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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

2022-2023. It’s been a complicated season on Edmonton stages.

That Destination Fringe last summer sold 95,000 tickets to shows was a tip-off that live theatre was gradually getting its mojo back. And in the fall, post-Fringe it really did return, with brio and in full voice — albeit with a continuing struggle to draw audiences away from their screens in a world where the post-pandemic malaise has lingered.

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Theatre had questions about its own rules of engagement, with artists and with audiences. And it turned its much-tested ingenuity toward broadening the demographic of its creators and drawing a more diverse audience to the live theatre experience, often in unusual close-ups.   

And questions about art and how it gets made, and by (and for) whom, continued. The Theatre Network season at the Roxy had two shows with real-life artists as characters: Eugene Strickland’s The Innocence of Trees and Jim Guedo’s Joni Mitchell: Songs of a Prairie Girl. The two characters in First Métis Man of Odesa were the actors themselves, telling their own intercontinental love story, with first-hand questions about the purpose of art when the world is falling apart. At Workshop West, Liam Salmon’s Subscribe or Like was all about the high-traffic intersection of ’reality’ and screen imagery and storytelling online, and its ripple effect on identity. So, in its way, was Prison Dancer at the Citadel, the debut of new Canadian musical with an all-Filipino cast and crew, inspired by a viral YouTube video of Filipino prisoners dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

At the Citadel Trouble in Mind, a 1955 play by Black playwright Alice Childress, found an oft-camouflaged link between power and race in the theatre itself. Dora Maar: the wicked one, at Workshop West, springboarded from the story of Picasso’s muse and lover, an artist in her own right, to wonder about creative inspiration, and the seductiveness of power and fame. Even the old chestnut Deathtrap (fun, at Teatro Live!) wondered about that, too, proposing in its comedy thriller-within-a-comedy thriller that if worst comes to worst, it can be stolen.

Inspiration, and the urge to see the world through different lenses, took many forms this season on Edmonton stages. Here’s a small selection, in no particular order, of theatre highlights from the season just past, September till now, to trigger your own memories.

John Ullyatt and Gianna Vacirca in Sexual Misconduct Of The Middle Classes, Theatre Network. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes: Hannah Moscovitch’s clever play took us  beyond criminal sexual thuggery of rape and assault into a subtler, more treacherous terrain where consent is compromised by power and fame. And, audaciously, it isn’t told from the victim’s point of view. Terrific performances from John Ullyatt and Gianna Vacirca, in Marianne Copithorne’s riveting production at Theatre Network. Read the full 12thnight review here.

Subscribe Or Like: Liam Salmon’s tense new social media thriller is the season’s most disturbing insight into a seductive borderless world where human connections are losing ground to a digital playground of self-created identity and escalating drama. Which is to say OUR world, now, and our human predicament. Geoffrey Simon Brown and Gabby Bernard have a mesmerizing chemistry as a desperate millennial couple: two outstanding performances in a multi-media barrage of a premiere production directed by Kate Ryan at Workshop West. Read the 12thnight review.

Austin Eckert and Troy O’Donnell in The Royale, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

The Royale: Marco Ramirez’s play has a knock-out story, lifted from history, of an ambitious Black boxer who dreams of being the heavyweight champion of the world in the early 20th century. In racist segregated America the deck is stacked against him, and the price of victory, and moving history even a little bit forward, is scary. The charismatic Austin Eckert led an exemplary cast of five in André Sills’ production at the Citadel. And the stylized theatrical way the story gets told — in movement, sound, and lighting — is thrilling. Not a single punch is landed, but you feel every blow in your ribcage. Read the 12thnight review.

Sheldon Elter and Kristi Hansen in Sweeney Todd, Plain Jane Theatre Company. Photo by dbphotographics

Sweeney Todd: This was the season we got re-connected up close to the grisly and glorious Sondheim masterwork Sweeney Todd, via the Plain Janes’ ingenious eight-actor one-piano chamber version in a 60-seat house (CO*LAB) where you might actually get splattered by blood. The setting of Kate Ryan’s Plain Jane production is the break room of a meatpacking factory, with the cast in killing-floor smocks and hairnets. Which put us up close to the carnivorous thirst for vengeance of the wronged barber of the title, and the macabre recycling zeal of his accomplice Mrs. Lovett, who bakes the deceased into meat pies. In sizzling performances by the startlingly resourceful husband-and-wife pairing of Sheldon Elter and Kristi Hansen, the rage felt visceral. The full 12thnight review is here.   

Kristi Hansen and Ian Leung, A Doll’s House Part 2. Photo by Jim Guedo.

Doll’s House Part 2: Lucas Hnath’s 2017 play, which opens with an insistent knocking at the door, is a contemporary sequel of sorts to Ibsen’s 1879 portrait of a stifling marriage, with its feminist cred, and “the door slam heard around the world.” Nora, the wife who abruptly up and left her marriage, her husband and her children, is back and at that door, and ready to face the consequences. Jim Guedo’s Wild Side production, led by Kristi Hansen as Nora, made a compelling, funny and surprising evening of it. Beautifully weighted, it gave full heft to opposing points of view amongst four un-dismissable characters, including the family retainer (Maralyn Ryan) and Nora’s husband Torvald, persuasive, likeable even, in Ian Leung’s performance. Read the 12thnight review.

Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova in First Métis Man of Odesa, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alexis McKeown.

First Métis Man of Odesa: A charming, unconventional, and moving theatrical experiment in marrying a real-life love story to art. Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova, its joint creators — the one a Canadian Métis playwright and the other a Ukrainian theatre star —  play versions of themselves onstage. At first it’s a sort of screwball with high stakes, an intercontinental rom-com where the obstacles start with distance and escalate with pandemical border closures. Then came the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine, and stakes are raised again, exponentially, by the tragic drama of the world. Lianna Makuch’s Punctuate! production, inventively designed and lighted, allows the oddball chemistry of the pair, and their creation, to flourish. A memorable evening in the theatre. The 12thnight review is here.

Linda Grass and Kristin Johnston in Enough, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Enough: The season’s most unsettling capture of our vague, undefinable anxiety that we’re in the end times of something, with mysterious turbulence ahead, was Trevor Schmidt’s striking Northern Light Theatre production of the poetically weird Stef Smith play. Two flight attendants, vividly played by Kristin Johnston and Linda Grass, have an aerial view of the crumbling world and their fragile lives 30,000 feet (and three minutes) below them. Read the 12thnight review.

Andrew Broderick and Alana Bridgewater in Trouble in Mind, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Trouble in Mind: The 1955 play by the Black American playwright Alice Childress (which has a history that runs eerily parallel to its fictional story) takes us backstage in rehearsals for a play by a white playwright that feels, to its complacent white director, important as an anti-racist statement: hey, it’s against lynching. In Cherissa Richards’ production Alana Bridgewater stars as an actress who’s spent years playing “character” parts, waiting for theatre to catch up to her dreams of magic and grandeur — until she gets tired of waiting. Startlingly topical after 70 years. Read the 12thnight review.

Jake Tkaczyk and Josh Travnik in 10 Funerals, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

10 Funerals: In his dark and funny comedy, which premiered at Shadow Theatre in a John Hudson production, playwright Darrin Hagen traced a whole history of gay couples and their place in the culture, through plagues, homophobia, violence, subtler marginalization. The play is a chronicle of a gay couple returning in each scene in each era from a funeral. Played at younger ages by Jake Tkaczyk and Josh Travnik and in older versions by Doug Mertz and Nathan Cuckow, the couple makes of 10 Funerals a sort of gay sitcom with a morbid streak: old-school gallows humour, with an underscore of sadness. Read the 12thnight review.

Dora Maar: the wicked one, Workshop West. graphic by db photographics

Dora Maar the wicked one: In their latest play, the team of Daniela Vlaskalic and Beth Graham set about creating a theatrical portrait of one artist dangerously seduced by the creative energy and power of another. That would be the innovative French photographer Dora Mara, lover and muse of Picasso, who in the play’s chosen metaphor flew too close to the sun, à la Icarus, with fatal results. Intriguingly, the portrait of Dora is in the multi-plane, multi-angled Picasso style. In Blake Brooker’s GAL/Hit & Myth production, presented at Workshop West, Vlaskalic’s performance as the artist who plummeted to earth when her wings melted was a knock-out. Read the 12thnight review.

Boy Trouble: Mac Brock’s new play, which premiered in the Fringe Theatre’s Spotlight Series, locates its queer characters, estranged boyhood friends at 16 in 2015, in a veritable minefield for coming-of-age. It’s a fraught world that demands secrecy, on the one hand, and makes secrecy dangerous, on the other. Brock’s Amoris Projects production sets Max Hanic and Romar Dungo in perpetual motion, a never-ending game of tag that flings them, solitary and vulnerable into the great big shark tank of Grindr and the internet. Read the 12thnight review.

Gianna Vacirca, Garett Ross, Morgan Yamada in Pride and Prejudice, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Pride and Prejudice: The Citadel production of a version of the Jane Austen classic novel by the American actor Kate Hallett, did something high risk. It added layers of funny to a comic masterpiece. That really shouldn’t work, a juxtaposition of hijinks and Austen. But Mieko Ouchi’s production was a lot of fun, a circus of heightened physicality and grotesque silliness, with heightened performances from nimble comedy experts like Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Nadien Chu, Garett Ross, Ben Elliott. And at the centre, a performance of exasperated charm and self-discovery from Gianna Vacirca as Lizzie. Read the 12thnight review here.

Stay tuned. The season in Edmonton theatre part 2 is coming up.