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

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

2023. It was the year a small Edmonton theatre company with new artistic directors and an affirmative declaration for a name, devised an original way to remind us of the remarkable breadth of the performance scene here.

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Theatre Yes’s The Play’s The Thing did that — a two-night sold-out production of Hamlet, English theatre’s celebrated heavy hitter, in which 20 scenes, 10 a night, were divvied up amongst 20 stage companies, to perform in their own signature styles. A crazy impromptu deconstruction, yes, and an appreciation that it’s for live theatre to conjure worlds through other eyes, offer perspectives through other lenses, offer possibilities for change, readjustments of focus.

Here’s a dozen highlight productions on Edmonton stages (in no particular order) that did all of the above, for me. And I hope they’ll fire up your own memories of the year in theatre here. That’s Part 1. Stay tuned for Part 2, a selection of memorable performances, images, moments, theatre experiences that linger in the mind.

Pochsy IV. No other satirist captures so fearlessly, and with such original panache, the contemporary drift towards a kind of late-capitalist chaos the way Karen Hines does. Pochsy, the toxic and euphoric charmer we first met many Fringes ago, poisoned, poisonous, and attached to an IV pole, came back to us this year, to open the Theatre Network season. And with her, wrapped in her signature miasma of good cheer and malice, a vision of cosmic disintegration into absurdity, or oblivion. In Hines’ writing, and a performance of lethal sweetness, this is realized in a veritable barrage of capitalist slogans, self-help mantras, market-driven clichés, religious pieties, cultural complacencies…. Queasy, disturbing, and riotous. Read the full 12thnight review here.

The Hooves Belonged To The Deer, In Arms Collective at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo of Tarragon Theatre production by Cylla von Tiedemann

The Hooves Belonged To The Deer. One of the most provocative plays of the year, it’s the work of playwright/actor Makram Ayache, a rising star in Canadian theatre. The In Arms Collective production, beautifully staged by Peter Hinton-Davis, starred the playwright himself as a queer Arab Muslim kid, the outsider in a white fundamentalist-Christian prairie town. As Izzy discovers his sexuality, the youth pastor of the church befriends him — at a human price. Startlingly expansive, lyrical, and intricate, a collision of generations, mythologies, religions, origin stories, cultural assumptions, the play takes us past the flat prairie horizon into an ancient world and the Garden of Eden where Aadam and Hawa (Adam and Eve) are joined by Steve, in a glance at the old homophobic joke. In exploring the terrible tab exacted by religious orthodoxies, this is a multi-layered play, a love story too, that takes on the cultural big-M moment vis-à-vis Muslim perspectives. And it makes a case for breadth of vision, remarkable in the generosity of its invitation to reconsider a whole cosmology. Read 12thnight’s preview interview with the playwright here.

Austin Eckert in The Royale, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The Royale. Marco Ramirez’s play has a story with a major right hood, scooped from history: a Black boxer in the Jim Crow South in the early 20th century dreaming of being the heavyweight champion of the world. In racially segregated America, with the deck formidably stacked against him, the price of winning, of moving history even a step forward, is formidable. The thrill of the production directed by Shaw Festival star André Sills at the Citadel, with its cast of five led by Austin Eckert, is a theatrical validation, the stylization of the storytelling, in choreographed movement, sound, and lighting. No blows land; their reverb, though, is shattering. The 12thnight review is here.

Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s. Teatro Live!’s revival of this clever and spirit-raising homegrown musical, created by Jocelyn Ahlf, Andrew MacDonald Smith, Ryan Sigurdson and Farren Timoteo (who were newcomers in 2009), is a reminder of the way this company has charted its own original zigzagging course through the terrain of comedy. It sparkles, and in every way, every reference, it’s of this place, set in the “golden age of dining and dancing in Alberta’s capital.” Two intertwined romances, clever songs, a certain musical comedy pizzaz, high-spirited performances led by Andrea House as supper club impresario Mitzi, add up to both a tribute to Broadway showbiz and the artists who opt to stay here to make their own authentic showbiz tradition. The sense of possibility that moves the show gladdened the heart.  “I gotta be here…. The sky’s the limit and we gotta lotta sky.” The 12thnight review is here.

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

First Métis Man of Odesa. A charming, very touching, uniquely experimental theatre piece located right in the complex traffic at the intersection of art and real life. By and starring husband and wife theatre artists Matthew MacKenzie and Marie Khomutova who play versions of themselves in Lianna Makuch’s Punctuate! Theatre production, it’s a bi-continental love story with its own unusual chemistry. MacKenzie is a notable Canadian Métis playwright; Khomutova is a star Ukrainian actor. And their romantic comedy, which darkens into an international pandemic scramble, is further impacted by the brutalities of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The real-life story continues, with the birth of a baby and of this play, which continues to evolve in response to the real world. In its own surprisingly tough-minded way, it’s an ode to art, and the rigorous creative process of making it in high-stakes situations. The 12thnight review is here.

Trouble in Mind. Amazing, and not in a heartening way, how topical the 1955 play by the Black American playwright Alice Childress remains after 70 years. And its own history runs eerily parallel to its fictional story about the link between power and racism in theatre: the playwright refused to make the changes demanded by the white producer for the planned Broadway run that subsequently never happened. Trouble in Mind takes us backstage in rehearsals for a crappy play that the self-congratulatory white director feels is important for its anti-racist message: hey, it’s against lynching. In the Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production directed by Cherissa Richards, Alana Bridgewater starred as an actress in love with the magic of theatre who’s spent years in character parts waiting for the big break in a “real” role that will never come. Read the 12thnight review here.

Gabby Bernard in Subscribe or Like, Workshop West. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Subscribe or Like. Liam Salmon’s memorably tense thriller, which premiered at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, is a disturbing view of the current human predicament, a lawlessly escalating world where we create our own identities and in which we are spending more and more of our lives finding followers and creating entertainment. Do the play’s frustrated millennials (Gabby Bernard and Geoffrey Simon Brown) actually live in the internet? Read the 12thnight review here.

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

Enough. Trevor Schmidt’s vivid Northern Light Theatre production of the weirdly poetic Stef Smith two-hander remains the year’s most uneasy unsettling capture of our vague collective global anxiety, and our sense that we might be in the end times for terra firma. Two flight attendants (Linda Grass, Kristin Johnston) have a view, 30,000 above the ground, of a world that seems to be disintegrating, along with their lives. Read the 12thnight review here.   

Kristin Johnston in Mob, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Mob. Intriguingly, Workshop West produced another genuinely disturbing thriller where the intruder is social media. Mob, by the Quebec actor/playwright Catherine-Anne Toupin, has genuinely queasy resonances with Hitchcock’s Psycho. And as its shivery title suggests, you are never alone. In Heather Inglis’s striking production, beautifully designed and lit, Kristin Johnston starred as a traumatized woman on the lam from … something. The 12thnight review is here.

Kris Unruh and Christina Nguyen in Twelfth Night, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz.

Twelfth Night. Amanda Goldberg’s inventive 10-actor production, conceived expressly for the beautiful Cristal Spiegeltent in which the Freewill Shakespeare Festival took up residence in the summer, didn’t so much stage Shakespeare’s great dark/light gender fluid comedy as provide a joyful (and very musical) fantasia to deconstruct it. True, acting and staging choices leaned into the lighter side of the multi-hued comedy and away from melancholy. But as a re-creation with a theme song (“you’ve got the music in you, don’t let go”), it was a genuinely spirited re-creation in which the inclusive sense of self-discovery (and re-discovery) prevailed. The secondary characters took the lead in this the first Twelfth Night I’ve seen where the goofball Andrew Aguecheek got to go home with someone. Read the 12thnight review here.

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

Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes. Beyond criminal sexual assault and rape is a territory more subtle, treacherous, and problematic. Hannah Moscovitch’s clever play, which springs a trap, goes there — and tells the story not from the victim’s but the perpetrator’s point of view. Marianne Copithorne’s impeccable Theatre Network production starred Gianna Vacirca and John Ullyatt, both in top form. Read the 12thnight review here.

Indecent, Studio Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang.

Indecent. Paula Vogel’s play tells a true theatre story that connects us to the historical and cultural currents of the last century. It’s a story with much to say about our darkening moment now, and the rise of anti-Semitism — art, tradition and freedom, courage, love, diversity. And the Studio Theatre production directed by newcomer Benjamin W. Smith, beautifully designed and lighted to conjure its characters in and out of the shadows of time, did it proud. The 12thnight review is here.