Dolly Parton and Andrew MacDonald-Smith, My First Hundred Years. Graphic by Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

For your weekend entertainment, Edmonton theatres are standing by, and you shouldn’t miss your chance. You could experience …

… the reinvention of cabaret.

For one thing, there’s nothing like getting the scoop first-hand. In his delightful “biographical cabaret” My First Hundred Years, a gloriously fake memoir, Teatro Live! and Citadel star Andrew MacDonald-Smith sings songs and tells “first-hand” stories from a century of instinctively being in the right place at the right time. He’s onstage with a grand piano and a wonderful pianist, Frances Thielmann, who knows exactly what to do with that instrument.

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So…. good times with Andrew’s old pals George and Ira, with a little first-hand insight about why the Gershwin he’s going to sing isn’t more famous. MacDonald-Smith was there when Irving Berlin was courting Ellen, his wife-to-be, against the express wishes of her dad. The show, for Edmonton Opera in the Citadel’s intimate Rice Theatre, opens with Berlin’s Blue Skies, and the deliciously rhymed I Love A Piano. “I know a fine way/ to treat a Steinway….”  Our man onstage was on a first-name basis with Yip Harburg. No one who starts an anecdote casually with first-hand travel advice from Ivor Novello can  really afford to be ignored.

And, as for Kurt Weill (and Lotte and Bertolt ) and those times in Berlin in the 20s, “it was fun till it wasn’t, so I left.” MacDonald-Smith, an urbane and genial “historical context” in a suit, didn’t forget to remember, as a lovely Irving Berlin song has it. And that thought weaves its way through the cabaret, written in witty fashion by playwright Stewart Lemoine.

It extends to the music itself, which restores the songs you do know to their original context so they feel fresh, without the stamp of decades of pop and jazz singers making them their own. There’s a chilling version of Mack the Knife, for example. Brother Can You Spare A Dime is a highlight, devastating in performance.

Most of the songs I didn’t know, like the very strange Black Max, by William Bolcom, all jagged intervals and rhythms. Some I’d only heard of. And a familiar number from that contemporary philosopher of positivity Dolly Parton turned out to be an ear-opener.

It’s a fine 70-minute entertainment, running through Sunday. 12thnight talked to two of the collaborators, MacDonald-Smith and Lemoine in this preview.  Tickets: edmontonopera.com.

Farren Timoteo in Listen Listen, Teatro Live. Phoro by Eric Kozakiewicz

… another view of music altogether. It’s the last weekend of Teatro Live’s premiere production of the Elyne Quan comedy Listen, Listen at the Varscona. Its premise will make you smile. A Muzak afficionado (played by the terrific comic actor Farren Timoteo) is called upon to heroically defend his music of choice, and his oddball situation of being utterly attentive to music that’s expressly designed to be ignored. The conceptual opposite, musically speak, of paying attention to the lyrics, as demanded by My First Hundred Years. 12thnight interviewed the playwright here. And here’s the 12thnight review. Listen, Listen runs through Sunday at the Varscona, in a production directed by Teatro Live’s Belinda Cornish. Tickets: teatroq.com.

Gabby Bernard and Geoffrey Simon Brown in Subscribe or Like, Workshop West. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

… your last chance to see Subscribe or Like at Workshop West, a play that speaks, powerfully, to the strange disappearance of “reality” and “truth” in our world, poised as it is between online and in-person connections. Check out the 12thnight interview with playwright Liam Salmon here, and the review here. It runs through Sunday at the Gateway Theatre in Strathcona. Tickets: workshopwest.org.

… Austen city limits. We can’t get enough. In a season that has included a Sterling-nominated reinvention of Pride and Prejudice at the Citadel, and a production of the backstage musical comedy Austentatious at Walterdale next month (July 12 to 22), there’s Austen in opera form at Opera Nuova this weekend and beyond. Mansfield Park, a 2011 chamber opera version of the 1814 Austen novel by the English composer Jonathan Dove.

With a nod to Austen’s Regency milieu, Brian Deedrick’s immersive production happens in the Wedgwood Room at the Fairmont Hotel Macdonald Sunday (1 and 7:30 p.m.), Monday and Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: operanuova.ca.

Graphic by Psi Lo.

… emerging in progress, happening before your very eyes. Nextfest, Edmonton’s remarkable 28-year-old celebration of emerging artists, continues through Sunday on every stage and in every nook and cranny at Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre. 12thnight had fun, as always, talking to festival director Ellen Chorley about the 2023 lineup, and was fascinated to meet four of the Nextfest’s up-and-coming mainstage playwrights: Madi May, Cayley Wreggit, Kijo Gatama, and Bashir Mohamed.