“Terror and festering dread,” and a mystery narrator to unknot: We Had A Girl Before You at Northern Light. A review.

Posted on November 7, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Kristin Johnston in We Had A Girl Before You. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

We’re isolated from each other, alone in the dark. Haunting wind and sea sounds surround us, threaded with wisps of melody and … are those human cries? (composer/ sound designer Dave Clarke).

When we enter the theatre a shadowy figure in funereal black is already there, on an outsized wrought-iron chair between banks of flickering candles. There’s an open volume on her lap.

What happens in Trevor Schmidt’s new solo Gothic thriller We Had A Girl Before You, is the opening of that volume and the recounting of a ghostly tale of “fear and wonder … terror and festering dread,” a cocktail for our own uneasy time. Is it a true memory? A dream? A feverish fantasy of an unhinged Victorian mind? Has the loveless Miss Edwina Trout (“Weenie” to her friends, if she had any) cast herself as the heroine in a first-person Gothic romance novella of her own device?

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She is not entirely sure, as she turns the pages of her diary conjuring people and encounters for us. And neither are we. Which is the seductive fun of Northern Light’s atmospheric season-opener, re-crafted by playwright/ director/ designer Schmidt from its original purpose as a two-night fund-raiser. In the 300-seat Westbury Theatre it’s a model of safe social-distancing for a masked audience of less than two dozen.

The uncertainties attached to the narrative are skillfully gathered. What IS sure is Schmidt’s deft and stylish homage to the elite perpetrators of the Gothic romance — the heaving bosoms of its aspirational orphaned governesses longing for love, its alluring but elusive mystery men, its crumbling manor houses teetering atop its remote cliff-top settings, its ghostly trail of unexplained deaths, its terrible weather.

We Had A Girl Before You, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

There are sly hints of Rebecca and The Turn of the Screw. There are clever echoes of the motifs (brother and sister, mysterious illness, encroaching madness) and the great opening gambit of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. The reverb here is unmistakeable: “The house loomed above me, towering over the cliff, leaning as thought it meant to hurl itself to the crashing sea below.” And if the Brontes are your jam (I confess!), you’ll strike gold here. Whiffs of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights drift by in the mist: fire in the charred north wing, a toxic water-filled dungeon, a locked room with a mystery inhabitant…. In Miss Edwina Trout, there’s a wink at the novella-addled heroine of Jane Austen’s gothic romance satire Northanger Abbey.

“I was drawn to the to the unknown … I was ready for an adventure,” says Miss Trout of the employment opportunity as a “lady’s companion” — in a manor house called Desolation atop a cliff on a remote island — that will rescue her from her dreary life at the Wexlington-Sheffield Home for Foundlings, Orphans and Unfortunate Unwanted Children.

Kristin Johnston in We Had A Girl Before You, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

“Weenie,” the only character we meet in person in this full-bodied Gothic romance, single-handedly populates it, blowsy barmaids, taciturn coach drivers, vicious orphanage matrons, boatsmen with one cloudy eye. The list is impressive. Playwright Schmidt clearly relishes the heaping-on of similes and circumlocutions, a great zest for words, built into the genre. And the striking Kristin Johnston, who tread so fearlessly in Northern Light’s Origin of the Species and Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs, is remarkably skillful at identifying a whole cast of colourful characters by voice, verbal inflection, accent, facial expression, as well as recording for us Weenie’s declension into terror and possibly beyond. She is a commanding presence.

In this Johnston is materially assisted by the narrative contributions of Roy Jackson’s virtuoso lighting design: this is a production where theatrical lighting can change time and place, not to mention atmosphere, in a blink.

The tale is gift-wrapped in a deluxe way. It’s for us to unwrap it, and instead wrap our minds around the possible status of the character who sits before us, telling us a “true story.” Intriguing, playful, and fun. Who doesn’t need that now?

Check out a 12thnight PREVIEW with playwright/ director/ designer Trevor Schmidt here.

REVIEW

We Had A Girl Before You

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written, directed, and designed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Kristin Johnston

Where: Westbury Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barn, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: through Nov. 21

Tickets and COVID protocols: northernlighttheatre.com

 

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Doing musical theatre in 2020? It’s an intricate challenge: the making of Keep Calm and Rock On at the Mayfield

Posted on November 6, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Pamela Gordon in Keep Calm and Rock On, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Ryan Parker

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You’ve got to be ingenious to make live theatre. And no one (sane) ever said it was slam-dunk easy money.

But bringing a musical live to the theatre stage in late 2020 in the middle of a pandemic? It’s just about the most nerve-wracking thing you could possibly do. Just ask Van Wilmott, who’s opening one this week at the Mayfield Dinner Theatre.

The Mayfield artistic director was on the phone last weekend to shed light on the multiple creative complications that went into Keep Calm and Rock On — and the maze of ever-changing safety rules and work-arounds that have gone into rehearsing it. “Zoom and plexiglass,” sighs Wilmott. “If only we’d known … we’d all be rich.”

Off the top, of course, there’s this to work around: in musical theatre people sing. And although singing, regarded all summer as the riskiest of COVID-spreaders, was downgraded to join loud talking on that risk list, “there’s still no singing in Alberta without a giant asterisk,” as Wilmott puts it. Masks or barriers of some kind are de rigueur. “And we will not lip-synch here under any circumstances.”

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It’s a principal reason (along with budget) that the intended lineup, dotted with big-cast big-budget jukebox musicals — like Rock of Ages last spring and Mamma Mia! slated for the spring of 2021— were scrapped, for later. Instead the Mayfield season opened in September with a one-man play, Playing With Fire: the Theo Fleury Story, for a distanced audience, 35 per cent reduced (less than 110 in a 450-seat house). The plexiglass barricade between the stage and the audience, and the barriers between tiers of the house, made theatrical sense in a hockey play that happens on a rink.

In any case Wilmott had long wanted to bring in the hit Ron Jenkins production, starring the compelling Shaun Smyth (on real skates) as the troubled hockey star who “had a shit-storm dealt to him, and he overcame his demons and came out on top!”

“We’ve never had a show with 455 F-bombs in it,” says Wilmott, a wry and candid sort in conversation. “But they were so tied to the character that 98 per cent of the audience was just fine with it.” And Wilmott thinks the play’s “direct address, a guy talking right to you,” was ideal for engaging the audience, especially since Smyth’s performance was so visceral and captivating.

A solo play, with dark currents, was an unconventional Mayfield choice. But it counts as a success at an unusually adventurous dinner theatre. “We did the (box office) numbers we could,” Wilmott says of filling the reduced house capacity. And in a commercial house, “the best case is a break-even…. It was a way for us to put our toe in.”

Keep Calm and Rock On, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Ryan Parker

Stay Calm and Rock On, the original jukebox musical that opens this week and runs for 11 weeks over the seasonal holidays, goes beyond a toe dip. It comes closer to a full-bodied immersion experience — with elaborate COVID-ian logistical adjustments in size, budget, stagecraft, and rehearsals. “The clear expectation of the Mayfield Christmas musical (traditionally the theatre’s biggest money-maker and a magnet for office parties) is that it needs to be rock, and it needs to be silly and shticky,” says Wilmott.

“The budget has been streamlined, for 35 per cent occupancy,” says Wilmott. The production staged by Kate Ryan has a cast of five, instead of the usual nine or 10, along with a five-member onstage band. And “the cast is living in as close a bubble as we can make it,” Wilmott says.

Bubbles are easier to maintain with out-of-town performers whose domestic lives are elsewhere. Of the five actor/singers, four (ensconced at the Mayfield Inn & Suites, home of the theatre) come from away, and two (Pamela Gordon and Brad Wiebe) are a couple. The fifth, Edmonton’s Kieran Martin Murphy, has “taken one for the team,” by actually leaving home and moving into the hotel for three months be inside the cast bubble.

The original idea was “a contemporary Vegas show,” says Wilmott. “It got pulled by budget, so we reinvented.” Instead this latest from the prolific Mayfield collaborator Will Marks is a deep dive into the archive of ‘70s hits. And the premise, as Wilmott describes, works assiduously around COVID safety protocols (and got OK’ed by the government). It starts with this, tailored expressly for the times: “when you’re singing you’ve got to be in a box.”

The concept is “a band who haven’t been onstage together in years — because they absolutely hate each other. If you took Spinal Tap, and mixed it with Fleetwood Mac and the Mamas and Papas, and A Minute To Win It….”

Now “stuck with each other,” they’ve landed in a sort of escape room/ game show situation. And their way out is via a variety of musical challenges. “They’re re-living their hits, and they have to score points to get out….”

“When a song kicks in, the singer has to be in a (plexiglass) box, kinda like an isolation booth in a recording studio.” The live band, laughs Wilmott, the musical director, “is encased in Plexiglass. Like Madame Tussaud’s.… We keep the actors away from the musicians. Which is never a bad idea.”

It was, he sighs, “an interesting show to stage.” And it came with “the weirdest rehearsal period ever,” says Wilmott. “Everyone has to stay healthy, come hell or high water.” Everyone wore a mask or shield. “We kicked people out of the rehearsal room every 30 minutes so fresh air could circulate.” At 9 every night when rehearsals ended, “the ghost-buster people came with big spray guys to disinfect the room for (the requisite) 12 hours before the next day’s rehearsal.

Stage director Ryan, who directed a Zoom production of Sondheim’s Assassins with the Citadel Theatre Young Company this past summer, says the learning in musical theatre continues:  “More breaks, less people in the room, spacial relationships are everything, and technology is our new friend.”

“Not exactly what you’d call efficient,” Wilmott sighs. “A challenge for sure. But it’s a new world. And there’s no choice. If you’re going to DO this, this is how it has to be,. It’s the only safe way….”

PREVIEW

Keep Calm And Rock On

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Musical direction: Van Wilmott

Stage direction: Kate Ryan

Starring: Jahlen Barnes, Pamela Gordon, Brad Wiebe, Kieran Martin Murphy, Erica Peck

Running: through Jan. 17

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca

  

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Antidotes to a gruesome week: here’s a couple of surprising beautiful theatre “concerts” on film

Posted on November 6, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Hailey Gillis (lighting by Patrick Lavender) in Ghost Quartet: In Concert. Photo: Crows Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Looking for an antidote? It’s been a gruesome nail-biter of a week on multiple fronts; everyone knows what exactly what that question means.

So, the doctor is IN.

I caught a couple of truly original and surprising, beautifully filmed theatre “concerts” this week. The Spike Lee film of David Byrne’s American Utopia (on HBO on demand, Crave and other streaming services) is one. Dave Malloy’s Ghost Quartet: In Concert is the other.

Maybe start with the Byrne, since it has such an unexpected, joyful, uplift to it.

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The stage version (spun from Byrne’s 2018 album) opened on Broadway last fall, and then got felled by COVID four months later. Byrne opens holding a model of the human brain, and meditating on the weirdness of humanity from the inside out. I know, right? A week like we’ve all been having, and you’re bound to wonder about that body part.

On the move throughout, Byrne and a great multi-national band, barefoot and in identical gray suits, perform some 20 songs, including some of the big Talking Heads hits. The visuals are dazzling: Annie-B Parson’s clockwork choreography, inspired by Byrne’s oddball interest in ‘color guards’ (i.e. marching bands), and Rob Sinclair’s virtuoso lighting effects on a translucent curtain that seems at times to be made of hanging chains.

The Spike Lee film is amazingly inventive at capturing the stage/audience energy in a packed house (the 970-seat Hudson Theatre). Apparently there were 11 camera placements from every angle, including overhead, à la Busby Berkeley. Lee acknowledged that unexpected inspiration in a fascinating New York Times interview last month.

Under our circumstances, songs from the Before Time, like Burning Down The House, seem to wear a new mantle. The protest song Hell You Talmbout includes reading out the names of African-Americans killed by police officers.

At a moment of isolation and disconnection, there’s a spirit of community, social justice, and inclusion about the whole thing that wards off despair. It ends in a strangely hopeful way. “Everybody’s comin’ to my house/ I’m never gonna be alone.” With that Byrne et al take to their bicycles and go out into the streets of New York. You feel like cheering.

There’s a strange updraft, too, at the end of Dave Malloy’s weird and haunting Ghost Quartet In Concert. There are only a couple of chances left, and you shouldn’t miss the experience of this dreamy production by Toronto’s Crows Theatre adapted for film. It’s superbly staged by director: Marie Farsi and lit with other-worldly invention by Patrick Lavender. TheloMalloy is the creative original behind Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, a highly unusual musical extrapolated from chapters of War and Peace.

The original cast — Hailey Gillis, Kyra Guloien, Andrew Penner, Beau Dixon — returns. And they really bite into the characters who wander through the past and present interchangeably, in this free-floating, open-ended, un-hinged fantasia of ghost stories.

It’s certainly not storytelling in the conventional sense, with any narrative chronology that I could figure out (Malloy has called it a song cycle). But it’s full of stories, Scheherazade-style. And haunting figures — two sisters, a dead child, an astronomer, and a bear (who’s at “the last piano in the universe”) — recur in different permutations. The “monk” turns out to be jazz guru Thelonious Monk; the show is kooky that way.

The actors (including the wonderful Guloien, whose parents are ESO bassist Rhonda Taft and the reed virtuoso PJ Perry) are first-rate musicians. And their songs move blithely between jazz, rock,  folk, and something like classical recitative (or maybe that’s just the way Malloy’s oddly expanding lyrics work). Maybe we are all ghosts in our own memory-scape (to be discussed, over whiskey). Tickets: crowstheatre.com

If you’re up for venturing out of your house in person and not just in your mind, there are a couple of lively antidotes available. One of them I’ve seen, and can recommend: A Brimful of Asha at the Citadel, finds the hilarity, and the affection, in the gap between fractious generations, in the true-life account of a mother’s vigorous, and repeatedly failed, attempts to arrange a traditional marriage for her son. Read the 12thnight review here.

And here are two promising possibilities I’m looking forward to. Northern Light returns to live action tonight at the Westbury Theatre in Fringe-land (the ATB Financial Arts Barns), with the premiere of Trevor Schmidt’s new gothic thriller We Had A Girl Before You. The production, starring Kristin Johnston, runs through Nov. 21. Tickets here.  And at the Mayfield Dinner Theatre, a new musical ventures into the ’70s rock archive with Keep Calm and Rock On, which runs through the festive season till Jan. 17. Tickets here.

Take a couple, and call me in the morning.

 

     

  

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We Had A Girl Before You: what happened to her? A new Gothic thriller opens the Northern Light season

Posted on November 3, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Kristin Johnston in We Had A Girl Before You, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

O no O no…. Don’t look through that keyhole. And don’t open that door.

Trevor Schmidt’s new gothic thriller looks through that keyhole, and  opens that door (and the Northern Light Theatre season), Friday. In We Had A Girl Before You we meet a Victorian orphan spinster who’s accepted a position as a lady’s companion. O no: at a remote country manor.  O no: on an island.

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What has happened to Edwina Trout’s predecessors in the job? It’s a mystery that “the new girl” (Kristin Johnston) is increasingly apprehensive about, but highly motivated to explore.    

We Had A Girl Before You, joins a select group of Schmidt’s own plays produced by NLT in his tenure of nearly two decades there, among them Flora and Fawna’s Field Trip, Cleopatra’s Sister, Water’s Daughter. And it’s a rare example of something tricky onstage: a solo thriller.

“The protagonist is trying to piece together a mystery, along with the audience,” says Schmidt of this complex playwriting and acting challenge. “It’s someone recounting their terrifying experience…. She walks us through it: ‘I felt my skin crawl’, that kind of descriptive language. And the audience is trying to get ahead of the story as well, to figure out where it’s going.”

Kristen Johnston in We Had A Girl Before You, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

“With narration, you can have her talking to someone through the keyhole. You can do creeping dread. You can do suspense. You can’t do jump scares, the shocking things like that,” he says of his chosen monologue form. The events of the story “have to be doled out differently in a monologue.”

As a veteran writer of award-winning monologues, sometimes play-length and sometimes an interlocking series (Watermelon Girls, Tales From the Hospital) Schmidt says “I love the idea of an unreliable narrator. Is this a ghost story? Or is this person crazy? Are we being told the truth?” After all, “we only get introduced to other characters through the protagonist. We’re only seeing their version of these people.”

Schmidt, who has long gravitated to writing for women, is “a huge fan” of the gothic thriller genre. “I love the old black-and-white movies, the ‘40s costume melodramas!” he says, warming to a favourite subject. He can’t get enough of the BBC Rank Studio movies based on the novels of Lady Eleanor Smith (The Man in Gray), or Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca), or Henry James (The Turn of the Screw).

The scenarios are time-honoured. “A young woman who ends up in a castle or a manor house. Sometimes she’s married to an emotionally distant man with secrets. Or she’s the second wife battling the memories of the first. Or  the governess. And if only she can uncover his secrets and help him heal, he’ll fall in love with her and her life will change.” Ah, or maybe it will change for the worse; things aren’t easy (in economic, romantic, or fashion terms as Schmidt points out) for the women of the Victorian age.

It’s an attraction that goes way back with him, back to a boyhood self whose TV access, of economic necessity, was delayed, then limited to three channels. “Saturday mornings when other kids were watching cartoons I was watching old black-and-white movies,” he says. “I was raised on them…. I think it’s why I’m so attracted to colour onstage. It’s the first thing I notice, and it’s very important to my design work.”

And that appeal includes the particularities of the acting style. “The best actors of that era have a heightened way of playing things,” says Schmidt, who’s nailed that delivery himself in such Guys in Disguise hits as BitchSlap! in which he was Bette Davis opposite Darrin Hagen’s Joan Crawford. Crawford, “fully commits to … everything! It’s so good. You have to play it straight, a full-on heartfelt commitment.”

The style “is very difficult for young actors today to grab onto,” as Schmidt puts it. “It’s just not accessible to them. They kinda want to send it up. To secretly make it a judgment instead of buying into it…. If you fully commit, it will work; if you hold back it won’t fly.”

Kristin Johnston in Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Johnston was an ideal choice, says Schmidt, witness her big bold performances in such NLT shows as Origin of the Species and Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs. “When we started rehearsal, I told Kristin I didn’t know what the tone was — was it straight-up homage? Or a satire, because she is so funny? Can we straddle both? It starts off with lots of comedy, and becomes a lot more gripping and serious.”

That arc is what Schmidt and Hagen have aimed at in their outrageous Guys in Disguise comedies. “Darrin and I call it ‘the sucker punch’. You bring ‘em in thinking they’re getting one thing, then you give ‘em something more.… I love to pull the rug out from under people. You thought you knew, and now you don’t! ‘Cause life is like that.”

These thoughts find their way into a production originally intended as a two-night Northern Light fund-raiser in late November.  COVID meant the cancellation of the intended season-opener, The Oldest Profession, with its five-member cast of women of a certain age. Then “Fringe Theatre bumped us up (from the 60-seat Studio Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barn) into the (300-seat) Westbury. “It allows for more social distance, and for more seating…. We had to re-envision a solo show for a much larger space. That was the challenge.”

Actually, the sense of isolation in a big dark space works in favour of atmosphere, he says of a design that is more about candlelight, draperies, and sound designer/composer Dave Clarke’s contributions on theremin, than a set per se. “There’s a lot of telling; there’s not a lot of showing. So the audience has to engage their imagination and envision what’s being described.”

“You can’t just sit there!” says Schmidt, who’s no fan of kitchen sink drama (“where water runs in the tap … that doesn’t interest me.”). The less you can see the more you can start to imagine….”

PREVIEW

We Had A Girl Before You

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written, directed, and designed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Kristin Johnston

Where: Westbury Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barn, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Friday through Nov. 21

Tickets and COVID restrictions: northernlighttheatre.com

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Meanwhile, back at the Varscona … a homecoming for Teatro

Posted on November 1, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

General rule of thumb: On any joyful occasion you can never really go wrong with dancing. If there’s singing, so much the better.

It frames Welcome Home, a celebration of the re-opening of the Varscona Theatre — and the homecoming of Teatro La Quindicina, one of its resident companies.

I caught the second of three Fridays of Welcome Home a couple of nights ago. And if you’re languishing in a pandemical funk (and really, who isn’t?) and remembering wistfully moments of alive-ness in a theatre,  there’s one more Welcome Home to go this coming Friday. Tickets are free at teatroq.com (reservations, masks, sanitized hands, and a temperature under 38 de rigueur); donations are welcome and it’s the moment for theatre-goers to step up.

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The homecoming opens with the arrival of Teatro star Andrew MacDonald-Smith onstage to explain the conga, the collective dance that connects the disconnected at wedding receptions. It’s a scene from (and the prevailing metaphor of) Stewart Lemoine’s 2010 comedy Witness to a Conga. “Remember plays?” wonders MacDonald-Smith, to a round of cheering from the scattered audience, reduced to about 40 from the 200 capacity.

The evening over which Belinda Cornish and Mark Meer preside in bright and witty fashion as co-hosts, ends in a riot of tap-dancing, surely the giddiest of art forms. Triple-threat MacDonald-Smith pounds the stage in I Can’t Be Bothered Now from Crazy For You (he starred in the Citadel production a couple of seasons ago). In this anxiety-plagued time, it’s a kick to hear “bad news go ‘way/ call ‘round some day/ in March or May…. I’m dancing and I can’t be bothered now!”

The evening’s entertainment doesn’t just allude to the pandemic, it’s creative and amusing about the necessary rules. In the new world there can be no singing onstage without masks. Steven Greenfield arrives at the keyboard as the most famous masked star of them all (c.f. Andrew Lloyd Webber). You see the comic possibilities attached to the mask rule in the torch-y Come Rain Or Come Shine, as delivered by Chariz Faulmino, a sparkling newcomer to the scene.

In honour of the occasion, Teatro premieres a surprising and funny new Stewart Lemoine playlet Poking the Dragon, starring Cornish, Meer, Greenfield and Faulmino. It’s built on a three-way escalation of e-mail correspondence amongst parties separated by the necessity, and aggravation, of working at home in a pandemic. As EPCOR continues to dig around, loudly, in the back alley behind the house, I instantly sympathized with the much put-upon Alex (Meer).

Cornish and Meer, both first-rate improvisers, ask performers, and special interview guests (last Friday, Jana O’Connor and Farren Timoteo), “How is your pandemic?” and “What gigs did you lose?” The answer to the former does not involve, thankfully, sourdough starter tips. The answer to the latter is, heartbreakingly, lots and lots, nearly all.

Teatro La Quindicina runs a summer season that’s the flip side of every other company in town, June through October. They cancelled 2020 completely, and rescheduled everything for 2021. So as an appetizer to that  prospect, there’s a song from Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, an original musical by Edmonton artists (MacDonald-Smith, Jocelyn Ahlf, Farren Timoteo and Ryan Sigurdson), set in Edmonton, and saluting a surprising chapter of  Edmonton history, the lively 50s supper club scene here.

We have full-bodied live shows to look forward to. Meanwhile, my friends, there are the delights of the creative small-scale work-arounds. Yes, fun nights out like this one, tap-dancing and singing in small theatres like the Varscona. Give yourself a break.

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So, is he married yet? A Brimful of Asha, live at the Citadel. A 12thnight review.

Posted on October 30, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Nimet Sanji in A Brimful of Asha, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Janice Saxon.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“You are here,” the engaging title character tells us with a smile at the start of A Brimful of Asha, “to help me sort out my son.”  The son smiles too, and rolls his eyes.

In this amusing and good-natured play-cum-memoir — which opens the Citadel’s Horizon Series Live in hospitable fashion — this ‘sorting out’ takes the form of a duelling recounting of a real-life 2007 story by a real-life mother and son. Ravi Jain is a notable Canadian actor/director (the founding artistic director of Why Not Theatre). Asha Jain (“hope” in Hindi) is his mom, a non-actor and as she cheerfully puts it, “an abused mother.” The dispute, says Asha, is “generational.” Ravi does not disagree.

Immigrants from India, Asha and Ravi’s dad are determined to arrange, in the traditional Indian way, a marriage for their resistant, in their eyes outrageously single, 27-year-old son. As a new theatre school actor grad with a career that’s starting to take off, Canadian-born Ravi has his own ideas on the subject of marriage. They involve waiting for a couple of years, what’s the rush?, till he’s more established professionally and he’s  found a girl for himself, and fallen in love.

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Bad enough, then, that Ravi is unmarried and wants to find his own life partner. But theatre? “What a proud profession for Indian parents,” she says, with an eye-roll you feel from Row P. Many of her interjections, amusingly, are director’s notes: “hurry up, you’re taking too long!”

Originally, the co-creators themselves performed the hit show, which undoubtedly gave this unusual storytelling enterprise an added immediacy. Not least because Asha, the theatre skeptic, turned out, by all reports, to have unexpected comic timing and a great deadpan. In the Citadel production directed by Mieko Ouchi, the characters are performed by a couple of terrifically likeable actors, Adolyn H. Dar and Nimet Kanji.

The challenge of direct, conversational rapport is upped by the change of venue, from the Citadel’s intimate Rice Theatre to the 680-seat Shoctor. This enables reassuring social distancing in a masked audience reduced to a 100-person max and scattered through the house. And it feels very safe, though I can imagine that, under non-COVID-ian circumstances (remember those?) the experience of A Brimful of Asha would be enhanced by eye-to-eye connection in a space that might seem less “theatrical.” Ditto the shared laughter.

Adolyn H. Dar and Nimet Kanji in A Brimful of Asha. Photo by Citadel Theatre.

But if that sounds like ingratitude, I must add that it feels like a special occasion to be out in the city and in a real live theatre with people. And Ouchi’s production and the actors, experts at generating affectionate connection with each other, are a lot of fun. Elise CM Jason’s set (lighting by Patrick Beagan), a long dining table, gets the position of influence  in the centre of the Shoctor stage. And in Ouchi’s production which locates the characters at opposite ends, ventures towards reducing the distance between mother and son are always smartly walked back, which makes narrative as well as COVID sense. “Family album” type shots and other assorted documentary projections happen on a series of high screens behind Ravi and Asha. Only Ravi acknowledges them.

Nimet Kanji in A Brimful of Asha. Photo by Citadel Theatre.

Kanji inherits the tricky task of being the actor who portrays the “real-life” half of the pair, who scores big on sheer natural charisma. And Kanji is very droll, and adept at making Asha ’s quick-witted rejoinders and annotations ‘non-actorly’. And Adolyn H. Dar as Ravi, who unlike his mom is in his natural habitat in a theatre, is much busier and more flamboyant at presenting the series of comic characters who populate the story (occasionally many at a time as befits a tale that’s as much about families as individuals).

Hang on, I’m getting to the story. The starting point is Ravi’s trip to India to give a theatre workshop in Calcutta. The plan is that he and his Canadian friend Andrew will travel around the country afterward and see the sights. Through a series of subterfuges involving a parental “vacation,” Ravi’s single-minded mom and dad arrive in India and keep setting him up, over and over, with “nice Indian girls,” i.e. suitable marital prospects they’ve vetted, in encounters and negotiations that involve both families. Ah, they even put an ad in an Indian newspaper.

In the battle for the upper hand in the culture collision and the gap between contemporary and traditional, Ravi, the modern Canadian guy with the gift of the gab, would seem to be the odds-on favourite. But he keeps getting out-manoeuvred and ambushed at every turn. And there’s a hilarious escalation in his mounting exasperation, as charted by Dar.

A Brimful of Asha, named for a song by the Brit alt-rock band Cornershop, is actually a sort of cross-generational cross-cultural screwball. And in the course of it, Asha unapologetically argues for the old ways, arranged marriages over so-called “love” matches. After all, when you get married and have kids, as you must and you will, it’s not just the individuals but the families that get hitched. Love is something that grows; it’s not where you start. Besides, getting a son married, which is to say “happy and settled” in Asha parlance, is her chief maternal duty.

Why would parents be better than kids at picking a life partner for them? “Parents have experience,” she says, an answer that echoes around the globe in every household of every culture. To Asha the filial rejoinder “it’s none of your business” is just so much lint in the cosmic dryer.

In a sweet, unexpectedly funny scene Asha tells the story of her own arranged marriage, her emigration to a new country and a lonely life in Toronto. Ravi wonders if it doesn’t seem, in retrospect, sad to have given up her own girlhood dream. That’s just on hold, she says puckishly. When Ravi is finally “married and settled,” and not a moment too soon, she can get back at it.

The phrase that recurs nearly as often as “married and settled” in this winsome little play is “on the same page.” And that, in the end, after all the arguing, is where the relationship between mother and son lands. You’ll leave smiling. 

REVIEW

A Brimful of Asha

Theatre: Citadel Shoctor Theatre, as part of Horizon Series LIVE

Written by: Asha and Ravi Jain

Directed by: Mieko Ouchi

Starring: Adolyn H. Dar and Nimet Kanji

Running: through Nov. 15

Tickets (and COVID precaution details): citadeltheatre.com

 

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The experimental spirit lives on in Edmonton theatre, live and in unusual hybrids

Posted on October 29, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Here There Be Night, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by dbphotographics.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Calling the pandemic an “obstacle” to live theatre, or maybe a “challenge,” is a bit like saying COVID is the flu.

The pandemic has had a devastating effect on an art whose raison d’être is the experience, interactive by very definition, of real live people sharing a space. But as they continue to prove, there’s been a remarkable resilience about theatre-makers. Performing for, communicating to, audiences … it’s what they DO. And dammit, they’re going to figure out ways to do it.

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I wrote in July (have a peek here) about the resourcefulness of theatre artists and companies struggling to jump-start their craft after the fateful, heart-stopping industry-wide shutdown in March. In exile from live stages, they taught themselves, fast, to write for, and perform on, unfamiliar virtual platforms. Or they took live theatre to The People instead of the other way round, one backyard deck at a time.

The financial implications for the industry are potentially ruinous, as the stream of lay-offs, cancellations, indefinite delays continues. But as the weather turns frostier, the spirit of experimentation lives on — in the gradual return of audiences to live, scaled-down in-person theatrical experiences, and in new virtual/live theatrical hybrids. It’s time to check in on the scene again. This week, when there are lively, and welcome, examples of all of the above, is a good time to do it.

Inviting size-small audiences inside into size-large theatre spaces for small-cast productions is a test of ingenuity in creating intimacy (and also in making the money work, in even a modest way).

Workshop West’s Here There Be Night, continuing its run till Nov. 1, is an experiment along the opposite route. It takes us out. And it’s intimate by definition: one-on-one immersive theatre that takes audiences, singly or two at time, to a series, of eight original five-minute solo plays that are custom-tailored in the writing, the directing, and the performing, for eight unexpected locations, mostly outdoors, in Old Strathcona — and for the eerily isolating times in which we live. In each case we’re part of the play; we have a role in the script.

We’re caught (as the cellphone app narration has it) between destinations, the world as we knew it and the unknowable world-to-be. Everything about it, including the locations (I mustn’t tell you about them in advance), speaks to the unnerving experience of being in a familiar world but seeing it in a new way. Here There Be Night takes you to  odd nooks in Fringe Theatre Land, from  jagged new angles. If you can possibly score a ticket, put your mitts on and sally forth, and prepared to be immersed. (WWPT’s Heather Inglis talks about the show here. We went out and saw the show Friday night. Read about that here. 

Colin Matty, Curio Shoppe, Catch the Keys Productions. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography

Curio Shoppe (running through Oct. 31), Catch The Keys, purveyors of the annual Dead Centre of Town excursion into Edmonton history at Fort Edmonton, is a clever experiment in turning an online experience in the lurid annals of Edmonton history into an interactive grave-straddling experience — a haunting on location at your place. The story unfolds based on your choices. Eerie? Ask not for whom your cellphone rings, it rings for thee. Check out thoughts from director Beth Dart here, and our experience with the show here.

Speaking as we are of playful creative experiments in the online world, I wish I’d seen an intriguing venture from The Fox Den Collective (Queen Lear Is Dead). They crafted an online mystery, S.I.S.T.E.R.,  live streamed to audiences on five-member teams that are visited in Zoom break-out rooms by a succession of suspects. The teams are invited to collaborate to ask questions, assess clues, make deductions. Sounds like fun.

We’ve already had the benefit of the increasing sophistication of Zoom and YouTube fractured-screen experiments. The plays have  been especially successful when, like Mac Brock’s Tracks which premiered in June, they’ve used the online medium itself as a sort of metaphor, and they’ve actually been created to be about COVID-ian feelings of disconnection and isolation.

Girl Brain has been savvy and playful with that thought. Catch their very amusing video series mining the Zoom disconnect and discomfort for comic sketches about the ambiguities and perils of dating in a pandemic. In the summer, the Citadel’s [esc] Series of playlets commissioned digital theatre experiments that were all about the domestic and professional miscues and mixed signals that are inevitable disruptions when life is live streamed instead of live.

Cherish Violet Blood in Deer Woman, Article 11. Photo by Prudence Upton.

The riveting live-streamed Article 11 premiere production of Tara Beagan’s Deer Woman, presented online by Calgary’s Downstage Theatre (starring Cherish Violet Blood), took this gut-wrencher of a play out of the theatre and into the woods. It’s a solo show till it isn’t —a visceral, galvanizing production that chronicles an escalating personal quest for some sort of social justice in a world of violence for Indigenous women. It isn’t cautious or polite in its exposé of white hypocrisy.

Like everyone hungry for theatre, I’ve been watching a huge assortment of theatrical productions created with a film version in mind (the deep-dive into the National Theatre, RSC, and Shakespeare’s Globe archives). Some locate you amongst real audiences in real theatres, from the Before Time. Some are playful with the conventions of YouTube viewing. And some, like the Old Vic’s series of solo or two-hand plays (Lungs, Faith Healer, Three Kings with the mesmerizing Andrew Scott), with distanced actors onstage in any empty house, capitalize on the premise of distance and an empty theatre.

The Twits, hosted online by The Guardian, is a filmed “theatrical reading” of the delightfully gruesome Roald Dahl story. It was storyteller theatre reduced to its base elements: a book with a story in it, a couple of (distanced) top-drawer actors on a stage in an empty theatre, clutching the book and a prop or two, selecting what to dramatize. It was a model of apparent simplicity. I learned something from that.

Nathan Cuckow and Beth Graham in Victor and Victoria’s Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things, Kill Your Television Theatre

Guys in Disguise experimented with radio play theatre earlier in P.T. (pandemic time). They reconfigured Dragula, their gothic Fringe spoof of a decade ago for voices inhabiting a clever space-defining sound design. Now Kill Your Television Theatre has just launched a YouTube audio version of their spooky and ingeniously framed gothic 2012 thriller Victor and Victoria’s Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things, by Beth Graham and Nathan Cuckow.

until the next breath, Catalyst, Grand Acts of Theatre. Photo by Alan Kellogg.

But the hunger remains for a live experience. Catalyst Theatre’s until the next breath (part of the National Arts Centre’s Grand Acts of Theatre series across the country), a hauntingly lyrical outdoor extravaganze in a clearing in Victoria Park, was the largest-scale theatre experience of the fall: a cast of 50 actors, musicians, dancers, performing for an audience of 100.

Increasingly, theatre companies have ventured back to in-person performances of limited-cast shows inside theatres. “Safe” isn’t a kudo to which the risk-takers of theatre would have aspired a year ago. But safety is the starting point for the return of audiences to theatre. And theatre companies have been exemplary.     

Nimet Kanji in A Brimful of Asha. Photo by Citadel Theatre.

The Citadel has launched a three-production Horizon Series LIVE with A Brimful of Asha, a hit-two-hander based on a real-life story, about the subterfuges of a mother trying to arrange a marriage for her son, who’s pushing 30 and still single, on a “vacation” to India. The show, originally destined for the Rice, has been moved to the Shoctor, for a 100-member masked audience with sanitized hands. That’s where it opened this past weekend. Meet director Mieko Ouchi here, and co-creator Ravi Jain here. More on the show to come.

Musical theatre specialists the Plain Janes experimented with reconfiguring theatre space for pandemical times, with the playful and ingenious Scenes From The Sidewalk: An Inside Out Cabaret. A masked audience of 20 distanced and in the Varscona Theatre lobby, looked out at the world through the big theatre windows, where six performers reached out to us through the glass, singing, dancing, presenting poems. The configuration was a metaphor for the subject matter, the pandemic experience for musical artists, looking wistfully at theatre from the outside (and vice versa). It felt both happy and poignant to be there. Read about it here.

Teatro La Quindicina returns live to the actual Varscona theatre stage for Welcome Home (two of the three Fridays of performance remain), a variety/ concert/ interview show with singing, dancing, and an original distanced Stewart Lemoine comedy for four actors. Have a look at the 12thnight preview here.

Improv is back live and in a theatre, too , with full COVID precautions. From the Grindstone (which includes live streamed versions of all shows), I caught a performance of Good Head by the amazingly dexterous Gordon’s Big Bald Head (Mark Meer, Ron Pederson). In a movie edition of their hit Fringe show they offered to “do” their own version of any flick in cinematic history. On the night I saw them, the duo did Gothika. Really.

Taking their cue from their chosen line of work, the ever-adaptable always-ingenious improv company Rapid Fire Theatre has moved to a flexible black box space, the Backstage Theatre at the ATB Financial Arts Barn, that’s more adaptable to changing COVID restrictions than the fixed-seat Zeidler Hall at the Citadel. For now, at least, they’ve improvised  cabaret tables. And since they’ve never met a high holiday they didn’t like, their programming (which includes live streaming) features a Halloween show, Murder at Makeout Point, “an improvised teen slasher” that opens tonight.

Next week there’s more. An actual musical revue, Keep Calm and Rock On by the mysterious Will Marks, opens at the Mayfield Dinner Theatre (table service for an audience reduced to about 150 in a 450-seat house). And Northern Light Theatre has moved its season-opener We Had A Girl Before You, an original psychological thriller by Trevor Schmidt, from the Studio Theatre at the ATB Financial Arts Barn to the much-larger Westbury Theatre. Look for 12thnight coverage of both shows.

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One on one theatre: Here There Be Night takes you into an underground resistance network

Posted on October 25, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Here There Be Night, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Sometimes the creative ingenuity and resilience of theatre artists just about takes your breath away. In a dangerous time when big live theatre gatherings have been cancelled, thwarted, delayed, diverted, they will find a way.

I went on an adventure Friday night outside in the cold dark air in Old Strathcona, with a map, my hand-warmers, and my cellphone. And in eight of the most unexpected locations in a district I thought I knew well, I met a story.

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Here There Be Night is eight five-minute solo plays each starring a single actor: an involving one-on-one encounter with a real-live person. So, eight experiences that lead you out in the world, look you in eye (from six feet, or behind barriers), and in an amazingly inventive variety of ways acknowledge the strange, distancing, anxious and isolating, not to say be-nighted, moment in which we live. It felt like an act of defiance, a sort of underground resistance network, to be out in the world, connecting (with absolute safety) like that in the dark.

It’s the Workshop West Playwrights Theatre season-opener, elaborately plotted to take you (and a COVID partner if you like) through the dark into little moments that in the writing, the performing, and the directing, shed light on our weird, spooky situation. Tickets are vanishing fast (after all, this is theatre that gathers its audience one or two at a time). So get on this ASAP.

I really don’t want to spoil the fun of the unexpected for you. So I’ll just tell you that the pieces are acted with startling commitment, to engage you, their exclusive audience. And the writing is impressive — writing an original five-minute play that feels satisfying, and custom-tailored to its odd location must be devilishly tricky. Workshop West’s new artistic producer Heather Inglis (one of the four directors) has assembled 10 playwrights of different styles and angles of attack (I list them all below).

The range is wide; Edmonton playwrights have risen to the occasion. In the course of your tour you’ll encounter smart, political black comedy (from Jason Chinn). There’s puckish interactive whimsy (Harley Morison), unnerving spookiness (Bevin Dooley), a fantasia  on our disconnected feeling of being stranded between destinations (Beth Graham), or between worlds (Amena Shehab and Aksam Alyousef). There’s a meditation on our longing for love and spiritual connection (from Mūkonzi wa Mūsyoki, a playwright new to me). Perhaps the most disturbing of all the encounters comes from the playwright Josh Languedoc, powerfully acted by Sheldon Elter.

The finale (Mieko Ouchi) is soulful. And so is the seductive conversational voice of the guide in your ear (by Susie Moloney, spoken by Melissa Thingelstad). My old cellphone was a wimp, and cacked out too soon in the cold. So I wish I’d heard more of the narration (by Susie Moloney, voiced by Melissa Thingelstad), which unspools from the thought that the veil between worlds is particularly thin at the moment. Don’t you feel that in your bones?

Meet at the Strathcona Community League (masked, to download the cellphone app and get instructions). And set forth, with earbuds and layers. Prepare to be surprised.

REVIEW

Here There Be Night

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre (with participation from Theatre Network, Catalyst Theatre, Northern Light Theatre, Theatre Yes)

Written by: Aksam Alyousef and Amena Shehab, Jason Chinn, Bevin Dooley, Beth Graham, Josh Languedoc, Mieko Ouchi, Susie Moloney, Harley Morison, Mūkonzi wa Mūsyoki

Directed by: Patricia Cerra, Heather Inglis, Lana Michelle Hughes, Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Helen Belay, Nadien Chu, Patricia Darbasie, Sheldon Elter, David Madawo, Jameela McNeil, Christina Nguyen, Amena Shehab, Melissa Thingelstad

Where: eight locations in Old Strathcona (meet at Strathcona Community League with a cellphone, at least iPhone 6 or Android 4, plus mask and earbuds).

Running: through Nov. 1, staggered start times

Tickets, schedule, and COVID protocols: workshopwest.org

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A Brimful of Asha: a son, a mother, and a culture gap onstage at the Citadel. Meet co-creator and Canadian theatre star Ravi Jain.

Posted on October 24, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Ravi Jain, co-creator of A Brimful of Asha, Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of an emerging theatre career must be in want of a wife. (A wife arranged by his mother).

We now take you back a decade or so, to the life and burgeoning fortunes of the then-27-year-old Ravi Jain, a rising star in Canadian theatre — and single.

We caught up with the actor, director, theatre maker, artistic director of Toronto’s evocatively named Why Not Theatre to ask him about the company, and the hit play opening tonight on the Citadel’s 680-seat Shoctor stage (to an audience of 100 as part of Horizon Series LIVE).  A Brimful of Asha, his joint creation with his mother Asha, was inspired by the business, so problematic for his immigrant India-born parents and not for him, of his lingering singleness (at 27!) and their acrobatic attempts to arrange a marriage for him in the traditional way.

Born and raised in Toronto, Jain left after high school to study theatre abroad, in an assortment of the world’s theatre capitals, London first, then New York, Washington, Paris. “I didn’t grow up much on Canadian theatre,” he says of his younger self. “I was inspired more by physical theatre, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, a collision of cultures. For me it was always international….”

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“When I came back to Toronto I didn’t really see that happening anywhere,” says Jain, who’s lively, smart, and accessible in conversation. “And I wanted to find a way to make it happen, that vision, that conversation … to change the model of what a theatre company can be.”

The result, in 2007, was Why Not, a company of the experimental, innovative, risk-taker stripe that has acquired a creative team of 10 over the last dozen years, as well as an international profile for new work, and original takes on classics (witness an acclaimed production of Prince Hamlet, gender-bending and in an expressive melange of English and ASL).

Nimet Sanji in A Brimful of Asha, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Janice Saxon.

In short, Jain was a happening up-and-coming Canadian theatre creator, and happy to wait for marriage until he had time and focus to, you know, meet the right woman and fall in love. Why not? Arranged marriages don’t get a lot of positive vibes from the contemporary western culture, right?.

Enter Asha. A Brimful of Asha, he says, was inspired by “a true story; it really happened.” And “it was important to have my mom’s perspective…. She said ‘if the audience heard my side of the story they’d agree with me!’”

“In a lot of ways she was right. And in a lot of ways she was wrong,” laughs Jain.

So mother and son wrote the play together, with its amusing and provocative counterpoint of perspectives, in a wild narrative that involves mom and dad following Ravi on a theatre work trip to India and plotting to set up meetings with a series of eligible bridal prospects. And Asha “agreed to appear on the stage as herself.” Which has got to count as a remarkably brave venture by a non-actor who wasn’t exactly thrilled, to understate the case, by the career her son had chosen.

The premiere run at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre in 2012 sold out completely, as did a second run there. “People loved it. And the response has been the same as we toured it all over the world,” says Jain. As reports from everywhere confirm, “people come away feeling like our relationship is at the centre of the story. And we have a good one. People recognize their own mom in mine, and they’re really taken by the story…. Older people often say ‘when I was young I agreed with you; now I’m older I grew with your mom’.”

Ravi laughs. “It’s the same everywhere.” Besides, he says simply, “she’s great. And charming.” Mieko Ouchi’s Citadel production, starring Nimet Kanji and Adolyn H. Dar, is only the second ever with actors other than the Jains.

In the end, did four years of touring the world changed his mom’s mind about the desirability, or lack thereof, of a career in theatre. “I wouldn’t say that!” says Jain. “She appreciates it more…. She has more appreciation for the people, and the hard work that goes into it. She loves the interaction with an audience. But is it her dream job for her kid? Well, no.”

And come to that, it’s a moment of great uncertainty in the world of theatre. Jain, who’s not into Zoom versions of theatre for Why Not, thinks “The big change isn’t whether (live theatre) will be back, it will … but the process of how we go about making it, making space for different people, different voices…. This gives us time to think about the inequities.”

Ravi Jain and his mother Asha Jain at his wedding. Photo supplied.

I know what you’re wondering, of course. Did Jain manage to get wed, in the end, to someone he’d chosen for himself? See above. “I’ve been married for eight years,” he laughs. “I was engaged when we first opened the show.”

Check out 12thnight’s conversation HERE with director Mieko Ouchi about the “heartwarming realness” of A Brimful of Asha.

REVIEW

A Brimful of Asha

Theatre: Citadel, as part of Horizon Series LIVE

Written by: Asha and Ravi Jain

Directed by: Mieko Ouchi

Starring: Adolyn H. Dar and Nimet Kanji

Running: Saturday through Nov. 15

Tickets (and COVID precaution details): citadeltheatre.com

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Curio Shoppe is home care, Catch The Keys style. Give yourself a fright.

Posted on October 22, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Morgan Yamada as Marie, in Curio Shoppe, Catch The Keys Productions. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Home care (Catch The Keys-style). “It’s time to haunt your own house,” says a silky voice, coming at us in the dark from the internet ether.

As its name suggests, Curio Shoppe, the ingenious joint creation of the Catch the Keys sister duo Megan and Beth Dart, spins its nightmare story from a selection of dusty, vintage objects. “The odd and unwanted, bits and bobs,” as the shoppe owner slyly describes a selection of objets that unlock a grisly narrative from Edmonton’s history. As we know from the company’s annual excursions into the past with Dead Centre of Town, we may be steeped in urban banality, but we’re the largely unknowing possessors of a surprisingly lurid, violent, bizarre history.

This time the location is your place, with the lights out, which is a trickier proposition. You’ll hear no more about the story from me; this is an experience that reveals itself in your online choices (designed by the ever-creative systems analyst Bradley King), and layers of projections and video and strange sounds and voices, and … oh my gawd, why is my cellphone ringing?

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I’m just reporting back from last night to say that Curio Shoppe is an artful, immersive piece of theatre, designed especially for a time in our collective history when we’re jammed between so-called reality, the online world, and, er, other worlds from the past and beyond the grave. Isn’t Google a sort of medium after all? How often do dead people text you?

Give yourself a fright.

Curio Shoppe includes Colin Matty, Morgan Yamada, Jake Tkaczyk, Christine Lesiak, and other cameos. And it’s the work of an entire team of audio, video, lighting, internet and theatrical designers and other experts who have lavished love on it.  And also ghoulish gore. I’m pretty sure it’s not fake. Is it?

It runs through Oct. 31. And tickets (one per household) are available at catchthekeys.ca. The only requirement is a reliable internet connection and a cellphone that’s on.   

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