The LIbravian, Brú Theatre. International Children’s Festival of the Arts.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a three-festival week in this theatre town (in addition to a much anticipated theatre revival and an intriguing opera experiment).The festive season is here, and the moment is at hand for you to venture forth and sample widely.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

•Nextfest, Edmonton’s innovative multi-disciplinary emerging arts festival, returns to Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre Thursday for 11 days, with a 29th annual edition that embraces 500-plus artists and the chance to see what’s new with the next generation — in theatre, dance, music, film, digital creation, visual art, and experiments in amalgamating all of the above. Stay tuned for a 12thnight survey with festival director Ellen Chorley, and interviews with some of the Nextfest playwrights. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca or at the door.

•At the Citadel, the annual Collider Festival returns Saturday and Sunday to celebrate new play development — and especially scripts scaled especially to find a home on the country’s largest stages. Festival director Mieko Ouchi has assembled a high-contrast selection of four new works-in-progress from the Citadel Playwright’s Lab which has focused on adaptations this year. And the first act of each will get a (free) reading at the festival.

Saturday night’s offerings pair Nowhere With You: A Joel Plackett Musical Experience by James Odin Wade with Sue Goberdhan’s The B-Team. The former, in which the protagonist returns to his home town to reassess his life, is inspired by music. The latter is, as billed, “a contemporary twist on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic The Scarlet Letter.

playwright Collin Doyle

Sunday night’s pair of readings, co-presented by Script Salon, include Katherine Koller’s adaptation of the Jane Austen novel Persuasion and Collin Doyle’s The Riverside Seniors Village Theatrical Society Presents: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

And the weekend includes workshops. Saturday’s is “Adaptation For Large Spaces,” led by playwright Belinda Cornish, whose own adaptation of the Todd Babiak novel The Garneau Block premiered on the Citadel mainstage in 2021. Sunday’s workshop, with musical theatre veterans Kate Ryan and Steven Greenfield, is “Building A Musical.”

Full schedule and tickets for the workshops: citadeltheatre.com.

•The world is crazy, unstable, unpredictable. But there is reassurance, my anxious friends:  just up the road in St. Albert, the young at heart will find that the Kids Fest, the venerable International Children’s Festival of the Arts now in its 40s, has returned to the banks of the mighty Sturgeon Thursday through Sunday.

The seven mainstage productions, from across the country, the U.S. and Ireland, include Grimmz, a hiphop uptake on Grimm stars like Cinderella from American touring duo Experiential Theatre, The Libravian (from Ireland’s Brú Theatre, based in Galway), and Dino-Light from New Orleans’ Lightwire Theatre.

As always at the Kids Fest, the startlingly accomplished St. Albert Children’s Theatre is doing a show: the “junior version of Polkadots: The Cool Kids Musical, inspired by The Little Rock 9, a group of courageous Black kids in the ‘50s who stood up against segregationist attempts to bar them from entering an Arkansas high school. You can meet three Indigenous puppets in The Bighetty & Bighetty Puppet Show, the creation of artists from Pukatawagen, Manitoba. And there’s more — outdoor performances, activities both ticketed and free, and an all-pervasive festive vibe.

The full Kids Fest schedule and tickets: tickets.stalbert.ca.

Oscar Derkx and Beth Graham in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

•The Teatro Live! season continues Friday with a revival of Stewart Lemoine’s funny,  delicately nuanced 2009 comedy The Oculist’s Holiday, which takes its characters, and us, to Switzerland and the shores of Lake Geneva in Lausanne  in 1931. The all-star Teatro cast of Belinda Cornish’s production is led by Beth Graham as a Canadian teacher on holiday, with Oscar Derkx, Rachel Bowron, Mathew Hulshof, and Cathy Derkach. Stay tuned for a 12thnight interview with the director, a playwright and actor of note herself. The Oculist’s Holiday runs on the Varscona stage (10329 83 Ave.) through June 16. Tickets: teatroq.com.

Das Rheingold, Edmonton Opera. Photo by Nanc Price.

•Edmonton Opera’s unconventional “chamber” version of Das Rheingold, the opening opera of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, takes a truly wild story of fractious gods, Rhine maidens, giants, a lecherous dwarf, and its huge emotional landscape to a place it’s never been before: “a hotel in Edmonton 1964.” It’s fascinating to see the imaginative vision and stagecraft of the celebrated theatre/opera director Peter Hinton-Davis unleashes on this.  And it happens out in the open on a thrust stage, the Citadel’s 685-seat Maclab Theatre, surrounded by the audience.

The adaptation by Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick finds a way to reduce the orchestral forces from 85 to a lean mean 18. Wotan (Neil Craighead) is asleep and dreaming of conducting his own production of Das Rheingold. In place of the magisterial king of the gods figure, here he’s a rumpled figure who seems to wake up with a killer headache when the Rhine maidens start singing and his wife arrives, on his case. And he’s taken aback (no wonder) by the sheer force of the gold thief Alberich in Dion Mazerolle’s knock-out performance. Andy Moro’s stunning design and lighting are indispensable dramatic participants in the Wagnerian cosmology, from the bottom of the Rhine to the celestial sphere, of this highly theatrical production, which moves through the whole joint and among us, up and down staircases and through the aisles.

Das Rheingold continues Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday at the Citadel’s Maclab Theatre. Tickets: edmontonopera.com.

•AND it’s the last weekend for Workshop West’s lovely production of Conni Massing’s Dead Letter, an intricately layered comedy that darkens into a murder mystery and beyond, into more existential mysteries. Tickets: workshopwest.org. Check out the 12thnight review here, and an interview with the engaging playwright here.