstadt), so not a Roxie, is the terrifyingly long-legged, elegant creature who presides over Signor Tremendulo's flagship store like a priestess over a shrine containing Leonardo da Vinci's new fall line in pietas. Thingelstadt plays her with velvet ferocity; gimlet-eyed, she strides through the salon on six-inch spikes without jiggling her perfectly coiffed head.
If the salon were just a shoe store and Roxanne were just a manager, you'd say Pippa (Tracy Penner), a nervous kook who arrives on the fly (wearing funky boots and an air of desperation), is being interviewed for a clerk's position. This is more like an audition for a leading role at La Scala.
Are they selling shoes? A trick question. Pippa tries. "We're selling the zeitgeist of the moment." Not good enough; Roxanne is withering. "We sell the zeitgeist of ahead of the moment." Is a resume required? "That is so working-class," declares Roxanne damningly.
What saves Pippa is a gift for channelling; she clutches a pump to her chest and "becomes" the women who wear it, from Jackie O. with her matching shoes and handbags to a gladiator in lace-up sandals.
As I say, you're thinking satire, with Roxanne as the fantastically shod scapegoat. But then, Shoe! surprises you -- with Roxanne's argument that despising the rich society wives, the upwardly mobile mistresses, the petulant heiresses, etc., who buy $10,000 worth of shoes at a time, is in itself a form of snobbery. Clearly, Pippa finds them repulsive: The actor conjures them as a series of big, loud, grotesquely distorted cartoons. Penner's performance is built on big, colourful choices, true, but arguably a size too wide for the circumstances.
Roxanne's view, oddly enough, has a certain democratic impulse about it. Unjudgmental empathy is the only way to sell shoes to "our women." And that means grasping that self-esteem, dissatisfaction, neglect, revenge and sublimation are embodied in designer-shoe acquisition. It's a shoe-shaped feminist argument: Tremendulos as power for the powerless.
When Pippa, the protege, gets the bright idea of launching a cheap line so that everyone can have a Tremendulo experience, Shoe! opens a veritable Pandora's shoebox. In one way, Pippa's populism is admirable; in another, it replaces real art with the commercial motive of profit before quality. Is art by its very nature elitist? If so, is that bad?
The performance style of Kathleen Weiss's premiere production is high-style platform, a species of comic intensity which teeters occasionally over into the shrill. The odd ballet-shoe flattie moment wouldn't go amiss. The show has us watching at knee level, like clients waiting for a size 8 from the stockroom.
The setting is not just a propos, but (for fetishists) also distracting in the extreme. I myself had a chance to ogle surreptitiously the Fluevog line, and if my bank loan comes through, I shall return and triumph.
