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Excerpt from Eye Weekly 10/14/04: Andrew Gillies

THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK

Featuring Jennifer Waiser, Andrew Gillies. Written by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett. Adapted by Wendy Kesselman. Directed by Alexander Galant. Presented by Marshall Arts. To Nov 7. Wed-Sat 8pm; Sun mat 2pm. Wed-Thu & Sun mat $25; Fri-Sat $35. Bathurst Street Theatre, 736 Bathurst. 416-872-1212.

There's a point in this Marshall Arts production where those neatly packaged memories of Anne Frank left over from seventh-grade English class go completely sideways. It happens when young Anne, played here by Urinetown's Jennifer Waiser, candidly scrawls in her now-famous diary thoughts about menstruation, her growing lust for boys and a secret desire to touch other girls' breasts. The image of the poetic, doomed and strangely asexual teen who put a human name and face on the Holocaust's brain-numbing horrors disappears, replaced by the wayward thoughts of an average girl coming of age in confusing and dangerous times.

Wendy Kesselman's update of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett'sThe Diary of Anne Frank is a curious beast, mixing the original 1950s adaptation of the Jewish teen's diaries with recently published material the girl's father, Otto, removed from the initial printing. It seems that Anne had more on her mind than Nazis and kittens in those two years she was shuttered away in that Amsterdam attic.

This is a production that lives and dies on the backs of its leads, and Waiser, charged with the potentially messy job of uniting her character's idealized folk-hero quality with the uncomfortable warts-and-all realities of the real Anne, doesn't disappoint. The 26-year-old Waiser perfectly nails the quixotic essence of a 13-year-old girl, that chaotic mish-mash of brooding, swooning and petulance that no adult -- save Drew Barrymore -- could get away with. Andrew Gillies' Otto Frank comes off as a little clipped, but he keeps some gravitas in the tank for his dramatic final scene.

While Waiser treads an agreeable middle ground between the stoic Anne of the page and the hormone-mad adolescent, Kesselman's clumsy stitch job makes for some jarring emotional jump-cuts. The transitions between Anne's light and dark halves are abrupt and choppy, making for a character that is as fractured as she is sympathetic. Script problems trip up Carol Lempert's Edith Frank, too; she idles for an hour-and-a-half as a melancholy mom trying to hold her family together before turning into a heartless monster practically on a dime. The structural snafus are a drag, but with a mostly steady cast and source material as life-affirming and tragic as this, it feels rotten to split hairs. STEVE ENGLISH

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