Category Archives: Features

Four decades of playing without a script: the Rapid Fire Theatre story is now a book

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca The thing you’ve just got to love about Rapid Fire Theatre is that everything that makes you anxious (if not out and out crazy) in life is delightful to them. It’s their high-octane fuel, their motivation, … Continue reading

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Summer theatre adventures in New York

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca New York City last week —  It started in a heart-warming cross-border exchange, with trimmings. In the mezzanine of the Lyceum Theatre on West 45th 15 minutes before curtain on a Thursday night performance of the … Continue reading

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Spirits rise: revisiting the Edmonton theatre season, part two

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca Fever Land, according to that heartbreaking/ riotous comedy by which Teatro La Quindicina returned to live performance last fall, is the kingdom where your spirits rise, vivacity accelerates, and the gray clammy feeling of routine is … Continue reading

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Celebrating the Edmonton theatre season that returned to live, part one

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca It began in some trepidation, cautiously, experimentally, with complicated logistics, under constant threat of delays and cancellations. But this was the season that live theatre actually returned to live and in-person. Yes, the pivot pivoted. We … Continue reading

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Raising funds for Ukraine: theatre steps up. A play, a playwright, Pyretic Productions, and the Blyth Festival

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca It started with the discovery of a hand-written diary, the journal in which Lianna Makuch’s grandmother recorded her flight, on foot, from war-ravaged Ukraine in 1944.  That wrenching chronicle, and an anniversary of the full-scale Russian … Continue reading

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Meet the Mischief-makers, creators of comic havoc (witness Peter Pan Goes Wrong at the Citadel)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca The three creators of Mischief Theatre‘s Peter Pan Goes Wrong were in town last week to watch the North American debut of their 2013 play unleash theatrical chaos on the Citadel mainstage. The trio of Londoners … Continue reading

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Theatre rooted in the land: Ayita, premiering at SkirtsAfire. Meet creator Teneil Whiskeyjack

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca The mainstage centrepiece of the 10th anniversary edition of SkirtsAfire — the multidisciplinary arts festival devoted to celebrating and showcasing women and non-binary artists — is a new play. Distinctively Indigenous in its inspiration, creation, and … Continue reading

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Ten years of SkirtsAfire: amplifying the voices of women and non-binary artists

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca It’s been a decade, amazingly, since Annette Loiselle and a couple of her actor friends, Sharla Matkin and Nadien Chu, sat at the Carrot Cafe, plotting over popcorn, red wine, and lopsided statistics.  For years Loiselle, … Continue reading

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Old Strathcona here they come: for the first time in Workshop West history, a theatre of their own

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca Workshop West Playwrights Theatre is moving.   Come March 1 you’ll find the venerable company, age 43, in their own theatre, in the heart of Edmonton’s entertainment district. Welcome to the newly christened Gateway Theatre in … Continue reading

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A home of their own, in the entertainment ‘hood: Rapid Fire Theatre at 41

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca They’ve dreamed it for years. Now, at age 41, Rapid Fire Theatre finally has a home of their own. And it’s in the ‘hood that’s their  traditional home base, Old Strathcona.  Edmonton’s premier improv company is … Continue reading

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