Eli Yaschuk, Nina Vanderham, Aidan Laudersmith in The Noon Witch, Teatro Live! Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Thirty years ago, Teatro La Quindicina audiences caught sight of a highly idiosyncratic witch who preferred sunlight to night time, and lured men to their watery death with caloric fatty snacks so they sink.

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Playwright Stewart Lemoine has said that his inspiration for The Noon Witch was a 20-minute Dvorak tone poem (Op. 108, B196) whose point of origin was an eccentric Hungarian legend. Needless to say, there’s nothing quite like it in Canadian theatre.

Much has changed since The Noon Witch took us to 1920s Budapest in 1995. The ex-firehall Chinook Theatre in Strathcona became the Varscona and then the “new Varscona.” Teatro has become Teatro Live!. What hasn’t changed is that a Stewart Lemoine comedy that introduced a new generation of young actors to Teatro (and Edmonton theatre) stardom — Jeff Haslam, John Kirkpatrick, and the late great Julien Arnold among them — is poised to do the same again.

Davina Stewart and Jeff Haslam in The Noon Witch (1995), Teatro Live!. Photo supplied

A revival of The Noon Witch, directed by the playwright, opens Friday in the Teatro Live! season. And in Lemoine’s cast are four newcomers — Eli Yaschuk, Aidan Laudersmith, Nida Vanderham, Ethan Lang — recent theatre school grads from MacEwan and the U of A, alongside the experienced Teatro sparkler Michelle Diaz.

Yaschuk and Laudersmith are Joszef and Anatol, a couple of Budapest lads-about-town, “park bench philosophers” as billed, who fall under the sweet but possibly lethal spell of Tinka, who has supernatural powers and an alluring way of proffering cream cakes.

If you were lucky and caught Jim Guedo’s MacEwan theatre arts production of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, this past season, you’ve already met Yaschuk, in a fierce, compelling performance in the title role of the driven French painter Georges Seurat immersed in his work, neglecting his lover Dot. Art and making art and mapping out the sky: the Sondheim musical masterpiece has things to say to young artists, fresh from theatre school.

Eii Yaschuk. Photo supplied.

Yaschuk’s entry point onto the stage, if you don’t count a childhood “always in the backyard making shows,” wasn’t Les Miz singalongs. It was Ukrainian dance, 13 years’ worth. A familiarity with being onstage, and an “obsession with musical theatre,” as he says, led him straight to MacEwan University’s theatre arts (and one of MacEwan’s first new BFAs in musical theatre). And like his fellow artists who bravely set forth into the world of theatre in 2020, that fateful year that COVID started shutting down shows, it was a largely Zoomed-in education for the first couple of years, as arranged of necessity by a creative faculty. “Somehow we did two months in person that fall…. And right before Halloween we got sent home, and spent most of the term online…. I’d go down to my basement for my 9 a.m. dance class. On Zoom.”

“And actually,” he says, “it wasn’t horrible. We were new theatre kids. And we hadn’t known anything else.”

At MacEwan, Yaschuk, a bona fide triple-threat, found himself in an assortment of roles, with distinctive theatrical qualities, like Mr. Cellophone in a Kander and Ebb revue. He was Man in Chair, the musical theatre devoté who conjures an entire 20s-style musical in his imagination in The Drowsy Chaperone. By second year, he and class-mate Rain Matkin, who co-starred with him in the Sunday in the Park (Dot to his Georges), “would go to theatre, to see what was out there.” There’s nothing like a Zoomed existence to make artists (and audiences) appreciate the live experience.

The first Teatro show they saw? Fever Land, a sad/funny 1999 Lemoine play that marked the company’s return to live performance in the fall of 2021. Like The Noon Witch it involves supernatural intervention in human affairs. And Yaschuk was drawn to the style, “heightened, bubbly, very articulate characters who think and speak in full sentences.”

Those distinctively Lemoinian features find their way into The Noon Witch, along with the challenge of making unusually literate language sound natural. “For the first few days it felt … new,” says Yaschuk. “I’m running out of breath! Now we’re on our feet it does feel natural!”

Even the characters Yaschuk and Laudersmith play in The Noon Witch, Joszef and Anatol, have a history at Teatro. Five years before The Noon Witch they first appeared in a park discussing opera in Lemoine’s The Unremembered Budapest (the playwright jokes he apparently had “a Hungarian period”). As per the Teatro tradition of real food onstage, Hungarian goulash was served onstage at a climactic moment. This time, it’s “baked goods,” a term far from current in the contemporary lexicon. Ditto “foodstuffs,” which Yaschuk particularly likes. Teatro’s newsletter Aieeeee! even includes a recipe for ‘langos,” a traditional Hungarian street snack.

Joszef, as Yaschuk describes, “is a delightful man. Quirky. A worrier, Full of anxiety about backed goods (he’s concerned about getting plump), tightly wound.. Super-fun to play.” Joszef might actually shudder at the sight of a cream tart. Which makes him highly resistant to the charms of Tinka.  Anatol, on the other hand, says Yaschuk of the character Laudersmith plays, is “very articulate. A bit smarter, to be honest. He thinks a lot more; he always has a plan…. It’s a classical dynamic.”

At the other end of the theatrical spectrum from Lemoine’s fantastical comedy, we’ll be seeing Yaschuk in April, opposite Matkin, in the Northern Light Theatre production of Radiant Vermin in April. Philip Ridley’s darkly funny and knowing satire has a go at the housing market and consumerist greed: a young couple achieves their dream home … at a horrifying price.

Yaschuk and Matkin created a “cabaret play” together (“we spur each other on”), and In My Room was at Grindstone last summer. Look for them at this summer’s Fringe together in Victor and Victoria’s Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things, a macabre 2011 goth thriller cum scary bedtime story by Beth Graham and Nathan Cuckow. Jim Guedo, returning to the Fringe after a long absence, will direct.

Meanwhile, there’s the fun of a Teatro rehearsal — with foodstuffs.

PREVIEW

The Noon Witch

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Eli Yaschuk, Aidan Laudersmith, Nida Vanderham, Ethan Lang, Michelle Diaz

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Feb. 21 through March 9

Tickets: teatrolive.com