Dayna Lea Hoffmann, A Hundred Words For Snow, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

2023 (part 2). Here’s a small assortment (in no particular order) of highlights — moments, performances, bright ideas, experiences — of the year of live theatre on Edmonton stages.

Home sweet home. 2023 was the year.…

Rapid Fire Theatre got their new “forever home,” the Exchange Theatre in Strathcona, perfect for improv, mere steps from the actors’ pub The Next Act.

The Freewill Shakespeare Festival, evicted from their Hawrelak Park stage found themselves a new home, a vintage Spiegeltent, and built two productions, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night, to fit the locale.

Little Willy, The Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Photo supplied.

Theatre Network brought Another F!*#@$G Festival home to the new Roxy, and the name struck a chord. And here’s heavyweight validation: Jesus Christ and Shakespeare appeared onstage in the same show (Little Willy by the great marionettiste /playwright Ronnie Burkett).

The In Arms Collective brought a memorable production of Makram Ayache’s The Hooves Belonged To The Deer home to Edmonton after a splashy Toronto premiere.

The Answer Is Fringe, the 42nd annual edition of our beloved, outsized wayward summer festival, brought it home, after a few summers of cautious incremental increases. It wasn’t the biggest it’s ever been, but it felt like a return to the Fringe’s old fringe-y self — and sold 114,000 tickets to 185 indoor shows.

Theatre Network premiered a playful new holiday musical With Bells On (based on Darrin Hagen’s festive two-hander) that brought co-creator Devanand Janki (with Tommy Newman) back to his home town to work after decades in New York. And with an 11 o’clock number, Fabulous.

Theatre Yes got a pair of new artistic directors who now call Edmonton home: Ruth Alexander and Max Rubin, who between them are a director, an actor, a musical director, a cabaret artist, a composer. Our gain.

Performances that linger in the mind: 

Austin Eckert, all nervy bravado and simmering rage and angst as the aspirational Black boxer in The Royale.

In a fine ensemble cast, Makram Ayache as the marginalized, increasingly troubled queer Muslim kid, searching for a way to belong, in his play The Hooves Belonged To The Deer

Gianna Vacirca as the quick-witted, wry, often exasperated Lizzie Bennett, who retained the original spirit of Austen amidst the Citadel’s high-spirited screwball ‘fun in the Regency’ version Pride and Prejudice.

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

Mariya Khomutova as a version of herself, funny, charming, and increasingly fractured by the competing urgencies of love, motherhood, and country in First Métis Man of Odesa.

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski (aka Lilith Fair) as the drag queen, flamboyant, sardonic, and charismatic, who shares a stuck elevator with her conceptual opposite, a defeated sad sack accountant in With Bells On.

John Ullyatt in a persuasively subtle performance as an intelligent, civilized man who knows right from wrong, until he somehow doesn’t, in Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes at Theatre Network.

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

Tenaj Williams as the nebbish floral assistant who rises to botanical greatness by striking a Faustian bargain with a carniverous plant in the Citadel’s Little Shop of Horrors.

Dayna Lea Hoffmann as the 15-year-old heroine who sets forth on an arctic expedition in the touching coming-of-age solo show A Hundred Words for Snow at Northern Light. And as the beleaguered grad student server surrounded by her alter-egos, starting to have her doubts about the feminist success story in Karen Hines’ funny insightful satire All the Little Animals I Have Eaten, at Shadow Theatre.

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

Andrea House as the irrepressible Mitzi, queen of the ‘60s Edmonton supper club scene that’s the setting for the homegrown musical Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, revived this year by Teatro Live!.

Gabby Bernard and Geoffrey Simon Brown, entirely convincing as a couple of millennials trapped in an unsatisfying reality that’s gradually being erased by the internet, in Subscribe or Like at Workshop West.

Kate Newby as Dorothy Parker in Fresh Hell, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Kate Newby as the acerbic wit Dorothy Parker in Conni Massing’s Fresh Hell, at Shadow Theatre.

Jason Sakaki, Kale Penny, Farren Timoteo (front), Devon Brayne in Jersey Boys, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Farren Timoteo brought unexpected emotional layers to his stage-owning portrait of Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys (not to mention an eerie command of those virtuoso falsetto swoops).

Amelia Sargisson, pitch perfect in a comic performance as the flinty and charming Gwendolyn in the Citadel’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Braydon Dowler-Coltman, who (in addition to playing Miss Bingley and Mr. Wickham) fashioned a very funny comically physicalized portrait of the narcissistic cleric Mr. Collins in the Citadel’s Pride and Prejudice.

Kristin Johnston as a mysteriously traumatized but self-possessed woman in Mob, at Workshop West.

Brett Dahl and Nadien Chu in Twelfth Night, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

Clown performance of the year: A Tie. Nadien Chu as the party-hearty tippler Lady Toby clutching an assortment of drinks in Twelfth Night and Zachary Parsons-Lozinski (see above) in full drag foliage slipping into that heightened style with daffy aplomb in With Bells On.

What we have got they don’t got:

Not one but two improv comedy companies who created an original holiday musical. (a) Rapid Fire Theatre’s The Blank Who Stole Christmas is an impressively impossible hybrid of the improvised and the scripted, in which the cast is confronted every night by a different villain, unknown to them in advance and completely unrehearsed. (b) Grindstone Theatre’s daffy, theatrically ingenious, and very funny Die Harsh, an amusingly synchronized mash-up of that thriller and A Christmas Carol by the team of Byron Martin and Simon Abbott. Both shows, incidentally, run through Saturday night at the Exchange Theatre and the Varscona Theatre, respectively.

Bright idea of the year: Theatre Yes’s The Play’s The Thing, a two-night “deconstruction” of Hamlet, with 20 Edmonton stage companies each doing a scene in their own signature style. An experiment in community bonding.

Surprise concept of the year: Director Jackie Maxwell boldly set her production of Importance of Being Earnest, that high-Victorian comic jewel ahead by half a century into the 1950s. And it was an unexpected fit. Which only goes to show the class system with all its trimmings, including parental authority, respectability and privilege, doesn’t age.

Romar Dungo and Maxwell Hanic in Boy Trouble, Amoris Projects. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

New talent: directors Benjamin W. Smith (Indecent) and Brett Dahl (Strange/ Familiar), playwright Emma Houghton (Freaky Green Eyes, a stage adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oates novel), actors Mohamed Ahmed (a portrait of wary grace in The Royale) Romar Dungo (a gay Filipino kid stepping up to domestic and social pressures in Boy Trouble).

Dramatic premise of the year: Many possibilities. Here are three. (a) The protagonist of Elyne Quan’s Listen Listen, which premiered at Teatro Live, is passionately devoted to, and fierce in his defence of his favourite art form, Muzak, music expressly created to not listen to. (b) In each scene of Darrin Hagen’s very dark comedy 10 Funerals, the same gay couple is returning from a funeral (with two sets of actors), a kind of survey of gay life from the huge death toll from AIDS through the gay party scene, activism and onward. (c) Die Harsh: Grindstone Theatre’s ingenious hybrid of the irredeemable action thriller and the world’s most famous redemption ghost story, A Christmas Carol.

Moments you take with you: 

Jason Hardwick’s tap number in First Date at the Mayfield, a full-on validation of the proposition that all New York waiters are artistes waiting for their big break.

Hodan Youssouf in After Faust, RISER Edmonton 2023. Photo by Brianne Jang

In Connor Yuzwenko-Martin’s ambitiously off-centre After Faust at RISER 2023, Elon Musk leads a bicycle charge through the twinkling galaxy.

In a funny deadpan performance as a Count Orsino in Amanda Goldberg’s music-filled version Twelfth Night for the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, Scott Shpeley strides briskly up the aisle toward the stage carrying his double-bass the way ordinary mortals carry their lunch.

In Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s at Teatro Live, a musical comedy pair of scene-stealers (Josh Travnik as a wry deadpan bartender and Bella King as a rule-bound account manager) find themselves at a bus stop trying out their dawning realization they may be attracted to each other, via a terrific Ryan Sigurdson/Farren Timoteo song.

Chris Dodd in Deafy, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

The realization that Chris Dodd’s Deafy was the first play by a Deaf playwright on a Citadel stage, in 58 years.

Creating the theatrical world: In a great year for designers on Edmonton stages, full of contributions by projection specialists, sound and lighting whiz kids, here’s a sampling of stand-outs.

Beyata Hackborn’s tilted high-tech quilt of frosted tiles and light-up doorways into the internet nightmare for Workshop West’s Mob.

Anahita Dehbonehie’s design for The Hooves Belonged To The Deer, a wood-slatted chamber of red sand, dominated by a ladder, for a play that moves beyond the prairie horizons to the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Knowledge, and … heaven.

Darrin Hagen’s serial sound score calibrates the subtly gradated declension into a queasy world of bad behaviour in Theatre Network’s Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes.

Roy Jackson’s lighting made dramatic contributions to Northern Light’s Enough, with scenes divided between 30,000 feet in the air and on the ground, and to the unnerving glow of the internet world in Workshop West’s Subscribe Or Like.

Alison Yanota’s design for A Hundred Words For Snow at Northern Light made of the stage an ice floe in a sea of ice overhung with translucent icicles, an effect enhanced by Matt Schuurman’s projections and Daniela Fernandez’s eerie cosmic sound score.

Nadien Chu, Alexander Ariate, Jeff Lillico, Helen Belay, Amelia Sargisson, Davina Stewart, Julien Arnold in The Importance of Being Earnest, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Michael Gianfrancesco’s gorgeous array of high-style ‘50s costumes for the Citadel’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Cory Sincennes’ evocatively detailed design conjured the backstage view of big self-contained theatre in the Citadel/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s Trouble in Mind.

Daniel Van Heyst’s design for Shadow Theatre’s Fresh Hell created a shimmering liminal space where 20th century Central Park in Manhattan and the 15th century French countryside somehow meet.

Have you seen 2023: the year in Edmonton theatre, Part 1, the play’s the thing? It’s here.