Summer theatre choices, including three in their last week: a little 12thnight survey

Posted on July 23, 2025 by Liz Nicholls
The Lion King, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Joan Marcus.

The Lion King, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Joan Marcus

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Wakey wakey! It’s your last chance this week to catch …

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

•The Lion King. Julie Taymor’s 1997 musical, a non-pareil triumph in conjuring an imaginary world, has been here a couple of times before under the Broadway Across Canada banner, but not for a decade. It magically transforms the 1994 hit Disney Corp movie animation into a stage musical with exclusively animal characters. The music is an original amalgam of African chants from composer Lebo M and others with ballads from the Elton John pop rack. The stagecraft is magical: rod puppets, stunningly inventive headgear and appendage extensions that transform human actors into animals. They come to life in a powerful Shakespearean coming-of-age story of usurpation, dispossession, exile, restoration — the Circle of Life. It runs on the Jube stage till Sunday. Tickets: ticketmaster.ca.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Alexander Ariate in The Odd Couple, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

•The Odd Couple. Neil Simon’s 1965 comedy classic gets deluxe treatment from a perfect cast at Teatro Live! The friction of mismatched, and sparring, roommates comes to life in performances from Alexander Ariate as the irredeemable slob Oscar and Andrew MacDonald-Smith as the uptight neurotic neat-freak Felix. And the supporting characters, the poker boys and the Pigeon sisters, are a riot. Have a peek at the 12thnight review here. It runs through Sunday at the Varscona. Tickets: teatrolive.com.

Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Defiance Theatre at Found Festival 2025. Photo by Brianne Jang

•Lucky Charm. Louise Casemore’s fascinating and clever invitation to a séance (and a great story) at Mrs. Houdini’s home has ended its entirely sold-out live run at “a secret residential location in the Hazeldean neighbourhood.” Now through Sunday, you can catch the show, directed by Theatre Yes’s Max Rubin, onscreen. The widow of the world’s greatest magician and escape artist has been enjoined (chained, one might say) by her late husband’s specific request, to try to summon his spirit from beyond the grave. I was lucky enough to have the experience live, and there’s a 12thnight review of the Defiance Theatre production here. Streaming specs and tickets: commongroundarts.ca or theatreyes.com.

Kelsey Verzotti in Legally Blonde. Citadel Theatre and Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price.

•And continuing at the Citadel, a rosy comedy prospect: Legally Blonde, the fizzy pink-powered Broadway musical that started as a novel before it became a hit movie. There’s a big whack of girl empowerment and self-belief involved in the story of Elle, the California sorority queen who goes to Harvard Law School in pursuit of her callow boyfriend, followed by her own personal Greek chorus. But it’s light of touch, with a lot of great dancing, and a funny hairdresser. Stephanie Graham’s Citadel/ Theatre Calgary co-production is fun fun fun. The 12thnight review is here. It runs through Aug. 3. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.

Posted in Features | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Summer theatre choices, including three in their last week: a little 12thnight survey

Lifting the veil between the living and the dead: Lucky Charm, a little review of a very cool show

Posted on July 19, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Defiance Theatre at Found Festival 2025. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

I’m coming very late to this (a week away in the east is to blame, more about this later). But I went a séance Friday night.

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

It was in an unexpected place, a bungalow on a placid neighbourhood street. Life lesson #14 (also applicable to art and in particular the Found Festival): you never can tell. The séance happened downstairs, in a dim, atmospherically cluttered chamber — with trimmings: red velvet drapery, incense, tiny glowing Tiffany-style lamps, a gramophone, all manner of memorabilia … gilt-framed photos, old cigar boxes, tea trays, books. Ah, and a table.

That’s where a New York showgirl in a beautiful frock stepped out of the 1920s (in high heels), to have a go at summoning the spirit of her late husband. That the dearly departed, gone these 10 years, was the most famous magician and escape artiste in the world, Harry Houdini, was one surprise. And so was the widow’s tone: jaded, skeptical, worldly amusement. That’s how we met Bess, Mrs. Houdini, the presiding muse of Louise Casemore’s Lucky Chance.

Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Defiance Theatre at Found Festival 2025. Photo supplied

Without fail for the last decade, in accordance with her late husband’s express instructions — a chain as formidable as the kind from which Harry regularly escaped — Mrs. Houdini has invited people into her home weekly, with a purpose. For 520 Sundays in a row she has attempted to connect with her late husband, looking for the code he proposed embedding in a deck of cards. And it hasn’t happened. By now, Sunday number 521, she’s entitled to her doubts about the whole enterprise, which includes the razzmatazz hucksterism of her barker assistant (Jake Tkaczyk). And she congratulates us for our sense of possibility over plausibility.

That skepticism about spiritualist conjurers, and claims of lifting the veil between the living and the world of the dead, are part of the story, and the dramatic tension, in Casemore’s fascinating and intricate play. The Houdinis were famous spiritualist de-bunkers, and Harry’s agenda in the weekly séances is to explode the fraudulence for once and for all. The irony that glints off Lucky Charm at strange angles is that the widow of the star escape virtuoso is herself his prisoner, enchained from beyond the grave, sealed off from the world — by loyalty, by a sense of loss, by grief. Ah, and by memory.

I don’t want to spoil the surprises and unexpected puzzles of Casemore’s intriguing play, directed by Max Rubin of Theatre Yes and designed by Even Gilchrist. But Bess Houdini does conjuring of her own, by her interactions with the audience and by the memorabilia she collects, both from us and in the room. The storytelling of Lucky Charm is highly original, both in the story itself — which conjures an alluring lost Jazz Age world of entertainment (did you know Houdini made an elephant disappear?) — and in the way a remarkable story gets told, with the audience.

This is theatre up close, eyeball to eyeball (six of the audience of 15 are at the table, surrounded by the rest of us). And Casemore, as you know if you’ve seen OCD and GEMINI, is such a vivid, expressive, attentive performer.

Strange and eerie things happen; this is a production with both a magic consultant (Ron Pearson) and a special effects designer (Ian Walker). There’s a sense, to be sure, in which all live theatre is a conjuring of spirits, both living and dead. But Lucky Chance, irony-infused, is something special. It’s actually about the conjuring (with an alluring story to tell about a legendary escape and illusion artist and the behind-the-scenes assistant to whom he was married). And we the audience share some magic of our own; our memories are the key that unlocks her story. Are we Bess’s lucky charm? More than that I shouldn’t say, but it’s an easeful interaction that counts, theatrically and narratively.

The Common Ground Arts Society/ Theatre Yes production, developed during the playwright/star’s two-year Fresh AiR Residency at Found Fest, sold out its entire run in advance. Lucky Chance is now in its last weekend live (and unless you do have a lucky charm or connections beyond the grave, you should consider the streaming option of this very cool show July 23 through 27). Details at commongroundarts.ca.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Lifting the veil between the living and the dead: Lucky Charm, a little review of a very cool show

A vintage ’60s comedy done up deluxe(ly) at Teatro: The Odd Couple, a review

Posted on July 18, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Alexander Ariate in The Odd Couple, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The sound of an audience laughing out loud is something to be cherished — especially if it’s live, and you’re there among the people. One of the classics of old-school American comedy returns, in style, to the stage here, after an absence of two decades. And with Teatro Live!’s revival of The Odd Couple, Neil Simon’s 1965 comedy, his most produced and popular, you too can have that experience.

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

The great (and oft under-valued) skill of playwright Simon is to turn a remarkable supply of zingy one-liners into full-fledged characters. Especially a challenge, perhaps, when those characters are as definitive in the culture as Felix and Oscar, the mismatched newly single roommates of The Odd Couple. It’s a challenge to which Belinda Cornish’s production, beautifully cast and with bench strength beyond the stars, rises in a hilarious way.   

We hear of Felix Unger (Andrew MacDonald-Smith) and Oscar Madison (Alexander Ariate) before we actually see them — the neatnik neurotic and the easy-going slob, respectively — from their  poker-playing buddies.

The Friday night game location is the latter’s eight-room Upper West Side apartment, reduced by the born-again bachelor to an epic mess of empties, strewn towels, laundry, chip bags (set design: Lieke den Bakker). The refreshments are suspect; Oscar’s fridge has been broken for two weeks. “There’s milk standing up that isn’t even in the bottle,” says one of the guys. Oscar’s game night “buffet” consists of a green or brown sandwiches (“either very new cheese or very old meat”). When Felix brings the food, by contrast, it’s “cream cheese and pimiento on date-nut bread.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Alexander Ariate in The Odd Couple, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Oscar the slovenly sportswriter is broke (he’s strapped for rent and behind on alimony); Felix, the uptight, obsessively fastidious television news writer whose wife has just left him, needs a place to live. Does this entirely incompatible pair have a hope in hell of successful co-habitation? The odds-against quotient is, of course, the comic ground zero of The Odd Couple. The new room-mates drive each other crazy. And the architecture of the story is built on the the way the frictions of this shotgun “marriage” bring to the foreground the reasons why each of their wives got fed up and left them. Ariate and MacDonald-Smith, both expert comic actors, are uproarious as Oscar and Felix.

Fresh from a very fine performance as Horse (a horse) in Horseplay at Workshop West, Ariate’s Oscar has a lovable and breezy sense of largesse about him that makes even his most mordant one-liners  seem like his interpretation of cosmic joking around. Oscar, who has never poured a drink he didn’t slop (the audience goes Oooo collectively when he knocks the nut bowl to the floor), is not only impossible to squelch by mere criticism, he rises, albeit off the couch, to it. He is a man energized by exasperation.

His depressive and neurotic room-mate, whom he memorably describes as “the only man in the world with clenched hair,” is, in MacDonald’s performance, a morose and adenoidal master of the passive-aggressive. Tall and lanky (even his pants are uptight), Felix enters the room legs first, shoulders slumped, a veritable sight gag in himself. His hypochondria (“on New Year’s Eve he has a Pepto-Bismal,” says Oscar) is a stitch. Listening to Felix “open” his sinuses made the audience shriek with laughter. Watching MacDonald-Smith try to arrange himself in a low chair is a little comic gem. It’s a performance of great physical dexterity and precision.

Felix rises to happiness only when exercising his homemaker’s skill set: his relationship with the vacuum cleaner and the cord is a veritable pas de deux. It’s exactly the kind of obsessive bustling that reduces the affable Oscar to seething fury. “Leave everything alone! I’m not finished dirtying up for the night.”

Clockwise Oscar Derkx, Bernardo Pacheco, Alexander Ariate, Mat Busby, in The Odd Couple, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifouc

It’s a mark of Cornish’s production that the supporting roles are occupied so amusingly. The poker guys — kitted out by costume designer Leona Brausen, a ’60s expert —  are individualized in performance: Garett Ross’s sardonic Speed; Mat Busby’s thoughtfully analytical cop;  Oscar Derkx as Vinnie, the naif who consistently fails to read the room; Bernardo Pacheco as Roy the accountant on a short fuse. They make the most of the domestic texture of Simon’s comedy in which we, apparently inadvertently, get to learn telling snippets about all their marriages and kids and jobs.

Kristin Johnston, Jenny McKillop, Alexander Ariate, Andrew MacDonald-Smith in The Odd Couple, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

And the giggly English Pigeon sisters Gwendolyn and Cecily (“the English Betty Boops,” as Oscar puts it), who arrive for a disastrous double-dinner date, are a hoot in performances by Jenny McKillop and Kristin Johnston. They are an eyeful, as outfitted in 60s flamboyance by Brausen.  Their luminous orange chiffon baby doll peignoirs, the plumage of Brit birds, will make you giddy.

It’s one of those comedies that gets wrapped up pretty abruptly in the interests of a happy ending that seems a bit obligatory. And you do wonder how on earth Oscar and Felix ever became friends in the first place. But that’s on Simon, not this Teatro production. There is great vintage fun to be had, revisiting the sights and sounds of the ’60s in this seminal American comedy, and the period views on marriage and divorce, male camaraderie, friendship that go with them. We all had a blast.

REVIEW

The Odd Couple

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Neil Simon

Directed by: Belinda Cornish

Starring: Alexander Ariate, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Mat Busby, Oscar Derkx, Garett Ross, Bernardo Pacheco, Jenny McKillop, Kristin Johnston

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through July 27

Tickets: teatrolive.com, varsconatheatre.com.

 

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on A vintage ’60s comedy done up deluxe(ly) at Teatro: The Odd Couple, a review

Toasting the season on Edmonton stages: the 37th annual Sterling Awards, led by Brick Shithouse

Posted on July 15, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Brick Shithouse, fenceless theatre, Common Ground Arts Society, Found Festival 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A wave of indie creativity prevailed at the 36th annual Sterling Awards bash Monday night hosted by Luc Tellier and Nadien Chu, as the theatre community put on lipstick and dancing shoes at the Westbury Theatre to toast the season just past on Edmonton stages.

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

Alexander Ariate as Horse, Lee Boyes as Jacques in Horseplay by Kole Durnford, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifousl Set by Beyata Hackborn, lighting by Sarah Karpyshin

The outstanding production Sterling for the season belongs to Horseplay by newcomer Kole Durnford, a highly imaginative two-hander about the best-friendship between a horse and his jockey — that premiered at Workshop West.

Oscar Derkx and Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

Its counterpart in the best musical category, Grindstone Theatre’s production of the virtuoso Broadway musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, the finale of the company’s new mainstage musical season at the Orange Hub, got top honours from the Sterling jury.

But it was a new play, produced with visceral bone-crushing physicality in a warehouse, that proved decisively the top choice of jurors at the celebration, named for theatre pioneer Elizabeth Sterling Haynes. Ashleigh Hicks’ Brick Shithouse, which took us into the world of disaffected 20-something underachievers gravitating to the dangerous illusion of online anonymity, picked up six Sterlings of its eight nominations. In addition to top honours in the indie category, the fenceless theatre production (developed by Common Ground Arts Society at its Found Festival) took away a best director award for Sarah J Culkin, as well as Sterlings for Even Gilchrist’s lighting, Sam Jeffery’s fight direction, and Culkin’s ensemble cast. And it garnered the playwright the top award in the highly competitive best new play category where contenders included Stephen Massicotte, Kole Durnford, Andrew Ritchie and AJ Hrooshkin.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical. Luc Tellier (centre) as Puck, Citadel Theatre. Costumes by Deanna Finnman, set by Hanne Loosen, lighting by Jareth Li. Photo by Nanc Price.

Of its eight nominations, Daryl Cloran’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The 70s Musical at the Citadel — a re-fitting of Shakespeare’s most popular rom-com with danceable chart-toppers by the likes of Supertramp — took home three Sterlings, one for Oscar Derkx’s supporting performance, one for Deanna Finnman’s amusingly flamboyant ‘70s costumes, one for Ben Elliott’s musical direction.

Cody Porter in Angry Alan, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

The acting awards, divided between musicals and straight plays, were dispersed among large and small companies. For his star performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in the Byron Martin’s Grindstone production of Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show, Zachary Parsons-Lozinski now has a Sterling Award. The Sterling for leading performance in a play went to Cody Porter, for his nuanced, smartly calibrated performance as a men’s movement recruit in Trevor Schmidt’s Northern Light production of Angry Alan.

The supporting role Sterlings went to Alexandra Dawkins for her performance as Madame in the Putrid Brat production of Jean Genet’s play The Maids, and to Oscar Derkx as rustic artisan Flute, coaxed onto rollerskates into the role of Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The 70s Musical at the Citadel.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Joel Schaefer in The Play That Goes Wrong, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The Citadel’s only other Sterling went to Beyata Hackborn’s ingeniously disintegrating set for last summer’s The Play The Goes Wrong (a co-production with Theatre Calgary and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre). In all, of its 25 nominations in 26 Sterling categories, Edmonton’s largest playhouse came away with but four awards.

Damon Pitcher, Jacob Holloway, Victoria Suen, Amanda Neufeld in Krampus: A New Musical, Straight Edge Theatre at Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Elsewhere, Stephen Allred and Seth Gilfillan’s jaunty and macabre holiday musical comedy Krampus, the work of Straight Edge Theatre and Workshop West, picked up the Sterling for outstanding score. Kena León’s intricately cross-hatched sound design for Amanda Goldberg’s Dance Nation at the SkirtsAfire Festival got a Sterling. And T. Erin Gruber’s multi-media design for Thou Art Here’s Cycle, which set Andrew Ritchie in motion atop a bicycle careening through urban streets, was a Sterling winner in a five-nominee category that included such large-scale productions as Disney’s Frozen and Heist at the Citadel (as well as After Mourning – Before Van Gogh and The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, both at Shadow Theatre).

Of the five Fringe categories, four Sterlings went to the new and scoriating Liam Salmon play Local Diva: The Danielle Smith Diaries. The Low Hanging Fruits’ premiere was deemed by the jury both the outstanding new work and the outstanding production amongst offerings at Edmonton’s giant summer theatre festival. It also garnered Sterlings for director Owen Holloway, and for star Zachary Parsons-Lozinski (his second Sterling of the night) in a blistering performance, flamboyant and furious. Luc Tellier’s Fringe production of the Kat Sandler comedy Bright Lights, set in a support group for people who’ve had encounters with aliens, was deemed the best Fringe ensemble.

The theatre for young audiences Sterlings went to Alberta Musical Theatre’s Rapunzel (outstanding production) and the Silver Skate Festival’s (outstanding artistic achievement).

As previously announced, Gina Moe was this year’s recipient of the Margaret Mooney Award for outstanding achievement in administration. The Ross Hill Award for Outstanding Achievement in Production went to Nico Van Der Kley. And director/ artistic director Gerry Potter, the founder of Workshop West Playwrights Theatre and more recently Rising Sun Theatre, and altogether a tireless supporter, mentor and promoter of Canadian theatre, was recognized for his Outstanding Contribution to Edmonton theatre.

Congratulations to all the nominees, the Sterling recipients — and, heck!, to everyone who defied the odds-against in a tough year and made theatre happen this season in Edmonton.

And the 2024-2025 Sterling Awards go to …

Outstanding Production of a Play: Horseplay (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre)

The Timothy Ryan Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical: A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (Grindstone Theatre)

Outstanding Independent Production: Brick Shithouse (Fenceless Theatre and Common Ground Arts)

Outstanding New Play (award to playwright): Ashleigh Hicks, Brick Shithouse (Fenceless Theatre and Common Ground Arts)

Outstanding Performance in a Leading Role (Play): Cody Porter, Angry Alan (Northern Light Theatre)

Outstanding Performance in a Leading Role (musical): Zachary Parsons-Lozinski “Lilith Fair,” Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show (Grindstone Theatre )

Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role (play): Alexandra Dawkins The Maids (Putrid Brat)

Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role (musical): Oscar Derkx, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ‘70s Musical (The Citadel Theatre)

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Play or Musical: the cast of Brick Shithouse (Fenceless Theatre and Common Ground Arts)

Outstanding Director: Sarah J Culkin, Brick Shithouse  (Fenceless Theatre and Common Ground Arts)

Outstanding Set Design: Beyata Hackborn, The Play That Goes Wrong (The Citadel Theatre, Theatre Calgary, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre)

Outstanding Lighting Design: Even Gilchrist, Brick Shithouse (Fenceless Theatre and Common Ground Arts)

Outstanding Costume Design: Deanna Finnman, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical (The Citadel Theatre)

Outstanding Score of a Play or Musical: Seth Gilfillan and Stephen Allred, Krampus: A New Musical (Straight Edge Theatre and Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre)

Outstanding Sound Design: Kena León, Dance Nation (SkirtsAFire Festival)

Outstanding Musical Direction: Ben Elliott, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical (The Citadel Theatre)

Outstanding Choreography, Fight, or Intimacy Direction: Sam Jeffery, Brick Shithouse (Fenceless Theatre and Common Ground Arts)

Outstanding Multimedia Design: T. Erin Gruber, Cycle (Thou Art Here Theatre)

Outstanding Production for Young Audiences: Rapunzel (Alberta Musical Theatre Company)

Outstanding Artistic Achievement, Theatre for Young Audiences: Even Gilchrist, Tessa Stamp, and Whittyn Jason, The “Away” Project (Silver Skate Festival)

Outstanding Fringe Production: Local Diva: The Danielle Smith Diaries (Low Hanging Fruits)

Outstanding Fringe New Work (award to playwright): Liam Salmon, Local Diva: The Danielle Smith Diaries (Low Hanging Fruits)

Outstanding Fringe Performance By An Individual: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, Local Diva: The Danielle Smith Diaries (Low Hanging Fruits)

Outstanding Fringe Performance By An Ensemble: the cast of Bright Lights (Blarney Productions)

Outstanding Fringe Director: Owen Holloway, Local Diva: The Danielle Smith Diaries (Low Hanging Fruits)

Outstanding Individual Achievement in Production: Kat Evans (production manager)

Special Award: achievement in sustainability and community stewardship: Tessa Stamp

Margaret Mooney Award for Outstanding Achievement in Administation: Gina Moe

Ross Hill Award for Outstanding Achievement in Production: Nico Van Der Kley

Outstanding Contribution to Edmonton Theatre: Gerry Potter

 

 

 

 

Posted in News/Views | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Toasting the season on Edmonton stages: the 37th annual Sterling Awards, led by Brick Shithouse

In the pink: fizzy and fun Legally Blonde at the Citadel, a review

Posted on July 11, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Maya Baker, April Cook, Kelsey Verzotti, Sarah Horsman, Layne Labbe in Legally Blonde. Citadel Theatre and Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Omigod you guys…. This doom-laden summer, the peppy pink Broadway musical singing and dancing across candy-coloured frames on the Citadel mainstage is your invitation to, like, get happier.

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

Legally Blonde, which started out as a novel (by Amanda Brown) and became a 2001 movie hit with Reese Witherspoon before it arrived in 3-D on Broadway in 2007, is a daffy but energizing empowerment fable that gives you an enjoyable buzz, and no hangover whatsoever.

The work of Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin (music and lyrics) and Heather Hach (book), it tells the story of pink-clad UCLA sorority girl Elle (Kelsey Verzotti), a super-vivacious fashion merchandising major who goes to Harvard Law School. She does this in pursuit of her callow climber of an ex-boyfriend Warner Huntington III (Kaden Brett Forsberg) who’s dumped her for not being “serious” enough for his upcoming legal career.

At Harvard Law Elle discovers her inner-navy blue suit, so to speak, once she finds her textbooks that is. But in the end, underestimated, she defies everyone’s low expectations, including her snooty “serious” classmates, her ‘ex and his “serious” new girlfriend (Chelsea Woodard), and their intimidating tyrant of a law professor (John Ullyatt). Yup, Elle is a winner by being true to her own blonde rich Malibu girl self (and also because she’s the smartest person in the room).

Kelsey Verzotti and Daniel Fong in Legally Blonde, Citadel Theatre and Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price

Cheeky (and a wee bit subversive): this is a musical that shamelessly has its cake and eats it too, by looting the time-honoured archive of blonde jokes for fun, then turning them on their head. Do not judge a legal mind by her blonde highlights. Paulette (Patricia Zentilli), a sage hairdresser with romantic bruises, doesn’t make that mistake. Neither does the Law 101 teaching assistant Emmett (Daniel Fong), a helpful shlepper of a new friend who lends a hand (and then a heart).

John Ullyatt (right) as Professor Callahan in Legally Blonde. Citadel Theatre and Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price.

The Citadel/Theatre Calgary co-production directed and choreographed, with non-stop pizzaz, by Stephanie Graham is a veritable explosion of pink-fuelled energy. Beyata Hackborn’s set design is a fantasy arcade of successive proscenium arches in glowing popsicle colours, lighted by Renée Brode. Rebecca Toon’s pink-forward costumes, and there’s a wild profusion of them, are a riot. At the preview performance I was kindly allowed to attend, surrounded by excited pink-frocked people, costume changes were greeted by audience cheers. The “serious” Harvard types look pretty drab by comparison, and, really, where does it get them?

There’s been a touch-up of roots on Legally Blonde for the sensibilities of 2025. Professor Callahan, for example, refers acidly to “Gen Z enthusiasm.” Good humour does prevail, but the slightly queasy courtroom scene, for example, with its argument about the sexuality of a witness — is he gay or European? — now ends with a Pride flag flourish and boyfriend-boyfriend kiss. Elle’s rich papa’s throwaway comment about the ethnicity of the people she’ll meet at Harvard is gone.

Kelsey Verzotti in Legally Blonde. Citadel Theatre and Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price.

What saves Legally Blonde from earnestness about the sisterhood or female empowerment, is its light application of self-mockery at crucial moments. For one thing Elle has her own brightly pumped  Greek chorus, who enter singing, dancing, and advising up a storm whenever tragedy — like getting dumped, making bad hair decisions, getting outfaced by Warner’s new girlfriend, or being between issues of Cosmo — threatens. They are very amusing as the live in-person personal “essay” that accompanies Elle’s law school application (may I single out Maya Baker for her contagious vigour?). Their song Positive is a highlight: “keep it positive/ as you slap her to the floor. Keep it positive/ as you pull her hair and call her whore….”

Gunho Kwak, Buttercup and Patricia Zentilli, Legally Blonde. Citadel Theatre and Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price

And Elle has canine back-up, too. She arrives at Harvard Law School with a fluffy purse-sized dog named Bruiser, played with exemplary gravitas by Koko, last seen by Citadel audiences as an understudy in The Garneau Block. He was an audience favourite at the preview I saw. The other scene-stealer is Buttercup in a walk-on walk-off as Paulette’s dog, held hostage by her -ex. Ah, and the sexy UPS guy played with comic pizzaz by Gunho Kwak.

The O’Keefe/Benjamin songs aren’t particularly catchy in melody. But the rhymes will make you smile. Warner’s breaking-up song, Serious, a little gem of crossed wires, is nailed by Forsberg and Verzotti, “if I’m gonna be a senator when I’m thirty, I’m gonna need somebody … Serious. Less of a Marilyn more of a Jackie/ somebody classy and not too tacky … serious.”

Professor Callahan’s review, in song, of the legal profession, Blood in the Water, is a highlight, delivered by Ullyatt with carnivorous aplomb.  “Read your Thomas Hobbs/ Only spineless snobs/ Will quarrel with the morally dubious jobs.” There’s a rhyme to savour.

Daniel Fong, Kelsey Verzotti , Kaden Brett-Forsberg in Legally Blonde. Citadel Theatre and Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price

Elle, in Verzotti’s spirited performance, negotiates the chin-up girly brashness of our heroine without getting too cloying. You want her to succeed (and are secretly relieved she’s opted for law and not, say, neurosurgery). Graham’s cast, including Verzotti and the appealing Fong, are first-rate physical performers and singers.

There’s a certain appealing kookiness about the whole thing. Suddenly there’s a Riverdance spoof, for heaven’s sake, pertaining to Paulette’s taste in dream men. What? And there’s a whole production number devoted to the motivational skills, in action, of gung-ho fitness queen Brooke (Sarah Horsman), whose murder charge requires an Elle intervention. What? The answer is: just for the theatrical fun of it.

This fizzy concoction is not dinner, my friends, nor was meant to be. This is not even champagne (more like bubble tea), but no matter. It’s spiked with some sass, and a sense of humour about itself. There’s a buoyant summer message about verve and self-belief (and wearing pink at all times). A perfect summer drink.   

REVIEW

Legally Blonde

Theatre: Citadel and Theatre Calgary

Written by: Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin (music and lyrics), Heather Hach (book) based on the Amanda Brown and the MGM motion picture

Directed by: Stephanie Graham

Starring: Kelsey Verzotti, Daniel Fong, Kaden Brett-Forsberg, Sarah Horsman, John Ullyatt, Patricia Zentilli, Gunho Kwak, Maya Baker, Jessica Jones, Layne Labbe, Jameela McNeil, Robyn Ord, Mark Sinongco, Dean Stockdale, Chelsea Woodard, Buttercup, Koko

Running: through August 3

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on In the pink: fizzy and fun Legally Blonde at the Citadel, a review

Musicals, comedies, and a mysterious experiment in contacting the dead: a week of choices on Edmonton stages

Posted on July 10, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Alexander Ariate in The Odd Couple, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The Lion King, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“There’s more to be seen than can ever be seen.” OK, Rafiki the shaman baboon isn’t singing about the week in Edmonton theatre at the start of The Lion King. But, heck, he could have been; you have choices.

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

Among them, movies magically transformed into stage productions, a mysterious experiment in connecting with the dead, a classic stage comedy, a comedy about the classics….

•The return to these parts today, after nearly a decade, of Julie Taymor’s 1997 musical, a non-pareil triumph in conjuring an imaginary world. The Lion King, which magically transforms the 1994 Disney Corp movie animation into a stage musical with exclusively animal characters, has been here before, a couple of times, under the Broadway Across Canadian banner. The stagecraft is magical: rod puppets, stunningly inventive headgear and appendages that transform human actors into animals. And they come to life in a Shakespearean coming-of-age story of usurpation, dispossession, exile, restoration. It runs on the Jube stage till July 27. Tickets: ticketmaster.ca.

•At the Citadel, pink rules, in a Broadway musical fuelled by an anthem to empowerment and self-belief. Pink-powered Legally Blonde, which started as a novel, became a hit movie and then arrived onstage singing and dancing, tells a tale of the California sorority girl who surprises everyone by going to Harvard Law School. The Citadel-Theatre Calgary co-production directed by Stephanie Graham officially opens Thursday and runs through August. 3. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

•The classic mismatched roommate comedy is at hand. Neil Simon’s 1965 gem The Odd Couple, which hasn’t been seen onstage in these parts for a couple of decades, is the season finale at Teatro Live!. Belinda Cornish’s production has an all-star cast led by Andrew MacDonald-Smith as the fastidious up-tight Felix and Alexander Ariate as the imperturbably slovenly Oscar. It runs at the Varscona through July 27. Tickets: teatrolive.com.

Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Found Festival 2025. Photo by Brianne Jang

•Found, the festival of unexpected encounters with art and artists, is back. Surprise! You could find yourself in a grand Masonic hall, or a bedroom, or a “secret residential location.” And the mainstage presentation is, alluringly, an encounter with the greatest mystery of all. Is there life after death? Louise Casemore’s Lucky Charm, the feature presentation at the festival, invites you to the home of Bess Houdini, the widow of the most famous magician in the world, as she attempts to make contact beyond the Great Veil. Have a peek at 12thnight’s festival preview. And meet Louise Casemore, the creator and star of Lucky Charm, which runs through July 20 in a house in the Hazeldean neighbourhood, in this 12thnight interview. There’s a new Michael Watt satire at  Found, too: Reign Check! And more. The full schedule of Found Fest events, descriptions, and tickets: commongroundarts.ca.

•At Walterdale, Edmonton’s venerable community theatre, Shakespeare In Love, opening tonight at the company’s ex-firehall home in Strathcona, is a backstage pass to the fractious, competitive world of Elizabethan theatre in the 1590s. The stage version of the delightful 1998 Marc Norman/ Tom Stoppard movie rightfully claims its space in the live theatre, since that’s what it’s about. You’ll meet a promising young upstart, Will Shakespeare, who’s promised a beleaguered theatre manager a comedy “with a love story, and a dog.” C’mon, anyone could get writer’s block. Anne Marie Szucs’ production runs through July 19. Tickets: showpass.com.   

Posted in Previews | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Musicals, comedies, and a mysterious experiment in contacting the dead: a week of choices on Edmonton stages

The fascinating mystery of Mrs. Houdini: Louise Casemore’s Lucky Charm premieres at Found Fest

Posted on July 7, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Defiance Theatre at Found Festival 2025. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You know how a question slides into your brain at an oblique angle — and takes over — when you’re really supposed to be thinking about something else?

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

Actor/playwright Louise Casemore has been there. And the result is Lucky Charm, the uniquely intriguing (and site-specific) solo show that is the mainstage presentation at this year’s Found Festival.

It happened in Banff, “in a solo (playwright’s) residency, and I was supposed to be working on a different play,” Casemore laughs. And then the fateful question overtook that script: “what would it have been like to be married to a person world famous for his ability to escape? Someone who intentionally puts themself in death’s way intentionally, all the time? What would that dinner conversation have been like?”

That person was Harry Houdini. And you are not alone if you didn’t know there was a remarkable and complicated love story attached (or should we say chained?) to him, a story remarkable both in life and after he died under mysterious circumstances. Did you know he was married? To a performer “with an act of her own? Casemore didn’t. “The more I learned the more I was shocked I’d never heard the story before, in the public sphere, in pop culture. I was astonished no one had taken a crack at Bess Houdini’s story before….” Research was irresistible. “And here we are, just over two years later, on the doorstep to a premiere.”

Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Found Festival 2025. Photo by Brianne Jang

The doorstep? Well, exactly. Lucky Charm opens Thursday at the home of Mrs. Houdini (a secret residential location in the Hazeldean neighbourhood), where she regularly tried to make contact with the dearly departed. It’s an invitation to the 1920s and the séance table or the onlookers’ gallery.

When Bess met Harry, as Casemore explains, she was a performer in her own right, with an act of her own, “a singer and dancer in the Coney Island pier vaudeville scene.” And when she took a back seat to assist the most celebrated magician in the world with his act, “she was instrumental, the major brain power, in helping Harry develop some of his most famous tricks.”

“In lots of ways his success came to define her position in life as well,” explains Casemore. “And, in a way quite tragically, she became the symbol of Harry’s legacy, keeping the throngs at bay, people desperate to break into his house and steal his secrets. She became the protector of his estate, much to the chagrin of the magic community in lots of ways.”

Lucky Charm by and starring Louise Casemore, Defiance Theatre at Found Festival 2025. Photo by Brianne Jang

There is a romantic love story attached to the Houdinis. And Casemore was struck, she said, by their common devotion to debunking spiritualism that was all the rage in the ‘20s, and exposing its practitioners and mediums as frauds — “their secondary mission in life.” Witness the very public falling out of Houdini and his friend Arthur Conan Doyle, a devoted spiritualist, at the time.

Lucky Charm is inspired by “the great irony” of the Houdinis’ mutual agreement that “If Harry were to die, Bess would hold a séance so he could prove for once and for all whether was an afterlife. Which really became the foundation of the play.” It was, says Casemore, a case of Harry announcing to the world, in effect, “you can trust me on this; if I can’t do it, no one can.”

Casemore, who trained as an actor in Fort McMurray, has a U of A master’s degree in theatre practice (her specialty is playwriting for immersive theatre). And Lucky Charm isn’t the first time she’s been attracted to taking theatre to unusual, intimate locations (her mantra: “small capacity shouldn’t be small theatre”). She’d been directing and producing her own indie work for almost a decade in 2015 when the Fringe director of the time Thomas Scott wondered if by chance she had a piece she’d like to try in a new bar near the Fringe grounds. It was the basement of the Mexican bistro bar El Cortez. “I felt it was a low-risk opportunity,” she says. So that’s where Casemore premiered her Sterling Award-winning Fringe hit OCD, which went on to tour the country. Functional and GEMINI followed.

Undressed did play an actual theatre, the Martha Cohen, in a production by Calgary’s Alberta Theatre Projects. But it was reconfigured for Casemore’s theatrical purposes. “We were having a full-on auction (of used wedding dresses). So, an unconventional experience in a conventional space,” as she puts it.

Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Defiance Theatre at Found Festival 2025. Photo by Brianne Jang

With Lucky Charm, “I was so fascinated about using a real home, where we have to be polite about wiping our feet … a place with carpet and shoes, with a life.” Bess, after all, “held séances in her home, and never charged … as part of her promise to Harry.” The world was cruel: “she was called a charlatan and a gold-digger — even though she didn’t make money” from the séances. Casemore found herself wanting to “to give a voice to this woman who’d had such a challenging and interesting life.”

Casemore laughs. “One of the key points of my affection for Bess was that she was notoriously unlikeable.” Casemore’s “actor brain,” she says, was galvanized by that sour, difficult personality: “what’s simmering underneath that? I was keen as an actor to take on that challenge as well.”

At last year’s Found, Lucky Charm had a workshop, as the first year of Casemore’s two-year Fresh AiR residency at the festival. And she discovered that the audience was quite affected by the persistence of Bess, a career skeptic, in trying to make contact beyond the grave. “There are so many rituals surrounding loss.” Casemore points out. “And if there’s even a chance, maybe …. Part of it is hope, grief, wishful thinking.” And, of course, there’s the possibility of magic.

Lucky Charm

Found Festival 2025

Theatre: Defiance Theatre, presented by a partnership between the Found Festival and Theatre YES

Written by: Louise Casemore

Directed by: Max Rubin

Starring: Louise Casemore with Jake Tkaczyk

Where: “a secret residential location in Hazeldean neighbourhood”

Running: Wednesday through July 20

Tickets: commongroundarts.ca (currently sold out, but there’s a waiting list plus another option, soon to be announced)

   

Posted in Previews | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on The fascinating mystery of Mrs. Houdini: Louise Casemore’s Lucky Charm premieres at Found Fest

Putting the Find back in Found: the festival of unexpected encounters with art and artists is back

Posted on July 5, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Found Festival 2025. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What will you Find at Found? Surprise! “Experiences you can’t find anywhere else,” says Whittyn Jason, the director of the festival of unexpected encounters with art and artists.

Common Ground Arts Society’s Found Fest is back Wednesday for a 14th annual edition.  And as a Found-ling you could find yourself in a grand Masonic Hall, a warehouse video studio, the bedroom of a couple you’ve never met, a private residence in a ‘hood.… Or partying inside an original art installation in the middle of the night.

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

The “mainstage” production, to blithely borrow a term from considerably more conventional theatre, happens in “a secret residential location somewhere in the Hazeldean neighbourhood.” For an audience of 15 at a time.

In Lucky Charm, by and starring Louise Casemore, we’re invited into the home of Bess Houdini, the widow of the most famous magician in the world, as she continues her regular attempts to contact her late husband. Ah yes, and in the process, to throw light on the most alluring mystery of them all: is there, could there possibly be, life after death?

Lucky Charm, by and starring Louise Casemore, Defiance Thatre at Found Festival 2025. Graphic supplied.

“So cool and so ambitious,” says Jason of the show. And its intimate location means that “the magic, the illusions happen right in front of your eyes. People will be enchanted. Louise is such a captivating performer. And she’s so precise…. A unique space, a unique story, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

The Defiance Theatre production, developed during Casemore’s time as Found’s two-year Fresh AiR Artist Residency program, is presented by a first-ever partnership between Common Ground Arts and Theatre Yes. In fact it’s directed by the latter company’s artistic director Max Rubin. Stay tuned for 12thnight’s upcoming conversation with creator/star Casemore.

Like last summer’s Brick Shithouse (nominated for eight Sterling Awards), Lucky Charm has an extended run, past the festival dates. But tickets are vanishing faster than a rabbit from a magician’s top hat. Found Fest’s managing producer Mac Brock reports (laughing)  that since the box office is so hot, “I asked the team if there could be one or two more seats a performance. And the looks I received!” So, short answer: nope. But there’s a waiting list, and, wait for it, other possibilities.

At the other end of the spectrum of unexpected “found spaces” at Found 2025 is the grand Masonic Hall downtown. That’s where you’ll find Reign Check by Michael Watt, half of the pair (with Jaquelin Walters) who brought the wistfully odd and funny musical clown play Let’s Not Turn On Each Other to last summer’s Fringe. For Reign Check they’re co-producers, and Walters is in the cast of Erin Pettifor’s production.

Reign Check, the third full Walters and Watt production in as many years, chronicles the fortunes of aged King Leslie, “out of touch, self-absorbed, clinging to his throne and his authority, whose subjects are trying to expel him from the kingdom,” as Jason describes. “It is chaotic. It is interactive. It is confrontational, a satirical talk on political power.” And if this isn’t sounding relevant to you, you’re not really awake.

“I love their work,” says Jason of the pair. “I saw Let’s Not Turn On Each Other at the Fringe, and I was immediately obsessed with these two. When they pitched something (to Found), I was so intrigued.” Trying to describe the nutty hilarity of the piece, Brock thinks of the duo as “the prairie Cole Escola,” the eccentrically hilarious cabaret artiste/creator/star of Oh Mary!, which found its buzz small-time and became the toast of Broadway. “It’s if a medieval king went to a powerpoint party!”

“I genuinely think they’re the funniest people in the city,” Brock says. “This is a period piece but it is somehow so unmistakably Gen Z and 2025. Or 2035.” And the ornate Freemasons venue, with its beautiful stained glass and natural light (not to mention the skull and cross bones embedded in the floor), suits the play perfectly.

S.E. Grummett and Sam Kruger in Slugs, Creepy Boys at Found Festival 2025. Graphic by Bokeh Media.

A new show from S.E. Grummett and Sam Kruger is an alt-theatre special occasion. And Slugs, the latest from the co-creators of queer-cult hits Creepy Boys and Something in the Water, is particularly category-resistant. Jason talks about its “techno-punk cabaret format,” but with clowns and “a puppet nightmare.” Brock, expanding, says “two techno-punk musicians set out to put together a show about … nothing. Not about anything that’s wrong in the world, not about anything that matters…. It’s ‘we’re just here to have a good time, not think or feel anything’. And as you can imagine, it’s not an easy thing to do.” Audiences are strictly 18+ for the show, which happens at Strong Coffee Studios in outer Strathcona (6571 Gateway Blvd).     

Meegan Sweet and Jasmine Hopfe in Headhole, Found Festival 2025. Photo supplied

Claudia Kulay’s Headhole, also an 18+ experience, makes voyeurs of its audiences — in a bedroom in a secret residential location in Strathcona (“under 10 minutes walking from the Fringe Arts Barns” as billed). As Brock explains, “a couple, played by Jasmine Hopfe and Meegan Sweet, are trying to spice up their love life, so they experiment with having people watch them in the bedroom…. ” Jason, who saw an earlier iteration of Headhole at the 2023 Fringe, describes it as “intimate, and funny.”  This new production is directed by Geoffrey Simon Brown, who’s been in on the Found Festival since its very beginning in 2011.

Duh-Bull Fee-Churr: Older Girlz & Smoke Show, which takes place at sunset in Paul Kane Park in Strathcona, pairs the free-floating performance/spoken word work of Big Al McKee and Steve Pirot. Brock calls Big Al’s Older Girlz, which had a reading at this year’s SkirtsAfire Festival, “mesmerizing.” He says “it feels like three schoolgirls plays games in the playground, sharing secrets and gossip, with all the insecurities and super-powers of it….” Jason agrees. “There’s a big coming-of-age aspect to it.”  Actors Sophie May Healey and Autumn Strom have been enlisted to lead the adventure “through your dreams and your nightmares.” It’s is a roving show, says Jason. “And you can run around the park with them. But if you’re not a rover, that is also fine. You can sit watch them run around the park.”

As for Smoke Show, if you saw Pirot in Uncle Stiv’s Looping Machine at the Fringe, you’ll know to expect something kooky, poetic, and smart from this unclassifiable “new rhapsody,” as billed, from the poet/playwright/philosopher.

The Found Fest has a tradition of poetry showcases in diverse forms. This year, (un)earthed, (re)birthed is curated jointly by Philip Hackborn and  Shima Robinson, joined by five other artists. So, seven poets in all responding to the prompt ‘where have we come from? what have we left behind?’.” The poets have been encouraged to bring in an object, and reflect on its meaning.

This year’s Fresh AiR artist in residence, Shyanne Duquette presents a reading of their new play Skinhead at the Studio Theatre in the Fringe Arts Barns. “A really fearless writer,” as Brock describes, who takes us into the world of 12- to 15-year-old boys. “The writing is so sharp; the voices are so clear.” Skinhead will get a full production premiere next year at Found.

As always at Found there’s a music series. And new this year is AfterFound, a nightly afterparty of music and performance at the Fringe Grounds Cafe. In a partnership with Latitude 53, the space is awaiting the transformational ministrations of visual artist Alexis De Villa to become “a magical nightclub performance venue,” as Jason puts it.

AfterFound at Found Festival 2025. Graphic supplied

Afterfound has a music night, a cabaret variety night, and a big-ass summer art party, Hot Garbage — part dance party, part multi-disciplinary performance showcase, part interactive installations, part just-plain indescribable. As Jason explains, 12 artists have been enlisted, and at the outset of the festival, they’re put into four groups of three — with a 72-hour time limit “to collaborate and come up with some sort of installation/ durational something!.” All four will be revealed at the big Hot Garbage party that happens in De Villa’s installation.

As for you, my Foundling friends, prepare your glue guns and duct tape. You will be wearing “the hottest garbage of the year, your re-used, up-cycled stuff, the crazier and wackier the better.”

Found Festival 2025 runs Wednesday through Sunday in assorted venues. Further show information, full schedule, and tickets: commongroundarts.ca.

   

  

Posted in Features, Previews | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Putting the Find back in Found: the festival of unexpected encounters with art and artists is back

The season on Edmonton stages, highlights part 2

Posted on July 3, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Alexander Ariate as Horse in Horseplay by Kole Durnford, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and costumes Beyata Hackborn, lighting Sarah Karpyshin

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Remembering the 2024-2025 theatre season — in its performances, its design inspirations, its risky experiments, its moments of magic (and/or crazy live-ness) — and its saddest, most irreplaceable losses.

Start with those. The passing of wonderful theatre artists Julien Arnold, Jim DeFelice, and John Wright, all accomplished and generous with their talents, all close to the heart of the Edmonton arts community.

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

Memorable performances, in roles big and small:

•Alexander Ariate. A captivating performance, comical and heart-catching, as Horse in Kole Durnford’s Horseplay at Workshop West. Perpetually in motion (choreography Amber Borotsik), he created a character with questions to ask about the perplexing human world, and the bonds of friendship, love, loyalty — and grass. .

Ellie Heath, Cathy Derkach, Brian Dooley in Jupiter by Colleen Murphy, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson.

•Brian Dooley. As the alcoholic patriarch In Colleen Murphy’s epic family drama Jupiter, a working-class House of Atreus, his performance in the Theatre Network premiere production set the bar high in fearlessness — a memorably harsh, prickly, judgmental character, a veritable repository of grievances through three decades.

•Ron Pederson. In A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder, the Broadway musical comedy produced by Grindstone in their new mainstage season at the Orange Hub, dies in inventive ways no fewer than eight times. In a bravura comic performance, he played almost all the members, variously snobby, vicious, daffy, and insane, of a blue-blood family who get murdered serially by a disinherited upstart. Surely Pederson must be wondering what an actor has to do to get a Sterling nomination.

Oscar Derkx in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudrea

•Oscar Derkx. See above. A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder relies for its comic complicity on a serial killer who’s absolutely likeable and disarming. A performance of comic charm, dexterity, and finesse.

John Ullyatt as Bottom, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The 70s Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

•John Ullyatt. Speaking as we are of death-defying death scenes, the single most prolonged and hilarious example in the season belongs to Ullyatt’s performance as Bottom, the bossy stage-struck weaver who’s gallantly offered to play all the roles in Pyramus and Thisbe put on by rustic amateurs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the ‘70s Musical at the Citadel.

•Garett C. Smith. A magnetic performance — witty, with commanding gravitas — as the title character of Neil Grahn’s new birth-of-an-activist play The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow at Shadow Theatre. A remarkable (and remarkably unknown) historical character who returned from a star role with Canadian forces in World War I to find he couldn’t even vote.

Nikki Hulowski and Brennan Campbell in Where You Are, Shadow Theatre. Set and lighting Daniel vanHeyst, costumes Leona Brausen. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

•Nikki Hulowski. As the estranged daughter In Where You Are at Shadow Theatre, a performance that negotiated with ease the artifices of a Kristen Da Silva sibling comedy that doles out its dark family secrets, like its one-liners, on the quota system. Always fun to watch.

•Cody Porter. An unerringly calibrated performance at Northern Light Theatre that gives this Penelope Skinner stinger of a play its chilling insight: how on earth an ordinary reasonable, even decent guy, gets red-pilled. A question for our Moment.

•Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk. In Radiant Vermin, the season’s “Modest Proposal,” this engaging and entirely watchable pair of newcomers brought a breezy charm to the couple who mysteriously acquire and continually get to upgrade their dream home — at a horrifying price. At the toxic centre of Philip Ridley’s withering Faustian satire is an insight about insatiable consumerist greed.

Mathew Hulshof, Bella King, Rachel Bowron in On The Banks Of The Nut, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

•Bella King. Irresistibly bright and funny as the dauntless temp, an agent of chaos, who sets the Stewart Lemoine screwball comedy On The Banks Of the Nut in motion, and keeps it there.

Sydney Williams. A dexterous, unsettling performance in Trevor Schmidt’s Monstress at Northern Light, as a Frankenstein-esque doctor whose triumph in bringing a dead girl back to life is tainted by gathering doubts about stepping outside the boundaries of human morality.

Julien Arnold and Geoffrey Simon Brown, in rehearsal for The Woman In Black, Teatro Live! 2024. Photo by Cassie Duval.

•Julien Arnold. In the hit thriller The Woman In Black at Teatro Live!, the late great actor played an elderly solicitor with a dark secret, who then conjured, with remarkable precision, everyone his younger self encountered, a wild assortment of characters and accents, on a fateful trip to the eerie north of England. Masterful.

•Lindsey Angell. As Blanche in the Citadel’s A Streetcar Named Desire, a dispossessed Southern belle from a lost world, valiantly in performance mode in a new one.

•Ellie Heath. In Colleen Murphy’s Jupiter at Theatre Network, a performance that cuts to the chase of the inter-generational drama: from the promise of a bright, curious young girl through middle-aged disappointment and beyond.

Togetherness: the season’s memorable ensembles.

Michael Cox (centre) and the cast of The Full Monty, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

•The Full Monty. Times being what they are, shattered male self-esteem isn’t, theoretically, in the top 10 of issues. And yet.… This 25-year-old Broadway musical about the desperation of a bunch of tough but fragile unemployed steel workers in Buffalo, depends on the chemistry of the ensemble for its humour and its charm. Kate Ryan’s Mayfield cast, led by Michael Cox, delivered.

•Stars On Her Shoulders. Hayley Moorhouse, Meegan Sweet, Dayna Lea Hoffman, Dana Wylie, Gabby Bernard in Stephen Massicotte’s memorable new World War I play, as nurses in a convalescent hospital in war-time France, struggling to re-imagine their lives and  prospects for happiness on the threshold of a new century.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical. Luc Tellier (centre) as Puck, Citadel Theatre. Costumes by Deanna Finnman, set by Hanne Loosen, lighting by Jareth Li. Photo by Nanc Price.

•A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The 70s musical. At the Citadel, a cast of 16 actors who sing, dance, and play instruments (led by Luc Tellier in vertiginous Fluevogs as agent of mischief Puck) preside over a plot with a lot of coupling — not to mention the pairing of Shakespeare and a jukebox full of chart-toppers.

Brick Shithouse, fenceless theatre, Found Festival 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang

•Brick Shithouse.  The seven-member ensemble directed by Sarah J Culkin hurl themselves, literally, into the online universe in Ashleigh Hicks’ play to create the world of restless 20-somethings who can’t seem to get traction as they wait for the lives to really begin.

Kragva, Moog and Wug in Goblin: Macbeth, Spontaneous Theatre at the Citadel. Photo supplied

•Goblin:Macbeth. Spontaneous Theatre deposited three curious goblins in the Rice to undertake a version of Shakespeare’s swift and gory tragedy of ambition and corruption. Witty and smart, one of my favourite shows of the season.

•Dance Nation. In SkirtsAfire Fest’s mainstage show, Amanda Goldberg’s cast of nine women, ages 20 to 50-something, took us into the fraught world of dance-mad 13-year-old girls.

Experiments of the year

•From Theatre Yes to your backyard, The Doorstep Plays, three short plays by up-and-comers, in a different location every show.

•Workshop West’s ticketing initiative: every ticket this season was pay-what-you-will, and general manager Jake Tkaczyk calls it “a smashing success.”

•Common Ground Arts initiative to pair aspiring theatre producers in one-on-ones with veterans.

The 2024-2025 award in theatre versatility: Darrin Hagen, who added opera librettist (Silence at NUOVA Vocal Arts) and film (Pride vs Prejudice) to his long list of credentials. Runner up: actor/ choreographer/ playwright/ composer Mhairi Berg.

Ambitious indie production of the season: Amena Shehab’s After The Trojan Women, which added to the great Euripides anti-war play modern characters from the contemporary war-blasted Middle East.

A season of bold design choices, a small selection of highlights:

•Greg Morrison’s original score for Mump and Smoot in Exit at Theatre Network, an dramatic assortment of jagged dissonances and violin riffs, for the strange dark world in which the pair find themselves.

John Turner (Smoot) and Michael Kennard (Mump) are back, in Mump and Smoot in Exit, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

•Darrin Hagen’s score for Stars On Her Shoulders at Workshop West: whiffs of Edwardian music hall, and allusions to a new and fractured world.

•Kena León’s cross-hatched sound score for Dance Nation at SkirtsAfire, a capture of the confusing apparently chaotic world of dance-obsessed pre-teen girls.

•Beyata Hackborn’s simultaneously real and magical set design for Horseplay at Workshop West, a grassy knoll that’s the tip of the earthly globe for Horse and Jockey, overhung with dreamy flying horses in perpetual motion.

•Deanna Finnman’s dressed the cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The 70s Musical at the Citadel in a wardrobe of fabulous sparkles and denim. The memory of Bottom (John Ullyatt) in his bellbottoms, transformed to rock star, lingers in the mind.

•Bonnie Beecher’s superbly atmospheric lighting for A Streetcar Named Desire at the Citadel, spoke to the heart of a play that is, at heart about two worlds, and two kinds of lighting, real and romantic, in collision.

Sydney Williams and Julia van Dam in Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Briane Jang, BB Collective Photography

•Larissa Poho’s dramatic colour-drenched lighting for Monstress at Northern Light, a play about obliterating the boundary between life and death.

•Amanda Sieve’s golden, sepia-tinged lighting for The Ballad of Johnny and June at the Citadel, using vintage onstage lighting instruments.

•T. Erin Gruber’s theatrical lighting design for the thriller The Woman in Black at Teatro Live! created a semi-visible, shadowy world, full of unsettling flickers and murk, indispensable for the storytelling.

Little Dickens, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, Theatre Network. Photo supplied.

•In Little Dickens, the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes at Theatre Network,  Burkett’s costume designs, exquisitely executed by Kim Crossley, for the cast of diminutive actors appearing in their own version of A Christmas Carol, with aging showgirl Esmé Massengill as the flinty Ebenezer. Her “redemption gown” is a showstopper,

•Corwin Ferguson’s multi-media design for the thriller Heist at the Citadel, with swooping aerial views of Manhattan and computer circuitry, in a dizzying assortments of long-shots and close-ups.         

Newcomers of the year: Sam Free, Rain Matkin, Kole Durnford, Donna Leny Hansen, Eli Yaschuk

Resilience award: Freewill Shakespeare Festival. They’re in Louise McKinney Riverfront Park till July 20 with As You Like It.

Did you see Remembering the season in Edmonton theatre, part 1, highlight productions? It’s here.

Posted in Features | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The season on Edmonton stages, highlights part 2

Fun at camp: Freewill goes for the bold strokes in As You Like It. A review

Posted on July 1, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Alexandra Lainfiesta in As You Like It, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The first hint that Freewill Shakespeare’s As You Like It will go for the bold strokes is that Orlando (the magnetic Braydon Dowler-Coltman), in ball cap and sunglasses, roars up to the stage, to an overture of pounding techno music (by Darrin Hagen). He’s brandishing an industrial strength leaf blower.

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

Orlando is seriously pissed off, raging at being cheated of his inheritance and rightful education by his brother. And, hey, Orlando is the nice sibling — gentle, mannerly, a romantic hero destined to fall madly in love at first sight, write rhyming love poems, and nail them to trees. Wait till you meet his treacherous bro (Josh Meredith).

In the third year of a THREE-YEAR exile from Hawrelak Park (a punitive lack of creativity from the city of Edmonton), resourceful Freewill has set up camp in Louise McKinney Riverfront Park. At the back of the stage designed by Emily Faith Randall you can see, and sometimes hear, the traffic changing gear up Grierson Hill; there are trees enough to stand in for the Forest of Arden, with help from worthy arboreal-acting from the audience. So, a city and an oasis from the city: As You Like It in a nutshell.

In this 36th annual edition of Edmonton’s most genial summer festival, Freewill returns to a joyful mid-period romantic comedy with which they have a long and happy history together (since 1995) — a play about retreat, or escape, from oppressive worldly power, re-birth and rediscovery in Nature, and the many permutations of love.

In David Horak’s exuberantly comic production, “of a holiday humour” as Rosalind says of herself, we’re at close enough quarters in this park to feel we’re on an adventure together with the characters. The court, the stronghold of an evil usurper Duke (Ian Leung) complete with a gaggle of sycophants, has an aggressively contemporary edge. The courtier Le Beau, played by Amber Borotsik as a sort of purse-lipped manager, trips briskly around the stage in business attire, with a clipboard. Charles, a muscled hot-rod swaggerer in Brennan Campbell’s amusing cameo, arrives on a Segway, in classic chariot-driver posture.

Brennan Campbell and Braydon Dowler-Coltman, As You Like It, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang

When young Orlando stubbornly insists on challenging Charles to a match, the fight plays out as virtual reality combat, ingeniously choreographed by Ainsley Hillyard. And then comes the fateful love-at-first-sight moment: Orlando and Rosalind fall for each other, in a big way.

When the evil Duke banishes Rosalind (Alexandra Lainfiesta), his own feisty daughter Celia (Dayna Lea Hoffmann) opts to go with her, in disguise as a brother-sister act. And they co-opt the court Fool Touchstone (Troy O’Donnell) for their trip to the wild. They do not travel by motorized vehicle, needless to say, by bicycle built for several, with a lot of luggage.   

That’s where Rosalind’s dad the good Duke (Leung in a double-turn), a genial woodland host, is living out his exile with his followers, “fleeting the time carelessly as they did in the golden world.” Mother Nature, a Freewill collaborator of long standing, seemed to understand the heart of the play Saturday afternoon. As Rosalind, Celia, and Touchstone arrived in the Forest of Arden, the clouds lifted, the wind died down, and the sun came out.

Josh Meredith and Mhairi Berg, As You LIke It, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang

Costumed in classic ‘60s hippie mode by Ami Farrow — tie-dyed folk fest wrap-arounds, scarves, sashes — they are hanging out in the company of philosopher muse Jaques, a melancholy specialist by reputation, played with unusual comic energy and enthusiasm by Nadien Chu. In tune with the demeanour of Horak’s playful production, assorted human sheep cavort by, ears flapping, from time to time, for (organic) decoration.

They’re a musical bunch, in this Horak adaptation for a cast of 12. As You Like It is a play with a generous measure of songs. Techno be gone; the songs go live and acoustic, composed by Mhairi Berg as Amiens, who leads the singing, accompanied by Meredith on guitar.

Alexandra Lainfiesta and Dayna Lea Hoffman, As You LIke It, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang

At the centre of a play in which love takes every shape and form — first love, romantic love, parental love, love as loyalty, the love of estranged brothers — is Shakespeare’s most appealing heroine. Rosalind, disguised as the page Ganymede, is played by the agile Lainfiesta as quick-witted and impulsive, a born organizer who can’t quite figure out why everyone else can’t keep up. Her relationship with Celia, played with comic zest by Hoffmann, is one of the delights of the production. As a skeptical observer of Ganymede’s fake courtship by Orlando, Celia rolls her eyes in ‘what are you thinking’? exasperation as Rosalind keeps up her male disguise past the point of comfort (and narrative sense).

Alexandra Lainfiesta and Braydon Dowler-Coltman, As You Like It. Photo by Brianne Jang

This isn’t a production that will shed light on the nuances of that; it’s not about the mystery of self-discovery while in gender-swapped disguise. Dowler-Coltman’s Orlando, in the production’s most nuanced performance, knows at some level he’s being  being tested and teased by an attractive someone who never knows when to say when. This is a production about playfulness.

Amber Borotsik and Troy O’Donnell, As You Like It, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang

The acting style is broad; the characters tend to illustrate what they’re saying with hand-signal semaphore (true, outdoor productions have to play to the back of the park). It’s a bit wearing up close, over time. Jaques outlines the seven ages of man by diligently acting them out. O’Donnell’s Touchstone arrives in the forest, not as a worldly wit who surprises himself when he’s out of his natural court habitat, but as a hail and hearty sort, an old-school blusterer already countrified. His pursuit of the uneducated goatherd Audrey (Borotsik), which leaves her ardent shepherd beau (Meredith) out in the cold, plays out as farce, with the blithe cruelty that implies. I really enjoyed Cody Porter as a shepherd who knows who he is, and remains unimpressed by this intruder.

The ending, with multiple couplings, is a kind of romantic free-for-all as comic resolution. No one goes home alone; even Jaques goes off to philosophize in tandem.

“Sweet are the uses of adversity,” argues the good Duke. Freewill, a company of impressive ingenuity, has had a lot of experience in that department. You’ll have fun at this show, and Louise McKinney Park is a congenial setting…. Back to Hawrelak next summer if all’s well that ends well with their fund-raising campaign.

REVIEW

As You Like It

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Directed and adapted by: David Horak

Starring: Mhairi Berg, Amber Borotsik, Brennan Campbell, Nadien Chu, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Alexandra Lainfiesta, Dayna Lee Hoffmann, Ian Leung, Josh Meredith, Troy O’Donnell, Cody Porter, Elena Porter

Where: Louise McKinney Riverfront Park, 9999 Grierson Hill

Running: through July 20

Tickets: freewill.bespoketicketing.com

 

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Fun at camp: Freewill goes for the bold strokes in As You Like It. A review