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Jon Kaplan’s Top 10 Theatre Artists

1. TOM ROONEY

Actor

Going to the heart of his characters, making the audience care for them despite less than admirable traits, hiding acting craft beneath a deceptively simple presentation, Rooney always gives a riveting performance. This year he stood out in Someone Else, winning a Dora as a married doctor in mid-life crisis who uncovers an old emotional wound when he’s drawn to a young patient. He shone at Stratford this summer as Vladimir opposite Stephen Ouimette’s Estragon in Waiting For Godot, showing off his clowning ability to make us both laugh and cry, and as the outwardly righteous judge Angelo in Measure For Measure, physically tormented by his covert desire for a young nun but unable to stop his lust. Masterful work.


2. BRUCE DOW

Actor

Dow knows how to play big when it’s appropriate, but he’s also remarkable at highlighting the subtleties of a character. In Of A Monstrous Child: a gaga musical, he gave a Dora-winning turn as in-yer-face but sensitive performance artist Leigh Bowery, returned to life to guide viewers through a multilevel look at Lady Gaga. His hypocritical judge in The Life Of Jude was a comic gem. Dow capped a strong year in the brave production of Pig, playing a series of gay men (Barry, Harry, Garry and Larry), the sometimes murderous, sometimes covetous tricks and exes of a young man already caught up in a dangerous relationship.


3. CAMELLIA KOO

Designer

There seems no end to Koo’s inventive visuals, which always add a layer to a production. This year she turned the set of the satiric Ching Chong Chinaman into a made-in-China packing crate, while for Blue Planet she created a magical beach on a mysterious island where children never age. Water was appropriately at the core of carried away on the crest of a wave, seeping onstage from the start of the show until the cast was wading in a pond by the end. In Sister Mary’s A Dyke?!, Koo took us into a queer schoolgirl’s imagination, filled with books, pews and a pup tent put to multiple uses. Finally, she built walls of salt-and-pepper shakers to encase the action of The Gravitational Pull Of Bernice Trimble.


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4. COURTNEY CH’NG LANCASTER

Actor

Lancaster initially made an impression as a member of the Soulpepper Academy. This year, cast as a yodelling, plucky Rosina in the company’s production of The Barber Of Seville, she won viewers’ hearts. Her musical charms were also evident in her portrayal of the inspiring ingenue in The Ballad Of Weedy Peetstraw. But she’s a strong serious actor, too, as she proved playing a young stripper in The Flood Thereafter and recently, in The Tin Drum, a pair of wives, one unaware that she’s the rejected fourth side of a love triangle and the other involved both with her husband and her stepson.


5. TONY NAPPO

Actor

Nappo was rightly acclaimed for his work in Murderers Confess At Christmastime, in which he played an empathetic wheelchair-bound man desperate to connect with a woman emotionally and sexually. Earlier this year he stole the show with a bravura turn as hockey enforcer John Kordic in Sudden Death. Bruiser-type performances are naturals for the guy, but he can show a more subtle, poignant side onstage, as he did at the start of God Of Carnage before becoming a Neanderthal fighter along with the play’s other characters.


6. AMY KEATING

Actor

Keating has grown up – onstage, that is. She was perfect several seasons ago in Mr. Marmalade as a four-year-old with an imaginary drug addict for a friend. She still played a childlike character at various ages in this year’s three-part Passion Play, but they all had an adult awareness of the world. In Murderers Confess At Christmastime, she was older still, a not so innocent kidnapping victim who stood up to her captor. But she burned brightest in After Miss Julie as Christine, the maid who’s usually the weak point of the play’s emotional triangle here, her below-stairs character knew exactly what she wanted, and got it.


7. KAWA ADA

Actor

There hasn’t been a more chameleon-like actor on the stage this year than Ada, who will debut as a playwright in 2014. He played multiple roles in carried away on the crest of a wave, impressing especially as an open-minded Muslim examining a miracle at a Christian church. In the workshop of Body Politic, he won audiences over as a young gay man getting an education in Toronto queer history, and he’s currently sizzling with comic electricity as a lightning-struck boy in Weather The Weather. But his most memorable turn, both mesmerizing and repulsive, was as a slimy real estate agent in Iceland seeing a link between capitalism and sex, he worships at the altar of both.


8. DAMIEN ATKINS

Actor/playwright

Queer works occupied much of Atkins’s time this year. He rightly drove the epic Angels In America, playing Prior Walter, the gay man with AIDS who’s destined for great things, giving a first-rate performance that took his character from a fearful, lost and needy soul to a hero who literally dons the mantle of a prophet and goes to heaven to make a case for mankind. As co-writer/performer in the kaleidoscopic The Gay Heritage Project, he energized a number of episodes, in the most memorable bringing the HIV virus to trial not only for the deaths it has caused but also for depriving Atkins of a generation of queer role models.


9. ANDY TRITHARDT

Actor

Trithardt first caught my eye when he humanized the rigid minister in Ibsen’s Brand at George Brown Theatre. This year he was featured in a trio of plays by Kat Sandler (Rock, Sucker and the remount of Delicacy), capturing the playwright’s mad, off-the-wall characters: a man who believes voices that tell him to bash certain people to death, another who decides to convert to Judaism and become a rabbi when his parents die unexpectedly, and a conservative, well-off husband with a yen for wife-swapping. In between, Trithardt, as adept communicating with his body as with his words, scored as a medieval knight errant desperate for a quest in Adventure and a comic peasant lad in the cartoony Engaged.


10. JESSICA MOSS

Playwright/actor

Moss has become a shining star in the indie theatre world for her writing as well as her quirky, sharp-edged performances. She started the year in the intimate discussion-group setting of Faroe Islands, making the audience part of her emotional character’s concerns as a whale hunt activist. She finished 2013 with a rapid-paced stream-of-consciousness monologue about the death of a father and Lucky Charms, part of Fear And Desire (And The Whole Damn Thing). In between, she played a woman determined to become a vampire though she can’t abide the taste of blood (Sucker) and, in an acclaimed turn as author/actor in the Fringe hit Polly Polly, played multiple characters with breathtaking skill. It won her the Ed Mirvish Award for Entrepreneurship.

jonkap@nowtoronto.com

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