We’re invited to a ’60s party: Cocktails at Pam’s, Teatro Live! revives a signature Lemoine comedy. A preview

Posted on July 8, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Shannon Blanchet as Pam in Cocktails at Pam’s, Teatro Live! poster image.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Forty years ago a theatre company blithely outside the Canadian theatre mainstream invited Fringe audiences to a ‘60s cocktail party.

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In Cocktails at Pam’s, dressed-up people kept arriving at Pam’s place. Gimlets and gibsons got made, along with small talk. Canapés got passed around. Charades … well, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The hostess with the most-est may not have realized it at the time (she was pretty busy with vases for the flowers). But Pam’s party was the birth of a Teatro tradition, born in 1986 at the fifth Fringe when Teatro Live! was still called Teatro La Quindicina.

Stewart Lemoine’s signature Teatro comedy — a play? a real-time party onstage? performance art? — was revived every five years. And the last time we saw Pam and her guests, a decade ago, it was to hoist a highball to the opening the new Varscona Theatre, built from the very bricks of the old, and to celebrate Teatro’s 30th anniversary. “Finally, in 2016, we didn’t have to rush to take the set down!” says Lemoine.

Some things have changed in 40 years, needless to say, including the company title, and the name of the venue (formerly Chinook). The Teatro revival, the show’s sixth, that opens Friday on the Varscona stage has an all-new cast of 11 (!), mostly Teatro faves. Shannon Blanchet as Pam presides, in the role originated and played in every revival till now by Davina Stewart. Teatro’s resident costume designer Leona Brausen, an expert in the mid-century look, is no longer onstage in the role she originated (and played every time out after that, till now): Pam’s best friend, the dauntingly chic Sarah Black. “Big hair and disdain,” as Brausen describes Mrs. Black. “Super-judgy and impatient…. Stewart wrote it with me in mind.”

In this latest incarnation Rachel Bowron and Mathew Hulshof are the Blacks. And, says Brausen, amused, “Rachel gets (director’s) notes with ‘more Brausen, less Brausen’.”

Playwright Lemoine is remembering that sold-out 1986 premiere, the first time that Teatro, born at the first Fringe in 1982, had been in an actual theatre (“we lucked out!”). It was in a double-bill with his pocket musical What Gives?, in which Brausen was Allure Potemkin, and her dance number Baby Legs was a showstopper.

The queue for tickets, in that pre-advance tix era, was “crazy,” says Lemoine. “And it felt like an epic run for us,” since the Fringe holdovers, at the Citadel that year, gave the show an extra week of sold-out performances, followed by another show at Spruce Grove’s Horizon Stage.

“The cast size, at 11 startlingly large for a Fringe show, followed on the success of Lemoine’s 14-actor musical (with Gary Lloyd) My Miami Melody the year before, “which finally got us known as a Fringe act worth checking out,” as he puts it.” The tickets were five bucks, “so if everyone got $150 at the end of the Fringe, that was all right.”

What set Cocktails at Pam’s apart, he figures, was “the real-time aspect. Lights up, the party happens, and goes and goes till it’s done. No scene changes; the actors don’t play multiple characters…. It’s really happening right there in front of you and never stops.”

Not even for a story, unlike another defining Teatro show of the era, Lemoine’s The Vile Governess and Other Psychodramas, an “Ibsenesque romp” as billed, that had a Toronto run. “All our plays were ‘maybe the Fringe isn’t the best place for this’.” In the case of Pam’s party, “there was furniture, a bar, there were people wearing period costumes and putting on extensive makeup — in the Fringe’s 30-minute turnaround between shows…. We were the people who mistook the Fringe for Broadway.”

Davina Stewart (centre) as Pam, in the 2016 revival of Cocktails at Pam, Teatro Live! Photo by Andrew MacDonald-Smith

Lemoine started writing it, he recalls, “not for the Fringe or with a production particularly in mind, but as an exercise in keeping a thing going. I remember thinking ‘I’m just going to start a party and keep adding people to it — that’s how a party works. And I don’t really have to think about the plot,  just follow the party trajectory…. And when there’s enough people there I’ll figure out what the consequences are’.”

“It was just going on,” in a way that’s often been compared to Seinfeld, “and I noticed that it should have some sort of consequences, a major incident…. I took a big swing!”

What did Brausen think the first time she read Cocktails at Pam’s?. “Hmm, I know I liked it. It was fun. A bit Seinfeld, the characters are all likeable, and dis-likeable. It was, still is, my favourite Stewart comedy…. Smoking, drinking, hors d’oeuvres — it was everything I wanted in theatre!”

The costumes she’s assembled for the new cast, including the shoes, are all originals from the treasure trove of ‘60s pieces in her basement. Ah, the footwear, those crazy, torturous pointy shoes that have contributed to the bunion epidemic world-wide, plus “little kitten heels that get brittle and break off, says Brausen, who’s all about authenticity in garb. She’s dressing Virgil Black (Hulshof, back from Toronto for the run), as per Cocktails at Pam’s tradition, in a black Nehru jacket with a ‘60s pendant…. And “he has the pointiest men’s shoes; they could take the eye out of a bug in a corner.”

Wigs are a Brausen specialty. And when actors use their own hair, no follicle is safe. “Mat is so trusting; he let me cut his hair with seam ripper scissors!” says Brausen incredulously. “Severe bangs!” And as an extra spritz of authenticity, Brausen is toying with the temptation of giving the cast a few squirts of the Fabergé 60s classic Tigress backstage. Ah, the sweet smell of excess.

PREVIEW

Cocktails at Pam’s

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Shannon Blanchet, Rachel Bowron, Kendra Connor, Belinda Cornish, Cathy Derkach, Oscar Derkx, Mathew Hulshof, Bella King, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Kristen Padayas, Troy O’Donnell

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 8e Ave.

Running: Friday through July 26

Tickets: teatrolive.com

  

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What does it take to belong? Inside the high-risk world of SKNHEAD at Found Fest: meet playwright Shyanne Duquette

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

SKNHEAD by Shyanne Duquette, Found Festival 2026, Common Ground Art. Photo by Sable Boltz

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“What would we do to be part of a community” What would we sacrifice?”

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Shyanne Duquette wants to know. With their new play SKNHEAD, opening Thursday at Common Ground’s Found Festival in a “secret location” on 97th Street, the mixed-Cree theatre artist takes us into the harsh, lonely world of inner-city 14-year old mixed-race latch-key kids. “They just want to belong to something, but they don’t know what that something is….”

And when, like these kids, you’re on the outside looking in, “yearning for something, but you don’t what you’re yearning for,” as Duquette puts it, the dangerous attractions of gang culture can’t be under-estimated. “These are kids who don’t exactly have a watchful parental eye over them.”

“Feeling like an outsider and not knowing how to break in” is something Duquette knows about first-hand. “The place of just being sad and alone…. There are layers of personal experience that I bring, embedded in the text,” says the 27-year-old multi-disciplinary playwright/ director/ actor/ producer/ arts facilitator.

playwright Shyanne Duquette

Duquette, who’s engaging and eloquent in conversation, has tapped their own experience before, the struggle to find roots, and re-claim Indigenous identity and culture. In their first play Omisimawiw (Cree for “elder sister”), which got its start at the 2022 Nextfest, they told the amazing true story of feeling an instinctive connection with another woman on the university-bound LRT. Duquette, who’d grown up with their mom and two sisters, went right up to the stranger with a question: “hey, is your dad my dad?” The answer, it turned out, was yes; they’d discovered a sister. And they’ve since become friends, added another younger sister to make a trio, and discovered other siblings from an Indigenous dad they didn’t know (“15 … that I’m aware of”).

SKNHEAD by Shyanne Duquette, Found Festival 2026. Rehearsal photo by Sable Boltz.

The six characters of SKNHEAD are “kids on the brink of something,” says Duquette. “In that desperate middle-school time, at 14  you don’t really know who you’re going to be. who you’ll be.” It’s one of the goals of SKNHEAD, says the playwright, to “scrutinize the predatory nature of gangs, their impact on low-income individuals. The impact of poverty can make a child years older than what are.”

And that applies to their own experience, and the complicated family dynamics that go with it. “The experiences I had at 12 are not the experiences of other theatre creators,” they say. And their challenge as an artist is “to balance what traditional theatre audiences expect from life, adulthood, childhood, with my own experiences and the story I want to tell, and the audience I want to reach.”

“I don’t come from a family of folks that go to the theatre,” says Duquette, a U of A grad with a B.A. in drama. “I’m the first artist in my family…. And I want to engage with an audience who might not feel comfortable in traditional theatre spaces.”

Which is why both the personality and the goals of the Found Fest, taking audiences into unexpected, non-theatre ‘theatres’, are so meaningful to them. One of the biggest barriers to theatre as an accessible live art form “is the theatre space itself — the community that’s already embedded there, the conventions, the rules, the regulations. And when you already feel on the outside….”

The “secret space” on 97th Street, “beautiful and so freakin’ bizarre!”, is perfect for SKNHEAD, they think. “When you go into a space, and no one knows what’s going on, where the bathrooms are next door …” it’s a great equalizer, they laugh. And all tickets at Common Ground are pay-what-you-will. “Even $20 can be a lot to some people. And the option to pay nothing removes a barrier for an audience I want to reach!”

SKNHEAD by Shyanne Duquette, Found Festival 2026. Photo by Sable Boltz

The fulsome workshop production of Duquette’s new play has attracted contributions from major Canadian theatre stars: it’s directed by the multi-award-winning Ntlaka’pamux playwright/actor Tara Beagan and designed by the great Andy Moro. The dramaturg is actor/playwright Geoffrey Simon Brown of Calgary’s Major Matt Mason (and an early Found Fest instigator).

Duquette’s burgeoning theatre career, which began with improv in school and a drama degree from the U of A, was jump-started when they were Beagan’s assistant director on The Herd, by the Indigenous playwright Kenneth T. Williams, at the Citadel in 2022. A last-minute production emergency meant Duquette suddenly found themself in the cast, acting, and onstage.

Acting, which they still do “here and there,” is not their priority, though. “Producer, director, playwright” are a better fit, they think. “You just get a little bit more say, on the macro level, you know? In the last few years I’ve been so focussed on ‘ethical performance creation’ — how we can hard-hitting stories in ways that protect not only the audience but the actors and creatives as well.”

Theirs is a creative schedule that has escalated in the last few months, with more to come. “When it’s feast or famine you gotta feast when you can, right?” they say cheerfully. In June Duquette was in Toronto, part of Why Not Theatre’s program for emerging BIPOC producers, working on a short Tara Beagan play. In November they’re back in Toronto, at Native Earth, the country’s leading Indigenous company, at work on their new play Fawn.

And meanwhile, in this “the summer of Tara,” they’re ensconced in an un-theatre space at Found Fest, asking themself questions that are central to their artistic practice, and trying to find a balance. “What do I want to tell my community with this script? What do I want to tell an entirely difference audience subset?”

“I wanted to challenge the preconceptions of the theatre audience about the boys who develop into misguided men — by showcasing their humanity. I wanted to inspire reflection on the circumstances that shape them, and investigate how we as a society can better support youths that can find themselves in harm’s way.”

PREVIEW

Found Festival 2026

SKNHEAD

Theatre: Common Ground Arts

Written by: Shyanne Duquette

Directed by: Tara Beagan

Starring: Moses Kouyate, Pax Anderson, Aidan Laudersmith, Emily Berard, Tom Tunski, Sheldon Stockdale

Where: secret location on 97 St. between Jasper Ave. and 102 A Ave.

Running: Thursday through Sunday

Tickets: pay-what-you-will, commongroundarts.ca.

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Discover art and artists in unexpected places: get found at the Found Festival

Posted on July 6, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Sophie May Healey in Hysteria’s House, Found Festival 2026. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s just no telling what will happen when you find yourself at Found. Yes, the festival of encounters with art and artists in unexpected places is back Thursday with a 15th annual edition.

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You too could be a Found-ling, and find yourself in a secret warehouse, or a historic house, a church or an antique and collectibles shop. Or you could be strolling through a park, and happen upon a human clock. Or (maybe still in your bathrobe), you’re find yourself inside a Google Doc.

Found is all about brokering experimental relationships between performers, unusual spaces, and … you. To see what happens.

“The heart of site-specific and found-space art is to walk into a space you normally wouldn’t expect, and the art transforms the space and the space responds to the art,” says Found Fest director Whittyn Jason, a busy theatre designer with a particular love for site-specific theatrical experiments. “It feels so real; because you aren’t normally supposed to be there, it adds an element of danger” to the theatrical experience.

It’s exciting to give your preconceptions a shake. As Jason says, “your expectations are subverted when you don’t know the rules…. Very punk rock/ DIY roots.” Site-specific “makes theatre so much more dynamic, interesting, challenging.”

SKNHEAD by Shyanne Duquette, Found Festival 2026. Rehearsal photo by Sable Boltz.

Besides, “bringing a piece to a space that’s non-theatrical,” as Jason puts it, means it’s accessible to an audience that might not show up to conventional theatres. That was particularly important to Cree playwright Shyanne Duquette, in the second year of their Found Fest “Fresh Air Artist-in Residency. Which was why they were so delighted with the venue for their new play SKNHEAD, Found’s feature presentation: “a secret commercial location somewhere on 97th Street between Jasper Ave. and 102 A Ave.” After all, the characters are mixed-race inner-city kids, outliers desperate to belong to something, who gravitate to gangs. Governor General’s Award-winning playwright Tara Beagan directs. (Stay tuned for 12thnight’s upcoming interview with Duquette).

It’s a ‘gift from the gods’, to borrow from clownspeak, to find the perfect location for a creative idea. Jason laughs, “it’s always a good sign when the playwright is excited about the space, and you hear ‘this rocks!’” Or “it has to happen here.” Jason will only say that the secret SKNHEAD venue is  “intriguing” and “an Edmonton icon.”

Goalie Play, Found Festival 2026. Image supplied.

In their first year as Fresh Air artists-in-residence, Alex Ward (playwright) and Alexander Voutchkov (producer/dramaturg) present a “work-in-progress reading” of Goalie Play. The central character is an NHL goalie — paired with a drummer — who suffers a career-altering injury, and is forcedto examine his life, and re-imagine it without hockey.

Whittyn describes it as “an interdisciplinary one-man show (starring Ryan Blair), with elements of puppetry, live drumming, recorded voice…. a feast for your senses, an inter- disciplinary piece about what it means to make sacrifices to an institution that’s larger than you, larger than life.”

Sophie May Healey in Hysteria’s House, Found Festival, photo supplied

Hysteria’s House, by and performed by Sophie May Healey, takes the audience to the historic John Walters House in Kinsman Park. “It’s a romp!” says Jason, who’d seen an earlier Nextfest iteration of the “dark comedy/ clown/ neo-burlesque” solo show, directed by Alexandra Dawkins. “Sophie is so funny … such a magnetic, mesmerizing and enigmatic performer.” And since Hysteria’s House explores the dark Victorian corridors of femininity and misogyny through the lens of gothic romance, “a parlour of the era” is an uncanny location. (Jason warns it’s a tight fit, so don’t dawdle getting tickets.)

The multi-disciplinary performance poetry piece Mass For Shut-Outs takes the audience to Robertson-Wesley United Church. Created and performed by Tanya Davis, a former P.E.I poet laureate (and Found Fest’s first Maritime artist), it re-frames a Catholic mass for people who have historically been ostracized from the Church. There’s live music, and at the post-service reception, in time-honoured church tradition, there’s juice and cookies.

Mass For Shut-Outs, We Quit Theatre at Found Festival 2026. Photo supplied.

You don’t have to be in Edmonton to go to Found Fest 2026. The highly original Winnipeg based duo We Quit Theatre, Dasha Plett and  Gislina Patterson, brings 805-4821, “a trans coming-out story made up of other stories,” as Jason describes, to Google Docs (“with occasional links to YouTube,” and, hey, a dialogue from Hamlet). You can interact with it as “a live-typed digital performance” on your laptop; or you can have a more communal experience by showing up in person at the Studio Theatre for a “movie screening,” complete with popcorn.

Jason calls 805-4821 “multi-media queer phantasmagoria.” Plett and Patterson, they say, are “a couple of the most interesting contemporary artists in the country right now,” says Jason. We Quit Theatre will be back, in person, for Common Ground’s “Prairie Mainstage Series,” with i am your spaniel; or A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare by Gislina Patterson.

The timing of 805-4821 is on the nose: our Moment in history is hard and getting harder for queer and trans people. “As a queer non-binary artist myself, I want to be able to curate the art I want to see! This feels important and timely.” The We Quit Theatre pair “has quite a following,” Jason says, cheered that “people are excited about queer and trans art!”

Untitled (clock piece), Found Festival 2026. Photo supplied.

And speaking as we are about timely, Untitled (clock piece), by Toronto-based Susannah Haight and Edmonton’s Tia Kushniruk, is an outdoor 12-hour durational performance piece in which six dancers move in real time through a clock made of stones. It happens in Henrietta Muir Park across from the Muttart. Says Jason “we’re researching mosquito repellent as we speak.”

At Maven and Grace on Whyte Ave., writings from the bottom of the lost + found bin, curated by Philip Hackborn, this year’s edition of Found Fest’s annual poetry showcase, gathers poetry from an assortment of Edmonton poets. Says Jason, they explore “the theme of what we have lost and found; one person’s trash is one person’s treasure.”

There’s a music series, an AfterFound Cabaret, an “after-dark craft night.” And Tamarack’s Sound Fest is a free two-day celebration of Indigenous and Métis food, music and art. It’s time to get Found.

PREVIEW

Found Festival 2026

Produced by: Common Ground Arts Society

Where: assorted “found venues,” including the great outdoors

Running: Thursday through Sunday

Tickets, information, full schedule: commongroundarts.ca.

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Brian Paisley: we’ve lost the breezy visionary who thought up the Fringe, and changed a city forever

Posted on July 5, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Edmonton Fringe founding father Brian Paisley.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The saddest of theatre news this weekend. Brian Paisley, the founder of the Edmonton Fringe (the prototype for fringes everywhere on the continent) has passed away in Mexico where he’s lived for many years, following a pneumonia-related illness.

And we have lost the wry, puckish visionary who had a bright idea, in 1982, that would change the face of theatre here, across the country and the continent. It put this hinterland city on the map, and kept our playwrights and actors and directors here and creating things in the theatre off-season. Forty-five years ago, no one really knew what a Fringe was on this side of the pond. And Brian — it would have been unthinkably formal to call him Mr. Paisley — thought of “A Fringe Theatre Event” as a probable one-off.

Armed with a modest left-over grant, Brian’s summertime inspiration of 45 summers ago, too simple and too crazy to resist, was to invite artists to a dusty warehouse district called Old Strathcona to do a show, their heart’s desire, whatever they wanted to do, no matter how uncommercial, off-centre, idiosyncratic or just plain nuts — and see who showed up. It was unpredictable; it was a low-risk gamble. That was the fun of it. And artists and audiences couldn’t get enough of it.

Partly it was sustained by the way the casual, improvising spirit of the Fringe reflected the breezy, offhand charm of its founder. Brian was a master of inverse marketing: “We have shows for people of every taste, and shows for people with no taste at all,” as he was fond of saying. He was an indefatigable supporter of artists, a congenial comrade to audiences, with a high tolerance for chaos and almost none for bureaucracy. In the 10 years Brian ran the Fringe, before he left to take up writing and directing for film and TV, it grew so fast it constantly outpaced its infrastructure and resources and left its organizers scrambling madly to keep up.

I still remember Brian’s office in the dank basement of the old Princess Theatre, with an incomprehensible scheduling board covered with stickie notes. A constant stream of people would stumble downstairs in the dark and pitch him a succession of loony ideas, and he’d always say “well, make a show, try it out….” The guy was a born experimenter, and a generous enabler of other people’s experiments. And people loved him for it. His mantra: “our artistic mantra is to have no artistic mantra.” It sounds so simple and it’s so, well, profound.

Anyhow, this is by way, on a sad day, of thinking fondly of an artist who started something that transformed the way we thought about theatre, and how it gets made. We owe, all of us, big-time. I sure do, since the Fringe was my first gig as a theatre writer for the Journal, and I had so much to learn about casting aside preconceptions and experiencing theatre, in all its live-ness, in the moment.

Big legacies make for big losses.

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Musical theatre tickles the Bard: larky Something Rotten! at the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, a review

Posted on July 2, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Brian Christensen (centre) as Shakespeare in Something Rotten, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Jenn Galm.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Who on earth is goin’ to sit there while an actor breaks into song?” ambitious playwright/impresario Nigel Bottom wonders incredulously (in song, natch) in Something Rotten!, the ingenious musical comedy hit now singing and dancing on the Heritage Amphitheatre stage in Hawrelak Park.

Funny he should ask.… Opening night of Something Rotten!, the second of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival summer offerings in their long-awaited return to the park, was a test case for the seductive power, and amusement value, of musical theatre — and a demo.

The heavens opened. Not your “gentle rain from heaven,” to quote (as Something Rotten does), another Portia from another show by that full-of-himself fan magnet from Stratford. Nope. Mother Nature’s contribution on Canada Day night was a pounding deluge, with all the theatrical trimmings like percussion and lightning and apocalyptic cloud cover. The show got a tempest delay, of 15 minutes, with lighting by the Weird Sisters. From the big boisterous audience who’d sloshed across the park to be under the big top could be heard the classic cheery Edmonton summertime greeting, “at least it’s not snowing.”

And we all had a lot of fun.

As the minstrel (Renell Doneza) sings in the rousing opening production number Welcome to the Renaissance, “we bring it to you with much ado.” Well, exactly. Freewill has paired Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, which closed last weekend, with a musical. The company, incidentally, hasn’t gone musical theatre since the rock musical version of Two Gentlemen of Verona nearly two decades ago.

Produced under the Freewill umbrella by two community musical and dance groups (Edmonton Pops Orchestra and Shelley’s Dance Company) and directed by Freewill’s artistic director David Horak, Something Rotten!, a 2015 Broadway hit currently in blockbuster revival mode at Stratford, has an added attraction. Freewill’s illustrious playwright-in-residence is himself a character in this larky high-spirited concoction by the American showbiz brothers Kirkpatrick, Karey and Wayne, with collaboration on the book by the Brit John O’Farrell.

As the title suggests, it’s embedded with a clever mash-up of sly, cheeky allusions and jokes, of every size, passing or head-on, to the sacred oeuvre of the Bard. And the musical theatre references, a witty jumble, never stop coming at you, A Chorus Line, Annie, Rent, The Lion King, The Sound of Music, Les Miz, Cats, Phantom…. It’s enough to make you giddy.

So, Shakespeare AND musical theatre, a delish and diverting treat for fans of either persuasion, often non-binary in that regard. It’s so amusingly apt a choice for a Shakespeare company that you just can’t help wishing Freewill had been able to afford alternating the two shows in rep, so you could see the actors in both.

But I digress. And Something Rotten!, in which the 19-member cast is outfitted in surprisingly extravagant period detail by Karlie Christie, does look good. Here’s the gist: we meet sibling playwrights, Nick (Stephen Allred) and Nigel (Eli Yaschuk) Bottom. The Bottom brothers are struggling to create a hit and make their mark, and stave off bankruptcy, in the cutthroat commercial theatre scene of 1595, dominated by cocky, entitled rock star Shakespeare (played by Brian Christensen with an amusing swagger, in a series of poses).

Eli Yaschuk, Melenie Reid, Stephen Allred in Something Rotten, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Jenn Galm

Nigel, a sweet-natured romantic poet, who’d rather write sonnets than sell out, is captured delightfully by Yaschuk. Nigel is a big Bard fan. This is beyond irritating to Nick, played by Allred with a very funny air of eye-rolling exasperation. He seethes fury (musically of course). God, I Hate Shakespeare (“he’s a hack with a knack for stealing anything he can”) might send ripples of sympathy down your spine if you flunked English 30. The sibling chemistry is captivating.

Nico Maiorana and Stephen Allred in Something Rotten, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Jenn Galm

Desperate for inspiration, Nick secretly consults a soothsayer named Nostradamus (well, his nephew Thomas actually), played with funny histrionic excess by Nico Maiorana, to find out what the next big thing in theatre will be. Musicals, Nostradamus thinks after elaborate consultation with his inner visionary. “What the hell are musicals?” And in a showstopper choreographed by Shelley Tookey, with an ensemble in tap shoes doing riffs from every musical and choreographer you can think of, he explains the concept to his perplexed client. “You slap your lap, then finger snap. That’s when you know it’s time to tap….”

Despite its chorus of Grim Reapers, Nick’s first attempt, ‘The Black Death’ about the bubonic plague, doesn’t impress the investor. Go figure. So Nostradamus tries again, this time to predict Shakespeare’s biggest hit, so the Bottoms can pre-empt it. He’s close but no cigar: “Omelette the Musical” (possibly with ham, and a Danish).

In a comic and well-sung performance Melenie Reid plays Nick’s wife Bea as a sort of theatrical Renaissance suffragette. And as Portia, the Puritan poetry-groupie Nigel falls instantly, and dangerously, in love with, Alyson Horne is funny, too. Martin Galba is Shylock, a persistently stage-struck money-lender who’d do anything to be in a show. 

Something Rotten, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Jenn Galm

You can’t expect to hear every word of a word-filled musical out doors, in the middle of a storm. That would not be reasonable. The sound isn’t entirely consistent, but it’s surprisingly good under the circumstances, after the opening number. And up against a battering by the elements, Horak’s cast, among them experienced community players and recent musical theatre grads, have variable vocal success, understandably. The leads are strong, and the ensemble fearlessly tucks into Tookey’s choreography, which gets its comedy counterpointing the doublet-and-hose setting against contemporary musical theatre moves. Wearing tap shoes and not cleats when everything’s wet takes chutzpah.

The live band of 11 (!) led by musical director Michael Clark of the Edmonton Pops Orchestra, is an unexpected luxury. And what fun it is to be with an audience that can pick Rent out of the air just by hearing a phrase or two.

Freewill is back. And you should be, too.

REVIEW

Something Rotten!

Theatre: Freewill Shakespeare Festival, produced by Edmonton Pops Orchestra and Shelley’s Dance Company

Created by: Wayne Kirkpatrick and Karey Kirkpatrick (music and lyrics), Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell (book)

Directed by: David Horak

Starring: Stephen Allred, Eli Yaschuk, Brian Christensen, Melenie Reid, Alyson Horne, Nico Maiorana, Todd Hauck, Patrick Lynn, Martin Galba, Renell Doneza, and ensemble

Where: Heritage Amphitheatre, Hawrelak Park

Running: through July 12

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com

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Fringe Unforgettable: the upcoming 45th annual edition of the Edmonton Fringe Festival has a theme, a nickname, and shows

Posted on June 29, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

This year’s upcoming 45th annual Edmonton Fringe, the oldest and biggest of its kind on the continent, now has a theme, a nickname that gets to the heart of the matter: Fringe Unforgettable.

At the christening Monday, Fringe Theatre’s executive director Megan Dart and artistic director Murray Utas announced that Fringe Unforgettable, this year’s edition of our mighty summer festival (Aug. 13 to 230) also has shows, 209 of them from here, across the country, and around the world, running in 37 venues. Some 80, selected by lottery, will happen in the 10 “official” Fringe-run venues. The other 129 shows are in 27 BYOVs, bring-your-own venues acquired and outfitted and curated by artists themselves, mostly in Old Strathcona, with notable exceptions like the four curated venues in La Cité francophone. New venues this year include Queen Alexandra Community Hall, with five shows, and Mile Zero Dance studio, with shows curated by Common Ground Arts.

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What hasn’t changed since the 2025 edition is the $20 top ticket price fringees will be paying for shows. Artists set the price, to a $15 maximum, and there’s a $5 Fringe surcharge, which shrinks in the case of smaller ticket prices.

And the Fringe maintains its free programming this summer. The free KidsFringe — imaginative activities and crafts, workshops, performances, music, storytelling, and more for kids under 12 — is back. So is the Fringe’s free outdoor carnival of circus and street artists, and the free music series, this year 16 concerts in ATB park. Food trucks, beer tents, and the featured Sea-Change brews — of course!

New this year (well, newly returned by popular demand after last year’s cost-saving cancellation) is the free Fringe shuttle that takes fringees and artists between the main site and the French Quarter. And the  Fringe has launched Q2Q: as billed a “queer Barns series featuring open mic, drag workshops, cabarets, art markets and more….”

Pêhonân (nêhiyawêwin for “meeting place”), an Indigenous-led Fringe initiative that features Indigenous artists, knowledge-sharing, and Treaty 6 storytelling, is back in an expanded form, with “a community of tipis” in the green space south of the Strathcona Community League.

The dimensions of Fringe Unforgettable are (so far) a bit smaller, in show count and venues, than last year’s A Fringe Full of Stars, with its 223 shows in 40 venues. But it’s a moveable feast, right up till show time. And as Utas says, “we could invite more shows … but how big do we need to be anyhow?” He and Dart, Fringe artists both, have long been determined that expansion shouldn’t outpace audience and resources, in order for both artists and their audiences to have a peak (let’s say “unforgettable”) experience. Since the  Edmonton Fringe remains North America’s largest, a festival that’s bigger for the sake of size would be “a colder journey,” as Utas puts it, one with an emphasis on competitiveness instead of “celebrating that we are all in a festival together.”

Utas and Dart are particularly attentive to the “average audience attendance” at the shows (tricky since the size and audience capacity of the venues varies). “And that’s been trending upward” from 60 per cent, Utas says happily.

So, “45 years of Fringe,” and still Unforgettable, says Dart, based on “the simple but radical idea that anyone can be an artist, and everyone has a story to tell…. Unforgettable is what happens when a memory makes its mark.”

Festival guides, containing your memories-to-be for the 2026 Edmonton Fringe go on sale July 29, tickets and passes August. 5 at noon. See fringetheatre.ca for further information.

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Funny, amiable, and hey, there’s small-town curling: Hurry Hard at the Mayfield, a review

Posted on June 28, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Jamie Cavanagh, Jenny McKillop, Kristi Hansen, Paul-Ford Manguelle, Mat Busby in Hurry Hard, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Curling may have snazzy international tentacles, and Olympics cred and all that. But there’s something quintessentially small town, domesticated, and Canuck, about curling.

The camaraderie, the jokey squabbling, the tenacious feuding, the intense competitive spirit (not to mention the limited dating pool) … they’re all part of Kristen Da Silva’s Hurry Hard, a Canadian rom-com with brooms, now hurrying hard on the Mayfield stage in a Kate Ryan production with an all-star cast.

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A big part of the fun is seeing what five top-drawer actors with comic chops — Matt Busby, Kristi Hansen, Jamie Cavanagh, Jenny McKillop, Paul-Ford Manguelle — make of a genial if predictable comedy that takes us backstage at community curling, with a double-takeout of funny one-liners, family friction, and the dark unresolved family secret obligatory in Canadian theatre. It’s (very) carefully constructed, with the exception of a couple of cringe-y cliché scenes. Under Ryan’s direction the actors apply themselves expertly to creating vivid and distinctive, believable characters and making convincing chemistry happen.     

Bill (Mat Busby) and Sandy (Kristi Hansen) met while curling, they got married in the Didsbury Curling Club, and now, d-i-v-o-r-c-e-d (everyone spells it out in Didsbury, AB.), they’re busy trying to avoid each other in that very location. The stakes laid out by the play are high. For one thing, it’s  the last bonspiel at the curling club before it gets torn down, its inglorious probable future, as one character sighs, a frozen yogurt shop. For another, Didsbury is playing arch-enemy Olds for the regional championship. And as Bill’s no-goodnik bro Terry (Jamie Cavanagh) points out, the regional championship means retaining “the banner!” and being on the front page of the paper. As I say, the stakes are cosmically high.

The crisis at hand is that the team is short one member (a freak gravel truck encounter en route to practice) whose fingers are being sewn back in a particularly prairie gothic way. And without female participation, a notion that appalls the blithely sexist Terry — “women aren’t made for sports” — and leaves Bill conflicted for reasons pertaining to his d-i-v-o-r-c-e,  the match will be forfeited. Goodbye Didsbury dreams, especially Terry’s. But wait, Sandy is a kickass curler, hmm.

Mat Busby, Jamie Cavanagh, Kristi Hansen, Paul-Ford Manguelle in Hurry Hard, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Sandy’s friend Darlene (Jenny McKillop), the town hairdresser, is a mere novice at curling, and a reluctant one at that. As Hurry Hard opens Terry is awaiting the arrival via Canada Post of his Hercules platinum ultra-light super-broom. And Sandy is applying an ice pack to Darlene’s backside (“why are we playing such a slippery sport?”). The fifth character, the team’s alluring newest member, is Johnny (Paul-Ford Manguelle), good-natured eye candy, awesomely fit and dumb as a stone.

Speaking as we were about Terry the casual sexist, nothing much can be done about the jarring scenes in which Johnny’s mere presence reduces Darlene and Sandy to nitwits. The former can’t keep her hands off him; she’s all over him like wasps discovering the Gatorade. And Sandy isn’t much more restrained. What? The actors just step up, shed comic nuance, and go for it. And then return to their characters.

Daniel vanHeyst, the reigning monarch of atmospheric, detailed design — consider, as but one example, his Ontario cottage country set for Da Silva’s Where You Are, at Shadow Theatre a season ago — has fashioned a wood-panelled small-town curling clubhouse that feels authentic through and through, a veritable crucible of curling. The general clutter, the photo walls, the double-rack of trophies of every size, the kitchen with the serving window, the lighting fixtures shaped like curling rocks. When Sandy alludes to the old-sock smell of the joint, you know exactly what she’s talking about; it’s coming off the set. The lighting, like the cast and the set, is deluxe, amusingly prosaic and dramatic as required (it’s by Siobhan Sleath).

The sibling rapport between Bill and Terry is amusingly set forth in the play, and smart comic performances from Busby as the mild-mannered ex-husband, a sad-eyed nice guy/ straight man to Cavanagh as the freeloader underachiever bro. Cavanagh is genuinely funny as the aging ladies’ man, with the shrug of the guy perpetually on the rebound from his past. The latter’s off-hand way with escalating outrages of entitled freeloader-dom, unspooled like a shaggy-dog story by Da Silva, will make you laugh.

The chemistry between the women has a similar dynamic, and matching scenes. McKillop is a hoot as Darlene, who’s been around, and whose breezy observations — about food, hair, men, dating, assorted sports — have a kind of practical worldly wisdom about them. “If you ever need anything waxed …” is an exit line McKillop floats as she drags herself off towards the ice. “If you ever need a shoulder, or any other body part, to cry on….” And they play off Hansen as the warm-hearted, reasonable Sandy, an aspirational caterer trying to put her d-i-v-o-r-c-e behind her.

It’s Manguelle’s unselfconscious cheerfulness — it’s unsquelchable — that make Johnny the babe magnet so funny.

Will the assorted domestic and sporting crises be resolved in the course of the sitcom?  Geez Louise, get a grip (and have a “Strawberry Brier”, number 1 on the theme cocktail menu). As you will glean, you need know nothing of curling (I’m guilty) to get a kick out of Hurry Hard, an amiable entertainment executed by likeable actors in a setting that, like the characters, feels lived in. Rock on.

REVIEW

Hurry Hard

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre, 16615 109 Ave.

Written by: Kristen Da Silva

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Mat Busby, Jamie Cavanagh, Kristi Hansen, Paul-Ford Manguelle, Jenny McKillop

Running: through July 26

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca, 780-483-4051

 

 

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A three-festival weekend in Edmonton theatre: improv, Shakespeare, musical theatre…

Posted on June 26, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Much Ado About Nothing, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2026. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Real people together, artists and audiences, getting festive: what a concept! It’s an AI-proof three-festival weekend on Edmonton stages.

100 Decibels, at Improvaganza. Rapid Fire Theatre, photo from website.

•No one can really know what will happen at Improvaganza, Rapid Fire Theatre’s annual excursion into the impromptu, the unforeseen, the unpredictable. It continues this weekend through Sunday, with showcases from an international array of improv and sketch comedy artists, and RFT’s own elite band of experts in the fine art of spontaneity. The lineup includes 100 Decibels, a particularly expressive physical comedy troupe of Deaf artists from Canada, Poland, and the Philippines. At Friday night’s show they’re paired with Only Improv In The Building, an improvised murder mystery starring an assortment of improvisers directed by Jon Carr, who’s the artistic director of Dad’s Garage, RFT’s sibling improv company in Atlanta.

Kaleidoscope, “an improvised mosaic” as billed, is the work of the Vancouver-based improv ensemble Camp. And it operates on the collage principle in joining scenes. 2-Man No-Show, the tag-team duo of Ken Hall and Isaac Kessler unleash their “clown-prop” style and the fourth wall doesn’t stand a chance.

For the full schedule, show descriptions, and tickets, go to rapidfiretheatre.com.

Vanessa Sabourin and Jesse Gervais in Much Ado About Nothing, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2026. Photo by Brianne Jang

•Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in the Park with Will: Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing celebrates the return of the beloved Freewill Shakespeare Festival to their natural al fresco home, the Heritage Amphitheatre in Hawrelak Park, after YEARS of  exile. Ian Leung directs a 10-actor cast of theatre pros in the festive-with-a-dark-side mid-period comedy by the company’s resident playwright. And, hark!, the fun of a hang in the newly reno-ed park, plus all the traditional Freewill accoutrements, including squirrel input, popcorn and a sprawl on the grass with a glass of vino, can be yours! Check out the 12thnight preview interview with artistic director Dave Horak. And the review is here. Tickets and full schedule: freewillshakespeare.com.

Much Ado is part one of this year’s festival. Part two, Something Rotten, a big-cast Broadway musical comedy hit crammed with Shakespeare jokes, opens next week and runs through July 12. It’s produced by Edmonton Pops Orchestra and Shelley’s Dance Company, and stars an assortment of community artists directed by Horak. Tickets and full schedule: freewillshakespeare.com.

Brigadoon, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Nanc Price.

•The finale production in NUOVA Vocal Arts’ 2026 festival is the 1947 Lerner and Loewe classic Brigadoon, running on the Orange Hub stage through Sunday. Kim Mattice Wanat’s large-scale revival, which has not one but two alternating 36-performer casts of emerging musical theatre artists from across the country. And that’s a lot of tartan! The 12thnight review is here. Tickets: nuovavocalarts.com.

Edmonton Fringe founding father Brian Paisley.

•And coming up, of course, a few more festivals from now in mid-August, is the axis on which Edmonton summers, in all their festival-rich glory, have been poised for 44 years: the Fringe (Aug. 13 to 23). A bona fide Edmonton invention with grassroots cred, our best cultural export ever, has been a game-changer not only for the city and for Edmonton theatre, but for Canadian theatre nation-wide, and theatre across the continent. And Fringe season is upon us with news of grave medical difficulties for founding father Brian Paisley, whose inspiration it was, 46 summers ago, to invite artists to come to Old Strathcona, do a show, and see what an audience would think of it. And look what happened after that.

Paisley’s family has launched a GoFundMe to support him. Have a look here, where they post updates.   

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Taking the leap into the timeless (with tartan): Brigadoon at NUOVA Vocal Arts, a review

Posted on June 25, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Brigadoon, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If it takes a village to stage any Golden Age Broadway musical, consider the case of Kim Mattice Wanat’s production of Lerner and Loewe’s 1947 Brigadoon, the finale of this year’s NUOVA Vocal Arts Festival. The 37-performer cast I saw Wednesday night at the Orange Hub is one of two. And that, my friends, is a veritable World Cup of tartan (costume designer Viola Park).

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Ah, a village…. Brigadoon takes us, along with a couple of New Yorkers on a hunting holiday, right off the grid, to an enchanted 18th century Scottish town that rises from the mists of time, singing and dancing, once every hundred years for one day. Waste no time on the math — or, for that matter, on making sense of a set-up with such convoluted rules it requires an entire character (the village sage Mr. Lundie played convincingly by the newly retired Shadow Theatre artistic director John Hudson) to explain them, before intermission. In this early career hit by the legendary pair of creators, pre-masterworks like My Fair Lady, Lerner’s book is messy, not to say bonkers. And it unravels more and more in Act II.

The NUOVA production doesn’t re-work the original, as Shaw Festival and English revivals have done recently, in order to reference wartime trauma, and the eternal yearning for an peaceful, timelessly retro life. Nope, they’re New Yorkers with rifles slung over their shoulders, who happen upon a charming village that’s opted for collective escapism pending an invasion by witches in 1746.

Concentrate instead, as Mattice Wanat’s production does, on the singing and dancing. Loewe’s ultra-romantic, lush Brigadoon score, brimming with melodies that are now, understandably, classics (Almost Like Being in Love, The Heather on the Hill, Come to Me Bend To Me  among them). And savour, too, choreography by Courtney Arsenault, which salutes the distinctive work of the original choreographer star Agnes DeMille in balletic dance and Celtic-infused dance numbers.

Brigadoon, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Nanc Price.

NUOVA is designed as a showcase for emerging musical theatre artists from across the country. And among the cast are some lustrous, operatically powerful singers (musical direction by Ryan Sigurdson). When Tommy (Travis Edwards), yearning for love notwithstanding a fiancée back home, and his wry, cynical pal Jeff (Liam Sievwright in a droll, breezy performance) find themselves in Brigadoon, it’s on a wedding day. Charlie, played by a particularly  lustrous-voiced Leo Sigur (I’ll Go Home With Bonnie Jean), and Jean (Charley Fruition) are about to tie the knot. Tommy instantly falls in love with the sweetly grave village maiden Fiona, played by Lauren Reisig who has a soaring crystalline operatic soprano. And when it comes time to depart, Tommy is loathe to return to his old life, unlike Jeff, who’s had an acrobatically comical scene resisting the forceful advances of Meg. She’s the town good-time gal, played by Maya Wright, who has one of those Merman-esque sharp-edged musical theatre voices (My Mother’s Wedding Day).

The outsiders don’t seem particularly amazed by their adventure off the map (Americans making concessions for the weirdness of Scotland?). Jeff assumes he’s having a booze-assisted dream. The thud of emotional reality comes via Harry, a villager furiously disaffected by losing his fiancée to the groom-of-the-day. And Matthew Sabrissa captures his dangerous edge, and takes it into a sword-dance (choreographed by Dawn Moss) that’s one of the show highlights. Another is a funeral ballet, beautifully performed by Alexandra Woodley as grief-stricken, spurned Maggie, when Harry meets his end trying to flee Brigadoon. That’s another rule: strangers can leave; if a paid-up citizen tries to check out, though, the town will disappear forever.

John Hudson, centre, in Brigadoon, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Nanc Price.

You can see why Brigadoon, famous tunes notwithstanding, isn’t performed a lot. Its moments are scattered. With its ensemble production numbers, involving a lot of gathering and village commerce and bustle, it has an operetta feel. And although Leon Schwesinger’s two-tiered set, lighted glowingly by Ken Matthews, is stylized and simple, there’s a lot of shlepping of set pieces on and off the stage, often in black-outs between scenes. A day in the life of Brigadoon has its longueurs. And any vivid sense of individual characters doesn’t have much of a chance to emerge.

But, hey, the performers, the next generation of musical theatre triple-threats, are here to deliver big songs and dances. That they do, to a lush orchestral soundtrack. And, in an age battered by strife, violence, social discord, the idea of a romantic fantasy bubble created and maintained by true, deep, abiding love, is more seductive than ever. We’re all on the rebound.

REVIEW

Brigadoon

Theatre: NUOVA Vocal Arts

Created by: Frederick Loewe (music) and Alan Jay Lerner (book and lyrics)

Directed by: Kim Mattice Wanat

Choreographed by: Courtney Arsensault

Musical direction by: Ryan Sigurdson

Where: Orange Hub, 10045 156 St.

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: nuova.bespoketicketing.com in advance, or rush tickets at the door

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Once more unto the park! Much Ado About Nothing celebrates the homecoming of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, a review

Posted on June 21, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Vanessa Sabourin and Jesse Gervais in Much Ado About Nothing, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2026. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A sweet, long-awaited reunion is happening in Hawrelak Park. And you should be there to feel the vibrations.

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It’s been a hard, uphill road back, but the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, a ‘merry wanderer’ (as a sprite in one of the Bard’s comedies self-identifies) since 2019, is finally home. At last. Back in the park where Freewill belongs, newly reno-ed after the city’s punishing three-year (!) closure.

And it’s with Much Ado About Nothing, a mid-period romantic comedy produced multiple times by Freewill in their 36-year history. It’s a challenging combination of merry and spirited, witty and delightful — with a dark and difficult knot at the centre that in the end gets untied, and somehow has to be reworked into a festive bow.

The Shakespeare is the first of two productions (one after the other, not alternating in rep) this summer. In a first for the cash-strapped festival, the other, opening July 1, is the Shakespeare-savvy Broadway musical comedy hit Something Rotten, produced by the Edmonton Pops Orchestra and Shelley’s Dance company, presented by Freewill and directed by Freewill artistic director Dave Horak.

With its teasing title, Much Ado About Nothing has been a Freewill return-to-action ticket before now. A farcically high-speed 75-minute Horak adaptation returned a real live cast of five to stages (in backyards and at the Fringe) in 2021 to celebrate the end of the COVID Zoom period. This time, on the big Heritage Amphitheatre stage, the 10-actor production directed by Ian Leung, a Freewill actor himself, steps up both to the hilarity of Much Ado and confronts its dark discomfiting side too, en route to the resolution dance at the end.

Much Ado About Nothing, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2026. Photo by Brianne Jang

It’s a high-spirited play, and a weird one. Two pairs of lovers (one a case of romantic reluctance, one a case of love at first sight), the duping of both by comic vs sinister eavesdropping, a wedding that turns into a funeral and back again, a malevolent scheme unravelled by the unlikeliest characters in the play, a team of bumbling dimwit Keystone cops who couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery (or a bag of popcorn at a summer festival).

The look of Leung’s production, including Ami Farrow’s costumes, is vaguely Italian and the music (composed by Aaron Macri) has a lively Italian flavour to it. The actors occasionally accompany themselves as they sing. The set, recycled by Freewill and lighted by Josiah Hiemstra and Mother Nature, is a monumental two-storey house facade, with symmetrical doorways and windows. It isn’t exactly atmospheric, especially in a park with real foliage. But it works in a play in which concealment figures prominently. .

Director Leung’s edit of the text and his all-star actors locate the comic epicentre of Much Ado in the verbal jousting of the repertoire’s wittiest sparring partners, Benedick and Beatrice, both smart, both with the gift of the gab. Jesse Gervais and Vanessa Sabourin are splendid, and a contrast. Their volatile chemistry, based on fencing with words, will make you laugh.

The former, a gifted physical comedian, is a wry, charming Benedick, very funny, quick both on the uptake and the double-take, rueful when suave gets outfaced, always on the outlook for allies in the audience. Sabourin’s fierce, starchy Beatrice, equally quick-witted, is highly charm-resistant, with a wicked smile, and a withering way with deadpan.

Braydon Dowler-Coltman, John Ullyatt, Troy O’Donnell in Much Ado About Nothing, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2026. Photo by Brianne Jang

The matching scenes in which their affectionate friends set about bringing them together by planting clues designed to be overheard — how much Beatrice secretly pines for Benedick, and the reverse — are amusingly staged. They have the pair, and the conspirators, dodging behind the frankly fake shrubbery, hiding under tables, behind the pillars of Leonato’s house. Especially inspired are Benedick’s contortionist concealments and near-misses behind a bonsai tree in a succession of second-floor windows. 

Jen Fong and Rochelle Laplante, Vanessa Sabourin below, in Much Ado About Nothing, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2026. Photo by Brianne Jang

When moved to fury, when her cousin Hero (Rochelle Laplante) is falsely accused of unfaithfulness by Claudio (Braydon Dowler-Coltman), the groom-to-be, Beatrice really lets ‘er rip. That’s when the squirrel, one of Freewill’s corps of support players who’d been eyeing wistfully my companion’s popcorn, gave that quest up and returned his attention to the stage.

The production opens with dancers in two-faced masks, slapping each other away (choreographer: Marie Nychka). Which cuts to the chase in a play that unfolds in a series of betrayals, and rejections resolved.

Leung faces up squarely, without flinching or camouflage, to the perpetual challenge of Much Ado. The ugly hoax played by the villain Don John (Ron Pederson) on Hero and Claudio is made exponentially uglier by the latter’s instant rejection of his beloved, and the sheer cruelty of waiting till the wedding to denounce her publicly. The older generation, the hitherto genial senior Don Pedro (John Ullyatt) and even her doting father (Troy O’Donnell), join in too, shockingly fast.

So Claudio as a romantic hero who gets the girl is a tricky assignment for the actor who plays him. And in a smart performance Dowler-Coltman creates an appealing character who’s on edge, not quite put back together post-war. Claudio’s hair-trigger temper, and his rebounds between good cheer and anger, are symptomatic. A champagne cork pops, and Claudio hears gunfire.

Much Ado About Nothing, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2026. Photo by Brianne Jang

Hero has a graceful gravity in Laplante’s performance. She’s incredulous, but persists. I must admit I really don’t get the funeral scene with dancing and chanting by dark-clad figures. But Leung has added a strange, tiny but telling, moment when Hero lingers thoughtfully over her own fake tombstone. Forgiveness may be mysterious, I guess, but it has a price that the production takes the trouble to recognize.

Pederson has the unusual double-assignment of Don John, a sort of prototype Iago, and Dogberry, the nitwit head of the local constabulary. The former doesn’t display the energetic unmotivated malice, much less glee, you usually see in the Much Ado bad guy who declares “I cannot hide what I am; I am a plain-dealing villain.” Far from it. In Pederson’s unsmiling performance he seems entirely grim, terminally depressed (in a sequel he’d be in therapy). Being bad doesn’t make him happy much less gleeful; he’s always turning his back on the party, “sadness without limit” triggered by signs of revelry.

Pederson’s Dogberry is a riot. In a premium comic performance with a line in pratfalls, he’s an officious, spectacularly clueless, bureaucrat in a white shirt, a tie that keeps getting caught in his glasses, pants pulled up too high as he attempts to preside, and curry favour. His weapon is a clipboard, and a self-important scattergun way with words he misuses hilariously. Dogberry’s ancient associate Verges, a quavery enforcer played by Nadien Chu, teeters across the stage precariously, bent over like a paper clip. That this is the team that holds the key to law and order and the happy ending is preposterous, oddball, and fun, a veritable physical comedy seminar in much ado about little.

Much Ado is a romantic comedy with some impressive obstacles en route to the comic resolution. And taking a hint from that —  converting all your “sounds of woe into hey nonny nonny,” as the song goes, Leung’s smart production with its deluxe, veteran cast, is a welcome home for Freewill after the trials and tribulations of the last seven years. It’s a matter for celebration. Get your popcorn, grab a drink, plant yourself in new seats (with cup holders!) that get you up closer to the actors than before.

On Friday night, before the ‘hey ho the wind and the rain’ of the weekend, Mother Nature stepped up with a hint of a sunset for the finale dance. That’s what we remember from our summer Shakespeare. And it felt just right.

REVIEW

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

Directed by: Ian Leung

Starring: Jesse Gervais, Vanessa Sabourin, Rochelle Laplante, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Ron Pederso, Nadien Chu, Jen Fong, Richard Lee Hsi, Troy O’Donnell, John Ullyatt

Where: Heritage Amphitheatre, Hawrelak Park

Running: through June 28

Tickets and full festival schedule: freewillshakespeare.com

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