Stephanie Gruson, The Great Great Spiegeltent Spectacular, Cristal Palace spiegeltent. Photo by Liz

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Magic, as magician Billy Kidd tells us, lives in surprises, in the “not knowing what’s going to happen next.”

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Now, here’s something unexpected (in a good way). Of all the things you might conceivably be doing at K-Days, the one you can’t possibly have anticipated is toasting the diamond anniversary of a vintage 1947 Belgian spiegeltent in the company of immortals.

I went to the Great Great Spiegel Spectacular last night in the Cristal Palace spiegeltent, and discovered a cast of Edmonton artists — some airborne, some bending themselves into improbable shapes, some peeking from behind giant feather fans, others playing instruments. Ah, and many of them at least a century old. At least that’s what the emcee Johnny Marvel assures us. And how can you not believe an authority figure in brocade top coat, velvet pants and thigh-high boots?

John Ullyatt as Johnny Marvel, The Great Great Spiegeltent Spectacular, Cristal Palace spiegeltent. Photo by Liz

The Cristal Palace is, says this fantastical person (played by the fearless and charismatic John Ullyatt), a veritable repository of “joy and love and immortality.” Should you join the troupe and stay within the “glorious pavilion,” time stands still and you live forever; if you leave, well, too bad, time passes and eventually mortality takes over.

Jason Kodie, the leader of the rocking house band Le Fuzz, which operates in both of our official languages, recalls personally entertaining the lumberjacks who cut down the trees a century ago that went into building the beautiful hand-made wood-, mirror-, and stained glass-lined “tent.” And in the atmospheric golden glow cast by the mid-evening sun, as filtered through stained glass, appreciation for old-school entertainment is in the air, in the production assembled and directed by Firefly Theatre’s Annie Dugan. Since there are but 220 or so seats, every smile and wink, every flash off a sequin, is up close.

Our host, who explains the difference between lying and pretending, introduces the opening act under the big top. She’s trapeze artist that Johnny Marvel first encountered whilst touring Latvia in 1963. Sarah Visser certainly wears 60 years lightly as she twirls in the air, catching herself with one heel.

The House of Hush Burlesque duo of LeTabby Lexington and Violette Coquette, who have a beguiling comic chemistry, confidence vs. shyness, bring forth their vintage fan dance, preserved since Edwardian times.

There are contortionists, including a duo (Jordan Patten and Avery Dennington), and a glamorous and infinitely bendable drag artiste named Pepper who performs in vertiginous platform stilettos that are a kind of stage in themselves.

Instead of the presentational pizzaz endemic to circus performers, the hoop artist Eliza Lance has an unusually reflective air. She seems to retain a sense of wonder at being onstage at all, taken aback by her own expertise in a gravity-defying art form.

Grindstone Theatre brings a sample, different every night, of their prowess at improvising whole musicals. The opening song of a yet undiscovered musical set in a forest, an audience suggestion, was the offering Saturday night.      

And sassy motormouth magician Billy Kidd arrives from her home base, Bath in England, to reinvent, and with utmost invention, traditional tricks  like the rabbit in the hat or ‘pick a card from the centre of the deck’. She’s a first-rate comic improviser and she reads minds, as does her companion Charlie the monkey. I can’t say more.

With the spiegeltent, summertime Edmonton and its artists acquire a romantic venue (Dugan calls it “a receptacle of delight”) — with a bar — at a festival that has not traditionally been terribly hospitable to local artists. Kudos to the instigator, Explore Edmonton. And after K-Days, Shakespeare and his Edmonton cohorts move Aug. 8 to Sept. 3 in for the FreeShakespeare Festival, with an alternating pair of plays, Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet under this petite pleasure dome.

There’s daily entertainment in the Cristal Palace spiegeltent at K-Days, some free and some ticketed. The Great Great Spiegel Spectacular runs there at 8 p.m. nightly, through July 30. Tickets, at showcase.com, include K-Days gate admission.