Larissah Lashey, Jayce McKenzie, Abigail McDougall, Hayley Moorhouse in Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied

Hannah Whitley and J. Antonio Rodriguez in Hadestown, North American Tour. Photo by T Charles Erickson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Answer Is Fringe, the 42nd annual edition of our giant summer theatre bash, with its 114,000 or so tickets sold, was a sign. Theatre is getting its groove back, after three hard years that have tried the ingenuity, resourcefulness, agility — not to mention the patience — of its artists. And it’s dawning on audiences what they’ve been missing, the excitement of the live in-person experience.

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Theatre companies and artists are returning to stages large and small, with thoughts about how to venture forth in a darkened, possibly absurd, world. Yes, the theatre season is starting. Musicians Gone Wild: Rock the Canyon, the first instalment of a new series designed to highlight seminal eras in pop music, opens at the Mayfield this week. The funniest, most perfectly formed, comedy in English language theatre, The Importance of Being Earnest, launching the Citadel season in a production directed by Jackie Maxwell, later this month, is in rehearsal.   

There’s a new Conni Massing, Dead Letter, premiering at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. L’UniThéatre opens a new season with Joey Lespérance’s Michel(le). And there will be more to come (indie theatre works that way). But to whet your appetite, from what we know so far, here’s a selection of intriguing shows (in no particular order) to look forward to.

The Play’s The Thing, Theatre Yes. Photo supplied.

The Play’s The Thing: Here’s an irresistibly wild idea, a real community-builder season-opener, from Theatre Yes’s new co-artistic directors Max Rubin and Ruth Alexander, Twenty Edmonton performance groups of every stripe and specialty, have signed up to create and perform a scene from Hamlet in their own style. Theatre companies, dance companies, sketch comedy troupes, burlesque artists, musical theatre specialists, collectives of the Shakespearean persuasion, a circus theatre … the variety in The Play’s The Thing has crazy showbiz fabulosity attached to it. And in its very essence it’s of this place. The first 10 scenes of Hamlet are on Oct. 7, with 10 the next night, at the Westbury Theatre. Proceeds to the Food Bank.

Wonderful Joe: The playwright/marionettiste extraordinaire Ronnie Burkett, who has a three-decade history with Theatre Network (renewed with last season’s Little Willy), returns to the Roxy this season to premiere his latest (April 2 to 21, 2024), billed as “a love letter to the imagination.” Faced with separation and homelessness, old Joe and his dog Mister head into a broken world for a last grand adventure. Has the magic of the world been irretrievably lost? Are we looking in the wrong places to find it? In the course of Wonderful Joe, the pair encounter Mother Nature, Santa, Jesus, and the Tooth Fairy. The music is by John Alcorn.

Wonderful Joe by Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Brochure photo.

Candy & The Beast: A new “multidisciplinary murder mystery thriller with music” by artistic director Trevor Schmidt premieres as the finale of the upcoming Northern Light season. The setting of Candy & The Beast, the dark demi-monde of a small prairie town, will remind you of the 2022 prairie goth musical Two-Headed/ Half-Hearted by Schmidt and Kaeley Jade Wiebe. There’s a serial killer on the rampage, and a couple of trailer-park outliers, Candy and her little brother Kenny, set forth to track down the monster (April 4 to 20, 2024). Jayce MacKenzie and newcomer Bret Jacobs star in Schmidt’s production.

Candy & The Beast, Northern Light Theatre. Graphic by Curio Studio.

Robot Girls: Another Trevor Schmidt play premieres this season, and in a cross-company venture, it’s at Shadow Theatre. Robot Girls chronicles the tensions and coming-of-age stresses of a quartet of teens, junior high-age girls in a science club who are building a robot for an international competition. John Hudson’s production (Jan. 17 to Feb. 4) stars Jayce MacKenzie, Hayley Moorhouse, Larissa Lashley, and Abigail McDougall.

Pith! A lot has happened in the 10 years since Stewart Lemoine’s 1997 theatrical homage to the transforming power of the imagination was last seen here. Teatro La Quindicina is now Teatro Live!. The 42-year-old company, born at the Fringe, has exited those summer festivities. And leading man Andrew MacDonald-Smith, who starred as the instigator Jack Vail in the 2013 revival of Teatro’s most popular, widely travelled, play, is now co-artistic director of the company (along with Belinda Cornish). He returns to the role of the vagabond Jack, who arrives in Providence, R.I. in 1931, and re-starts the stalled life of a gloom-laden widow forever by engaging her in an imaginary journey. The playwright directs (Feb 9 to 25) a cast that includes Kristin Johnston as the widow.   

Mermaid Legs: Three sisters in crisis are the centre of Beth Graham’s intriguingly named new play, premiering on the SkirtsAfire Festival mainstage (Feb. 29 to March 10). Billed as  “a surreal theatre dance fantasia about the difficulty of truth, the complications of family, and the bonds of sisterhood.” Annette Loiselle’s production, her grand finale as SkirtsAfire’s founder and artistic director, sets in motion three actors and four dancers, who evoke the inner and outer landscape of the piece, developed with choreographer Ainsley Hillyard.

Karen Hines in Pochsy IV, Theatre Network. Photo from Theatre Network website

Pochsy IV: The toxic kewpie we first met in 1992, attached to an intravenous pole, in Karen Hines’ brilliant hit series, bathed in the eerie light of gallows humour, is back after an absence of 15 years. Pochsy IV, workshopped at the 2022 Play The Fools Festival, is in the three-play all-Canadian Theatre Network season. Where has Pochsy been (the people want to know)? An ex-employee of Mercury Packers (where, yes, she packed mercury), is again looking to the future. Michael Kennard of Mump and Smoot directs (Oct. 17 to Nov. 5).     

The Three Musketeers: The grand finale of the Citadel’s upcoming season is a large-scale swashbuckler — a big cast with a built-in ensemble mantra (“all for one and one for all”), big costumes, and a lot of swords (fight director: Jonathan Purvis). Daryl Cloran directs this highly comic adaptation by the prolific and much-produced American playwright Catherine Bush (April 20-May 12).

Hadestown: Edmonton figures prominently in the production history of Anaïs Mitchell’s richly evocative folk opera musical: the Citadel is where it made its preparations in 2017 en route to a Tony Award-winning Broadway run that’s still playing to packed houses. Rachel Chavkin’s production, radically reworked for New York, is back in town, in a Broadway Across Canada touring production at the Jube Nov. 14 to 19. Your chance is at hand to go to hell and back, wrapped in a ravishing dream of two intertwined love stories, inspired by the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.

Sunday in the Park With George: Sondheim’s glorious 1983 masterpiece, in which the past wraps itself around the present, is a mesmerizing, shimmering tribute to art: the creation of it, the human price tag on creating it, the people who make art and the people who surround the people who make art. It’s spun from the famous painting by the pointillist master Georges Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Productions are rare; the MacEwan Theatre Arts production directed by Jim Guedo is one to seek out (March 20 to 24).   

Botticelli in the Fire: Sex and art and violent populism collide in this fascinating 2016 one-act by the young Canadian playwriting star Jordan Tannahill. At its centre is the queer Renaissance painter Botticelli, working on his masterpiece The Birth of Venus, in a contemporary landscape of escalating danger. The resonances with our world are multiplying as we speak. The seven-actor production was originally slated for this past April, and this season it’s happening. Sarah Emslie makes their directing debut, as part of Fringe Theatre’s curated season (April 19 to 27).

Glenn Nelson, Reed McColm in The Drawer
Boy, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

The Drawer Boy: It’s been a couple of decades since Edmonton audiences saw this funny, moving Canadian theatre classic. Michael Healey’s 1999 Governor General’s Award winner, in which art and life mingle unforgettably, tells of the adventures of a young actor in the Ontario farming heartland. He’s there as part of a Toronto theatre company researching farm life, on location, for the play that would become another Canadian classic, the seminal The Farm Show. The Shadow Theatre production (Jan. 18 to Feb 4)  directed by John Hudson, stars Glenn Nelson, Reed McColm, and Paul-Ford Manguelle.

Indecent: Paula Vogel’s play is another a play about a play — with a theatre story, a real one, that connects us to the explosive historical and cultural currents of the last century. A company of actors brings Sholem Asch’s 1907 Yiddish groundbreaker God of Vengeance (in which a rabbi’s daughter falls in love a prostitute in the brothel downstairs from the family) from the capitals of Europe to New York. And with it, across the Atlantic, the first lesbian kiss on an American stage. Warmly received in Greenwich Village in 1921, the move uptown to Broadway two years later had disastrous results. Ben Smith directs, at the U of A’s Studio Theatre Dec. 1 to 9.

Private Lives: There’s one for the archives in the unique casting of Teatro Live’s production (July 11 to 28) of the spiky and insightful Noel Coward comedy Private Lives. The company’s two co-artistic directors Belinda Cornish and Andrew MacDonald Smith star as the divorced couple who re-discover each other on their respective honeymoons with new spouses, and re-kindle their passion and their marital war. A third artistic director, Max Rubin of Theatre Yes, directs the romantic fray.  

A cross-company sampling: The Theatre 8-Pack, a bargain at the price ($210), includes a production from each of eight Edmonton theatres: A Phoenix Too Frequent (Northern Light Theatre), The Drawer Boy (Shadow Theatre), Pith! (Teatro Live!), Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAfire Festival), Rough Magic (Studio Theatre), The Swearing Jar (Walterdale Theatre), Trout Stanley (L’UniThéâtre), and Dead Letter (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre). Tickets and full schedule: edmontonarts.ca.