Tenaj Williams in Little Shop of Horrors. Photo by Moonrider Productions for Vancouver Arts Club Theatre

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a week in Edmonton theatre that’s crazy with possibilities. Which is to say this is no time to be thinking of staying home, much less renewing your dibs on the couch.

Two Edmonton theatres launch their seasons this week. At Edmonton’s biggest playhouse, a small-scale retro cult fave goes into preview on the weekend. The trio of smarties who are Edmonton’s hottest sketch troupe launches an eight-performance series. An unusual vintage rom-com (in verse!) finishes its run on the weekend. There’s a highly unusual play by one of America’s hottest young playwrights. An original “performance piece” about a difficult and urgent cultural tension is on a workshop tour alighting here.

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•Suddenly Seymour…. At the Citadel, Little Shop of Horrors, a perennially popular1 1982 Off-Broadway “sci-fi comedy musical” with a very catchy ‘60s rock score by Alan Menken (and book by Howard Ashman), starts previews Saturday. Based on the Roger Corman B-flick of 1960, it concerns the fortunes of a nebbish florist’s assistant, labouring away in a failing Skid Row shop, who inadvertently cultivates a potted plant that feeds on human blood. The Citadel-Vancouver Arts Club co-production directed by Ashlie Corcoran stars Tenaj Williams as the hapless horticulturalist Seymour and Synthia Yusuf as sweet Audrey, his fellow employee (and crush) at Mr. Mushnik’s flower shop. It runs at the Citadel Oct. 21 through Nov. 19. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

Crescendo!, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

•Shadow Theatre’s 30th anniversary season starts with a new homegrown Canadian musical, original in conception. Sandy Paddick’s Crescendo! (music by Jennifer McMillan) is a musical that’s all about the urge to make music. It takes us into the world of a women’s community choir, to shed light on the multiple responses to the question of why it makes us feel good to sing, and really good to sing together, Meet the playwright in this 12thnight PREVIEW. The show, directed by the Plain Janes’ Kate Ryan, runs through Nov. 5 at the Varscona. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

Karen Hines, Pochsy IV, Keep Frozen Productions at Theatre Network. Photo by Gary Mulcahey

•To start their 49th season Theatre Network celebrates the return of Pochsy, Karen Hines’s memorable bouffon character we first met in 1992, in whose veins courses a toxic mixture of the sweet and the vitriolic. Pochsy IV is the latest from this distinguished Canadian theatre artist (All The Little Animals I Have Eaten), who directs the horror clowns Mump and Smoot. In fact, it’s Mump, aka Michael Kennard, who directs this production, whose title says either “4” or IV, as in pole, and maybe both. 12thnight had the fun of talking to Hines and Kennard in a PREVIEW. Pochsy IV runs Thursday through Nov. 5. Tickets: theatre network.ca.

Alyson Dicey, Ellie Heath, Caley Suliak of Girl Brain. Photo supplied.

•Three of the most agile, inventive comic brains in town are back at the Roxy this week as part of Theatre Network’s alternative Phoenix Series in the Lorne Cardinal black box theatre. That trio would be Girl Brain, Alyson Dicey, Ellie Heath, and Caley Suliak. They’re back with a new show running two weekends — wknds, yes, in the expansive sense of Thursday through Sunday.

The absurdities of everyday life and its everyday crises, from the female perspective, are meat and drink to the comic exuberance of Girl Brain. And naturally the Halloween season (and its costuming possibilities) is inspirational. The Filipina-Canadian pop musician HAIDEE is a Girl Brain guest for five of the eight shows; the burlesque star LeTabby Lexington of House of Hush and Send in the Girls joins the trio for the other three performances. And there are Taro readings by RoRo at intermission and after the Friday and Saturday night shows. Girl Brain runs Thursday through Sunday and Oct. 26 to 29. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.

•Consider the intriguing perms and combs of casting in the highly unusual play happening at the U of A’s Studio Theatre through Saturday. Everybody by the young and much-awarded American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate, Gloria). Everybody is inspired by the late 15th century morality play Everyman, author unknown, that shows up on every English Lit survey course at universities everywhere. It sets up a human pilgrimage toward salvation in encounters with allegorical characters.

Everybody is a contemporary dark comedy set in a theatrical world, in which the title character is figuring out what it means to be alive. The characters they meet include Friendship and Stuff, Kinship, and Death. And the casting at every performance is determined by lottery. Liz Hobbs, a versatile 2021 MFA grad, returns to her alma mater to direct the Studio Theatre production. Tickets: showpass.com or 780-492-2495.

Tanya Kalmanovitch in Tar Sands Songbook. Photo supplied.

• A unique theatrical experience that takes up the challenge of crossing contemporary cultural frontiers comes to Edmonton for a free workshop performance Saturday at the Brighton Block (9666 Jasper Ave.). Tar Sands Songbook is “written, performed, composed, produced” by Tanya Kalmanovitch, a Brooklyn-based artist/researcher who was born in Fort McMurray. As the title suggests, the multi-disciplinary show, currently on a fall workshop tour, is fashioned from tensions between high-contrast worlds and sensibilities — oil-based economy and ancient ties to the land. And Kalmanovitch has personal ties to both. See tarsandssongbook.com for further details.

Ellen Chorley and Brennan Campbell, A Phoenix Too Frequent, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

•It’s your last chance to catch Northern Light’s production of A Phoenix Too Frequent this weekend, through Sunday. You will have fun with Christopher Fry’s odd and humorous 1946 rom-com, in blank verse, based on a story from Petronius’s Satyricon. A Phoenix Too Frequent is not frequently produced anywhere these days; it was last onstage at NLT in 1978.

Have a peek at 12thnight’s review here, and an interview with Ellen Chorley, one of the three players in Trevor Schmidt’s cast, in this preview. Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com.

Lisa MacDougall in Rock The Canyon, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

Continuing at the Mayfield Dinner Theatre through Nov. 5, Musicians Gone Wild: Rock The Canyon. Laurel, that is, reverberating with “California sound.” The music-rich, highly enjoyable show is the opening gambit in their projected series of shows featuring music from seminal eras. Check out the 12thnight review. Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca.