Sterling night 2024

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Diverse disconnected thoughts from the Sterling gala Monday night.

•It was an evening of three-and-a-half-plus hours hosted by a pair of improvisers, Marguerite Lawler and Gordie Lucius from Rapid Fire Theatre who actually (on purpose?) managed to lose track of the script for a while. Because that’s what improvisers do. They acknowledged the irony that “people who don’t learn lines” were presiding over theatre awards. 

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• How Edmonton is this? The Sterlings evening began with an ode to pain. (Dentist, the very funny tribute to a career choice of inflicting it, from Little Shop of Horrors). It was delivered with maximum hilarity by John Ullyatt, nominated for the role he, er, nailed (bit into?) in the Citadel production). “I thrill when I drill a bicuspid….”

• Amazingly, the NHL took the risk of going up against the Sterlings Monday night. Generously, the gala acknowledged the competition. The excellent house band, in Oilers jerseys all, led by Erik Mortimer: The Play Offs. Lana Michelle Hughes, the new associate artistic director of Shadow Theatre, rushed onto the stage from time to time, in Oilers costume, to deliver updates from the game.

• The awards themselves designed by Tessa Stamp have Edmonton theatre built into them. They have the distinctive look of quilted logs, and they’re hand-crafted by Jaclyn Segal using scraps of materials from theatre sets this season.

•Rubaboo, the Métis cabaret that played the Citadel mainstage this season, is the first time in (their) living memory that Vancouver-based singer-songwriter-actor Andrea Menard and her Edmonton-based long-time musical collaborator Robert Walsh have ever worked in the same city at the same time. The inspiration for the show came, say the creators, via a phone call from Dennis Garnhum, the erstwhile artistic director of the Grand Theatre in London, Ont. who’s now at the Citadel rehearsing a summer production of The Play That Goes Wrong.

•Patsy Thomas, the beloved and nationally respected head of wardrobe at the Citadel (and the winner of the Ross Hill Award for Outstanding Achievement in Production) has a great theatrical speaking voice — deep, resonant, with edges. Just sayin’.

•In his charming acceptance speech for the Sterling Award he shares with Adam Dickson for their work on Small Matters Productions’ The Spinsters, Ian Walker noted that the occasion was “the first time a mechanical engineer has accepted a Sterling Award for costumes.” He’ll get no argument from me. Ah, that’s how the Ugly Stepsisters glided around the stage in their kickass ballgowns (which took seven sewers 1,500 hours to build).

•Edmonton theatre grande dame Margaret Mooney, who embodies that great showbiz mystery of star power, noted that it was the 22nd time she’d been onstage at the Sterlings to introduce the recipient of the theatre administration award named in her honour (this year, the multi-talented Elizabeth Allison-Jorde). Her reactions to that onstage role since the first time, as she noted with her usual acerbity, “ranged from ‘I really deserve this’ to ‘I have nothing to wear’.”

•As Northern Light Theatre artistic director Trevor Schmidt noted in his introduction, Allison-Jorde cannot be labelled. Her theatre contributions are both onstage and off-. She’s worked festivals (like the Fringe and Street Performers). She runs a theatre company (NextGen Theatre). She’s an actor, a director, a much sought-after stage manager…. The list of diverse gigs in a 30-year (and counting) career is impressive. In her acceptance speech, she gave “simultaneous credit and blame” for this showbiz career to her mother, the noted costume designer Pat Burden. She remembers her mom coming home to see that all her living room furniture was missing. Allison-Jorde needed it for a show. She was in high school at the time.

•Edmonton, indeed Alberta, is no longer rat-free. The inspired Fringe bouffon hit Rat Academy, the work of Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner (with director Joseph McManus) — the world seen through the eyes of the ultimate outcasts — will set forth on a year of touring. Call it a rat infestation; they do. “We didn’t think anyone else would like it!” said Yoner, and added “we’d do the show 8 days a week even if nobody liked it.”

• Elena Belyea, the creator and star of the “outstanding Fringe new work” This Won’t Hurt, I Promise, confessed to a sense of the surreal in their new hit: 60 minutes, they marvelled, of sharing their assorted anxieties with the audience, “then making them watch a video of my dog eating ice cream.” They reminded us that it’s a very tough time to be trans in Alberta; times are hard, and getting harder. It was a thought echoed in a long-distance message from Makram Ayache, whose The Hooves Belonged To The Deer was voted this year’s outstanding indie production.

• Belyea introduced this year’s recipient of the Sterling for outstanding contribution to Edmonton theatre. They called the 27-year-old playwright/ director/ producer/ promoter/ motivator par excellence Mac Brock — the managing producer of Common Ground Arts, RISER Edmonton, and the upcoming Found Festival — “indie theatre’s fairy godmother.” And his initiatives and unstoppable energy in boosting “other people’s work” have impacted “an entire generation of theatre-makers.”

• In accepting the choreography Sterling for her indispensable contribution to SkirtsAfire’s Mermaid Legs, Ainsley Hillyard paid tribute to the inspirational teamwork that went into Annette Loiselle’s multi-disciplinary production — and the care and support of the theatre community, a safety net for her personally in a very tough year.

• Here’s a tangible measure of the versatility of Edmonton theatre artists: playwright/actor Beth Graham. She’s fresh from a terrific starring performance in Teatro Live!’s lovely revival of The Oculist’s Holiday. Her play Mermaid Legs won five Sterling Awards, the most of any of the season’s shows, including outstanding production and best new play.   

•One of the (many) tantalizing things about the Fringe is a glimpse at shows you’d love to see again. Krampus, a clever Christmas musical comedy from the Straight Edge Theatre team of Stephen Allred and Seth Gilfillan, is one. It’s confirmed by seeing Amanda Neufeld, fierce and funny as the family matriarch patrolling Yuletide perfection, perform a number from the show. The songs are smart and funny….Are you listening, theatre companies?

The full list of Sterling Award winners is here.