Mump and Smoot open Theatre Network’s 50th anniversary season, in Exit. Photo supplied.

Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s time to play. After a year of continuing struggle, with rising production costs and dwindling funding, theatre companies and artists are finding their way back to stages large and small. Our mighty summer Fringe, as always, is a hint that the live experience is what we’re after (this year’s edition sold 127,000 or so tickets to 216 shows). And it always leaves us wanting more.

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The Mayfield launches its 50th anniversary season this week with Nashville: Music City, the next instalment (through Nov. 3) of Musicians Gone Wild, a series devoted to seminal eras in pop culture history that began with last season’s Rock The Canyon. The Citadel is in rehearsal for Daryl Cloran’s production of the Tennessee Williams classic A Streetcar Named Desire. Mump and Smoot, those existentialist horror clowns, have arrived at the Roxy to prepare for their new show The Exit.

A season announcements from Workshop West Playwrights Theatre just happened,  with news of a Stephen Massicotte premiere and a bold experiment in ticketing. And in the wings are indie productions as yet unannounced. But to whet your theatrical appetite, here’s a little selection (in no particular order) of intriguing shows happening this season, from what we know so far, to look forward to.   

Goblin:Macbeth, Spontaneous Theatre. Image supplied.

Goblin: Macbeth. Something wicked this way comes. Finally. After hot-ticket runs at Bard on the Beach, Stratford, and Calgary’s Vertigo Theatre, at last we get to see this inspirationally weird Spontaneous Theatre creation by Rebecca Northan (Blind Date, Undercover) and Bruce Horak — theatre artists who are the correct answer to “who would even think of doing this?” Three goblins, who’ve stumbled on a Collected Works of Shakespeare, decide to “do theatre,” and pick their favourite: the goriest, and the shortest. It re-launches the Citadel’s Highwire Series, on hiatus for a season, Jan. 11 to Feb. 2.

On The Banks of the Nut. In Stewart Lemoine’s 2001 screwball comedy (a “bucolic escapade” as billed), the “federal talent agent for Wisconsin,” on a rural quest to find “a citizen of rare talent” in 1951, is accompanied by a plucky temp, who seems to be a natural agent of chaos. As in so many Lemoines, music is by no means incidental. Here, the  post-horn solo in Mahler’s Third Symphony unleashes an unexpected life force reaction in the proprietor of Nut River Lodge. Lemoine himself directs the Teatro Live! revival, the first since 2010, that runs on the Varscona stage May 30 to June 13. And you can expect to see a new generation of Teatro talent, joining the company from this year’s auditions.

Mump and Smoot in Exit. The rumours are true! Brush up your Ummonian, Edmonton: the stellar pair of nightmare ‘horror clowns’ from the planet Ummo, who haven’t been sighted onstage in a decade, are back among us this season. Michael Kennard and John Turner are premiering their new show at their home away from Ummo, Theatre Network, as part of that company’s 50th anniversary season. In their slides across the country on a trail of gore and gizzards, existential rumination and, you know, death and torture, Edmonton has always figured prominently— ever since their sensational earliest appearance at the 1989 Fringe, Mump and Smoot in Something. The Exit, directed as usual by Karen Hines of Pochsy fame, herself a specialist in the darkest reaches of hilarity, runs at the Roxy Oct. 10 to 27, in a season that also welcomes back Ronnie Burkett for his Christmas show Little Dickens.

Monstress. It’s been a prolific year for playwright Trevor Schmidt, with premieres of Robot Girls, his hilarious and insightful coming-of-age comedy at Shadow and the thriller Candy & The Beast at Northern Light. And the artistic director of NLT has a new one coming up, to open the company’s 49th season, ‘Making A Monster’. Monstress (Nov. 8 to 23) has an eerie Frankenstein-ian thrill about it: a disgraced doctor in Victorian England who’s enlisted to re-create the dead-neck daughter of a wealthy man. Gradually, as Schmidt has described, the identities of the doctor and her creation begin to intertwine. Schmidt’s production stars Sydney Williams (Fresh Hell) and Julia van Dam (A Phoenix Too Frequent).

The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow. Six seasons ago Shadow Theatre scored a hit with Neil Grahn’s The Comedy Club, the remarkable true story of members of the Princess Patricia Light Infantry Division summoned in the darkest days of World War I to start turning out musical comedies to enhance the morale of Canadian soldiers. The playwright, who also works in improv and sketch comedy, film and television (and leans into a captivating combination of documentary and comedy), returns to Canadian World War I history for this story of the extraordinary life and career of one of Canada’s most highly decorated Indigenous soldiers. His new play, which launches the upcoming Shadow season (March 20 to April 7), tells of the star scout and sniper who returned home after the war to find himself in a world where he didn’t even have the right to vote. And so another kind of trench warfare began for the warrior/ Chief-turned-activist. Ryan Cunningham as Francis Pegahmagabow leads a cast of five in the production jointly directed by John Hudson and Christine Sokaymoh Frederick.

Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812. The innovative allure of Dave Malloy’s through-sung 2016 Broadway hit, lies both in its indie rock/electropop/ folk/ musical theatre score and its highly unconventional storytelling, is lifted from a 70-page segment of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Which is to say there’s nothing like it in the repertoire. I’ve seen it once in a sort of spiegeltent in New York, and once on Broadway (the Crows Theatre production in Toronto was extended twice this past season). It was a coup for MacEwan University’s theatre arts to get the rights for the student production, directed by Jim Guedo, that runs Feb. 12 to 16.

playwright Colleen Murphy

Jupiter. Any new play by the great (and fearless) Colleen Murphy is a Canadian theatre event. This Order of Canada appointee has a long history with Theatre Network (Pig Girl, The December Man, The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius). And that’s where her latest premieres, as part of their starry 50th anniversary lineup. Jupiter, set in Murphy’s own Quebec and northern Ontario home turf, happens over four days in a family living room — with dog! And it’s billed as exploring themes of “faith, truth and family dynamics.” Bradley Moss directs the production that runs at the Roxy April 1 to 20.

Dance Nation. This highly unusual dance/theatre amalgam by the American writer Claire Barron, a 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist, is the mainstage production at the 13th annual SkirtsAfire Festival (March 6 to 16). Intriguingly, it’s set in the tumultuous pre-teen girl world of competitive dancers, but it calls for a multi-generational all-ages cast of adult women. Amanda Goldberg, the festival’s new artistic producer, directs, as SkirtsAfire returns to producing (and not simply presenting) after the success of last season’s Mermaid Legs.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The 70s Musical. The cross-border success of Daryl Cloran’s Shakespeare-Beatles mash-up on As You Like It has inspired this latest venture (Feb. 22 to March 23). It match-makes Shakespeare’s most popular romantic comedy and its complications in the woods with David Bowie, Elton John, the BeeGees, Marvin Gaye, Olivia Newton-John…. Who are the hopeful thesps, Bottom the weaver and cohorts, the most reliably funny inhabitants of Dream, in this 70s world? An aspirational rock band? Cloran partners on the script re-do with Kayvon Khoshkam, the artistic director of Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan. At very least, a virtuoso turn in song rights acquisition is in the works.

Alphabet Line. AJ Hrooshkin’s play, the winner of this year’s Westbury Family Fringe Theatre Award, is tuned to the prairie vibe — rural/ urban, distant horizons, the need for connection in vast space — and what it means to be gay in the western Canada hinterland. In the late 1940s a queer man living on the family farm sends out daily messages by radio in hopes of a response. And then he gets one — from the big city of Saskatoon. It premieres in the Fringe Theatre season April 25 to May 3.

A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder. In a first for the enterprising and indefatigable little theatre, Grindstone, the new manager of the theatre spaces at the Orange Hub (10045 – 156 St.), is launching a mainstage subscription series of three big musicals there. And this riotous 2013 Tony Award-winning musical comedy is one of them (May 23 to June 1). It chronicles the murderous swath cut by a penniless, disinherited hero en route to an earldom. Only eight relatives stand between the aspirational Monty and his goal. It’s a quick-change virtuoso role, and the nimble character leads a cast of nine. Byron Martin directs, and casting announcements await.

Heist. There’s big and lavish in the Citadel’s upcoming season (think Let It Go). And there’s also this intriguing (and rare) theatrical proposition: a crime caper for the stage. Alberta playwright/ screenwriter (who’s also an ophthalmologist, in a rare double career) Arun Lakra has devised a heist with all the trimmings — double-crosses, diamonds, guns, lasers. It premiered last season at Calgary’s Vertigo. The Citadel production directed by Haysam Kadri, the artistic director of Alberta Theatre Projects, runs March 22-April 13.