Bella King, Josh Travnik, Andrea House, Mark Sinongco in Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

To see the Teatro Live! revival of Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s at the Varscona is to be reminded of something special about this place. In Edmonton you make your own fun.

OK, maybe you have to (as this town’s go-to defensive position has it), but you can be original, funny, and fabulous here. You can be resolutely of this place, create excitement (possibly with multi-syllabic rhymes), fall in love, for example.

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That’s what Teatro has done for the last four decades, charting its own off-centre custom-made course through the urban landscape of comedy, and finding romance with audiences en route. That’s what this clever, spirit-raising, delight-filled showbiz musical, commissioned from four theatre up-and-comers in 2009, is all about, at heart. And that’s what this revival, with a new and impressive cast directed by Kate Ryan, proves in the doing.

Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s (book by Jocelyn Ahlf and Andrew MacDonald-Smith, music by Ryan Sigurdson and lyrics by Farren Timoteo) takes us to the 60s supper club scene in Edmonton, “the golden age of dining and dancing in Alberta’s capital” as billed. It’s where impresario Mitzi Dupar presides, in high style, over her own supper club. Lately Mitzi’s has been feeling the pinch from a surge in competition (“it used to be just us and Teddy’s chopped liver”). Should the surf ’n’ turf be re-priced? What if the drinks went up a nickel, and there were special guests? The bar and the bandstand (with a nook for the bookkeeping) are the keynotes of Mitzi’s world and Daniela Masellis’s design.

Andrea House as Mitzi in Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Embodied with riotous, not to say epic, 60s pizzaz by Andrea House, Mitzi is a glorious grand-scale vision of billowing sparkle who sings, dances, mingles, cracks wise, greets the regulars with showbiz flamboyance, match-makes, kibbitzes with the band (an excellent onstage trio led by pianist/ musical director Erik Mortimer), oversees the drink specials and has a few herself. Breezy exit line: “remember Mr. Mayor, you owe me a cha cha cha!.” The writing by Ahlf and MacDonald-Smith is full of period throwaways and Edmonton references. And like the apt and witty score by Timoteo and Sigurdson, it’s genuinely amusing.

House, an artist of rather awe-inspiring versatility and range herself — singer-songwriter/ actor/ playwright/ producer (don’t know about her mixology skills) — is captivating in this grand-scale and detailed comic performance. To see Mitzi stage-manage her own histrionic death-of-my era scene, plummeting to the ground in the “I’m falling, falling” number is to see a master comic actor at work.

The role was originally conceived for Leona Brausen, also Teatro’s resident costume designer, who returns to kit out the cast in an unfailingly entertaining ‘60s array of brocade, satin, chiffon, floaty floral caftans and natty suits with bowties.

The twin centrepieces of the musical comedy are two knotted romances. Mitzi is having a love affair with the younger man, bandleader/singer Jack, whom she lured from Tommy Banks’ band The Banknotes over at the Embers (mainly by flashing her brassiere, she says). Jack, played with a kind of suave swagger by Mark Sinongco, takes to the stage with effortless charisma; dreams of stardom south of the border dance in his head.

Andrea House, Mark Sinongco, Chariz Faulmino in Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The age difference gives Mitzi’s breezy confidence a ripple of unease, especially with the arrival of a brash, ambitious new singer Tippi Lala (that’s Lala with an emphasis on the second syllable) who has no shortfall in the confidence department. When your burden in life is “enormous personal charisma,” as Tippi puts it matter-of-factly, you just have to roll with it. “I’m very used to be ogled.” Chariz Faulmino’s performance is a lot of fun.

When Jack gets the call he’s been waiting for all his life — Vegas beckons with a replacement gig — Mitzi’s unease goes into crisis mode. Sigurdson’s score and Timoteo’s lyrics embrace both heartbreak and urban panic, and both well within the compass of House, a remarkable singer. Let’s Re-Decorate, a knock-out she sings with her staff, has a witty high-speed buzz of Sondheim (think Company).

Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

You’ll get a big kick out of the musical comedy couple who grate on each other’s nerves: the droll, deadpan bartender Mitch (Josh Travnik) and the primly organized by-the-rulebook manager Numbers (Bella King). Mitzi keeps trying to set them up but they’re not having it — until a terrific, perfectly formed, show-stealer of a number at the bus stop, beautifully calibrated by the actors, when the pair wonder if they just might be a teeny bit attracted to each other. Played by the co-writers in the original, Travnik and King are natural comic scene-stealers, a form of larceny that’ll have you hoping for a sequel.

Mitch’s song about the proper conclusion to draw from Edmonton’s Sunday temperance law — no problem, drink Scotch at home — is a highlight too. And the fantasy dream sequence in which Numbers is rescued from an island by Mitch as an American gallant in a sailor suit occasions a lovely, lush ballad.   

The creators of Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s really know their musical theatre. And the spirit and charm of their musical comedy is the way it’s both an expert homage to Broadway tradition and conventions and a tribute to the artists who stay here, in a small place, and fashion that tradition in their own image. What, you’ve run out of olives for the martini special? Try anchovies, says Mitzi to the bartender, and call it the ‘fish bowl’.

And that, my friends, is why everybody goes to Mitzi’s. And why you should too. It’s a helluva fun evening out, and it lifts your heart to see a new generation of artists infused by by the sense of possibility that brought Everyone Goes To Mitzi’s into being 14 years ago. As Jack sings, “I gotta be here…. The sky’s the limit. And we gotta lotta sky.”

Meet the creators in this 12thnight preview.

REVIEW

Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Created by: Jocelyn Ahlf and Andrew MacDonald-Smith (book), Ryan Sigurdson (music), Farren Timoteo (lyrics)

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Andrea House, Chariz Faulmino, Bella King, Mark Sinongco, Josh Travnik

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through July 30

Tickets: teatrolive.com