We’ll meet again: Melanie Gall returns to active duty in her Vera Lynn show

Posted on August 28, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Melanie Gall as Vera Lynn in We’ll Meet Again. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In her TV address of April, when Queen Elizabeth encouraged the British people to be strong and stay resolute in a new kind of Blitz, she was invoking the spirit of the wartime 40s — and its most famous song.

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“We will meet again,” declared the Queen, an allusion to Vera Lynn’s biggest hit in a 93-year career. “We’ll meet again/ don’t know where/ don’t know when….”

“Even Vera Lynn couldn’t make it through 2020 unscathed,” as Melanie Gall notes. The iconic English singer died, at 103, in June. 

Her most galvanizing song has a particular resonance during these virus-battered, isolating times. After five months hiatus, Gall, the Edmonton-based much-travelled star of such solo Fringe hits as Edith Piaf: The Sparrow and the Mouse and Red Hot Mama: A Sophie Tucker Cabaret, is back live and singing (outdoors and at a safe distance) this very weekend. Her award-winning tribute show We’ll Meet Again: Vera Lynn, the Forces’ Sweetheart comes to the outdoor parking lot of the Jasper Place Curling Club Sunday, 2 p.m.

Gall’s startlingly far-reaching international touring schedule (Europe, Africa, Australia, South America) has long been set in motion by annual appearances at the Edinburgh Fringe. After a sold-out run of Ingenue: Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland, and the Golden Age of Hollywood at the Adelaide Fringe in March (it won the Best Musical award there), it’s been a whole season of tour cancellations for Gall. If times had been different, audiences in Durbin’s home town of Winnipeg would have seen the show at the Fringe there in July, before a run at the Edmonton Fringe earlier this month. 

Melanie Gall in Piaf and Brel: The Impossible Concert. Photo supplied.

Gall, who grew up in St. Albert, is as funny and engaging in conversation as she is onstage. A classical opera singer by training, she graduated from the U of A, then moved to Toronto and then New York. It was in the Metropolitan Opera training program she started fretting at the constraints. “In opera,” she said, you didn’t get to make your own artistic choices,” she says. “It’s strictly music-mandated; I loved the music but (opera) didn’t make me happy, and everyone was mean.” She laughs.

She made money in New York doing stints in Law and Order, “as a body double for someone pregnant.” And then she met Kirk Fitzpatrick, “a meta-clown with a weird act, who suggested doing the Fringe.” And that decision has been her bread-and-butter, Gall says. “I use the Fringes to sell to theatres.” In Edinburgh, a magnet for agents and festival and theatre managers, Gall is a rare example of a performer who not only gets gigs, but actually makes money. “I have an agent there, I got my Australia tour there, and I even got an Off-Broadway run through Edinburgh….”

“I learned as I went,” she says of a musical theatre path that began a decade ago. “And some shows were better than others.” Her Irving Berlin show, for example, that focussed on his early “quasi-naughty” songbook were out of copyright restrictions in the States, but not in Canada. Who knew? A cease-and-desist order ensued. 

Since Gall writes the text that glues the songs of her hour-long shows together (“40 minutes of singing, 15 minutes of writing”), she gradually developed an appetite for historical research. Her go-to libraries are the New York Performing Arts Library and the British Museum in London. “You’re living the research while you’re doing it,” she says of the experience of handling old programs, diaries, newspaper articles.

The leading expert on wartime knitting songs, Gall has fashioned not one but two shows  — Stitch in Time: A Knitting Cabaret and More Power to Your Knitting, Nell! — from “the lost knitting songs of World Wars I and II.”

“I tell stories and sing,” says Gall, who now has two CDs of knitting songs (mostly British, with one French and one Czech song). She knits onstage, and invites audiences to bring their own knitting to the show. “In Winnipeg, someone stopped the show” and rushed onstage to help, insisting that she’d dropped a stitch. “What do you do?” Needless to say there is nothing in the operatic handbook to cover the exigency of re-claiming your needles.

This summer’s premiere would have been The Lost Songs of Prohibition. As she points out, drinking songs would be a natural for cabarets in licensed venues. Next year’s show is an homage to Noel Coward.

Melanie Gall, We’ll Meet Again. Photo supplied.

Gall loves the Fringe tour. “It’s really fun, and it’s a level playing field! You get to play with the cool kids — and be one!”

Gall’s Vera Lynn show, which premiered in 2017 when the singer was a sprightly 99, was inspired by her grandfather’s love of the repertoire. “The BBC data base is full of great personal stories of World War II…. She didn’t walk away from the fans. She was there for them.”

“Vera Lynn,” incidentally, is Cockney rhyming slang for gin. And the singer had to take a spirits company, Halewood International, to court when they tried to use her name on the label.

At Sunday’s show you can expect to her a dozen or more songs from the 90-song Vera Lynn archive (including, of course, White Cliffs of Dover), “depending on the timing.” A parking lot venue doesn’t faze Gall in the least. “In Milan, I pretended to be American for a July 4 show.” In Chad she played outdoor at an international francophonie festival. “I’m willing to go anywhere!”

The Queen and Vera Lynn were right. We’ll meet again.

PREVIEW

We’ll Meet Again: Vera Lynn, the Forces’ Sweetheart

Created by and starring: Melanie Gall

Where: parking lot, Jasper Place Curling Club, 16521 107 Ave. (free parking, “lots of room to socially distance”).

Running: Sunday, 2 p.m.

Tickets: suggested price $20

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Heart + Soul: EPCOR’s good news for the performing arts

Posted on August 27, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

EPCOR’s initiative

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Every theatre company (and performing arts organization) in this live theatre town has sustained a devastating blow in the sudden, and continuing, shutdown of the industry six months ago.

In a bleak landscape for live performance, here’s welcome news: theatres, take note. EPCOR has launched a new $1.25 million community recovery fund in support of the city’s hard-hit arts/ culture/ recreation sector. The well-named Heart + Soul Fund invites applications for a one-time grant in three sizes: $5,000, $25,000 to $50,000, and $100,00 to $200,000.

As Thursday’s press conference revealed, the impetus behind Heart + Soul is to help charitable or not-for-profit organizations either to re-shape their existing programming for the new pandemic reality of 2020, or to create custom-made new initiatives. The idea, as EPCOR CEO Stuart Lee put it, is to invest in “re-energizing the community” — a community that relies heavily for its vibrancy, and indeed its identity, on sectors hit the hardest by pandemic reductions and closures.

The fund tops up EPCOR’s emergency relief funding to about $2 million, in addition to yearly $1 million contributions.

Launching digital platforms to transform the in-person to the virtual, re-modifying theatrical venues to accord with pandemic restrictions, mitigating risk, finding new ways of generating revenue, covering ruinous current expenses, leveraging matching funding … all are viable proposals for Heart + Soul. 

Capital projects are not eligible; Heart + Soul is designed for the operational. And the projects must be launched in 2020, in accordance with EPCOR’s fiscal year, so the fund is not available for summer festivals. Applications will be accepted starting now, till the $1.25 million is used up. Go for it, theatre companies. 

More information about how to apply is available at epcor.com/heartandsoul.    

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The Free Willies: the ‘sounds and sweet airs’ of travelling troubadours

Posted on August 21, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

The Free Willies, Billy Brown, Chariz Faulmino, Jameela McNeill. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Some time before the end of the month, it will happen. You’ll be in a park. Or a community playground. At a farmer’s market. Or chilling on a front deck. And suddenly, a little troupe of actor/musicians will pop up. They’ll sing songs, play instruments, tell jokes, do scenes from Shakespeare, taking their cue from the travelling players of the Bard’s own time.

They’re the Free Willies, a trio of young triple-threat troubadours presented under the joint flag of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival and Thou Art Here, the latter a “site-sympathetic” company dedicated to bringing Shakespeare to wherever you are. And in a series of 20-minute pop-up shows, the Free Willies mission is to raise your spirits, festival-deprived fellow citizens, while following all the COVID safety rules. It’s not your money they’re after, it’s your smiles.

The Free Willies. Photo supplied.

“Think of it as a late-summer dessert, an ice cream cone of a show,” says Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s new artistic director Dave Horak.  “Something fun and light” for a heavy time. And something live for a time of screen images.  

The three 20something up-and-comers in The Free Willies —   Jameela McNeil, Chariz Fulmino, and Billy Brown — “play versions of themselves,” says Horak. The spirit is cheeky; they take material from Thou Art Here’s larky Shakespeare puppet shows, which co-opt  contemporary songs for Shakespearean purposes. I Will Survive, for example, turns out to be about Hamlet. Who knew? Taylor Swift’s Fifteen is a Romeo and Juliet interpretation. The cabaret variety is a collaborative effort that owes much to Thou Art Here’s Alyson Dicey, says Horak.

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There’s even a song to works in the scrupulous COVID safely protocols in physical distancing and masks: “these are a few of my favourite things,” borrowed from The Sound of Music. The free Willies perform in face shields (better acoustically than masks), and they travel with a wagon equipped with an amplifier and speakers.

The Free Willies. Photo supplied.

Since the 2020 Freewill Shakespeare Festival was delayed by a year (Macbeth and Much Ado About Nothing won’t open in Hawrelak Park till June 15, 2021), the company was looking for an outdoor theatrical experience in the meantime, something to tickle both aficionados and those who are “a wee bit Shakespeare-curious,” as Horak puts it.

The Free Willies rehearsed in Horak’s garage, much to the enjoyment of his neighbours. Which says something about the classic showbiz impetus of the whole enterprise; you know, ‘my dad has a barn; we have a flashlight; let’s put on a show!’. 

There’s already been a lot of interest, Horak reports. Which means he’s up against an unusual theatrical problem: how to not attract a bigger crowd. That’s why the locations aren’t announced till an hour or two before showtime. Look for them on the Freewill and Thou Art Here social media feeds: @FreewillPlayers and @ThouArtHere. 

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Fringe FOMO: House of Hush burlesque goes live

Posted on August 20, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

House of Hush cast, Fringe FOMO. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Take it off! No, wait….

In the age of COVID, burlesque, a teasing vaudeville involving the playful progressive doffing of apparel, can remove just about everything — everything, that is, but the mask. 

Masked showgirls: now, there’s a new look for burlesque, and a new definition of Clothing Optional. And Delia Barnett, aka LeTabby Lexington, is amused. In Fringe FOMO, the live House of Hush Burlesque show that comes to Metro Cinema headquarters at the Garneau Theatre (aka Fringe BYOV 20) Friday night, LeTabby and Violette Coquette will be wearing masks for their (socially distanced) duet number onstage.

Barnett describes it as “a double fan dance.” The inspiration comes from the Golden Age of Hollywood: the Pickford girls, “America’s sweetheart” Mary and her fun-loving sister Lotte. In a better world, you would have seen the number in a Fringe show from Send in the Girls, another burlesque troupe co-founded by Barnett (with Ellen Chorley), devoted to exploring burlesque as theatre. 

“Violette is the stunner, the tall beautiful one. I’m the goofy clown one who follows her around,” says Barnett, whose personal perspective on burlesque is that it’s a heightened form of clowning.

Barnett has been in Fringe shows for the last dozen years, and produced them for the last nine. She says Fringe FOMO was designed as an antidote for Fringe deprivation syndrome.  “When the Fringe was cancelled we were really sad,” she says. “Then we thought it might be nice to have some time off. And then (as the Fringe time approached), devastation set in again….” Ah, the Fringe cancellation cycle; I know it well.

In the interests of COVID safety she and Violette looked around for the biggest venue with the biggest stage they could book. And the Garneau fit the requirements to a G (string). “The performers won’t remotely be within six feet of each other,” Barnett points out. In a 520-seat house, only 100 tickets will be sold. “They’ve planned it out really well, with single seats space, and spots for groups of two or four who come together…. So, 100 in the audience and five onstage; there will only be 105 people max in that big room.” And except for moments when audience members are drinking, or eating popcorn, it will be a masked assembly.

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Founded by LeTabby and Violette in 2017 as a way to package solo burlesque acts and get more rent-sustaining corporate gigs, House of Hush is nothing if not resilient. “Prior to shutdown we were having our most lucrative spring ever,” sighs Barnett. There were monthly burlesque shows in the retro cocktail lounge at the Crash Hotel, a downtown boutique hostelry on 103 St. across from the Rogers arena. In March, they switched to livestreaming the shows every two weeks, attracting performers from across Canada and the U.S. “It went super-duper well!” says Barnett, who has an appealing kind of buoyancy about her. “But when the weather got nice, business dropped off. So we thought it’d be fun to do a live show!” 

Barnett, who moved West from St. Catherines Ont. in 2007 to go to the U of A theatre school, says she was “too shy, too uncomfortable” to even think of performing burlesque when she was invited to audition for a troupe in Hamilton. But she was an admirer of the early 20th century German performance artist pioneer Valeska Gert, whose “erotic grotesque” credo was an inspiration. Barnett’s burlesque debut in 2010 was at a Nextfest Smut Night. “It was more performance art than burlesque, I think…. I talked about my mom and my childhood,” she laughs.

It was at Nextfest that Barnett met Ellen Chorley, now the Nextfest director. Both history buffs, they learned burlesque together, coached by a childhood friend, in her living room. Send In The Girls was born in their first duet. And in 2011 Barnett produced the troupe’s first big hit, Tudor Queens, a clever burlesque uncorseting of the wives of Henry VIII (she played Katherine Howard, the teenage bride who paid heavily for her amorous free spirit). 

“There is so much body-shaming; we’re not taught to love ourselves and our bodies,” Barnett says. Correcting those damages is one of her principal goals when she teaches burlesque. “Sometimes just moving your hips around brings up a lot of emotion!”

“Now the most comfortable I ever am onstage is in burlesque…. You pick your costume, you pick the music, you pick the choreography. You’re performing on your own terms,” she says. “You’re in charge.”

You’re even in charge of your own christening. Her burlesque alter-ego LeTabby Lexington is “a grown-up bolder version of my clown,” says Barnett, who has spent the last couple of seasons in the cast of the improv troupe Die-Nasty (most recently as a burlesque showgirl named Daisy Darling). Tabby was a nickname a university classmate (actor Mary Hulbert) gave her. “I reminded her of a tabby cat, and I thought it was funny to mix French and English.” Lexington is her favourite gargoyle from the Disney animated TV series Gargoyles.

Friday night’s Fringe Fomo features a variety of performance styles, as Barnett describes. Silk E Gunz, says Barnett, “does a fan dance to a rock song she loves.” Scarlett Fussion has “a hilarious mermaid act.” Luna LaPeal’s preferred style is jazzy; “her movement is so good.” For her solo, Violette Coquette does Cry Me A River, in “an amazing spectacle” that features 15 feet of fabric. In addition to her duet with Violette Coquette, LeTabby Lexington is the emcee. 

“Burlesque is bold, brave, funny, playful. What you see is a heightened version of me!”

PREVIEW

Fringe FOMO

Theatre: House of Hush Burlesque

Starring: LeTabby Lexington, Silk E Gunz, Scarlette Fussion, Luna LaPeal, Violette Coquette

Where: Metro Cinema at the Garneau Theatre

When: Friday, 9 p.m.

Tickets: metrocinema.org

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And back at the castle: a radio play version of Guys in Disguise’s Dragula

Posted on August 18, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Trevor Schmidt and Darrin Hagen in Dragula, Guys in Disguise. Photo by Ian Jackson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It sounds like a sublime punchline: a drag show, in all its be-wigged glam-frocked glory, as a radio play?

True, there’s a certain captivating perversity about the Guys in Disguise revival of their hit Fringe show Dragula  — opening aurally this week.

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But when you hear the very funny trailer for the radio play version of Darrin Hagen’s and Trevor Schmidt’s spoof-y gothic romance, with its creaky doors, eerie whooshes, and strange echoes — not to mention the wooden high-pitched tones of the dimbulb virginal heroine — you’ll catch the drift of the pluses, too.

Guys in Disguise, a company with more a three decade-plus archive in bending gender and match-making drag and theatre, premiered Dragula 10 Fringes ago on the Varscona stage. The absence of that massive showcase, where Guys in Disguise are bona fide stars, is the immediate impetus behind this new version (though they’d been thinking of re-doing it as a podcast, Schmidt says).

If it hadn’t been for COVID, there would be a new Schmidt/Hagen hot ticket running at the Fringe as you read this, starring its two creators along with Jake Tkaczyk and Jason Hardwick. “Crack in the Mirror,” which we are now officially missing, “is set in a women’s community group in the late ‘70s,” says Schmidt of the might-have-been. The theme of the monthly meeting is “mirror mirror on the floor.” The principal prop? Hand mirrors; you can take it from there.

Dragula, explains Schmidt, “marries gothic to the Hammer (horror) films from the late ‘60s…. Everything looks gothic except the hair!”  He’s amused to remember a prime question from every radio interview he and Hagen have done about their Guys in Disguise Fringe productions. “‘Can you describe to our audience what you’re wearing?’ Darrin would be in his cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirt and I’d be in a tank top and whatever. And we’d lie!”

So in a nod to this venerable media tradition, I ask Schmidt (who’s also the resident Guys in Disguise costume designer) on the phone what he’s wearing as virginal heroine Virginia Hymen, possessor of the hilarious voice, “dumb as a sack of hammers, quite blank.” He obliges: “A perfect dress. A seersucker-sucker stretch gothic gown, empire waist. Lace gauntlets. A beautiful antique lace negligee with a long train. Off-white….. And a huge beehive.”

The poster art is a tip-off, and owes its inspiration to “pulp novel covers,” says Schmidt. “Almost always a young woman running away from a castle. Usually at night.”

Trevor Schmidt and Darrin Hagen, Dragula. Photo by Ian Jackson.

The gist of Dragula, he says, is “young virgin goes off to castle and discovers intrigue,” etc. Naturally, Virginia, who’s playing with more than a few cards short of a deck, “takes a candle and wanders the castle at night, through towers and dungeons….” As sound designer/actor Dave Clarke has fashioned this abode, it’s a veritable repository of aural effects: wind, screams, barking dogs, slamming doors….

OK, you can’t see the garlic sausage in this aural version. Or the spooky lighting, or the giant picture frame the actors carried around the stage to change the setting. Or the two wooden stakes, one big one small, “for the Big Moment,” as Schmidt says. But, says Hagen, “you feel the set and taste the costumes…. And Trevor’s voice is so funny! He wasn’t sure people would realize how jaw-droppingly stupid his character is” without the visual accompaniment of blank looks. Hagen assures us that we will. The heroine’s “wooden flat delivery, without subtext of any kind” is a show-stopper for aural theatre.

The castle’s proprietor, as you will have surmised, is the Countess (imagine the statuesque Hagen in a selection of glamorous goth attire) with the sinister outgrowth in dentition. Virginia’s uncle Professor Dick Von Dick (Clarke) is a manly vampire-slayer. Wilma Fingerdo (Davina Stewart) is the Countess’s henchperson and former lover (“we don’t sleep in the same coffin any more”). Needless to say Wilma is a bit snarly about the arrival of a rival, especially a young and virginal one with a girly high-pitched voice. The narrator is voiced by Patricia Darbasie.

As in so many Guys in Disguise comedies, the serious — feminism, sexual politics, thoughts about the patriarchy, gender politics — is approached playfully, outrageously. “Sneaky fun,” says Hagen, whose play 10 Funerals is the grand finale of the upcoming Shadow Theatre season. “I really like to tackle big subjects with humour, and slip in the ‘lesson’,” says Schmidt.

Playwright/actor/activist/ queer historian Hagen calls Dragula “an allegory of homosexuality,” and vampire lesbianism is centrestage. Von Dick is the representative of the patriarchy, “saving women from their own lust…. Hey, a battle of good and evil!”

“It’s the first play where we purposely didn’t have swears,” says Schmidt, who’s currently working on a Bollywood-style indie film. “We wanted to see if we could do it.”

Have a peek at the trailer: https://guysindisguise.bandcamp.com/releases. That link is where you can get the $10 tickets soon. And hey, it’s a bargain. Hagen pictures you and your pals listening in your backyard “after midnight.”

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Signs of life: live theatre is coming back, with cautious first steps

Posted on August 15, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Shaun Smyth in Playing with Fire: the Theo Fleury Story, at Persephone in Saskatoon, 2016. Photo by Electric Umbrella/ Liam Richards.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

And they’re back!

Very cautiously, of course, experimentally, a little tentatively, with ultra-sanitized jazz hands. And not full-blast: nary a large-scale musical in sight, needless to say. But live theatre is starting to be back … live and with live audiences.

For an arts industry whose raison d’être is the excitement of real live in-person experience, it’s been a wintry four-and-a-half months. And you’ve got to admire the resourcefulness, the resilience, the sheer tooth-gritting persistence of our theatre artists, who’ve devised ways to translate performance onto screens.

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But 2-D imaging does whet the appetite for 3-. Three theatres are up for the complicated challenge of inviting real live audiences, albeit a fraction of their usual capacity, back and on location: Edmonton’s biggest playhouse, the Citadel; Edmonton’s tiniest, Grindstone; and the venturesome Mayfield Dinner Theatre.

Start with the smallest first. Next week Grindstone Theatre in Old Strathcona is launching a Re-Set Theatre Fest in person (or online). As the company’s tireless artistic director Byron Martin describes, Re-Set is a mini-Fringe of sorts. Nine sketch, stand-up and improv comedy shows rotate five performances each, from Wednesday through Aug. 30, at the Grindstone’s bistro headquarters (10019 81 Ave.) and the nearby Sewing Machine Factory (under the Mill Creek Cafe, 9562 82 Ave.).

A socially-distanced audience of 36 max at either 84-seat venue, will catch sketch comedy troupes like The Debutants or Marv N Berry. Or a BIPOC standup showcase, Black Laughs Matter, hosted by Natasha Lyn Myles. The lineup includes You Might Notice Something Different About Me, from trans standup comic Cindy Rivers. There’s an improvised Yeg DND, to make the nerd crowd happy. And there’s even a puppet talk show, Gabbin’ With Gobber, with Malachi Wilkins. See the whole line-up and schedule at grindstonetheatre.ca  

It’s not exactly curated. Word got out, “people applied, and we waived all producer fees” in favour of a $2 surcharge on tickets, Martin explains. “Ever since Phase 2 in July, we’ve started exploring the possibilities with our producers,” he says of the Grindstone’s weekly roster of troupes. “Everyone feels differently; everyone has a different comfort level.”

The pandemic check-list is reassuring, both in detail and enforcement. “The audience must wear masks. So, distancing and masks, sign-ups (at the start of every show) for contact tracing, hand sanitizing, separate entrance and exit, someone to seat people and make sure the rules are followed… We have to have a staff technical director onsite for every show, and we used to let the producers bring their own.Technicians have to wipe down everything between shows.” The list goes on. “And it’s a lot of work,” Martin admits. “But people are hungry for a live experience. And we’re very glad to be able to be open.”

Can the money work with an audience of 36?  “We have an average audience size of 30 anyway,” says Martin. “It works with 20 people watching.” And if your basic pandemic anxiety level isn’t tuned down yet to venturing forth in person, the shows will be live-streamed, with digital tickets available.

•The Citadel’s return to live in-person performance after the long intermission is their experimental two-night Horizon Lab, a two-night “celebration of Albertan BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and disabled artists’ stories,” on the Shoctor stage Aug. 28 and 29. One hundred (free) tickets a night are available for masked, socially-distanced audiences in the scrupulously sanitized 681-seat Shoctor Theatre. For those not ready to gather, a video version will be available a couple of weeks after the live run.

Helen Belay, Cinderella, Globe Theatre Regina. Photo by Chris Graham.

The summer’s artistic associate team — Helen Belay, Tai Amy Grauman and Mieko Ouchi — has already launched a Horizon Series, now underway at citadeltheatre.com, in which they interview leading BIPOC artists about their work, their experiences working on Canadian stages, their plans. Now the three have assembled five teams of BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and disabled artists, to devise a 10-minute piece each, in a months, for Horizon Lab. 

The prompt they offered artists was a question: “where are your stories?,” inspired by If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground, by the Canadian writer J. Edward Chamberlin. “The teams could choose to be their own performers, or bring others in,” explains Belay. 

Designer Elise Jason created a stage environment full of possibilities, “a palimpsest of artistic creation,” as Belay puts it. “There’s a hint of it in the graphic (above): A trio of celestial … suns? presences? in the sky. In beautiful rich course evocative of the landscape.”

“We asked ourselves what can we do right now that can serve the community. After the kind of miasma we’ve all been slogging through … everyone feels a real need for a 3-D space to gather. We’ve been inundated by screens. We just felt we had to incorporate a live element.”

“AND we wanted to put some money in the pockets of artists we believe in.”

Teams like Todd Houseman and Lady Vanessa Cardona (who created a piece for Christina Nguyen and Sheldon Stockdale), had worked together before. You may have seen their show The Whiteface Cabaret on FringeTV’s opening night Thursday. Other connections are new, “to plant seeds for future collaborations, to invest in relationships, and hopefully to change the landscape we live in, long-term,” says Belay. In the case of playwright/actor Mac Brock and Pepper’d co-founder Tasana Clarke, “they were two up-and-coming artists doing cool things…. Let’s see if they’d be interested in working together!”

The teams include a diversity of talents: Richard Lee Hsi and Morgan Yamada, both expert physical performers; Patricia Cerra, Carly Neis and Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks; Mohamed Ahmed and Elena Eli Belyea with Mahalia Carter-Jameson.

Says Belay “It’s been so fascinating, a privilege to be part of this moment, which hopefully will roll over into something for the future. Quite the illuminating experience!”

Tickets are free but required, with donations encouraged: citadeltheatre.com.

• The hit solo show Playing With Fire: The Theo Fleury Story is up on its skates once more — and back in a hockey-mad town staring Sept. 8. That’s when the Mayfield Dinner Theatre re-opens, in a socially distanced new configuration — with the magnetic Shaun Smyth as the NHL star haunted, and nearly derailed, by dark turbulence of his past as a victim of sexual abuse.

Ron Jenkins’ electrifying production, which happens entirely on skates on a specially designed rink, was on tour at the Citadel five years ago.  It returns, with Smyth in the title role, to tell (and show) the story of a small-town kid from a chaotic home life, with an extraordinary talent in a world that celebrated it, and then threatened it.

It runs Sept. 8 through Oct. 25. The Mayfield buffet has been replaced with table service. And theatre-goers can only remove their masks once they’re seated at the table.

Tickets and a list of precautions: mayfieldtheatre.ca or 780-483-4051.   

  

  

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The might-have-been hits home: it’s Fringe Eve in Edmonton

Posted on August 12, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Katie Hartman in The Unrepentant Necrophile, The Coldharts. Photo by Dan Norman.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

For months I knew it would come. The weirdest week of a weird summer. The week the Fringe doesn’t happen. It’s a might-have-been that leaves us face to face with the strangest, most unrecognizable of vistas … a Fringe-less August in Edmonton.

For 38 summers, it has never happened till now. In all the time I’ve been a theatre writer, since Fringe #2 in 1983 when my editor sent me out to investigate a bizarre little eruption of theatre in Old Strathcona, the Summer and the Fringe have been completely interchangeable terms. The calendar always, naturally, arranged itself around festivities that always started a week after the Folk Fest.

I know I risk sounding hopelessly self-centred, at a moment that hits thousands and thousands of other people, in the profoundest of ways — life, death, livelihood. But I can’t quite believe it, in truth.

In Might-Have-Been World on the eve of Fringe opening night, which changed from Friday to Thursday more than a decade ago, I’d be scrambling to write something more about shows I can’t wait to see, and how much the festivities have grown, shamelessly over-using “fringe” as a verb (an Edmonton contribution to world theatre lexicon). I’d be scrambling to unknot the contradictions in my ridiculously intricate Fringe schedule, hunting down an extension cord and power bar, lining up for a press pass (a tradition always accompanied by a lemon pizza lunch in  Strathcona to prepare the digestion for an onslaught of trail mix, green onion cakes and fried objects).

I’d be getting butterflies preparing to enter the high-energy world of jostling crowds, late late nights, lingering mini-donut smell in the air, and shows with no sets to speak of, enigmatic descriptions, and titles with multiple exclamation marks. And I’d be marvelling at the grand good fortune brought to us by the exciting Fringe mix of new, emerging talent and veteran artists, from here and the great big world, trying out shows, theatrical ideas, techniques, or skills they didn’t get the chance to exercise during the season. Like you I’d be preparing to be surprised, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms.

Well, 2020, an iffy proposition at best so far, has just flung itself willy-nilly, into Outer Space.

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A veritable tsunami of wistfulness is upon us. And the Fringe knows heartbreak when it sees it: they are after all, a festival facing a ruinous $3 million loss, surrounded by artists left stranded by the cancellation of their income. They’ve launched a fund-raising appeal they’ve christened Tears, Beers & Tickets You’ll Never Use — tickets to shows you can only dream about, beers you’ll never drink (not to mention horrifying pizza-in-a-cone things you’ll never eat). Check it out at fringetheatre.ca.

And since Fringe habits die hard, as well I know, Fringe #39, The Fringe That Never Was, has assembled free digital programming nightly for the festival duration: fringe shows, interviews with fringe artists from here there and everywhere, music, conversation…. It kicks off with Thursday night’s “opening ceremonies” at 6 p.m. on FringeTV, and runs there through Aug. 23. T

The full line-up is at fringetheatre.ca/festival/events. And you can check out the 12thnight.ca Fringe That Never Was survey piece HERE.

Todd Houseman and Lady Vanessa Cardona in Whiteface. Photo supplied.

Thursday night on FringeTV, in a collaboration with FringeLiveStream, Todd Houseman and Lady Vanessa Cardona translate their edgy 2018 Fringe satire Whiteface into The Whiteface Cabaret (7 p.m.).

Friday night at 7 p.m. (also Aug. 19 at 7), Brooklyn’s The Coldharts (Edgar Allan) reveal a digital Fringe version of The Unrepentant Necrophile, a punk rock musical with an alluringly unusual true-life premise, a love story between an apprentice embalmer and a corpse. Read my 12thnight interview with Katie Hartman and Nick Ryan about the show HERE.

Josh Languedoc in Rocko and Nakota. Photo supplied.

Josh Languedoc, a great Indigenous storyteller, has re-worked his much-travelled solo show Rocko and Nakota for the Fringe’s digital series (Aug. 18, 7:30). And before that (6 p.m.) this smart and genial artist hosts Irreconcilable Spaces of Cultural Identity: A BIPOC Fringe artist conversation. 

There are many more fringe-y things to see every night (except Monday), including a Virtual Wine Tent (Thursday through Saturday and Aug. 18 through 22, 8:30 p.m.). And, look on the bright side, there’s this: you can drink your plonk in a proper glass and not in those little plastic stemmed things that always tip over on your program.

        

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Remembering the enchantment: Brent Carver in Edmonton

Posted on August 11, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Brent Carver and Nicky Guadagni in Romeo and Juliet, directed by John Neville. Photo from Citadel Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There was an unmistakeable magic about seeing Brent Carver onstage. People felt it; they remembered the enchantment. I was struck again by that with the many heartfelt responses that came my way with the terrible news last week that he had passed away, at 68.

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Some conjured the impact that seeing his Romeo 44 years ago, in the 1976 John Neville production that opened the Citadel’s new brick-and-glass playhouse downtown. For some, Carver’s performance in that Romeo and Juliet was their “first theatrical experience ever,” the one that drew them into to a life-long love affair with theatre, as an artist or an audience member. Once seen never forgotten. For some it was Carver as Feste in the Citadel’s Twelfth Night a season later.

Brent Carver in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, 1975. Citadel Theatre.

Others went back even farther for their life-changing moment, to the original Sally Ann citadel on 102 St.  — and Carver as the title star of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.

His stellar seasons at Stratford, nine in all (the first in 1980), reveal his extraordinary range, Hamlet to Tartuffe to Tevye via Dr. Frank N Furter. And they’re well documented. But his connection to Edmonton goes way back. In 1973, a 22-year-old actor from Cranbrook, B.C. with a gentle smile and delicately chiselled features, was the callow Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing, Neville’s regime-launching bell-bottomed Tex-Mex production at the old Citadel.

Brent Carver in rehearsal for Romeo and Juliet, 1976. Citadel Theatre.

I wasn’t around then (in Edmonton, I mean). But in the 90s I was in the audience for Carver as a quicksilver Robin Hood at the Citadel. And I’ll never forget the magic of his utterly captivating performance as Cyrano, the big-nosed swordsman with the soaring romantic imagination and the otherworldly gift of poetry, in the Citadel production directed by Robin Phillips. It’s an evergreen memory for a lot of other people too, judging by my messages of last week.

Actor/improviser/director Ron Pederson, now Toronto-based, was an Edmonton kid of 14 when he saw Cyrano at the Citadel. “And in that one performance I realized what theatre was for and what an actor could be, and that being a Canadian actor was a real thing…. I went back three more times to see if I could see where it was coming from, how he was doing it. I’m happy I’ll never know. He changed my life; a Canadian actor going where his soul led him and sharing it all along the way.”

Brent Carver, right, with Kate Newby and Andrew Jackson in Cyrano, 1994, Citadel Theatre

Cyrano was Carver’s first first theatrical stop after 18 months of electrifying Broadway and West End audiences in the musical Kiss of the Spider Woman. His startling and original performance as Molina, a gay window dresser who conjures old movies (enacted by co-star Chita Rivera) to beguile his cellmate, won him the best actor Tony Award in 1993.

I remember seeing his dazzling performance in New York, and waiting by the stage door to meet up with him afterward. The assembled crowd, it turned out, was there for Rivera; the curly-haired soft-spoken Canadian with the ratty backpack (and the 20-year resumé of classical roles across the border) slipped away with me for a drink without any fan attention at all. 

Carver left splashy Broadway success after a year and a half — to come back to Canada. “And I left satisfied,” he told me in an Edmonton Journal interview in 1995. “There came to be more output than input…. There are many ways to make money. Your priority has to be the people you work with.”

The season after Cyrano, he was back in Edmonton at the Citadel to be Richard III in Phillips’ production. In his sexy, funny, dangerous performance, Carver played the hunch-backed master manipulator as a sort of evil urchin, appalling and seductive in equal measure. I’ll never forget the opening image: Richard rolls towards us, silently in an electric wheelchair, a dark and sinister figure lolling asymmetrically in the corner of the seat. And then suddenly, he was out of the chair, in a powerful kind of lopsided explosion, to tell us acidly about the winter of his discontent.

I interviewed Carver a few times in my decades at the Edmonton Journal. And I always found him funny and kind, very humble and non-starry, a bit shy, deeply thoughtful about theatre (well, about everything actually) but not following conventional tracks. He had a free-associative zigzag way of talking about things that was all his own. As a writer I found that very hard to capture on the page, that elusive, free-floating, pinball quality — without making him sound a bit loopy or wispy, which was absolutely not the case. The contradiction between the gentle, almost ethereal quality of the guy and his immense power as an actor were so intriguing. 

“Language,” Carver said of Richard III (in my 1995 Journal interview), “is a turn-on. It touches you everywhere: your heart, your head, under your skin. It creeps in and caresses you.”

I’m not sure how Canadian theatre can do without him.

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The loneliness of the long-distance playwright: have a one-on-one consultation with Workshop West’s new resident dramaturg

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Got a script in your sock drawer? A draft in your Google Docs? An idea for a play rattling around in your head? Workshop West Playwrights Theatre has an invitation for you.

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Their latest initiative, under WWPT’s new artistic producer Heather Inglis, is to provide free-of-charge, custom-made, one-on-one feedback, dramaturgical consultation and support to anyone who submits a script. “No barriers.”

From the start, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre (the only producing company in the country with “playwrights” in its official name) was a writer’s theatre. For four decades it has been, at heart, all about the discovery, care, development, and deployment of new Canadian work — a company surrounded by playwrights and scripts in every stage of development, from the bright idea on up.

The program invites Edmonton writers of every age, every background, every creative goal, every degree of experience (including zero), to have their work read and dramaturged by award-winning playwright/actor Beth Graham (Pretty Goblins, The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble, Slight of Mind). And that dauntingly elusive term “dramaturgy” can mean whatever you need it to mean, says the new “dramaturg-in-residence,” who knows what it’s like to be a lonely playwright sitting in front of a screen week after week.

“I’m here,” she says, “to make it not so lonely … to support writers in creating what they want to write.” After a draft, the lonely playwright is up against the question “now what?.” Until May, Graham is their “now what.”

“I’ll read the script — I try to do that in one sitting — jot down thoughts, and reply to the playwright to ask if they want to follow up with a one-on-one talk, a phone call or Zoom meeting. The idea “is to support people in what they want to write. Sometimes people are clear about what they’re trying to do, sometimes not.”

“It’s about support and letting the playwright come up with a plan. And not to put up obstacles,” says Graham, currently the U of A’s playwright-in-residence and leader of a playwrights’ circle there. “Do no harm. Support.” That’s her double-sided dramaturg mantra. And it involves asking a lot of questions, many familiar to actors: “what are your objectives? what are the complications?” — and extrapolating from there. “‘The feeling I’m getting is this: is that where you’re going with it? Or ‘that’s an interesting complication!’ Or ‘how can you raise the stakes on that?’”

As an actor-turned-playwright, Graham, who spent a season as Workshop West’s playwright-in-residence (ex-artistic director Vern Thiessen was dramaturg, along with Colleen Murphy, on Pretty Goblins), is a veteran recipient of countless dramaturgical interventions. And she knows full well that some are more productive than others. “O my gawd, yes. Sometimes I’ve come away so blocked. Sometimes I’ve come away with a plan, inspired and rarin’ to go!.”

The goal is “to give the writers the courage to keep going, to be inspired!”

Workshop West is accepting scripts till October 15. And they’re just starting to come in, Graham reports. Already there’s a striking variety: “comedies, dramas, politically motivated stuff, some things based on true events. All over the place, and that makes it fun! I’m really interested to see how these times will show up in them….”

Graham herself has a play in the works, “not about the pandemic” she hastens to add. “Actually I have a few; I call them ‘my drawer plays’,” abandoned drafts and ideas for scripts. The haul has turned up a variety: “Some I’m pulling out definitely need some work. Some have interesting stuff in them….”

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What do you know now that you didn’t know on March 12? 12thnight asked theatre artists

Posted on August 4, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Kristi Hansen and Sheldon Elter rehearsing the online Sterling Awards in their back yard. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“It’s been a learning curve.”

Once more, with feeling. Since March I’ve heard the line from theatre artists too many times to count. And it’s been delivered in every intonation and cadence: exasperation (sardonic or direct), rueful sigh, make-the-best of-it-shrug, plucky chin-up show-must-go-on vocal smile, bright exclamatory brio.

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Ever since the devastating moment four-and-a-half months ago live theatre suddenly ceased to be a matter of real live people sharing a room with real live performers, theatre artists, who are after all trained in the art of social non-distancing, have been learning new skills, complicated screen technologies, new ways of rehearsing and performing and thinking about their industry (not to mention new ways of paying rent with no money). And, coupled with the critical momentum of Black Lives Matter, they’ve had time to think about theatre itself, what they value, what should change.

What do you know now that you didn’t know March 12? That’s the question I asked a selection of theatre artists. Their thoughts about what they’d learned were very different. Some were hopeful about ‘digital theatre’; some were not. Here’s some of what they had to say.

Sheldon Elter in Métis Mutt. Photo by Ryan Parker.

Sheldon Elter (actor, playwright, musician):

“I didn’t realize how important our jobs were until everything was shut down. We are more vital than we think we are as ‘live performers’. There’s only so much Netflix a person can watch before you’re craving a live experience you can share with other people: friends AND strangers. I love the idea of people trying to do something: Zoom performances, backyard shows…. But I really do miss being close to a stranger in a seat next to me. Sharing laughs. Hilariously, the ‘infection’ of laughs and joy and tears is important. It’s what truly brings us together as audiences. And we are affected by each other when in CLOSE proximity.”

Kristi Hansen (actor, director, co-artistic director of Azimuth Theatre, leaving to make room for young BIPOC talent; co-artistic director of The Maggie Tree):

“March 12 is the day we did the dress rehearsal of Candide for Edmonton Opera in the morning. I went home and had a nap and when I woke up it was cancelled. I don’t think I’d even clocked that a shutdown was possible. And now, four months later, I’m very aware that CERB is coming to an end and artists need to start getting paid to work. Safely. And that our rights as theatre workers ARE workers’ rights: health and safety, pay equity, anti-racist policies in action…. Now is a great time to examine HOW we work instead of always defaulting to ‘the show must go on’.”

Playwright/performer Josh Languedoc. Photo supplied by Thousand Faces Festival.

Josh Languedoc, actor, playwright, improviser, Indigenous storyteller (Rocko & Nakota), newly appointed Youth and Education Coordinator at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre:

“A few random thoughts that jump out at me: One thing I didn’t know was how human the theatrical experience is. Not only do we create art for the public, we desperately miss being around them! Almost as if the tribal gathering of people in a theatrical space means more to the artists than the act of creating art itself. In short, digital theatre just isn’t the same!

I didn’t know how to stream shows over the internet. Frankly this is still something I don’t know a ton about. But through my work with FringeLiveStream I’ve been able to understand streaming platform basics something like OSB software. Still feels confusing but it’s interesting at the same time!

I was also surprised to see the federal government support the arts as much as they have during this pandemic. So many grants and programs made available to artists that allowed them to create. Conversely it’s NOT surprising our provincial government has done the exact opposite — slashed funds and cut off significant revenue sources to artists. This switch has genuinely surprised me!

In general, I’ve also realized how desperately we need each other. We truly are social beings who crave social spaces.

I’ve also come to seek wisdom in these times. I’ve learned really strong art is made in times of transition. And when people create from a place of ‘unknowing’ some really powerful material can be made. I cannot wait to see what strong narratives of culture, resilience and community come out of these strange times!”

Helen Belay, Cinderella, Globe Theatre Regina. Photo by Chris Graham.

Helen Belay, actor (The Blue Hour, Vidalia), storyteller, member of Citadel Theatre Associate Artist summer team:

“The digitization of our form is possible. Technology is so advanced now, and what I’ve noticed is that when we lean into the form of whatever we’re using — a recent and brilliant example is Gender? I Hardly Know Them’s httpeepee — you can make something really special. And beyond performance too — workshopping new works and auditions? Also possible. That being said, I miss sharing experiences and stories with other bodies and hearts in space. There is something incredibly magical about that….

Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Belinda Cornish, Helen Belay, Chris Pereira in Vidalia, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby.

The times we’re in right now have also made me realize that while I have lived experience and a decent base of knowledge around race and race politics, there are people smarter than me who have years of experience, study and vernacular…. So I’ve been reading up and thinking deeply on that. The book I’m currently chipping away at is Reni-Eddo Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race … and am planning to follow that up with Bob Joseph’s 21 Things You May Not Know About The Indian Act…. I think striving for specificity of thought and action in the context of history and politics is needed to effectively tell the stories we want and need to tell in this era of social change.

I’ve also been relearning how to simply be. I think a lot of us forget how to — because, hello!, children can whittle away the hours with ease AND enjoy it AND feel accomplished after the fact.

FINALLY … for years, I have thought I might never learn how to play barre chords on the guitar. But with a slow and steady effort, built out of a few minutes a day, I’ve found hope.

Mac Brock. Photo supplied.

Mac Brock, playwright (Boy Trouble, Tracks), actor, producer (Amoris Projects):

There’s been a slow yet constant thudding feeing tugging at me for the last few months. Our industry prides itself on adaptability and open arms, but it feels even now like we’re sitting on our hands, waiting for the few at the helms to make space for new creators, new stories etc. What I’ve been learning is that there’s a brilliant next act bubbling through his intermission: one of young, or long-underseen, creators flipping the tables and making the space they wish to see in the city.

I miss liveness. I miss audiences. I miss the joy of a really good idea done really well. But I don’t look forward to it returning to normal. I look forward to seeing how a new generation transforms how we make theatre magic. And oh, will there be magic!

  

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