The Citadel announces a new 10-show season: the 2026/27 lineup

Posted on February 3, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At the centre of the upcoming 10-show 2026-2027 season at the Citadel, announced Monday night by artistic director Daryl Cloran, are two world premiere stage adaptations by notable Canadian playwrights, and an original production of a Canadian hit musical.

The Citadel turns 61 with a $13 million lineup that includes a new stage version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Jazz Age novel The Great Gatsby, by Canadian playwriting star Erin Shields. And Cloran is collaborating with actor/playwright Jessica B. Hill on a new stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Both productions, directed by Cloran, involve partnerships with theatre companies across the country — in the case of the former with two others, not yet announced, the latter with Theatre Calgary.

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“One of the most prolific and exciting playwrights in the country,” as Cloran describes, Shields has made something of a specialty of re-imagining classics for contemporary audiences, through a feminist lens. “It’s one of her super-powers,” says Cloran. And Shields has the archive to prove it: it includes 2022 Citadel premiere of her version of Jane Eyre, and more recently such theatrical challenges as The Iliad and The Odyssey (Ransacking Troy), Shakespeare’s King Lear (Queen Lear), and, perhaps most amazingly, Milton’s Paradise Lost.

“She’s done a beautiful job of it,” says Cloran of the new Shields adaptation of The Great Gatsby (Oct. 31 to Nov. 22). “It leans theatrically into the opulence of the Jazz Age, a live jazz band onstage (at Gatsby’s splashy party).… And at its heart it’s such a great story.”

Cloran says the inspiration for a new version of Sense and Sensibility (Feb. 20 to March 14, 2027) happened at the Stratford Festival last summer, directing an adaptation of Jane Austen’s first novel by the American writer Kate Hamill. In Cloran’s cast as Elinor, the “sensible” one of the Dashwood sisters, was Hill, a notable playwright in her own right (The Dark Lady). And in the course of working on it, “Jessica and I imagined how we would tell it if we had a chance to do it differently….” The result, he says of the new six-actor adaptation, is “an Austen story everyone knows and loves told in a fun, theatrical way…. And it has such a beautiful heart, both the romance of it and the story of the two sisters finding their own autonomy and agency in an age of gossip and society rules.”

Of the three Broadway musicals in the Citadel mainstage season, one is Canadian and tells a real-life Canadian story. Come From Away, by the Toronto husband-and-wife team of Irene Sankoff and David Hein, started small, as a Sheridan College student workshop and has gone on to major Broadway and West End successes and beyond. It’s based on the real-life events of the 9-11 terrorist attacks on New York, when 38 flights were diverted to Gander Newfoundland, and a little town of 9,000 found a way to shelter and feed 7,000 stranded passengers.

Come From Away has come from away to Edmonton before now, in American touring productions. The rights were opened up just this season for regional theatres, as Cloran explains. And the Citadel and the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver are collaborating on their own production (May 9 to June 6, 2027), directed by the latter’s artistic director Ashlie Corcoran. “Such a great musical,” says Cloran. “And in a time when there are lots of questions about what it means to be Canadian, and standing up (for that), this is 90 minutes of Canadians being … good people.”

The Citadel’s “big family-focused musical” of the season Annie (Jan. 30 to March 7, 2027), the evergreen ‘70s Thomas Meehan/ Charles Strouse musical, is directed and choreographed by Julie Tomaino (Jersey Boys). Cloran points out Edmonton’s unusual wealth of young actors,; stage opportunities at the Citadel have played their part. “You don’t want to program Annie unless you have lots of super-strong young talent!,” Cloran laughs. “Right now because of shows like Frozen and A Christmas Carol, we have a great number of talented young performers. I’m so blown away by what kids are capable of….”

This summer, expect to see a musical that spells c-h-a-r-m (not to mention e-u-d-a-e-m-o-n-i-c), a vindication of nerds and outliers, all motivated differently. That would be The 25th Annual Putnam Country Spelling Bee (“so funny, so charming, with light, kind audience interaction” as Cloran describes). The Citadel’s associate artistic director Mieko Ouchi (whose own play Burning Mom starts previews soon) directs an “all-local team” in the 2005 Tony-winning William Finn/ Rachel Sheinkin musical comedy (July 4 to Aug. 2).

The season opens (Sept. 19 to Oct. 11) with a stage adaptation of the deluxe 1934 Agatha Christie whodunnit Murder on the Orient Express, by the dexterous American playwright Ken Ludwig (Lend Me A Tenor). Set on the luxury train of the title it comes with all the trimmings — lavish period costumes and, yes, the train (designed by Brian Perchaluk) onstage. Ah, and, of course, the fastidious Belgian detective with the waxed moustache and the little grey cells. Cloran compares its mystery/comedy mix to such popular screen offerings as Glass Onion. The Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre/ Citadel co-production, currently running in Winnipeg and starring Alex Poch-Goldin as Hercule Poirot, is directed by RMTC artistic director Kelly Thornton.

The season lineup includes the 2024 Indigenous comedy The Comeback by the Winnipeg-based couple Trish Cooper and Sam Vint and inspired loosely by their own experience — he’s Métis, she’s settler — finds its heart and its laughter at the intersection of two families, and the family chaos triggered by an unexpected pregnancy.

“Every season since I’ve been here, we’ve produced or presented Indigenous work,” says Cloran of the Citadel commitment to “shining a light” on Indigenous creation. The Comeback (March 27 to April 18, 2027), which premiered at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in 2024, is the Citadel’s first co-production with the National Arts Centre Indigenous Theatre. It’s directed by Eric Coates.

The Highwire Series, alternative shows by indie artists and companies presented at the Citadel, returns with Our Little Secret: A True, New Musical (Oct. 15 to 25 ). A hit at the Toronto Fringe, then in Edinburgh, and most recently at the Segal Centre in Montreal, the solo musical by and starring Noam Tomaschoff is, as Cloran describes, “the playwright’s true story.” The catalyst is his impulse, age 31, to order up a 23&Me DNA ancestry kit — and his discovery that his father isn’t his biological father and that he has 35 siblings around the world. “Funny, charming, and well-written,” says Cloran of the contemporary pop musical (music by Ryan Peters). Building from its Fringe origins (à la Drowsy Chaperone), the production is directed by Adam Pascal, from the original cast of Rent. Safe to say it has upward-and-onward cross-border aspirations.

Mrs. Krishnan’s Party arrives on tour (Jan. 15 to Feb 6, 2027) in the Citadel’s most intimate house, the Rice, from across the world. The show, by the New Zealand company Indian Ink, “lives in the same world as Big Stuff,” says Cloran. “It’s a lovely and heartfelt story about a mother and son. And it encourage the audience to be part of it, but in such a gentle, kind way.”

The Rice, he says, “will feel like the backroom of Mrs. Krishnan’s corner store. And she has members of the audience help her out with the cooking as she sets up her party…. I saw a video of it, and was crying all through it. So joyous and lovely.”     

“In the last couple of seasons we’ve hit our stride with the Highwire Series,” says Cloran of the shows by smaller and indie companies presented at the Citadel. He points to the success of Goblin:Macbeth and Big Stuff, indie alternative shows presented by the Citadel, “shows with a slightly immersive, unique feel to them.”

The season includes the eighth annual return of David van Belle’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol (Nov. 22 to Dec. 24), directed by Lianna Makuch. This past year was our highest sales we’ve ever had,” Cloran reports, even with Vinyl Cafe the Musical and the Bear Grease holiday special running at that time, too ( “we were quite the holiday destination”). “It’s so much part of people’s holiday traditions….”

Cloran’s announcement of the upcoming season, at the 60th anniversary bash Monday night, comes midway through a season in which Vinyl Cafe The Musical, its biggest success at the box office so far, was held over before it even opened. “It more than doubled our projections,” and has dates across Canada at other theatres, yet to be announced. With its numerous co-productions, next season, dubbed ‘From Here to Everywhere’, “will see a lot of our work out there across the country.”

Meanwhile, the 60th anniversary season continues with Death of a Salesman running through Feb. 15, and Burning Mom, The Wizard of Oz, Casey and Diana, and Cyrano de Bergerac still to come.

Looking ahead at the 2026-2027 Citadel season

Mainstage series: Murder on the Orient Express (Sept. 19 to Oct. 11, 2026); The Great Gatsby (Oct. 31 to Nov. 22, 2026); Annie (Jan. 30 to March 7, 2027); Sense and Sensibility (Feb. 20 to March 14, 2027); The Comeback (March 27 to April 18, 2027); Come From Away (May 9 to June 6, 2027).

Summer Musical: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (July 4 to Aug. 2, 2026)

Highwire series: Our Little Secret: A True, New Musical (Oct. 15 to 25, 2026); Mrs. Krishnan’s Party (Jan. 15 to Feb. 6, 2027).

Holiday production: A Christmas Carol (Nov. 22 to Dec. 24, 2026).

Tickets and subscriptions: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1829. Season packages on sale Feb. 2, casual tickets for the summer musical on sale March 18, casual tickets for productions in the 2026-2027 season on sale July 3.

 

 

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Attention must be paid: Death of a Salesman at the Citadel, a review

Posted on January 30, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

John Ullyatt in Death of a Salesman, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The first sight we have of the most indelible character in the 20th century theatre is a man alone, trudging wearily towards us in the murk of an empty stage.

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He’s a man with baggage, lugging two heavy sales cases. And, as we discover in Death of a Salesman, they are heavily weighted with dreams, with hopes, with delusions about the world and his place in it.

In this fine Citadel production — which returns to the theatre Arthur Miller’s 1949 classic that was in the company’s very first season 60 seasons ago — Willy Loman, the archetypal travelling salesman, comes to life in a tremendous performance from John Ullyatt. And Daryl Cloran’s unusually stylized production locates the man in a shadowy world where reality, in contained pockets of light, lands on wincing human encounters.

These are infiltrated, more and more, by dreams and ghosts, theoretical propositions and might-have-beens. Beyata Hackborn’s design, where everything happens in front of a  weathered facade of a house, and characters vanish through invisible walls and doorways — the only concrete doorway, moved by the actors, looks like a guillotine — is eloquently tuned to the imaginative abstractions of the production.

A bedroom is just a dislocated bed; the Loman kitchen is a table and a fridge set down in slanted light shafts way off-centre in an empty, lonely stage. Even when  house facade is lifted, to reveal the sales office, a single desk that’s the scene of Willy’s penultimate humiliation — after 34 years on the road he’s summarily fired by a much younger boss — it’s a space disconnected from the rest of the stage. Which speaks volumes about Willy’s life — his porous memory, his increasingly threadbare mantra that all a man needs in life is to be “not just liked, but well-liked” As he says, in many variations, to his sons Biff (Nathan Kay) and Happy (Alexander Ariate), staggering in separate ways under the weight of Willy’s expectations, “the man who creates personal interest is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want.”

Alexander Ariate, Nathan Kay, John Ullyatt, Nadien Chu in Death of a Salesman, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

The swirl of reality and fantasy is the drama of Bonnie Beecher’s lighting, with its multiple inventive hanging light sources, lanterns, lamps, chandeliers. The past, hinted at behind the house, has a purple glow, but there’s no material dimension, no urban environment, there. It all contributes to the production’s sense of a man who’s gradually lost track of his own world, and of time. The music (by composer/ sound designer Joelysa Pankanea), played live on keyboards and bass by actors who come and go from instruments on either side of the playing space, echoes in a harsh, but strangely ethereal way: dissonant fractured jazz riffs. There’s a poetic kind of cohesiveness about Cloran’s stagecraft.

Like the design, the casting is original. Last time the Citadel staged Death of a Salesman, 15 years ago, Ullyatt played Biff. Now as Willy, Ullyatt, a superb and versatile actor particularly known for the physical energy and invention he brings to performances, fully commits to a character with neither. Willy seems to age, and diminish, before our eyes, rising to flames of anger that flicker out in confusion, struggling to stem a tide of despair under a blanket of hope.

Alexander Ariate, John Ullyatt, Nathan Kay in Death of a Salesman, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

On the surface Nathan Kay, a newcomer to Citadel stages, wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of Biff, the ex-football star who peaked in high school, and at 34, a drifter crushed under the weight of his father’s fantasies, can’t get anything going. But his performance will surprise, and move you. In one of the most harrowing scenes, in a restaurant with his bro Happy (Ariate as a charming, conciliatory wastrel), Biff in desperation tries, and tries, to break through the fortress of Willy’s delusions with “facts” about his failures in life. “I’m not bringing home any prizes any more,” he says. And Willy, interrupting constantly in an escalating panic of denial, won’t hear of it.

Nadien Chu and John Ullyatt in Death of a Salesman, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

“The woods are burning,” he tells his sons, at a critical moment.  Ullyatt’s performance digs in, unearthing layer after layer of a man whose life doesn’t come in his size any more. “I just kinda feel temporary about myself.” At some distance, as the actor conveys, Willy does have a glimmer of a sense, quickly repressed, that what he’s selling — on the road and at home — nobody’s buying.

John Ullyatt in Death of a Salesman, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

Nobody, that is, except his staunchly loyal wife (and career enabler) Linda, in a fierce, blazing performance by Nadien Chu, who plays her as formidable, a force of nature. “Attention must be paid.” Linda is the family bookkeeper, so she knows, to a penny, the facts behind Willy’s lament that “I’m in a race with the junkyard” when it comes to aging appliances and cars. But what about aging salesmen? She buys into Willy, and therefore into his founding principle that personality counts above all else. She knows, and she doesn’t know, about the damages inflicted by dreams.

Cloran’s strong cast includes Anthony Santiago, excellent as the neighbour, prickly but kindly, who keeps lending Willy money under the table, and Tenaj Williams as Charley’s earnest son Bernard. And Willy’s brother Ben, an imposing sort of ghost who’s the mythology of success on legs — “when I was 17 I walked into the jungle; when I was 21 I walked out and by God I was rich” — is compellingly embodied by Andrew Wheeler.

In the end, in this beautiful 2026 Citadel/ Arts Club Theatre production, Death of a Salesman is a play about a father and his two sons. And beyond the ruthless way capitalism devalues and exhausts the little guy’s labours, there’s the existential question of meaning, inheritance, and love. Near the end, in a heartbreaking scene Willy says something about that. “Nothing’s planted; I don’t have a thing in the ground.” He lives, and dies, in hope.

REVIEW

Death of a Salesman

Theatre: Citadel Theatre/ Arts Club Theatre

Written by: Arthur Miller

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: John Ullyatt, Nadien Chu, Nathan Kay, Alexander Ariate, Anthony Santiago, Tess Degenstein, Jeff Gladstone, Christina Nguyen, Andrew Wheeler, Tenaj Williams, Morgan Yamada

Running: through Feb. 15

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

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John Ullyatt takes up the suitcase and the iconic mantle in Death of a Salesman, at the Citadel

Posted on January 26, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Death of a Salesman: graphic, Citadel Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Sixty seasons ago, a worn-out travelling salesman feeling his mileage and dispossessed from the “smile and a shoe shine” world he’s always known arrived on the stage of a former Sally Ann citadel in downtown Edmonton.

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From the start — it premiered in 1949 — Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman had struck a chord with America, the tragedy of Willy Loman, an “ordinary” man, a man with an “ordinary” family.

The play was already celebrated (The New York Times reviewer of the day called it “tremendous … a fresh creation in a style of its own”). The Edmonton theatre, christened the Citadel, was new, an audacious experiment — by spirited lawyer-cum-real estate entrepreneur Joe Shoctor and friends — half a continent away from the theatrical strongholds in the east. And Death of a Salesman was part of the Citadel’s inaugural season. After Robert Glenn’s 1966 production, Willy Loman has returned at intervals to the Citadel stage. In 1984, James Whitmore was in Len Cariou’s production. In 2011, Tom Wood was Willy Loman in Bob Baker’s production.

John Ullyatt, star of Death of a Salesman, Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied.

And on Thursday, in in a highly unusual kind of theatrical continuity, John Ullyatt, who played Willy’s troubled underachiever son Biff in that production 15 years ago, will be Willy Loman in the Citadel revival directed by Daryl Cloran.

“I was really nervous about doing it,” says Ullyatt, who’s thoughtful and funny, an inveterate re-thinker, chronically self-critical. Fresh from his fourth run exploring another iconic (the word doesn’t go amiss) character, Ebenezer Scrooge, in the Citadel’s A Christmas Carol, he says of Miller’s delusional salesman “I don’t feel old enough…. And yet I’m almost the right age, pretty close. It’s happening! (note of incredulity about the role). And as we work on it I’m feeling better and better about it almost every day. A great play, lots of twists and turns….   

In the course of his four years with Christmas Carol, “each time out I’ve learned something new about it; I figure that’s my job,” says Ullyatt with a smile in his voice, “and otherwise I’d be bored.” With Death of a Salesman, “it’s an adventure trying to get inside of it as quickly as possible. Every day something else falls into place. It’s coming into focus, a whole portrait is coming in to focus….”

“It never stops being awesome, this job. I really love rehearsing! It’s hard but it’s … fun.” The word fun sounds odd, he thinks, and he reassesses for a second, and goes with it. “We’ve made ourselves a (rehearsal) room where we laugh. A lot. Which is alarming,” he laughs. “Shocking!”

The role has always attracted a range of great and distinctively different actors, Lee J Cobb, George C. Scott, Brian Dennehy, Dustin Hoffman, Philip Seymour Hoffman — and Ullyatt joins that line. And pretty much since it opened the play has been a magnet for cultural commentators who see in Willy Loman’s tragedy the implosion of the American Dream, with its hollow promises that hard work will be rewarded. Ullyatt has reservations about that narrow-casting of the play. “The American Dream is part of it, certainly. But it’s about a lot of things, and at the centre, it’s a story about a family. A father putting all his hopes into his son, and how he’s going to be fantastic, being popular, well-liked. And the kid just isn’t that person, to put it bluntly.”

“To me that’s more important…. I can’t play the American Dream.” He points to a Charlie Rose interview with Arthur Miller in which the playwright said he thought of Salesman as a family story.

From the moment, a year ago, that director Cloran began talking to him about the production, Ullyatt says he was struck by the brain-bending thought that “being Willy is pretty similar to being an actor, actually…. He’s a gig worker, a salesman (without a pension). He’s on his own. And something that resonated with me is that as we get older we become less desirable. We live in a very age-ist world.”

“The world is changing around him, and Willy hasn’t kept up with it.” Ullyatt empathizes, and pauses to reflect. “As I get older these are the things I’m thinking about. More about the future and what’s going to happen next….”

In conversation Ullyatt is always re-assessing. He proposes an unexpected link between playing Ebenezer Scrooge and Willy Loman. “I see both of these characters as immature; they didn’t grow up.” He laughs, “of course that may be coming from me.”

Ullyatt’s striking versatility as an actor has made him equally at home in raucous comedies, cabarets, musicals, way off-centre dark satires, new plays, repertoire classics. His history with the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, in roles ranging from Richard III and Iago to the clown Launce in Two Gentlemen of Verona, is revealing. And so is his extensive Citadel resumé, which includes most recently, a very funny turn as Bottom the stage-struck weaver who throws himself into the play-within-a-play in Cloran’s Midsummer Night’s Dream The 70s Musical.

In a long list of indie credits Ullyatt may be the only actor in history who’s played Coriolanus, an unsavoury boy scout, and a dung beetle (Edmonton Street Performers Festival). “I love playing characters,” says Ullyatt, a Montreal native and McGill grad who moved here in the 1990s to do a theatre degree at the U of A. “I think of myself as a character actor.” He has an aversion to be called a leading man (I’m guilty of this). “Too square. I hate it,” he says flatly.

And he feels he’s learning how to separate the character from himself, much to the relief, as he reports, of his actor/playwright/circus performer wife Annie Dugan. “I’m not leaving Willy here (at the theatre),” he says. “I’m going home with him. But maybe I’m getting better at differentiating myself from the character: a character! this is not me! …. It’s not affecting me the way it has in the past … (laughter) where it was detrimental to my personal life!”

Mind you, “here’s a funny thing,” Ullyatt says. “Willy talks to himself a lot, and goes off into a dream land — not flashbacks, that’s important. I’ve been catching myself talking to myself, especially when Annie’s not around…. I’m making myself laugh,” he says. “I’m OK with talking to myself — as long as not too many people overhear me.”

Meanwhile Ullyatt has been intrigued by the ample selection of articles in which writers wonder “what Willy Loman would have thought of Donald Trump,” and conclude that as a person who feels “marginalized, betrayed, hurt,” he’d be a Trump supporter. “That’s a very interesting portrait of American society now,” says Ullyatt.

Is Willy Loman a tragic figure? Yes, says Ullyatt, who points out that the salesman certainly doesn’t fit the classic definition, “someone on high who’s taken down.” But here’s another thought: “what happens in tragedy is having your dignity taken away from you. He’s hanging on to a veneer, that if a man is impressive and well liked there isn’t anything to worry about. That’s what does him in….” As Willy’s wife Linda (Nadien Chu) says, “I don’t say he’s a great man…. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him.”

Then Ullyatt is back en route to rehearsal. “I feel like I’m painting my picture from the outside, and slowly working my way inside.”

PREVIEW

Death of a Salesman

Theatre: Citadel Theatre

Written by: Arthur Miller

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: John Ullyatt, Nadien Chu, Nathan Kay, Alexander Ariate, Anthony Santiago, Tess Degenstein, Jeff Gladstone, Christina Nguyen, Andrew Wheeler, Tenaj Williams, Morgan Yamada

Running: through Feb. 15

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

  

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Why do we keep making war anyhow? The addiction to rage: An Iliad at Shadow Theatre, a review

Posted on January 23, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Michael Peng in An Iliad, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Every time I sing this song, I hope it’s the last time,” says the man before us, a travelling storyteller with a gift of the gab, who’s arrived on crutches (not a prop, Michael Peng has a broken ankle), carrying a suitcase. Clearly it’s not the Poet’s first rodeo.

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At a climactic moment in An Iliad, the mesmerizing theatrical event onstage at the Varscona, the Poet finds himself trapped in his own endless catalogue of death and destruction. He’s been there through history, first-hand, for all of it — wars you know from school, wars you’ve barely heard of, wars that are now, Syria, Somalia, Kabal, Gaza, Mariupol….

Evidently the 2012 script has been updated (there is no war to end all wars.) What starts as an aside turns, at escalating speed and with the feel of improv, into a rant. Peng’s performance gives us the vibe that that the Poet is adding to his list willy-nilly, impromptu, as he taps into his memory bank. And as the character has reminded us at the outset, the exact causes of wars don’t even matter. The kidnapping of Helen — OK, she’s a looker, sure — is just an excuse: “it’s always something isn’t it….”

If An Iliad were another reiteration of a ‘war is hell’, it would be hard to find a sane objector. If it were “just” a 105-minute condensation of Homer’s 3,000-year-old Trojan War epic, recounted by an impressive single actor onstage, it would be a notably improbable achievement, both in the writing and the telling. And it is. But what makes An Iliad a thrilling experience is the unexpected way it’s theatre.

Michael Peng and Erik Mortimer in An Iliad, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Peng engages the audience masterfully, eye to eye, from the moment he enters — wry and conversational, humorously exasperated with his appointed task. Which is to say the eternal purgatory of telling and re-telling a brutal story that involves heroes and gods, yes, but is all about human nature. “Gods never die,” the Poet argues, with a shrug. “They change, they burrow inside us. They become us, they become our impulses.” The language is occasionally epic, but the cadence mostly idiomatically contemporary, with period check-ins to see if we’re getting it.

Onstage with the Poet is the Muse. In the person of Erik Mortimer, he’s a kind of troubadour at the keyboard. His original score, punctuated by ominous war drum beats, has the ethereal, tinkling magic of the music of the spheres. It’s happening in a bar not a theatre. And Scott Peters’ design pulls parachute-silk dust-covers off the joint, to reveal the bottles, and a pool table. The final sphere is a kind of silken inside-out umbrella, across which the designer’s lighting effects play: a sun at dawn or dusk, or a moon, or a spiderweb that’s as red as a heart.

In John Hudson’s production Peng conjures The Iliad’s star opponents Achilles (and his BFF Patroclus), Hector (and his wife, his baby son, his dad) — i.e.  the great warrior on a short fuse, the decent family man — in vivid imagery. How does an apparently devoted side-kick like Patroclus, for example, become “a killing machine”? How does Hector, “a good guy” as the Poet tells us, make the lethal choice to join the fray and be a violent rampager, under the “honour” banner, and in the process of confronting Achilles destroy everything that’s positive about his life in Troy. The scene in which the Poet describes the arrival of Hector’s father in the Greek camp, to plead with Achilles for the return of his son’s body, left the opening night audience in breath-holding silence.

After 3,000 years the Poet, the war veteran who affects a bemused air that melts off him in the course of his storytelling, is stricken by the insight he’s gained into vast and terrible gore, dismemberment, death. The cause, he argues, is a built-in human capacity for uncontrollable rage, “a trick of the blood.” When Achilles gets mad he gets really mad, a cosmic kind of tantrum. Nothing will stop him; his consuming fury burns everything and everyone around him to ashes. Rage is an agent of transformation, man into murderous beast, and it can bring down whole civilizations. “You know what that looks like,” says the Poet, looking meaningfully at us.

Michael Peng and Erik Mortimer in An Iliad, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The Poet is worldly, an appreciator of irony. And the slippery frontier between irony and despair is where Peng’s performance is pitched. Hence his apparently casual insight that Troy was lost in the chasm between what career warriors like Achilles and Hector might actually be thinking and what they actually say, grand and inflammatory. “Just give her back,” he says wearily of the beauteous Helen, stolen by Hector’s feckless underachiever brother Paris. “It’s what we’re all thinking.”

Killing people may come naturally to us, but violence and mayhem are an absurd waste of human potential, and time, he argues. Nine years into the Trojan War the soldiers, who’ve left their lives on hold in small towns everywhere, have forgotten why they’re fighting. And their wives at home have moved on.

It’s a complex and surprising play, an anti-war piece that appreciates complexity,  performed by a game but shell-shocked veteran observer of war after war, shackled to a story that always ends in tears. Peng’s performance takes it out of theory and messaging, and, in words and his own presence, makes it real and emotional for us. It’s what live theatre is for.

REVIEW

An Iliad

Theatre: Shadow

Created by: Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare

Directed by: John Hudson

Starring: Michael Peng with Erik Mortimer

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Feb. 8

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org

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Doomed to tell and re-tell the story of the Trojan War: Michael Peng stars as the Poet in An Iliad, at Shadow Theatre

Posted on January 20, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Michael Peng in An Iliad, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A traveller arrives onstage Thursday at the Varscona Theatre, suitcase in hand, with a story to tell. He’s been telling it for, oh, about three thousand years.

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“And every time he tells it he hopes he won’t have to tell it again,” says Michael Peng, who plays that game, eternal storyteller/poet in John Hudson’s Shadow Theatre production of An Iliad.

As Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, the American co-creators of An Iliad put it in their introductory notes, the storyteller is “doomed to keep telling the story of the Trojan War, in all its glory and devastation and surprise … until the day when human nature changes, when our addiction to rage comes to an end, when the telling of a war story becomes unnecessary. A day that has yet to come, of course.” After all, says Peng, “the one thing we do well as a species is kill.” And at the heart of it: “why we’re so angry, why we fight, why it’s it’s in our nature to fight.”

A one-person stage adaptation of Homer’s epic anti-war poem, compressed into the last 40 days of the 10-year siege of Troy by a Greek coalition, is, one way, an improbable theatrical enterprise, to be sure. Peng has found himself playing not only Achilles and Hector, the leading warriors of the narrative, but “all the gods, the heroes, the soldiers, their wives, Helen whose kidnapping started the whole brouhaha, and Paris who stole her. At one point Hector’s baby.…” In short it’s an all-ages, all-genders enterprise. “Epic, yes, but also intensely personal.”

“It’s a lot,” laughs Peng, fresh from the Citadel production of A Christmas Carol. “A lot of words. Intense, dramatic work. I’ve done a couple of one-person shows. But this is as emotionally and physically demanding as anything I’ve ever done.” He shares the stage with a Muse, musician Erik Mortimer, who plays his original score live. “Part of it is planned,” says Peng. “Part of it is us connecting onstage.”

Peng, who arrived here in 2006 from his southern Ontario home turf to get a master’s degree in directing at the U of A, began his theatre career as an actor, albeit an actor who started a theatre company, Lost and Found Theatre, in his home town of Kitchener before he moved here. He and Edmonton actor/playwright/director Chris Bullough launched an indie company, Wishbone Theatre, in 2010 with a production of Evelyne de la Chenelière’s Bashir Lazar, starring Peng as an Algerian immigrant substitute teacher in Canada. The Wishbone signature, as its inaugural 2010-2011 season — Falling: A Wake and Waiting For Godot — revealed, was challenging, hefty work, the opposite of lightweight. And Peng and Bullough took turns directing.

More recently, Peng has done more acting than directing. And the dark tonal palette for which he’s mostly known by Edmonton audiences, lightened when he spent last summer at Cape Breton’s Theatre Baddeck in two comedies. Dan Needles’ Ed’s Garage (“quintessential Dan Needles,” he says of the Wingfield playwright and  a “sweet, tender play full of prairie wisdom”)  was one. In the other, “a goofy Cape Breton comedy He’d Be Your Mother’s Father’s Cousin, “I spent most of the play looking for my keys and my glasses.”

“It was a delight to be able to do comedy,” Peng says. But now, he’s finding it especially rewarding “to be sinking my teeth into an important, timely story.” A story, as he puts it, “about fury and power,” both of those aided and abetted materially by social media. “If there’s one thing social media has fanned the flames of, it’s anger…. We’re so angry at one another all the time. Nobody talks any more. Nobody listens. There’s no civility. No compassion.”

Michael Peng in An Iliad, Shadow Theatre. Promotional image.

The travelling storyteller Peng plays in An Iliad has been on the road for 2700 years. But he acknowledges modern realities, and idiomatic language, at every turn. The audience is us; the setting is the brick-lined Varscona. “There are five or six times in the play when the Trojan War could have been avoided” if people hadn’t made bad choices.

And it’s not as if war has gone out of currency. “It’s very much of today,” Peng says, “almost shockingly modern, a story that continues to have meaning.” And authors Peterson and O’Hare encourage producers to update references. Wars and the anger that fuels them never end, so An Iliad doesn’t have a final resting place. Which makes the poet a sort of “embedded war reporter,” witnessing and recording.

Unlike movies, the Brad Pitt flick Troy among them, there’s no romanticizing the violence in An Iliad, no falling in love with it. When Peng began talking to director Hudson about the play he asked what the play meant to him. “The story is a warning” was Hudson’s answer. “It was ‘don’t do this; let’s find another way’…. It’s not escape; it’s immersion.”

PREVIEW

An Iliad

Theatre: Shadow

Created by: Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare

Directed by: John Hudson

Starring: Michael Peng with Erik Mortimer

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Feb. 8

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org

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What’s Calgary got that we don’t have? Under the spell of the Dream Machine, at the High Performance Rodeo

Posted on January 19, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Allison Lynch, Andy Curtis, Denise Clarke, Geoffrey Simon Brown in Dream Machine, One Yellow Rabbit. Photo by Benjamin Laird.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A question for this theatre town of ours: what has Calgary got that we don’t have?

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A: One Yellow Rabbit, an influential multi-disciplinary troupe of brainy incautious artistic renegades of the experimental stripe, with their own way of creating performance, and their own impromptu and unexpected international connections. Ah, and an annual January gathering of unexpected performance pieces, by them and others, that they gather under the banner High Performance Rodeo.

Photo by Donna Christensen

Edmonton met the Rabbits first at the Fringe here when no one knew exactly what Fringe was, much less what it could be — a natural pairing of the early ‘80s. And sure enough, the wildest stuff at early Fringes was Rabbit offerings. As the late great Rabbit Michael Green put it, “we had to be there.” The invitation to “just come, and do whatever you want,” as Fringe founder Brian Paisley always said,  was Rabbit bait. And it was irresistible.

In Edmonton we had a big regional theatre, and a startling proliferation of little theatres that became mid-sized theatres, and an unmatched assortment of indie theatres and co-ops inspired by the Fringe. But, damn, we didn’t have One Yellow Rabbit.

The High Performance Rodeo has turned 40 with this January’s 2026 edition. And in honour of the big four-oh, they’ve revived a signature Rabbits piece, their much-travelled 2003 Dream Machine. So I went to Calgary to see it.

The Dream Machine itself, a kind of modernist magic lantern with flickering light invented in 1960 by Beat poets Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville was built to mesmerize, to induce a drug-less high in the viewer. According to the program, “it never caught on.” And there it is, an accurate reproduction on the Big Secret Theatre stage. It’s a prop, the campfire so to speak, around which the eight-member cast of writer/director Blake Brooker’s production gathers from time to time in Dream Machine.

At the time, the idea of the show, according to Brooker’s program notes, was to see if the Rabbits could create a musical without characters or a story. It’s an homage to the Beats of the ‘50s, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gysin, and the rest, and their spirited waywardness — the individualist resistance to the forces of capitalist conformity in all its forms, aesthetic, sexual, commercial.

It’s a kind of free-associative amalgam of text, movement (choreographed by Denise Clarke), and the late David Rhymer’s fascinating music, sometimes lyrical sometimes jagged. It erupts into songs at times, or accompanies free-verse spoken poetry, or declarations like “I wanna play a killer in a movie.”

Andy Curtis, Denise Clarke, Geoffrey Simon Brown, Kris Demeanor in Dream Machine, One Yellow Rabbit, High Performance Rodeo. Photo by Benjamin Laird.

With some exceptions, like Calgary poet Kris Demeanor’s delivery of the 1958 Ginsberg poem America at the outset — an attack on American ruthlessness that lands with uncanny precision more than half a century later — the spoken text and lyrics are by Brooker. “If words are a virus maybe I’ve caught it.” And they’re in the style and capture the rebellious sensibility of the Beats. Which is to say they’re clever, poetic, with a playful, witty turn of phrase about them. They enjoy the sounds of words, and unmooring them from their usual resting perches (“our ambitions are injurious”).  They take up the rhythm of repeating choruses (“take a drink, have a sniff, walk the park, in the dark …”).

Dream Machine isn’t what anyone would normally call a musical. Brooker prefers “song cycle,” or “oratorio.” The dreamy state that was the goal of the machine inventors leaves meaning with the audience to unwrap, or not. And it does take some patience to follow the show’s long, meandering route through lyrical passages with jagged, unexpected edges, all captured in the strange bursting diagonals of Clarke’s choreography.

If you let the experience wash over you, you make out recurring motifs. One is that you are your own light source. And it’s closely related to another: creative inspiration — where to look for it, how to keep it going, how to be a creative individual. “Our minds are focussed on a map that’s never been drawn.”

Brooker’s excellent cast includes Clarke herself, a choreographic and theatrical muse for the company; the long-time One Yellow Rabbit performer Andy Curtis; the actor/playwright Geoffrey Simon Brown, and actor/singer Allison Lynch, with three fine musicians, Jonathan Lewis, Peter Moller, and Augustine Yates.

Dream Machine was a highly unusual theatrical undertaking in 2003. And a couple of decades later, in a world that’s turned back the clock and seems bent on curtailing freedom and repressing heterdoxy, it still is. “We’ve come to celebrate but we can’t remember what.” Ah, but there’s a 40th anniversary Rodeo to jog your memory. (It runs through Jan. 24. Tickets: oyr.org).

Dot, High Performance Rodeo. Photo by Donna Christensen

Human evolution of another kind is the exploratory impulse of Dot, a prop-heavy work-in-progress from the Canadian Academy of Mask and Puppetry. The idea is promising, a chronicle, at first playful then solemn, of our improbable human development from our origins as a small speck in a vast map-less cosmos.

The protagonist of Elaine Weyshko’s Dot, bouncing upstairs and down valleys at the outset — surrealist aerobics? — is, yes, a dot. That small but game ink dot, created live by a human hand with a paint brush, takes on challenges, joins other dots, and they evolve into dimensional beings. puppets with their own gibberish language. Yearning, love, struggle, loss, absurdity and tragedy are all within the compass of the domesticated former dot in its (his? their?) expansive new life off the screen…. The scenes, though, at least so far seem laborious and over-extended, a repetitive showcase series for puppetry techniques. A dramaturgical tune-up in the storytelling is in order. Kudos though to the electronic score, delivered onstage live by the Hair Control duo of Rebecca Reid and Ryan Bourne.

Dot, Canadian Academy of Mask and Puppetry at High Performance Rodeo. Photo supplied.

Week 2 of the Rodeo is coming up. And with it Edmonton Fringe fave Monster Theatre arrives from Vancouver with the fun of Juliet: A Revenge Comedy, in which the Capulet girl takes charge of her own destiny, assisted by other Shakespeare leading ladies. There are cabarets, a solo puppet show (Body Concert),  a new dance theatre piece from Decidedly Jazz Danceworks (Rare Beauties), a concert collaboration between a pop star and a symphony orchestra (Vivek Shraya: One Night Only), a new punk musical (Hucksterland). The list goes on.

Miss Rita’s Lucha Vavoom, High Performance Rodeo. Photo by Ron Lyon Photography.

Some of the country’s most distinguished theatre artists will be there. Daniel MacIvor’s Your Show Here is a solo exploration of the relationship between actor and audience. Pochsy fans take note, a dark, funny new work-in-progress from the great Canadian satirist Karen Hines (My Name Is Karen). And here’s the beauty of the Rodeo: you just can’t predict  what will happen in the theatre, A.I. begone!. when Miss Rita’s Lucha Vavoom (“think telenovela meets WrestleMania meets a horny fever dream,” hmm) arrives onstage Saturday, hosted by Rebecca Northan. Or three curious goblins, the ones who undertook productions of Macbeth and Oedipus, take charge of a gala, with a human in tow (Goblin:Gala). You just have to be there.

The High Performance Rodeo runs in venues of every size and shape through Jan. 31. Tickets: oyr.ca.

    

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Those Belle Époque bohemians are the party people: Moulin Rouge The Musical, a review

Posted on January 14, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Moulin Rouge The Musical, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Those Belle Époque bohemians sure know how to party. Your retinas will be dazzled the moment you enter the theatre. And that, mes amis, isn’t going to stop, or even pause, for the next two-and-a-half hours of Moulin Rouge, the glittering, sexy, gloriously gaudy and lavish 2019 Broadway jukebox musical that’s arrived on tour at the Jube.

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In the jukebox archive there are musicals that are ingenious about either scavenging familiar pop songs to paste into some sort of plot, à la Rock of Ages, or making up a thinnish drama to suit the song list (we’re looking at you Mamma Mia!). Has there ever been a jukebox musical so crammed with pop songs, 75 or more (about love, the falling into, the loss of, the hopes for, etc.) on a hyper-adrenalized spectrum from Offenbach to Beyoncé, Lady Gaga to Piaf to Katy Perry (sometimes characters have whole medleys as their calling cards)? The music credits take up nearly two pages of the program, in print so fine you’d need a magnifying glass if you were keen to nail them down.

Justin Levine, a virtuoso among music supervisors, has evidently updated the list with new music since 2019. And the packed and enraptured opening night crowd laughed with pleasure every time they identified a song.

That’s the thing about the pop repertoire; it doesn’t take massive contortions to repurpose love and love-lorn songs for a story like this one. Thank you Puccini. Based on the 2001 Baz Luhrmann film, which borrowed its story from La Bohème, Moulin Rouge the musical is your invitation to the fantasy version of the demi-mondaine Parisian nightclub and courtesan hang, c. 1899. In Alex Timbers’ production, reproduced for the Broadway Across Canada tour, it comes to us as a giant glowing red velvet valentine in Derek McLane’s stunning design, which unfolds as a series of heart-shaped prosceniums draped in red, that frame heart-shaped perspective projections of Paris roof-tops or street scenes from time to time.

Ah yes, the story. To cut to the chase, it’s a love triangle, with a bit of capitalism/arts push-and-pull thrown in. Christian (Ryan Vasquez), a poor and naive composer from Ohio who arrives in the City of Light to make his fortune with his tunes, has chance encounters with two crazy fin-de-siècle artistes, an Argentine tango specialist and gigolo (Danny Burgos) and the artist Toulouse-Lautrec (Kevyn Morrow) who are creating a show, Bohemian Rhapsody, for the Moulin Rouge. Which is how Christian falls in love with the establishment’s star attraction Satine (Gabriela Carrillo), a consumptive singer-dancer who’s being pursued by the ruthlessly libidinous, and well-heeled, aristocrat the Duke of Monroth (Andrew Brewer), who’s being pursued by the seedy/glam Moulin Rouge master of ceremonies Harold Zidler  (Bobby Daye) as a potential patron to stave off bankruptcy.  

Anyhow, we know that Christian and Satine are deeply, madly, in forever love mainly because they keep singing songs about exactly that. But before that, the opening sequence, which introduces us to the showbiz world in question, is a big, splashy, transporting production number from a cast with legs for days,  putting Lady Marmalade to good use.

Moulin Rouge The Musical, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

The real takeaway? The visuals, which are a knockout. It’s the moment to salute the endless array of Catherine Zuber’s extravagantly beautiful costumes, which memorably reinvent underwear, and then keep going, with ravishing frocks and topcoats, hats and feathers. And Sonya Tayeh’s choreography never stops being a cleverly allusive marriage of fin-de-siècle and contemporary, delivered by a come-hither cast of great dancers.

In classic fashion, at the outset, everyone’s saying hey, great, just wait till you meet Satine. And sure enough, Satine, the vedette played by the stunning, strong- and supple-voiced Carrillo who’s perfect for a role that includes torchy songs and ballads, knows how to make an entrance. She arrives on a trapeze, a vision of corseted sparkle, singing Diamonds Are Forever, Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend, Material Girl, and other diamantine ditties.

Andrew Brewer in Moulin Rouge The Musical, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

Christian Vasquez, also a terrific singer, won’t be everyone’s idea of a poor boy from the Ohio sticks since he looks as well turned-out as a barrister. Daye is terrific as the ingratiating MC whose good humour is a veneer for showbiz desperation. Burgos and Morrow as Santiago and Toulouse-Lautrec are excellent as ‘colourful characters’. The former gets a sizzling tango (with stage partner Kaitlin Mesh) as the moody Act II opener. The latter, who has a lovely rich voice, has a wistful Nature Boy number in which he sings about his big regret vis-à-vis Satine. He gave up his romantic hopes, he says, as a disabled person (he has a cane for heaven’s sake).

As I say, the design is spectacular, along with Justin Townsend’s striking lighting, a melodrama in itself in painterly images in backstage and onstage scenes, romantic tête-à-tètes in Satine’s boudoir, smoky Montmartre cafes.… Bohemian poverty never looked so good, or so expensive. And it comes with a terrific orchestra, too.

Moulin Rouge The Musical, Broadway Across Canada Touring. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

It’s all so excessive and driven (and OK, a wee bit tiring) you might wonder whether it’s having its gateau and eating it too: there’s a sassy hint of send-up in its prolonged matching of period setting and modern songs, especially in the playfulness of Act I before things get, you know, tragic in the longueurs of Act II. The alternate lyrics to The Hills Are Alive (“with the sounds of the proletariat”) are a case in point. The creators of Moulin Rouge, including playwright John Logan (of Red fame), are smart. Harold talks cheerfully about “dire and glorious poverty” — and then there’s a big catchy “shut up and dance with me” dance number. 

Sometimes the expert if way over-ample theatrical glitz and beauteous stagecraft wrap themselves around the music (or is it vice versa?) so uncannily you have to give your head a shake. The lurid red lighting of the number set to Roxanne, amplifying Satine’s ambiguous entertainer/courtesan career, is a knock-out. Talk about burning down the house.

And that’s how it is when you come to the cabaret (oops, wrong musical). Give yourself over to a hothouse over-the-top fantasy spun from the music engraved in your brain. As the MC says at the start, Moulin Rouge isn’t a place, it’s “a state of mind.”

REVIEW

Moulin Rouge The Musical

Broadway Across Canada

Book by: John Logan

Directed by: Alex Timbers

Starring: Gabriela Carrillo, Ryan Vasquez, Bobby Daye, Kevyn Morrow, Andrew Brewer, Kaitlin Mesh, Danny Burgos

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca

 

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Intermission’s over! Act II of the theatre season, and 10 shows too intriguing to miss

Posted on January 10, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Bella King, I Meant What I Said, Teatro Live!

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Intermission’s over, and Act II of the theatre season is about to begin.

Your nights out at the theatre are in progress. Rehearsals are happening in theatres across town. At Shadow (opening Jan. 22) Michael Peng shares the stage with musician Erik Mortimer, to star in An Iliad, a multi-award-winning modern re-telling of the Homer epic, an amazing concept in itself. The Citadel pays tribute to its 60-season history with a return to one of the 20th century’s greatest, and most enduringly powerful plays, produced in the theatre’s very first season. Death of a Salesman, in preview Jan. 24, stars John Ullyatt as Willy Loman, with Nadien Chu as his wife Linda. And more…. Broadway Across Canada’s touring Moulin Rouge, a splashy stage musical inspired by the Baz Luhrmann film, touches down at the Jube Tuesday. Look for upcoming 12thnight posts on all of the above.

And here are 10 other shows, in a long lineup of much-anticipated productions, that look too intriguing to miss.

Countries Shaped Like Stars. Created by Emily Pearlman and Nicolas Di Gaetano of Ottawa’s Mi Casa Theatre, the oddball enchantment of this whimsical fairy tale cum musical love story between two people who live on neighbouring peninsulas have made it a hit at festivals across the country. It was at the Fringe here in 2013, and I loved it (it’s just one of those theatrical Fringe shows that land lightly and stay with you), for its imaginative use of simple props, for its music … and its way of unhinging words from their usual mooring as it takes us to a time when anticipation grew on trees. Murray Utas directs a new Fringe Theatre production starring Dayna Lea Hoffmann as dragonfruit salesperson Gwendolyn Magnificent and Michael Watt as Bartholomew Spectacular, purveyor of fish popsicles. It runs Feb. 17 to 28 at the Backstage Theatre. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

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I Meant What I Said. There is much that is still mysterious about Stewart Lemoine’s first new full-length play in five years, premiering at Teatro Live! Feb. 20 to March 8. This I can tell you: it’s a comedy (OK, not a surprise, for a company and a playwright who devoted to adventures in expanding the frontiers of comedy). And the cast, directed by the playwright, is a quintet of Teatro’s younger generation stars led by Bella King and including Sam Free, Jayce Mckenzie, Eli Yaschuk, Nida Vanderham. Tickets: teatrolive.com.

And speaking of mysteries, Shakespeare is back in the park, forsooth. BIG NEWS from the Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s artistic director Dave Horak. After three summer’s exile from the Heritage Amphitheatre in Hawrelak Park, forsooth, they’re back in the park, the first group in the re-opened Heritage Amphitheatre, “with two full productions” June 18 through July 12. Their identity is to be revealed in the fulness of time (late January), “but I will tease that we are partnering with two other organizations so that we come back to the amphitheatre bigger than ever!” says Horak. “I’m hoping to make a big splash to welcome everyone back…. We’re even talking about fireworks for July 1st!”

Bouée (buoy or lifeline in English). What happens when a bunch of scientists undertake an up-date of humanity’s place in an infinite cosmos? “Cool, quirky, very physical,” as L’UniThéâtre artistic director describes this absurdist, highly theatrical play by Céleste Godin. The six-actor touring show from Satellite Theatre in Moncton NB takes L’Unihéâtre, Edmonton’s francophone theatre, for the first time across the river to the Roxy Theatre (10708 124 St.), where it runs March 6 and 7, with English surtitles. Tickets: lunitheatre.ca.

Cyrano de Bergerac, Citadel Theatre. graphic supplied.

Cyrano de Bergerac. The Citadel has commissioned a new adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s late-19th century high-romance swashbuckler from Edmonton actor/playwright Jessy Ardern, as the finale of their 60th anniversary season (May 2 to 24). The playwright retains the 17th century setting of a romantic adventure where wordplay meets swordplay — poetry by proxy — and in a nimble virtuoso touch has written it in rhyming couplets in homage to the elaborate verse form of the original. Amanda Goldberg directs this premiere production, starring Scott Shpeley as the great swordsman with the seductive poetic dexterity, and the epic nose. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.   

Everyone Is Doing Fine. Two art school friends land a job with a rich-guy hedge fund manager in this new comedy-drama by Calgary rising star James Odin Wade. Set at the treacherous, high-speed urban intersection of art, capitalism, sex, and ethics, the play was first seen in fledgling form at Workshop West’s 2023 Springboards Festival. The upcoming Workshop West premiere production (May 6 to 24) is directed by the company’s artistic producer Heather Inglis, who’s described it as “fast, smart, sexy, sophisticated.” Tickets: workshopwest.org.

Cry–Baby. Among the big Broadway musicals of this half of the season — The Wizard of Oz at the Citadel, Footloose at the Mayfield, 42nd Street at ELOPE, Once at Walterdale, A Chorus Line at MacEwan University — here’s a rom-com musical comedy we’ve never seen in these parts. A 2008 rock n’ roll musical based on the 1990 John Waters film, Cry-Baby it tells the story of a bad-boy rebel who falls for an upper-class square in 1950s Baltimore. And it comes with blue-chip creative cred. The book is by the Hairspray team of Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan; the music is by the late Adam Schlesinger, co-founder/muse of the terrific rock band Fountains of Wayne. Lauren Boyd directs a cast of 18 up-and-comers in a production from the enterprising indie company Uniform Theatre (they did Assassins at last summer’s Fringe). It runs in Theatre Network’s Phoenix Series at the Roxy (10708 124 St.) March 14 to 22. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.    

Casey and Diana. At the Citadel, finally Edmonton gets to see a hit play, by actor/playwright (and U of A theatre grad) Nick Green that premiered at Stratford in 2023 and has since played to full houses and critical raves across the country. We know Green from his plays like Happy Birthday Baby J and Coffee Dad, Chicken Mom and the Fabulous Buddha Boi. Casey and Diana is set in the AIDS crisis of the 1990s at Casey House, the Toronto AIDS hospice where the residents and staff are preparing for a visit by Princess Di, whose public compassion helped dislodge the exclusionary harshness of the era. The Citadel production April 4 to 26 is directed Lana Michelle Hughes, Shadow Theatre’s new artistic director. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.    

Request Programme, Northern Light Theatre. Graphic supplied.

Request Programme. In a tribute to its unusual shape-changing 50-year history, the season finale at Northern Light Theatre is a wordless performance piece that celebrates the large-scale experiments undertaken in the ‘90s by Trevor Schmidt’s artistic director predecessors D.D. Kugler and the late Sandhano Schultze. The 1973 piece, by the German avant-gardiste Franz Xaver Kroetz, follows a solitary woman who arrives home at her solitary apartment and does her usual solitary evening routine, makes dinner, cleans up, tunes in to a call-in radio show. And something happens that makes Request Programme a gut-grabber. And here’s the thing: the NLT production has a cast of 17 women artists of all ages — all actors with Northern Light credits on their resumés — one per performance. And since they do what they do onstage, every performance will be different. There is nothing like it in the season. Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com.

Ms. Pat’s Kitchen by Jameela McNeil, SkirtsAfire Festival.

Ms. Pat’s Kitchen. A featured production at the upcoming 14th annual edition of the SkirtsAfire Festival, Jameela McNeil’s play, set in Edmonton and celebrating our considerable Caribbean community, explores the fracture lines of an inter-generational mother-daughter relationship in a Jamaican family. And it steps up to the cultural and generational complications of the thorny issue of consent. I saw an early version at Nextfest; it’s been at the RISER New Works Festival, and now its mainstage premiere (March 5 to 8) at the ArtsHub Ortona (SkirtsAfire’s first venture into that river valley venue) is directed by Patricia Darbasie, and stars Noreta Lewis-Prince, Michelle Todd and Rochelle Laplante. Tickets: skirtsafire.com.

So, there’s 10. But there are so many more, including the return (July 10 to 26) of a signature Teatro Live! comedy, Stewart Lemoine’s Cocktails at Pam’s, a large-scale cocktail party in real time, directed by Teatro’s new artistic director Farren Timoteo who’ll be onstage in the cast of 11. The return of Chris Bullough Undiscovered Country in its latest incarnation at Theatre Network’s February Festival Weekend (Feb. 19 to 22),. Indie productions are still hatching, awaiting funding and sponsors….

And at our theatre schools, where some of the season’s most interesting work always happens, two classics of their kind. Tartuffe (directed by Kate Weiss) is at the U of A’s Studio Theatre (Feb. 5 to 14), and A Chorus Line (directed by Jim Guedo) at MacEwan University (March 25 to 29), in honour of this influential musical’s 50th anniversary.

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2025: the year in Edmonton theatre, part 2

Posted on January 5, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Brennan Campbell and Braydon Dowler-Coltman, As You Like It, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

2025: here’s a small selection of performances, design inspirations, moments, experiences, bright ideas (in no particular order) that have stayed with me. You will have your own personal assortment (feel free to let your mind wander through its memory tracks).

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A small sampling of performances that linger:

Alexander Ariate in Horseplay (at Workshop West), an exuberantly imaginative and physical performance as a horse named Horse dismayed to find that pursuing a dream means giving up something, too, in a pressurizing world that’s hard on the bonds of friendship. “It’s hard to be grown up and know the world.” Ariate’s performance as the amiable career slob and Oscar in The Odd Couple (at Teatro Live) was another gem.

Simon Abbott, Cameron Kneteman, Mhairi Berg, Maureen Rooney in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Mhairi Berg in a charismatic double-performance as both Girl and the younger self of Girl’s Granny, both feisty both quick-witted, in Morningside Road, the intricate new “Canadian Celtic” musical she wrote with composer Simon Abbott.(Speaking of doubling, Berg in a balletic pas de deux and as a tap-dancing FBI agent, among an assortment of other characters in Grindstone Theatre’s Die Harsh lodges in the mind too).    

Michele Fleiger as an old Alberta labour activist fallen into disrepair, re-discovering her skills, her sense of outrage, and her playfulness in  Nicole Moeller’s Wildcat at Workshop West.

Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Troy Feldman, Davinder Malhi in The Life of Pi, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Davinder Malhi, compelling as the precocious human star of Life of Pi (at the Citadel), panic-stricken but resourceful, traumatized but wonderstruck in his 227-day ordeal adrift at sea in a tiny life-boat with a Bengal tiger.

Mike Nadajewski and Patricia Zentilli in Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Andrew Nadajewski’s funny and endearing performance as the easy-going, rueful but ever-hopeful, Dave whose seasonal misadventures are at the heart of the Citadel’s new holiday musical Vinyl Cafe The Musical.

Cody Porter in Angry Alan (at Northern Light Theatre) brought an essential quality of reasonable “ordinary” even likeable decency to a character whose chronic disappointments in his life make him prime recruitment material for the men’s rights movements. Without a performance as nuanced as this one, the play would be de-fused and fail to fire.

Katie Yoner and Michael Watt in The 39 Steps, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Michael Watt who committed to an outlandish assortment of characters, of every age, gender, profession and accent (along with his stage partner Katie Yoner) in The 39 Steps (Farren Timoteo’s introductory production as Teatro Live!’s new artistic director). A performance of riotous comic physicality in a dizzying high-speed four-actor take on Hitchcock’s spy thriller.

Chariz Faulmino and Mark Sinongco in Disney’s Frozen: The Broadway Musical, Citadel Theatre and Grand Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

In a cast with high-power musical theatre talent (including Chariz Faulmino and Kelly Holiff) and a spectacular array of technical achievements in theatricality, Mark Sinongco’s performance as a nice-guy ice retailer, sidekick to a scene-stealer of a reindeer, had impact in Disney’s Frozen the Broadway Musical (at the Citadel).

In a scarily inflammatory ensemble Marguerite Lawler as the quick-witted sardonic Sutton, the wiseass of a circle of queer friends reeling after a shooting in a queer nightclub in Hayley Moorhouse’s Tough (at Edmonton Fringe Theatre). Their performance was an index to the play’s signature combination of rage and humour.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Alexander Ariate in The Odd Couple, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith in The Odd Couple brought a whole arsenal of precision comic physicality to Felix, the morose neurotic neatnik of Teatro Live’s very funny revival of the Neil Simon comedy classic of mismatched roommates. A veritable sight gag in himself, whether wielding a vacuum cleaner or lowering himself into a chair.

Brian Dooley as the working-class patriarch unravelling in booze and grievance through three generations in Colleen Murphy’s Jupiter (at Theatre Network) in a memorably harsh and committed performance.

Braydon Dowler-Coltman’s fine-tuned performance, romantic and comic, as Orlando in Dave Horak’s Freewill Shakespeare As You Like It in Louise McKinney Riverfront Park brought a delicate layer of discovery to the plight of the young romantic hero who falls madly in love, and races through the Forest of Arden pinning ardent verses to trees.

In a bravura comic performance, Ron Pederson, as all (but one) of the blue-blood D’Ysquiths, assorted upper-class twits, snobs, grotesques and buffoons who meet their maker in an octet of ingenious ways in Grindstone Theatre’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.

And Oscar Derkx brought precise comic timing to the the other D’Ysquith, the charming and likeable serial murderer of all the above in appealing performance crucial to the success of the kooky-macabre faux-Edwardian musical.

Sam Free and Bella King in On The Banks Of The Nut, Teatro Live! Photo by Ryan Parker

Bella King as the bright instigator of comic chaos, who takes charge of the professional and romantic fortunes of everyone else in the screwball comedy On The Banks of the Nut, revived by Teatro Live!

Lora Brovold, in a glowing, expressive performance in Michael Czuba’s After Mourning – Before Van Gogh (Shadow Theatre) as the older version of Van Gogh’s stubborn sister-in-law Joanna — on a heroic obstacle-strewn mission to make the world recognize and appreciate the “worthless” paintings of an obscure genius.

In a sparkling ensemble led by Luc Tellier as Ziggy Stardust as Puck the fairy party organizer, John Ullyatt as the bossy stagestruck weaver Bottom who magnanimously offers to play all the parts in the play-with-in-a-play staged by a gaggle of rustic artisans in Midsummer Night’s Dream The 70s Musical at the Citadel. 

Moments that lodge in your 2025 memory bank (collecting interest)

As the caregiver character in Bea, Michael Watt’s very funny monologue explaining A Streetcar Named Desire, and Stanley’s particular appeal, for the benefit of his client patient. “I do like a good intermission.”

As one of the 13-year-old dance-mad girls in Dance Nation (at SkirtsAfire Fest), Kijo Gatama’s monologue late in the play, that starts in the proposition that “I might be frickin’ gorgeous,” escalates into an impressive, even scary, manifesto of power ready to be unleashed on the world. “What am I going to do with all this power?”

The father-son scene in Goblin: Macbeth in which Banquo’s teenage son is much put out to be ordered to stop playing Smoke on the Water on his accordion.

The double drag-act in Cardiac Theatre’s KaldrSaga, a moment of boisterous rapport for a fractious father-teenage son relationship. The latter is sulky because dad nixes his changing his major from martial arts to musical theatre studies “Hammerstein to Hamilton.”

In using only rope and April Viczko’s superb lighting, the mountain-climbing scene in Rachel Peake’s production of Disney’s Frozen The Broadway Musical is a theatrical counterweight to an essentially cinematic property. It’s gorgeous.

Bottom’s death scene, a veritable cadenza of morbidity from John Ullyatt, a ne plus ultra moment in Midsummer Night’s Dream The 70s Musical.   

Newcomers of the year:

Kole Durnford, the Métis playwright from Stony Plain AB whose mainstage debut Horseplay — playful,  cleverly meta-, funny, and heartbreaking — about a friendship between a horse and a jockey was an imaginative insight into the high price of dreams and ambition.

In After The Trojan Women,  Amena Shehab, actor-turned-playwright, drew from her own experience as a Syrian refugee to find a continuity between the displaced survivors of the Euripides tragedy and the contemporary Middle East.

Comeback artist of the year (which makes her a newcomer too): Veteran actor Maureen Rooney made a welcome return to the mainstage after many a season — in Morningside Road as the tart-tongued Scottish Granny whose stories of growing up in Edinburgh in the ‘30s constitute a whole life philosophy for her Canadian granddaughter.

Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus in Big Stuff. Photo by Dahlia Katz

Wall? What fourth wall? It was a year of particular invention by theatre artists who found creative ways to include and interact with the audience. The elite improvisers of Rapid Fire did that with The Blank Who Stole Christmas, an original musical partly scripted, partly improvised, different every night since the star villain is an invited guest unknown to cast or audience in advance. In Big Stuff, one of my favourite nights in a theatre in 2025, the sketch comedy duo of Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus created a warm hospitality in which audience members felt truly at ease sharing their own stories about their stuff in the story of grief, loss, and love that emerged from the stuff onstage. Magical.

Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Troy Feldman, Davinder Malhi in The Life of Pi, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Puppet actor of the year: Richard Parker, the ferocious Bengal tiger at the centre of Life of Pi, as set in motion by Braydon Dowler-Coltman and Troy Feldman (honourable mention to Olaf the snowman, shepherded through his small but impactful role by Izard Etemadi in Frozen).

Jenny McKillop and Kendra Connor in How Patty And Joanne Won High Gold At The Grand Christmas Cup Winter Dance Competition, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang.

Five, Six, Seven, Eight… Choreography has a wonderfully creative year in Edmonton theatre, aesthetically, narratively, dramatically. A very small sampling includes Amber Borotsik’s exhilarating airborne pas de deux for two friends, a horse and a jockey, in Horseplay. Ainsley Hillyard’s ingeniously choreographed fight scene (Orlando and Charles the wrestler) in Freewill Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which played out as virtual reality combat. Jason Hardwick’s very funny choreography for two mis-matched renegades from an adult beginner tap class in How Patty and Joanne Won High Gold At The Grand Christmas Cup Winter Dance Competition (Northern Light Theatre). Robin Calvert’s astute choreography for unemployed steel workers who don’t actually know how to dance, as they worked up a strip number in the Mayfield’s The Full Monty. Gianna Vacirca’s fun, richly allusive movement choreography for the four subplots of Midsummer Night’s Dream the 70s Musical at the Citadel.

 The most unusual casting of the year: In Banana Musik (Common Ground Arts’ new Prairie Mainstage Series), Kris Alvarez’s charming, free-form memoir about her immigrant parents, the playwright appeared onstage with her actual mom and dad, non-performers, as they cooked, ate, and made music together.

Design inspirations of the year:

Director Trevor Schmidt’s design for Radiant Vermin with expert collaboration from Larissa Poho’s lighting and Matt Schuurman’s video. The design itself chronicles the incremental “dream home” upgrades that are part of the shocking Faustian bargain set forth in the play (at Northern Light), a (very) dark and snarky satire that’s made for the age when “affordable housing” is an oxymoron.

Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matkin in Radiant Vermin, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography. Set and costumes Trevor Schmidt, lighting Larissa Poho, video and projections Matt Schuurman

Lieke den Bakker’s striking set, evoking both nightclub and boxing ring, for Tough Guy, along with Kena León’s pounding and visceral score, both danceable and violent.

The stunning visuals of Haysam Kadri’s production of Life of Pi at the Citadel, its sea- and skyscapes, its theatrical evocation of exotic worlds and storms which play across a kind of outsized bubble, is the work of set designer Beyata Hackborn, lighting by April Viczko, video by Corwin Ferguson.

Maya Baker, April Cook, Kelsey Verzotti, Sarah Horsman, Layne Labbe in Legally Blonde. Citadel Theatre and Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price.

Beyata Hackborn’s design for Legally Blonde at the Citadel, a veritable arcade of light-up arches in popsicle colours (lighted by Renée Brode), with riotously pink costumes by Rebecca Toon, are a considerable part of the fun of a fizzy musical.

Daniel Van Heyst’s dreamy design (set and lighting) for Where You Are (at Shadow Theatre), is a detailed evocation of rural Ontario at its most genial.

Dave Clarke’s sweeping soundscape for After Mourning – Before Van Gogh, Darrin Hagen and Morag Northey’s soundscape for Jupiter, a combination of lyrical riffs and the ticking of time, and Joelysa Pankanea’s compositions are examples of the really expert sound design that happened on Edmonton stages this year.

Mhairi Berg’s lovely settings for the songs in As You Like It, one of Shakespeare’s most music-filled plays, take the Act I electronic rock riffs (by Darrin Hagen) into the pastoral, and acoustic, world of the Forest of Arden, in the al fresco Freewill production.

 

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2025, and live theatre as the prize human connector: the year in Edmonton theatre, part 1

Posted on December 31, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Kevin Klassen, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Troy Feldman, Davinder Malhi in Life of Pi, Citadel Theatre/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Lighting by April Viczko, projections by Corwin Ferguson, set by Beyata Hackborn. Photo by Nanc Price

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

2025: What a crazy, scary year it’s been. The world seems impossibly fractious, incoherent, unrecognizable. Can anyone really say they feel at home there?

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But the full-throttle invasion of screens of every size by A.I. has made the liveness of live theatre, where you share a room with real live people — more demonstrably authentic (and uncontrollable by algorithm) — more precious than ever.

It felt like that kind of year in Edmonton theatre. Challenging, yes, in every way, but energizing in placing a high value on human connection through storytelling. As a song in one of my favourite shows of the year, the new homegrown musical Morningside Road, has it, home is a place “built of stories we call our own.”

Our theatre artists, ingenious adventurers in the field of making much with little, took us to experiments in surprising venues — an off-the-track music club (An Oak Tree), the basement of a house on a tranquil urban street (Lucky Charm), a brick-lined hall in an old armoury (KaldrSaga)….

Michele Fleiger and Maralyn Ryan in Wildcat, Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre. Photo supplied.

They’ve invited us to reflect on the anxieties and chaos of our socio-cultural moment in ways that seem absolutely current, no matter the vintage of the play. Northern Light Theatre’s Radiant Vermin, for example, took a 10-year-old play about housing prices and greed, and found it flammable now. In a big year for new Canadian work on Edmonton stages Nicole Moeller’s new crime caper Wildcat at Workshop West was strikingly local in its references and hopeful about re-animating our atrophied capacity for resistance and change. Hayley Moorhouse’s Tough Guy, which premiered at the Fringe, set about unearthing ‘queer joy’ in the non-stop traumatizing harshness of the age.

Goblin: Macbeth, Spontaneous Theatre. Photo supplied.

There was delight to be found in the creative drive of artists to re-animate the classics — whether by pairing a rom-com hit of the 1590s with Supertramp in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the 70s Musical at the Citadel, or handing over a tragedy to a trio of curious goblins (Goblin: Macbeth), or relishing the perfectly mis-matched roommates for Belinda Cornish’s hilarious revival of The Odd Couple at Teatro Live!. Ah, or launching a new company (Edmonton Repertory Theatre) in these parlous times with the (very) Canadian classic Billy Bishop Goes To War.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Alexander Ariate in The Odd Couple, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

And the artists who brought work to the 44th annual edition of the Fringe, our mighty summer live theatre extravaganza, seemed to lean into plays, as opposed to “Fringe shows,” in a way we hadn’t seen in a while — and sold 138,500 tickets doing it.

It’s been a memorably non-static year in Edmonton theatre. New artistic directors at the Mayfield (Kate Ryan), Teatro Live! (Farren Timoteo), Shadow Theatre (Lana Michelle Hughes at the end of the current season). New companies (Edmonton Repertory Theatre). The return of hibernating companies (Cardiac Theatre), and changes pending at Theatre Network with the departure of artistic director Bradley Moss after 30 seasons, and at Common Ground Arts with the joint departure of managing producer Mac Brock and Found Fest director Whittyn Jason.

To jostle, I hope, your own memory bank of highlights from a tumultuous year, here are a dozen of my favourite shows, in no particular order. It’s Part 1. Stay tuned for Part 2, an assortment of memorable performances, designs, experiments, and moments.

Bailey Chin, Daviner Malhi, Kevin Klassen in Life of Pi, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Life of Pi. Both the fantastical story itself (borrowed from a 2001 Yann Martel novel, adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti) and the thrilling theatricality of how it gets told made a captivating experience to launch the Citadel’s 60th anniversary season. Haysam Kadri’s beautiful Citadel/Royal Manitoba Theatre production was a stunning collaboration of humans and puppets (Puppet Stuff Canada), lighting, projections, sound, set, by artists at the top of their game — all to tell a magical story about stories, about a boy, a quartet of zoo animals, and finally a ferocious Royal Bengal tiger adrift together in a lifeboat on the fathomless Atlantic for 227 days. The 12thnight review is here.

Mhairi Berg and Maureen Rooney in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Morningside Road. This funny, heartbreaking, and beautifully sculpted new homegrown “Canadian Celtic” musical cum memoir, by the combined forces of playwright Mhairi Berg and composer Simon Abbott, is an intricate time-travelling story about stories, and the way they’re populated, in colour, by memory. In the present is Girl (Berg) immersed in the oft-repeated stories Granny (Maureen Rooney), a peppery sort of Gaelic sage, tells about growing up in pre-war Edinburgh and beyond. And stories, like the songs, are layered in its complicated, fascinating archaeology of time. It’s for three actors (including Cameron Kneteman) and a live band of three who seem to float in memory in the Shadow Theatre premiere production directed by the company’s new artistic director Lana Michelle Hughes. This is a gem with a future. Check out the 12thnight review here.   

Alexander Ariate as Horse in Horseplay by Kole Durnford, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and costumes Beyata Hackborn, lighting Sarah Karpyshin

Horseplay. This irresistibly imaginative funny, heart-wrenching coming-of-age story of love, ambition, a friendship tested by crushing competitive pressures from the world, is about two BFFs, a horse named Horse (Alexander Ariate) and a jockey named Jacques (Lee Boyes). It got an outstanding premiere production at Workshop West, directed by Heather Inglis. And it introduced us to a stellar newcomer, playwright Kole Durnford. Have a peek at the 12thnight review here.

Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus in Big Stuff. Photo by Dahlia Katz

Big Stuff. This appealing original, by and starring the married comedy duo Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus, starts with the thorny relationship we have to our ever-accumulating stuff — to toss or not to toss, that is the question. And somehow, magically, it includes their relationship and our connection, via stuff, to the people, the moments, the motifs we’ve lost. How can a show about grief be so funny? And how does this delightful, amused and amusing pair establish such a warm rapport with us and our own stories about our own stuff, and our own people. There was a kind of magical embrace going on in the Citadel’s Rice house.

Goblin: Macbeth. This creation of Spontaneous Theatre, outrageously puckish as a concept, is one of the great surprises of the theatre year. Not that the expertise by Rebecca Northan, Bruce Horak and Ellis Malone was unexpected. But the three curious goblins who get intrigued by the odd human activity called theatre and have a go at Shakespeare’s tragedy did turn out a compelling, affecting, thoroughly intelligible three-goblin Macbeth in this fun, playful, smart show. Fingers crossed the Citadel is signing up for the new Goblin: Oedipus as you read this. Check out the 12thnight review here.

Mathew Hulshof, Bella King, Rachel Bowron in On The Banks Of The Nut, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

On the Banks of the Nut: The premise of this 2001 Stewart Lemoine screwball, revived with a younger generation of actors at Teatro Live!, has a madcap comic value all its own: an expedition by a hapless federal talent agent (Sam Free) and a bright and breezy office temp (the dazzling Bella King) through the rustic wilds of Wisconsin in 1951. They are in search of “a citizen of exceptional talent” (aren’t we all?). And the intersection of this airy quest and the aphrodisiac effect of great orchestral music make for a hilarious adventure, with an all-star cast directed by the playwright. And Mathew Hulshof with his dander up does have a certain unmistakeable resemblance to Gustav Mahler. The 12thnight review is here.

new  A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical. Luc Tellier (centre) as Puck, Citadel Theatre. Costumes by Deanna Finnman, set by Hanne Loosen, lighting by Jareth Li. Photo by Nanc Price.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream the 70s Musical. Matchmaking Shakespeare’s most popular rom-com with Supertramp and the Everly Brothers and a 25-song jukebox of danceable 70s hits is arguably an idea too kooky to resist. And this nutso ingenuity, devised by Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran, has, it turns out, a hilarious aptness to it you (I mean I) didn’t really expect. Will and Marvin Gaye, who knew? Great chunks of lyrical poetry vanish into stardust; instead, the hothouse intensity of love and love-gone-wrong get power ballads, rocking laments, and the exhortation to “give a little bit, of your love to me.” A cast of serious actor-singers dig in. And the ultimate theatrical pay-off is the transformation of the artisan garage band, led by John Ullyatt as Bottom the weaver, into rock stars. Major fun. The 12thnight review is here.  

Cody Porter in Angry Alan, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

Angry Alan. A surprising little stinger of a play by the Brit writer Penelope Skinner sheds light on one of the great mysteries of our time: how on earth do reasonable, even decent, guys get seduced, recruited, radicalized, by the preposterous claims of the men’s rights movement? In Trevor Schmidt’s Northern Light production Cody Porter, in a terrific performance as chronic underachiever Roger, stumbles onto the website of the title, and tumbles headlong into the Google vortex where explanations of his disappointing life, caged by rampant feminism, await. Utterly plausible, and scary as hell. Check out the 12thnight review here.

Ellie Heath, Brian Dooley, Monk Northey in Jupiter by Colleen Murphy. Photo by Ian Jackson

Jupiter. A new and fulsome epic from the feisty and fearless Colleen Murphy takes us into the heart of a working-class family haunted across the 30-year multi-generational fault lines of dysfunction and dark secrets. It premiered at Theatre Network in a production directed by Bradley Moss, and his  cast (which included the canine star of the season Monk) was led by Brian Dooley as the booze-soaked patriarch and Ellie Heath as the bright high school brainiac who fades into disappointed middle age. It made a lot of the Canadian family dysfunction repertoire seem pretty insipid in comparison. The 12thnight review is here.

Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

Tough Guy. In this muscular and accomplished play by Hayley Moorhouse five queer friends are trying in five ways to negotiate the emotional fall-out from the trauma of a mass shooting at a gay nightclub. In addition to the super-charged performances of Brett Dahl’s Persistent Myth production, what’s remarkable about Tough is the way the playwright has stepped up to doubts about the artistic expression, on stage or screen, of queer trauma in a homophobic/ transphobic world. Does queer art restore agency to the queer experience? Is there such a thing as “queer joy”? Tough Guy was brave enough to want to know. The 12thnight review is here.

Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Found Festival 2025. Photo by Brianne Jang

Lucky Charm. The most ingenious storytelling of the year happened in the atmospheric downstairs of a bungalow on a neighbourhood street. Louise Casemore’s strangely fascinating puzzle of a play (first developed at the Found Festival) is a séance, an invitation to lift the veil between the living and the world of the dead. It’s offered to us by the widow of the world’s most celebrated escape virtuoso, ironically like her late husband Harry Houdini a notable debunker of spiritualism. And somehow in the course of Max Rubin’s production, Bess Houdini’s own story as a Jazz Age player is unlocked, by our own memories. An intriguing conjuring of spirits, up close. Check out the 12thnight review here.

Dance Nation, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

Dance Nation. The mainstage production at SkirtsAfire in 2025 was an insightful, funny, disturbing play by the American writer Clare Barron that took us into the fraught world of pre-teen dance-crazy 13-year-olds, onstage and off-, poised anxiously on the threshold between childhood idylls and grown-up complexities. The characters are played by adult actors, ages 20something to 50something, who range freely between their younger and current selves. Amanda Goldberg’s ensemble production, her first as the new festival artistic producer, captured the stresses, the dreams, the triumphs. See the 12thnight review here.

The tip of the iceberg, as I think of exciting evenings in the company of The Pink Unicorn, Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, The 39 Steps, and so many more.

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