The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 55

Pages D6-D9 Television What's on THF OTTAWA TITI7PM MONDAY, MAY 30, 1988 On rH Flower girl and grief-stricken lady Actress shows her versatility in plum roles at Stratford Festival By Bob Cox The Canadian Press YORKTON, Sask. The York-ton Short Film and Video Festival ended in a tie for the first time Saturday, with a Quebec drama about wife abuse sharing top honors with a documentary on an Edmonton Mtis film-maker's discovery of his natural family. L'Emprise, directed by Michel Brault, and Foster Child, directed by Gil Cardinal, were both given the Golden Sheaf award of excellence as the top productions at the five-day festival for Canadian films less than an hour long. A record 313 films and videos were entered and 77 were nominated for awards. A total of 29 prizes were handed out Saturday night during a banquet at a community centre in Yorkton, a community of about 10,000 people 190 kilometres northeast of Regina.

Luc Hetu, scriptwriter for L'Emprise, made six trips to the red and grey raised podium decorated with small sheafs of wheat to accept awards on behalf of the film, which aired on the CBC French network last February. "It's a film that incited a lot of women to call a hotline for battered women in Quebec," Hetu said later as he packed the miniature, bronze wheat sheaf statues in a box. "It had a lot of impact." Michel and Sylvain Brault, a father and son team, took awards for best direction and best cinematography for the film. Dominique Chartrand won for best sound and Genevieve Bujold won best actress. Cardinal's journey of self discovery, in which the M6tis film By Jamie Portman Southam News STRATFORD, Ont.

It's shaping up as a typical week's work for Lucy Peacock, one of the brightest new actresses at the Stratford Festival. With a hectic schedule that usually goes from 10 a.m. until sup-pertime six days a week, she's moving from rehearsal area to rehearsal area and from director to director to prepare for three key roles at this summer's festival. Peacock, whom festival producer Richard Dennison describes as "an absolutely stunning talent," has landed the plum role of flower girl Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, opening June 3. But in addition, she has two major Shakespearean roles the resourceful and enchanting Helena in All's Well That Ends Well, opening Tuesday, and one of classical theatre's great cameo parts that of the grief-stricken Lady Anne in Richard III, the play that officially launches the 1988 season tonight.

That's not bad for someone Who only five years ago was fresh out of Montreal's National Theatre School and looking for work. Hers is a rugged schedule that saw Peacock begin rehearsals in early February and which will keep her acting on the Stratford boards until Oct. 30. It also reflects the glories of a repertory philosophy that allows both performers and play-goers the opportunity to experience a wide variety of fare within a given time frame. This is Lucy Peacock's fifth season at Stratford, and she can't imagine being content with any other kind of system.

"Repertory appeals to me an enormous amount," she says during a rehearsal break from Richard HI. "I can't really imagine myself doing the same play and role night after night for six months. "The length of the season here is very demanding, but you can keep the quality of your acting up to par because of the variety of work and the fact that you're alternating in two or three roles." There's also the warm sense of company fellowship a factor that helped this classically inclined actress move confidently into the treacherous waters of musical theatre. "People are very supportive of each other and that counts a great deal," she says. "There's no doubt that My Fat Lady is a Scriptwriters settle with some producers ti'i like Lucy's in bud, it has to be developed carefully," says Neville.

"In the past here, some good people were not developed properly. Too much was expected and asked of them too early." For Peacock, her five-season Stratford tenure has been a steady progression starting with the small Third Stage, moving to the larger Avon Theatre and finally this year tackling the famous but intimidating thrust stage at the Festival Theatre. "You have to learn to move in a special way on that stage. I really watch the other actors who know it well. You're so totally exposed.

There's no room for waffling or uncertainty. You have to know exactly what you're doing." And for all her apparent confidence in performance, she confesses that she sometimes suffers from stage nerves. "It's dreadful. Sometimes the knowledge that I'm getting frightened simply frightens me more." not right thetic support throughout and kept the orchestra down to allow the soloist to be heard at all times. In fact, from where I was sitting in the fourth row, the cellist drowned out the orchestra most of the time.

After intermission, Wegg led a substantial reading of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony that was really quite an achievement. The tempi were a bit on the slow side, particularly so in an acoustical setting that robbed the strings of any real glow, but every phrase was shaped with loving care and the performance had a clear sense of form. Wegg never opted for cheap effects, but it was interesting to hear how magically effective, for example, the Storm scene was when played by an ensemble about the size Beethoven knew and with about the level of proficiency of European orchestras of that period. Wegg is clearly a serious, thoughtful musician and with any luck the Nepean Symphony will soon become an important musical factor in the greater Ottawa community as well as on its home base. Pity the hall has not lived up to expectations.

tems in Rexdale. Konitz (June 10, 7.30 p.m.) is a portrait in performance and interview of saxophone great Lee Konitz by Real Daudelin. The series wraps up June 22, with a new film by the prolific Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. The Box of Sun is a poetic fantasy about a young woman who discovers a secret light that may revive her lover. Although his film is not a premiere, the CFI hopes director Bill MacGillivray will attend the June 3 screening of Life Classes, about a single mother who models in the nude and becomes an artist herself.

All films are screened by the CFI Cinema at the National Archives auditorium. maker finds his natural family after 35 years as a foster child, took four prizes, including a special award for cinematographer Jim Jeffrey for filming in difficult emotional situations. "Certainly, in the last few years if there was ever a film where you had to anticipate and feel what was going on, in other words begin rolling the camera before the action happened, Foster Child certainly was the film," Jeffrey said. A shortened and in Jeffrey's words incomplete version "of the 43-minute documentary aired last fall on CBC's Man Alive series. Foster Child also won the first Kathleen Shannon award named for the founder of the National Film Board women's studio for an independent film allowing people outside the dominant culture to express their perspective.

Controversy followed the judges throughout the festival, especially when they opted not to award prizes in an six categories. Some film-makers complained they attended the festival after learning they were nominated for an award only to discover Saturday night that no prize would be given out in their category. But judge Lawrence OToole, a New York film critic, said the judges wanted to maintain high standards. "Just because it was the best, in a category did not mean it was a prize winner, did not mean it was special," OToole said. "In some categories, where the competition was very stiff, the loser would be far superior to the top in other categories.

liicfs Milton Berle Las Vegas honor sity of Colorado Events Centre in Boulder. Billed as The Denver Broncos Classical Rock Concert, it also was the first scheduled Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra concert to be cancelled in 32 years. Tribute to Nat PHILADELPHIA Natalie Cole, the belter of funk-rock on Pink Cadillac, wants to do an album of delicate, old-fashioned ballads ones her father made famous. She hopes to record her Nat "King" Cole tribute sometime in 1989. Miss Cole believes she's well-suited to singing her father's material.

Critics have written, she says, that her phrasing shows insight into song lyrics, especially those of ballads. Jazz arranger dies NEW YORK Jazz composer-arranger-band leader Sy Oliver, one of the big band era's most influential and imitated arrangers, died Friday at Mount Sinai Hospital of lung cancer. He was 77. Sunny Side of the Street, My Blue Heaven and Aint She Sweet were among his most acclaimed arrangements. Oliver is ranked with Fletcher Henderson among the era's top arrangers.

His works include Opus Tain't Whatcha Do, Easy Does It, Swing High, Dream of You, For Dancers Only and Yes Indeed. From the late 1950s he was a freelance arranger for singers Frank Sinatra, Ethel Merman, Sammy Davis Peggy Lee, Jo Stafford, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters and the Mills Centrepointe Theatre rtif Peacock as Eliza Doolittle and huge challenge for me. In fact, it wasn't until we actually started rehearsals that I really believed I was going to do it." She has known every song in the Lerner-Loewe classic by heart since she was seven. But never before has she performed in a musical. "The first thing I did when I was given the role was to grab a recording and sing along with it.

I needed to see whether I could actually sing it." She decided that with the help of vocal lessons that she could. "I've had to stretch myself. I mean I've been singing all my life, but have never been trained. "As for dancing," she adds with a grin, "I yearned to be a dancer once and then accepted the fact I was one of these people doomed with a healthy body and large bones which put that ambition to rest." However, festival artistic director John Neville, who plays Professor Henry Higgins in the show, Uusic isvisw The Nepean Symphony, conducted by James Wegg, In its debut performance in the Centrepointe Thetre of the new Nepean Civic Centre, with cellist Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi as soloist, in concert Saturday evening only Nepean Themes Lytle Concerto No. 1 in Op.

33 Saint-Saens Variations Rococo, Op. 33 Tschaikowsky Symphony No. 6 in Op. 68, Pastoral Beethoven can be heard distinctly they will be motivated to prepare more carefully than has sometimes been the case in the past. But there is a basic problem with the hall that even the addition of an acoustical shell may not solve completely.

The auditorium has too short a period of reverberation for serious music and as a result the sound of an ensemble does not fully blend. You hear all of the strands, but somehow they do not weave themselves into a continuous picture. There are ways of providing symptomatic relief for such a condition, but there really is no cure. Which is a real pity, because the hall is attractive enough to warrant being used as an alterna en their only source of financial backing. It has also fostered the growth of regional film co-oper-.

atives. This regional emphasis is evident throughout Independent Visions which brings to the CFI films from Vancouver to Newfoundland. The program started Friday with two Ottawa premieres. One of these was Wheat Soup, a post-Apocalyptic vision of a Saskatchewan beset by wheat-poachers and appliance graveyards. It continues tonight with Atom Egoyan's Family Viewing, a hit on Canada's festival circuit last year.

One of the more eagerly-anticipated events is the premiere t.tfc. Neville as Henry Higgins predicts that Peacock will deliver a knockout performance. Neville recently had an emergency appendectomy and veteran Eric Donkin has taken over his role, but festival officials hope Neville is back by opening night. "From the first time I saw Lucy on stage, I felt strongly that this was a magical talent," For Neville, Peacock's move to the front ranks of the prestigious Stratford acting company vindicates current festival policies of "encouraging, nurturing and taking care of young performers." Joining Stratford's Young Company in 1985 she thrilled the public and critics with a memorably witty Mrs. Sullen in The Beaux Stratagem.

In 1986, she moved into the main company to deliver a chilling Ophelia in Hamlet. Last year, she played the title role of Nora in Ingmar Bergman's quirky reworking of Ibsen's A Doll's House. "When a theatre has a talent acoustics tive locale for serious musical events. Then, too, people in the west end deserve a proper concert hall within comparatively easy reach. At this juncture, Centrepointe Theatre is not that venue.

As for the concert itself, it proved to be a marvellously enjoyable event. Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi was the invited soloist and he really played up a storm in both the Saint-Saens and Tschaikowsky pieces on the program. The two works are major blocks of the cello repertoire and it was good not only to hear them both in the same program but to hear them played with such intelligence, musicality and intensity. Tsutsumi was obviously not treating this event as an outing to the boondocks. He played as well as he would had this been Carnegie Hall.

There was all the blazing intensity one could ask for in the romantic passages, all of the refinement one, could wish for in the Saint-Saens and that level of sheer virtuosity one encounters only from top-rank artists. He got as standing ovation and deserved it. James Wegg provided sympa here of Tales From The Gimli Hospital (June 1 at 7.30 p.m.), described as "a dark, expressionist, creepy fantasy set in a diseased, possibly hallucogenic underworld." Winnipeg film-maker Guy Maddin put it together for a minimal $16,000 and that includes $1,000 for a three-minute trailer. He hopes to have it shown at Toronto's Festival of von i aio. Also to be premiered as part of Independent Visions is Determinations (June 6, 7.30 p.m.), a film by Oliver Hockenhull, which takes a critical view of the sentences handed out to Direct Action guerrillas who destroyed a hydro substation on Vancouver Island and attacked Litton Sys Nepean Symphony has a new home, but there's a big problem with hall By Jacob Siskind Citizen staff writer The Nepean Symphony finally has a home, a hall with comfortable seats and decent sight lines and a stage large enough to hold the orchestra comfortably.

What it doesn't have as yet is a proper acoustical setting for its programs. At least that was the impression garnered from the opening concert Saturday evening in the Centrepointe Theatre. The sound is infinitely better than it was in Sir Robert Borden High Auditorium, which is pleasant enough for an audience but awkward for the players. At least here one can hear all of the members of the ensemble all of the time. That will also, inevitably, lead to a higher technical standard of performance.

Now that the players know that their every note Citizen news services LOS ANGELES Striking scriptwriters have voted to approve contracts with 73 independent producers, including the makers of television shows starring Johnny Carson and Bill Cosby. But while some writers will be able to return to their word processors, the agreements do not cover the producers of most prime-time TV programming, and an end to the three-month-old strike does not appear any closer. The contracts cover the makers of such popular shows as The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and The Cosby Show. Comics honored LAS VEGAS Comedians Milton Berle, Sid Caesar and Danny Thomas joined other celebrities and officials in dedicating a new addition to the Riviera Hotel and Casino, a 33-year-old fixture on the Las Vegas Strip. Gov.

Richard Bryan presented plaques to the three comics, who are appearing together at the resort in a Memorial Day weekend show billed The Living Legends of Comedy. The hotel's addition gives it a total of more than 2,500 rooms. Diva cheered TOKYO More than 2,300 fans gave American soprano Kathleen Battle a warm reception as she made her international debut with the New York Metropolitan Opera as Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro. Battle, arguably the best-known female opera singer in Japan, delighted the audience with a rousing performance Friday alongside bass John Cheek as Figaro. Her reception, however, was cooler than when the Met opened Wednesday with Placido Domingo in the lead role of The Tales ot Hoffman.

Domingo earned hearty bravos and eight curtain calls for Hoffman, which marked the beginning of the Met's first tour outside North America in 13 years. Broncos bomb BOULDER, Colo. Chicago music fans may love their football Bears, but in Colorado, the Broncos don't seem to have the same appeal. A Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra concert that was to have featured members of the Denver Broncos football team manhandling the baton was cancelled after only 40 advance tickets were sold. The concert, patterned after a similar event in Chicago, was scheduled Saturday at the Univer- Independent Visions of Canada premiere in Ottawa Institute offers six regional films in tribute to Canada Council By Noel Taylor Citizen staff writer The Canadian Film Institute has launched what programmer Tom McSorley calls "one of the most ambitious Canadian programs we've ever mounted." It includes six Ottawa premieres under the collective heading Independent Visions.

This title is intended to pay tribute to the Canada Council, whose incentive is behind the growth of the independent production movement over the last two or three years. "The Canada Council puts its money into high-risk productions and gets a film-maker started," McSorley points out. For many first-timers it is oft.