Giving thanks for theatre: the long weekend on E-town stages

Posted on October 11, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

 

Dead Centre of Town XII. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s the moment to be thankful for Edmonton’s most captivating arts asset – our theatre scene. Many possibilities are waiting for you this weekend, including a macabre entertainment spun from our own neglected history. And the Thanksgiving festivities include your last chance to see the splendid season-opener at the Citadel, the fun finale of the Teatro La Quindicina season, and a varied assortment from indie companies and our venerable community theatre. The crack Mayfield season-opener continues. And, well, have a peek….

•There’s a first for everything. Last night, on the way out of a show, I stepped over a corpse.

Cautiously. Not least because the dead have a way of not staying deceased, much less buried, in Dead Centre of Town. On my route to the 12th annual edition of Catch The Keys Production’s graveside historical explorations, a dead body with a chalky face triumphed over rigor mortis and bestirred himself to make eye contact. So did a macabre greeter swinging an axe. Autumn nights in Fort Edmonton Park — currently under widespread re-construction but strung with twinkling lights and haunted by unnerving sounds — can be like that. 

A ghostly prairie farmhouse with washing hung on a line is an eerie sight in the moonlight. And the bang of a classic screen door slamming behind you can be downright gothic. It’s the Mellon Farm, in its original location (on 1920 Street at the Fort). And Dead Centre of Town XII tells its stories there, snatched by playwright Megan Dart from the murky grave where Edmonton history lies mouldering, in the decade between 1918 and 1929. 

In this edition you’re up close in and around a house of unidentifiable flickering light, crammed with dusty objets from past lives (birdcages containing broken crockery instead of budgies, defunct lanterns, candles, a magic mirror, a piano strung with cobwebs…). And you’re rubbing shoulders with the ghosts of hollow-eyed poisoners, mass murderers, mothers with morbid connections to their children, dubious widows (presiding ghoul: Colin Matty). 

Outside, graves are marked, and have their own soundtrack: “The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling…. O death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling.” The look of the past is the department of The October People; the sound haunting is courtesy of Michael Caron.

I mustn’t tell you more about what you’ll learn. Except to say that nary a soul mentions E-scooters, potholes, snow clearance, taxes. The only money you see is stained with blood.

Dead Centre of Town XII runs through Nov. 1, with tickets available at catchthekeys.ca and eventbrite.ca. Check out my PREVIEW conversation with playwright Megan Dart, who’s into disturbing reveals, and hints of the great beyond.   

•Speaking as we are of disturbances, one of the Shakespeare canon’s most unsettling, and perennially topical, studies of master manipulation opens the season at the U of A’s Studio Theatre: Richard III. Richard III, who cuts a wide and murderous swatch through his relatives en route to the crown,  sets himself a test case for spin and gamesmanship when he celebrates assassinations that “leave the world for me to bustle in.”

Max Rubin, who directed not one but two challenging plays at the Fringe (Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie and Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party) acquires a master’s degree with this contemporary Richard III, which brings modern technology to the enterprise, and runs tonight through Oct. 19 on the Timms Centre stage. Apparently, the play hasn’t been seen in a Studio season since 1976, so it’s time. Tickets: ualberta.ca/artshows, 780-492-2495.

LAST CHANCE…

Tara Jackson, Karen Burthwright in The Color Purple. Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

•At the Citadel, the season has cracked wide open with The Color Purple, a musical with a powerful validation of the black experience and a universal story of self-discovery. 12thnight talked to the in-demand director Kimberley Rampersad, the first black woman to direct a professional production, and the electrifying star Tara Jackson, who tears into the role of Celie with heart, and urgency: meet them HERE. The 12thnight.ca review is HERE. The Color Purple runs on the Citadel MainStage through Sunday. Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com. 

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

•At the Varscona, the Teatro La Quindicina season (which runs counter-clockwise to the E-town norm) lands a highly entertaining finale with a revival of Stewart Lemoine’s frothy screwball comedy Vidalia. Saturday’s two performances are your last chance to have the fun of seeing it. 12thnight talked to the playwright and two Teatro stars, Belinda Cornish and Andrew MacDonald-Smith about the precise and peculiar demands of screwball comedy. Check our their thoughts HERE. And have a peek at my 12thnight.ca review HERE. The production Tickets: teatroq.com. 

•The season at Walterdale, Edmonton’s impressively ambitious community theatre, opens this week with Silent Sky by Lauren Gunderson (who happens to be the San Francisco-based playwright who wrote one of the continent’s most-produced plays, Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley).

Silent Sky, Walterdale Theatre.

The versatile opera/ theatre artist Kim Mattice-Wanat directs the piece, which chronicles the struggles of the brilliant but marginalized turn-of-the-century astronomer Henrietta Leavitt to forge a career for herself in male-dominated science. Silent Sky, starring Lauren Hughes, runs at Walterdale through Saturday. Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca).

Open Invitation, Saint Maggie Productions.

•Open Invitation, running through Oct. 12 at the Backstage Theatre (ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.), is an original one-act comedy by the indie theatre troupe Saint Maggie Productions. Crossed wires at a date-night dinner party: that’s the setting for the new comedy, created collaboratively by the ensemble. Anita Bourgeois directs a cast of six that includes Saint Maggie artistic director Nicole Grainger. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

CONTINUING …

•At the Mayfield Dinner Theatre, Million Dollar Quartet, there’s a whole lotta shakin goin on. Through Oct. 26 a superior jukebox musical with a hot cast continues to re-create that indelible December afternoon in 1956 when four of the greats — Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis — descended on a Memphis recording studio, and jammed. My 12thnight.ca review is HERE.

 

    

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Dead Centre of Town unearths our dark civic secrets

Posted on October 8, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

© Marc J Chalifoux Photography 2018

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

We have a checkered past, my friends. You could say we’re haunted.

For a dozen years now, in the season of ghostly chills, Catch The Keys Productions has been taking us on location, into the boneyard where our civic history and its most macabre secrets lie buried.

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In her original Dead Centre of Town scripts, culled by research into Edmonton’s lurid history, playwright Megan Dart exhumes the graves where our long-ignored ghosts are composting, awaiting rediscovery. For the last six years, Catch The Keys has taken us on expeditions to Fort Edmonton Park for its immersive roving thrillers.

Most recently, it was to the eerie vastness of the Blatchford Field Air Hangar. Starting Thursday the 12th annual edition of this grave-robbing Edmonton institution, takes us, 25 at a time, to the most intimate of sites, the Mellon farmhouse at the top of 1920 Street.

The Mellon farm is an intriguing location for a haunting, Dart explains. The house is “one of the few buildings at the Fort on its original plot of land,” which amounted to some 148 acres. The owner was John J. Mellon, an hotelier who owned the Royal Hotel in Old Strathcona in the early 1920s. “Shortly after he passed, it became a rental property…. It has belonged to everyone, and no one.” 

Dead Centre of Town XII. Photo by Mat Simpson.

Dead Centre of Town XII, the only show of the season with a “scare manager” (Kiidra Dunhault), capitalizes on that unnerving impermanence for its storytelling shiver, says Dart. After last year’s “mammoth operation,” with its cast and crew of 26, the Mellon farmhouse edition seems like a close-up — though of course seven performers and a running crew of six (including the playwright) hardly counts as petite, especially in indie circles. “We discovered, hey, we much prefer smaller spaces,” laughs Dart of an intricate production that haunts the house, and surrounds it, in the garden beds and “a big beautiful barn.”

Dead Centre of Town XII. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

In short, therefore, a wealth of possibilities for the theatrical creativity of special effects specialists Kat and John Evans, engineer-by-day Ian Walker, “our impossible machine wizard” (as Dart puts it mysteriously), and sound effects “magician” Michael Caron who (like cast-member Adam Keefe) has been exercising his wits with Dead Centre since year #1. The vagaries of power sources at the Fort mean that nocturnal ingenuity is a pre-requisite. Let’s just say flickering firelight comes dramatically into its own for Dead Centre Of Town. 

The three spine-tinglers unearthed from history by Dart for Dead Centre of Town XII, date from the period 1918 to 1929. And they include this pulse-quickener: “Alberta’s largest unsolved mass murder.” There was a suspect for the  killing spree — Grande Prairie-based, with an Edmonton connection — that left six dead had a killer suspect. “Two guys were acquitted, a large sum of cash was involved,” says Dart. “The police bungled the case rather magnificently.”   

The death of a young girl by poisoning in 1929 is the second of the trio of stories. And the third, spun from an urban folk legend, involves “a woman in white who haunts a house in Old Strathcona.” Says Dart, “We think of the play as her purgatory.” 

The up-close chill of edition XII, with its audiences of 25, means more nightly performances. By the end of the run Nov. 1, Dead Centre of Town XII will have clocked 80 shows, four performances a night for three weeks. No wonder the producers (and the cast and crew) call it “the Iron Man of theatre.” And all but two of the cast have multiple editions to their credit of the Catch The Keys enterprise that got its title from the  gruesome nickname of yore for the intersection of Jasper Ave. and 109th St.

That’s where the first Dead Centre Of Town, designed to be a one-off, happened 12 years ago. One of Edmonton’s first mortuaries stood on that fateful corner, surrounded by coffin shops and embalmers; it was where the train stopped to unload the bodies of soldiers during the assorted wars of the last century. When Megan and Beth Dart, the sibling muses of Catch the Keys got the bright idea of a morbid historical resurrections, it was a nightclub near their apartment. Since then Dead Centre of Town has happened in ex-cinemas, in former tinsmith shops, in saloons, in a defunct train station, a ghostly defunct carnival midway….  

“I was convinced this was the year we’d run out of stories,” says Dart, who says something of that sort every year. Just before her own researches prove her dead wrong.

PREVIEW

Dead Centre of Town XII

Theatre: Catch The Keys Productions

Written by: Megan Dart

Directed by: Beth Dart

Starring: Colin Matty, Christine Lesiak, Adam Keefe, Sarah Emslie, John Evans, Ainsley Hillyard, Monica Maddaford

Where: Mellon Farmhouse, 1920 Street, Fort Edmonton Park

Running: Thursday through Nov. 1

Tickets: catchthekeys.ca, eventbrite.ca

  

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Hey, the theatre season has landed: a weekend on E-town stages

Posted on October 4, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Hey Ladies!

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You may have noticed: the stars have aligned; the E-town theatre season is underway. This week there are musicals, plays, an original screwball comedy. There’s a staged reading of a play that’ll open on a stage later. There’s even an aerial high tea. There’s improv at a deluxe level.

And there’s Hey Ladies!!.

The question isn’t so much ‘what on earth is Hey Ladies!!’. The question runs more like ‘what on earth isn’t it?’. The possibilities of “Edmonton’s premier comedy info-tainment, musical, game, talk show spectacular … suitable for all sexes” are pretty much elastic-sided, open-ended, free-wheeling, category-resistant.

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In fact, in this Friday’s edition of Hey Ladies!!, which launches the 12th season of the show invented by and starring Leona Brausen, Cathleen Rootsaert, and Davina Stewart, with Noel Taylor, there’s a hypnotist, Sebastian Steel. There’s no dress code, but feel free to bring along your subconscious.

Hey Ladies!! is unpredictable. But there’s always music. This edition’s special guest is the startlingly versatile singer-songwriter/ actor/ playwright/ director/ acupuncturist Andrea House. And with any luck, she’ll perform songs from her new album Fire, which is a knock-out as I well know.

There’s always a DYI activity, or a craft. Where do you think Edmonton hipsters learned to reimagine their moth-eaten cashmere sweaters into original creations?

There’s always booze, and informative booze chat, this week from Scott Kendall of Bent Stick Brewery. There are games, prizes, comedy, shared knowledge and life tips on topics both arcane and popular.

Hey Ladies!! happens at Theatre Network’s Roxy on Gateway, 8529 Gateway Blvd. Friday at 8 p.m. Tickets: 780-453-2440 or TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca).

Tara Jackson, Karen Burthwright in The Color Purple. Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

•At the Citadel, the season has cracked wide open with The Color Purple, a musical with a powerful validation of the black experience and a universal story of self-discovery. 12thnight talked to the in-demand director Kimberley Rampersad, the first black woman to direct a professional production, and the electrifying star Tara Jackson, who tears into the role of Celie with heart, and urgency: meet them HERE. The 12thnight.ca review is HERE. The Color Purple runs on the Citadel MainStage through Oct. 13. Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com. 

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

•At the Varscona, the Teatro La Quindicina season (which runs counter-clockwise to the E-town norm) lands a highly entertaining finale with a revival of Stewart Lemoine’s frothy screwball comedy Vidalia. 12thnight talked to the playwright and two Teatro stars, Belinda Cornish and Andrew MacDonald-Smith about the precise and peculiar demands of screwball comedy. Check our their thoughts HERE. And have a peek at my 12thnight.ca review HERE. Tickets: teatroq.com. 

•The season at Walterdale, Edmonton’s impressively ambitious community theatre, opens this week with Silent Sky by Lauren Gunderson (who happens to be the San Francisco-based playwright who wrote one of the continent’s most-produced plays, Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley).

Silent Sky, Walterdale Theatre.

The versatile opera/ theatre artist Kim Mattice-Wanat directs the piece, which chronicles the struggles of the brilliant but marginalized turn-of-the-century astronomer Henrietta Leavitt to forge a career for herself in male-dominated science. Silent Sky, starring Lauren Hughes, runs at Walterdale through Oct. 12. Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca).

Open Invitation, Saint Maggie Productions.

•Open Invitation, running through Oct. 12 at the Backstage Theatre (ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.), is an original one-act comedy by the indie theatre troupe Saint Maggie Productions. Crossed wires at a date-night dinner party: that’s the setting for the new comedy, created collaboratively by the ensemble. Anita Bourgeois directs a cast of six that includes Saint Maggie artistic director Nicole Grainger. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

•High Tea, the season’s most elevated champagne tea service comes at us Sunday afternoon courtesy of Firefly Theatre and Circus. Tea, cucumber sandwiches, champagne arrive at your table from the air, served by the company’s anti-gravity cast of aerialists, trapeze artists and acrobats. You can even have your tea leaves read by a Spirit Sister of the Flying Séance (aka Stephanie Wolfe). It’s all in aid of Firefly’s premiere production of Inferno (and you’ll see a scene from that unique Dantesque creation). High Tea is served at the ATB Financial Arts Barns Sunday 2 to 4 p.m. Tickets: Tix on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca).

•The October edition of Script Salon Sunday (7:30 p.m., Holy Trinity Anglican Church, 10037 84 Ave.) unveils, via staged reading, Hole In The Sky. In Reed McColm’s new 9-11 drama a cast of four create 30 characters trapped on that fateful day. Free admission, donations welcome.

Million Dollar Quartet, Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

•At the Mayfield Dinner Theatre, Million Dollar Quartet, there’s a whole lotta shakin goin on. Through Oct. 26 a superior jukebox musical with a hot cast continues to re-create that indelible December afternoon in 1956 when four of the greats — Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis — descended on a Memphis recording studio, and jammed. My 12thnight.ca review is HERE.

•This town is nuts for improv.

Rapid Fire Theatre’s lineup of improv for the weekend includes tonight’s edition of Maestro, a ruthless elimination-style show which starts with a dozen performers and (on the basis of audience of audience scoring) ends up with one. Saturday night, it’s an improv edition of the classic board game Clue, on its feet and come to life. Tickets and schedule at rapidfiretheatre.com.

At the Grindstone Comedy Theatre & Bistro, tonight’s lineup includes cabaret, stand-up, and the award-winning The 11 O’Clock Number, an entirely improvised musical. Saturday night it’s YegDND and the comedy variety show Blue Halloo. Tickets and schedule at grindstonetheatre.ca. 

    

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Capturing the screwball effect: Vidalia, the larky Teatro season finale. A review

Posted on October 3, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If you’ve ever had the feeling that chaos was a mere blink away — and really, who hasn’t? — the screwball comedy is your go-to form.

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The unnerving sense that the fabric of modern life could unravel into disconnected threads at any moment, or get re-stitched into a suit someone else is wearing (while they’re eating your lunch) … these are signs that you may have wandered, by random chance, into a screwball. That’s where the ordinary, the mundane, the safely repeatable and un-momentous turn out to have a few screws loose, and become uncontrollably madcap.

Suddenly you might find yourself describing your life as a “romp.” And who on earth would ever think of using that term of themselves? Seriously. 

This is what happens in Vidalia, the fizzy Stewart Lemoine screwball cork-popper that has been revived after 17 years as the grand finale of Teatro La Quindicina’s summer season. Suit salesman Douglas Bloor (Chris Pereira) discovers that his regular practice of carrying his lunch to work in a briefcase has become life-changing, in ways and for reasons he can’t even begin to comprehend. “I have a feeling I don’t even work here any more,” he says. “Why am I a different person?”

Douglas finds himself desperately hiding in his own menswear shop changing room, and pretending to be a Pomeranian tailor whose purchase on English is slender-unto-nil. Meanwhile an espionage plot involving three identical briefcases roils around him, and two spies on a park bench find themselves musing on the sudden unreality of … everything.

“I’m having such an odd day,” says George (Andrew MacDonald-Smith), the more organized and possibly dangerous of the two. “I seem to be living someone else’s life.” The other spy, Ann (Belinda Cornish), the more self-dramatizing of the two, is shoring herself up against a deluge of panic.

How could this happen? Is it right to blame a suit salesman for cheaping it out and bringing his lunch when he could be doing Greek take-out?

In Vidalia, named after a gourmet Georgia onion, we are talking about a play in which unlatching a briefcase becomes an apotheosis of tension, dread, and suspense. The escalation is intricate and (this is crucial) effortless. And effortlessness is hard to pull off (a showbiz paradox worthy of further study) and may be a contributing factor in the scarcity of original screwball comedies in this country. The Lemoine canon, incidentally, has several, including Skirts on Fire, Whiplash Weekend, On The Banks Of The Nut, For The Love Of Cynthia. Like the onion itself, the seasonal Georgia star veg that you don’t cry over, screwballs are “unexpectedly sweet and hardly ever available.”

But I digress. The agent provocateur is a bright, impulsive, take-charge meddler (Helen Belay) whose instinctive preference is “why not?” over “why?” every time. When she tosses off the casual lie that her name is Vidalia she is destabilizing the world and stage-managing a screwball — all in the interest of making life more, well, entertaining. As an agenda, fun isn’t even an agenda. Which is what makes fun funny — as Lemoine’s Teatro cast, equally divided between veterans and newcomers, easily grasps.

Newcomer Belay, who has a dazzling smile much in evidence, is delightful as the quick-witted instigator, who gravitates to every improbability. “I’ll break protocol,” she says in response to a challenge. “But just because I like your moxie.” 

“What’s wrong with him?” someone asks “Vidalia” about the yapping Pomeranian. “He’s just appalled by something!” she shrugs. Pereira, in his Teatro debut, is very funny as the appalled party, the perplexed innocent reduced (or is it inflated) to histrionic imposture by incomprehensible compulsions.

Cornish and MacDonald-Smith are experts at delivering the combination of throw-away wit and reductive zingers that goes into the infrastructure. The former, often cast in roles of inscrutable elegance, is a riot as someone whose icy composure melts into epic confusion, tantrums, and self-esteem issues: “I get ambitions and I lose my way.”

MacDonald-Smith’s command of breezy charm, in trench coat or posh suit (costumes by Leona Brausen), is put to excellent use, overlaid with a killer edge. What fun it is to see the two of them at the cocktail hour, trying to decide if they’re in a rom-com or a spy caper gone wrong.

The scene changes on Chantel Fortin’s set are high-speed dance numbers. And along with the briefcases and flip cellphones they constitute a veritable choreography of random possibilities — the kind that add up, and unleash the screwball effect in routine lives. It’s a larky enterprise and a view of the world.  

REVIEW

Vidalia

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Belinda Cornish, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Helen Belay, Chris Pereira

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Oct. 12

Tickets: teatroq.com

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“I’m beautiful. And I’m here”: The Color Purple at the Citadel. A review

Posted on October 2, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

The Color Purple, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I believe I have inside of me/ Everything that I need to lead a bountiful life,” sings a confident woman in the last moments of the heart-grabbing musical currently on the Citadel mainstage.

The heroine of The Color Purple, has learned, the hardest way, what it means to love and be loved.

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As the ensemble sings at the outset, in a stirring anthem, “the good lord works in mysterious ways.” So does theatre, when you come right down to it. It takes a great and charismatic performance to bring to life, in a fulsome, dimensional way, a transformation as remarkable as Celie’s — the four-decade journey of a poor black abused girl who survives (no, triumphs over) a horrendous battering by racism, rape, incest, violence in the rural South in the early 20th century.

And that performance is what happens in Kimberley Rampersad’s vivid, compulsive production of The Color Purple, the 2005 musical (re-fashioned a decade later) wrested by playwright Marsha Norman from Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel, and the 1985 Spielberg movie that followed.

Tara Jackson as Celie in The Color Purple, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Calgary’s Tara Jackson, in her star performance, expertly charts the incremental self-discovery of Celie as a kind of emergence from survival mode, in all its flinching reflexive stoicism, “into creation,” as the character puts it. The sense of wonder, in every stage from merest glimmer, is available in Jackson’s under-the-radar evolution. And by the time she throws aside the cloak of invisibility and tears into the very fabric of her oppression, first with righteous anger and then with something you’d have to call joy — climactically in I’m Here — you’re ready to cheer. And you feel OK about cheering; it’s been earned.

The story is Celie’s. At 14, repeatedly raped by the man she believes to be her father, she’s had two babies, both snatched away by her tormenter. And, with a cow thrown in to seal the deal, he sells her into wifely servitude to a terrifying brute she knows as Mister (the commanding Ryan Allen). He beats her, he rapes her, and he whips her with words. “You’re poor, you’re black, you’re ugly … and you’re a woman.”

Her only solace in this veil of tears is her beloved sister Nettie (Allison Edwards-Crewe), who swears to love her forever. When Mister chases Nettie away, and her letters fail to arrive, life is nearly unbearable. The good news? “This life will soon be over” and heaven lasts forever. God, as Celie will point out reasonably, hasn’t exactly distinguished himself in her case.

The sisterhood, in the larger sense, is what saves her tiny flicker of self-hood from utter extinction and opens her eyes to a world where liberation can happen. Much to Celie’s amazement Sofia (Janelle Cooper, comical  and larger-than-life earthy), the formidable, deep-voiced wife of Mister’s wheedly son Harpo (the amusing Andrew Broderick), simply refuses to be man-handled: “hell NO!” 

Karen Burthwright, Tara Jackson in The Color Purple, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

The arrival of Mister’s mistress Shug Avery (Karen Burthright), a flamboyant honky-tonk diva, marks Celie’s discovery of sexual love and animation in a life endured hitherto without either. Burthright uses her lustrous voice in a couple of knock-out numbers, like Push Da Button, shimmering with sexy double-entendres. The love duet between Celie and Shug, What About Love?, is the musical’s most affecting.

The stagecraft by Rampersad, the first black woman to direct a professional production of The Color Purple on stage or screen, is a beautiful, moving collage of still-life tableaux, a witty ebb and flow of stillness and choreographed movement that never seems forced on the characters. There’s a kind of folk pageantry about the way the scenes unspool; they come to the stage, and us, out of period paintings. Somehow the idea of Africa (where Nettie has ended up, with a missionary family) has more impact than a physical production number, but the colours leap out at us in Rampersad’s artful staging.  

The Color Purple, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Anyhow, the painterly effect is enhanced by Hugh Conacher’s stunning lighting. It suffuses Brian Perchaluk’s set — a hint of improvised interior, a backdrop of light-tipped cotton fields, two impressively barren trees with supplicating branches — with the golden glow of passing dawns and dusks. The sky is a fossilized in-relief pattern of the earth; the effect is arresting.

Which brings us to the “Church Ladies,” a comical trio of moral arbiters who follow and annotate the action (Masini McDermott, Maiko Munroe, Sarah Nairne) in song and dance. They are the amusing perspective on the status quo. And in Ming Wong’s costumes, which nail the time, they are consistently fun to watch.

The Color Purple, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

As for listening, the 16-member cast has real vocal heft and dexterity in delivering with ease a score by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray that ranges from gospel to jazz, patter song to big juicy ballads, as accompanied by Floydd Ricketts’ accomplished eight-piece band. Peter McBoyle’s sound design is impeccable.

And a story of empowerment comes to life, as shadows flicker across Jackson’s features, now open to the world, and melt away. Her hard-won smile will make your eyes water.

REVIEW

The Color Purple

Theatre: Citadel, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre

Created by: Marsha Norman, Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, Stephen Bray, from the Alice Walker novel

Directed by: Kimberley Rampersad

Starring: Tara Jackson, Karen Burthwright, Janelle Cooper, Allison Edwards-Crewe, Ryan Allen, Andrew Broderick

Running: through Oct. 13

Tickets: 780-425-182o, citadeltheatre.com

 

  

  

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Vidalia and “briefcase syndrome”: Teatro ends the season with a larky Lemoine screwball.

Posted on September 25, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

I feel pretty confident in declaring that Vidalia, the screwball comedy that opens Friday at the Varscona (the finale to the Teatro La Quindicina summer season), is the only example in the world-wide screwball repertoire to be named after a high-end, mysteriously seasonal onion.

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“I was watching the early Food Channel at the time,” explains playwright Stewart Lemoine. “And I liked the word.” Which is a good thing, since it’s tossed from person to person, crisis to crisis, like a secret code, in his 2002 comedy.

Lemoine’s credentials in writing original screwballs (On The Banks Of The Nut, Skirts On Fire among them) put him in an exclusive subset of Canadian playwrights. Vidalia, he says, is a contemporary fantasia on a classic device,  “based as it is on the old (device) of three identical briefcases.” It’s a hoary theatre truism (thank you Anton Chekhov) that if there’s going to be a gun onstage it had better get fired in the course of the play. Similarly, if there are three identical briefcases, they will inevitably, they must, get mixed up and handed off to the wrong person. And complications will, must, ensue.

And that’s what happens here, when a suit salesman named Doug (newcomer Chris Pereira, in the role originated by Mark Meer in his first Teatro appearance, in 2002) brings his lunch to work in a briefcase that’s identical to two other briefcases. Doug will find himself, against his better judgment and possibly his will, entangled in a madcap espionage plot instigated by someone telling a casual lie about her name.  

The heart of a screwball, thinks Belinda Cornish, who plays a highly strung spy in the current Vidalia revival, is that “there’s one character, the Bugs Bunny as it were, who knows everything. Nobody else knows everything.” This screwball character, says Cornish, is “flying by the seat of her pants, and never seems out of control though she has no grand plan — only to be always having a good time!” Trudy (played by Teatro newcomer Helen Belay in the role originated by Briana Buckmaster) is “the one who sets things in motion, and for 90 minutes retains masterful aplomb.”

The added screwball complication in the 2002 premiere edition of Vidalia was the cellphone. It tampered, in a tricky way, with the time-honoured screwball “element of inaccessibility,” as playwright/director Lemoine puts it.

As he points out, when you’re constructing an elaborate network of story complications for screwballs or their pricklier second cousins, farces, not to mention murder mysteries, cellphones aren’t mere decorative props. In fact, “if people could get in touch with each other,” a lot of the theatre repertoire would instantly dissolve into a fine mist. With cellphones and a decent data play Romeo and Juliet could have sorted out that Mantua business, and the drugs, in no time. Tragedy? Gone. Any plot hinging on impersonation or assumed identity would be blocked before it even got started. “Seventeen years ago, it was flip phones,” says Lemoine. “Now it’s possible to track people.” Yes, you can run, but you cannot hide.

Two years ago, in his whodunit I Heard About Your Murder, set in a family getaway cabin outside cellular range, Lemoine concluded that “isolation is enough for the plot to work.” And in Vidalia, the combination of espionage and burner cellphones works with something of the same finesse.

Back to the three briefcases. Rehearsing the first Vidalia was nerve-wracking, recalls Lemoine. “I remember having a total meltdown, having to go back over the exchanges, ‘Wait! Stop! Everybody!’ To make sure who was handing off what case.”

Same thing this time out. Andrew MacDonald-Smith, who plays a debonair spy, says “we spent a whole afternoon identifying what briefcase is where, with who, and who knows which briefcase is with which character. I’m pretty sure I could taste colour after that rehearsal, and I’ve never slept so soundly….”

Cornish reports a similar experience. “Everybody has missed at least one switch,” she laughs. “The confusion is huge!” Breaking down every move into what each person thinks is happening versus what other people think is happening versus what is actually happening is “the most brain-melting exercise. Briefcase Syndrome.”

So, as Lemoine summarizes, there’s “a spy level of intrigue involving characters who are desperate for the return of the right case” and will spend the whole play trying to make that happen. And “there’s a character at the centre who accidentally de-rails a whole complicated exchange and doesn’t care about (the consequences),” a blithe meddler who enjoys the mounting chaos.

How do you rehearse a play like that? “I’m being contradictory,” Lemoine tells his cast. “It has to go very fast, but it has to be very accurate….” They start slow in rehearsal, and wind it up to speed — no approximations allowed.

As MacDonald says, comedies like Vidalia “should appear like a wildly fun romp. But they require a focus that is … unflinching!”  

PREVIEW

Vidalia

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Belinda Cornish, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Helen Belay, Chris Pereira

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday through Oct. 12

Tickets: teatroq.com

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Owning a black story: The Color Purple propels an empowering narrative across the Citadel stage. A preview.

Posted on September 24, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Color Purple, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

What about tears when I’m happy? What about wings when I fall?

I want you to be/ A story for me/ That I can believe in forever.

— What About Love?, The Color Purple

There are ground-breaking firsts attached to the production that launches the Citadel mainstage season Thursday. For one thing,  Kimberley Rampersad, one of the country’s hottest young directors, is (amazingly) the first black woman to helm any professional production, on stage or screen, of The Color Purple, the  2005 Broadway musical based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel.

For another, director Rampersad and several of her cast, including Tara Jackson, who stars as the struggling African-American heroine Celie, are fresh from another production of The Color Purple — the Canadian premiere at Halifax’s Neptune Theatre in May and June.

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Director Kimberley Rampersad. Photo supplied.

For Rampersad, who was last here to choreograph Daryl Cloran’s Edmonton-Winnipeg-Vancouver co-production of Matilda, being the first black woman to direct a piece seminally tied to black culture, identity, and history, is “telling…. I recognize the importance of it, and my part in that. But it is an indictment,” she says over mid-rehearsal lunch with Jackson last week.

“How has it happened that everyone else has more agency over a narrative than the people the narrative is about? How has it happened they’re relegated to the periphery?”

Produced on Broadway by Oprah Winfrey and revived in a Tony-winning John Doyle production in 2015, The Color Purple is a black story from a woman’s perspective. It chronicles the transformative 40-year journey of a poor, black woman in rural Georgia up against it — racism, rape, incest, violence — who comes increasingly, then triumphantly, into her own in the first half of the last century. It’s an intricate narrative of self-discovery to bring to the stage. But novelist Walker wanted the musical to be written. “She was not satisfied with the movie,” says Rampersad, citing Walker’s official biographer Evelyn White. “She felt the same-sex relationship, and the violence, were given a soft lens….”

Jackson thinks “the Canadian premiere happened in Halifax for a reason” — to wit, its history and its large and vibrant African-Canadian population, many of them descendants of people who arrived from the South on the Underground Railroad.

Tara Jackson, Karen Burthwright in The Color Purple. Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

“It’s an amazing black community there,” says Jackson, whom Citadel audiences have seen and heard in both Hadestown and Bittergirl: The Musical. “I can’t put it into words, how great it felt to represent the people of the place. It’s not often for me, being an Alberta girl (she’s from Calgary), that I look out into the audience and see … myself. Just as for them, they don’t often see themselves onstage. That will draw you to a show, I think.” She seeks out a word, “heartwarming,” and expands on the experience. “So fulfilling as an artist, as a human, as a black woman. It felt really special.”

And now, a Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre production that brings Winnipegger Rampersad and Calgarian Jackson back to their home towns to tell — no, to possess — a story that is neither white nor male. “The novel is phenomenal,” says the former. “And the (Spielberg) movie is formidable… it resonates through our pop culture.” The musical will have a natural rapport with the “long-standing black communities in Alberta and Manitoba” whose history, unlike the stories of refugees and more recent immigrants, is only vaguely known. “It has the potential to be magic.” 

She and Jackson are moved, she says, “to be able to practise our art in our home cities — and not have to reconcile who we are but to bring the fullness of our experience. And in mainstage places, not just peripheral places!”

The Color Purple, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

The book is by the award-winning American playwright Marsha Norman (‘Night Mother). As for the (Grammy-winning) score, by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray, it fuses jazz, gospel, ragtime, and rhythm-and-blues. Jackson finds that “the scenes inform the songs and the songs inform the scenes…. You could listen to the sound track and get the full picture. Which I think is ideal in a musical. Sometimes you feel so good or the hurt is so deep you have to sing it!” The Color Purple isn’t one of those musicals where you’re jarred when characters burst into song. As Rampersad points out,  “we find ourselves in places — church, two girls playing, a juke joint — where there is naturally music.”

Karen Burthwright, Tara Jackson in The Color Purple, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Jackson was a singer/songwriter student at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music en route to a music industry career when she and musical theatre discovered each other. “They were doing Rent in my last semester, and I auditioned because I’ve always loved Rent, and why not?. She was cast. And in the month of rehearsal that preceded the sole performance “I got bitten by the theatre bug. Hey, I can sing. And dance. And act. Why am I not doing this? I didn’t have any formal acting training, but hey, I’ll learn!”

Rampersad had something of the same discovery of musical theatre, in all its multiple facets Her career started in dance, then choreography, then acting. And now, directing. In the last six months, she’s directed not one but two different productions of The Color Purple on opposite sides of the country. And in between, last summer (hardly a light diversion), there was the Shaw Festival production of Bernard Shaw’s rarely produced, monumental, six-hour Man and Superman, including the Don Juan in Hell dream scene. 

It runs at the festival through Oct. 5, And in its full form it’s an event (as The New York Times rightly noted in seeking out an interview with Rampersad). “Epic, and not using the word as hyperbole,” she laughs. “It was … clarifying, a great artistic experience and I’m the better for it. … I loved being in the muck of it.”

The festival’s “intern artistic director” muses that “sometimes you feel isolated as a director, since there’s only one of you. But then you’re never alone in any artistic practice; you’re surrounded by great theatre-makers…. I don’t need to have the have the best ideas; I just need to have some of them. I need to be be able to identify them.”

The Color Purple, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

The significance, the weight, of The Color Purple for black artists can hardly be over-estimated. “It’s not often that I get to be in the same space as my peers, my fellow black actors,” says Jackson. “We are often spread apart in shows, one here one there. It’s not often we get to do a story about us.” Those are the shows that are, for the most part, not written yet, and stories that aren’t owned yet. It’s only the second time (after Soul Sistas at the Mayfield, in which she played Aretha Franklin) that Jackson has been onstage with an all-black cast.

“Walking into a room and seeing yourself, and hearing yourself, is … very different,” she beams. “I welcome it, and I want more of it! There’s a comfort, a familiarity, a kinship that’s built it. I fear the day when I don’t get to do this any more,” she says of The Color Purple. 

Rampersad nods. She calls the experience of rehearsing a black story with a black cast “a shorthand of how we walk through this world — the things we’re presented with, the things we walk through, the things we take the long way around. It’s a different way, a different awareness, sensitivity, sensibility, acknowledgment of what it is to walk through the world. The things we own and the things that are put upon us.”

Most Canadians in the industry, working in most rehearsal halls and on most stages, “don’t have the experience of feeling like The Other … ” says Rampersad. She notes that things are changing for black artists. “But slowly.”

“It’s a rare opportunity for us to put all that extra-ness into the work itself! It feels so different — a big inhale, yes, but it can also take the legs out from under you,” Rampersad muses. “That’s what almost all theatre is about, people who are out, trying to find their group, find their family.”

The rehearsals for this epic “labour of love” as Jackson calls it, are exhausting. Says Rampersad, “the show wears the characters down the way time does. It’s so demanding, so, yes, relentless on both characters and actors. It’s like a wheel that’s turning. And it picks up mud, and it’s going downhill so it’s picking up momentum getting dirtier, grittier, more meaningful until we hit the bottom. And no one gets to shake it off. The weight of the show literally works on them. Which is what life does….”

“You have to pre-set your dinner and pyjamas for when you go home. Because you have just enough energy to shower, send an email to a loved one. Zero extraneous energy. And you’re down for the count.”

PREVIEW

The Color Purple

Theatre: Citadel, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre

Written by: Marsha Norman; music by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, Stephen Bray

Directed by: Kimberley Rampersad

Starring: Tara Jackson, Karen Burthwright, Janelle Cooper, Allison Edwards-Crewe, Ryan Allen, Andrew Broderick

Running: Thursday through Oct. 13

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

     

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An outbreak of clowns: Play The Fool, E-Town’s “festival of clown and physical comedy” is back

Posted on September 23, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Mump and Smoot in Something with Thug

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Be a clown, be a clown, be a clown….”

— Cole Porter

“It is meat and drink to me to see a clown.”

— Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act V, scene i

This theatre town of ours is about to erupt in … clowns. And we are not, in this application at least, talking about political campaigns, my friends.

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With the return of Play The Fool, Edmonton’s Festival of Clown and Physical Comedy, for a fourth annual edition, clowns of every style, personality, obsession, esthetic — on the spectrum of light to dark, antic red-nosed naif to macabre existentialist— are unleashed into our midst.

The headliners, Canada’s internationally celebrated “clowns of horror,” do have red noses, true. But there’s more of nightmare than dream about Mump and Smoot, morbid clown questers from the planet Ummo, gibbering away in Ummonian and travelling through the world on a gruesome trail of gore and entrails and severed limbs.

The show they’re bringing to Play The Fool for three performances, the breezily titled Mump And Smoot in “Something,” With Thug — in which Michael Kennard and John Turner are joined by Candace Berlinguette — is “their very first, and a classic,” as festival director Christine Lesiak puts it.

It was Mump and Smoot’s calling card when they first arrived in Edmonton, at the Fringe, fully three decades ago. And there’s been a lot of blood under the bridge since then. The trio of nightmares in the show takes our clowns first to a fancy cafe and — flinch now — they order spaghetti, with gruesome results. The second sketch happens at a wake for a dead clown. Mump and Smoot are grief-stricken so vigorously that body parts start to fly off. Mump tries to strangle himself with his own severed arm. In the doctor’s office — wince now — Dr. Mump uses the reflex hammer so enthusiastically that Smoot’s leg comes off and his innards come out, like, well, spaghetti. There’s a kind of existential purity to the way Mump and Smoot try to beat each other to death, until they realize that they’re already dead.

“There has never been anything quite like them, before or since,” Lesiak says. “AND they’re incredibly influential mentors, master teachers.” Kennard, who plays Mump, the more pompous and manipulative of the pair, is a director/ movement professor in the drama department at the U of A. Turner, who plays the whinier, grievance-riddled Smoot, runs workshops on his “clown farm” on Manitoulin Island, north of Toronto. Their archive of students is literally thousands long.

Christine Lesiak in For Science! Photo supplied.

Lesiak, a notable clown herself is specially positioned to appreciate the uniqueness of Mump and Smoot. For one thing, she is in a highly unusual subset of clowns: she first arrived in Edmonton as a space physicist. Her hit Fringe show For Science! takes the scientific method into the world of clowning (or possibly vice versa) in the experiments undertaken by a Professor and Lab Assistant (Ian Walker).

They’ve just taken For Science! to Beakerhead, highly unusual Calgary festivities where arts and sciences intersect for purposes of entertainment. “A lot of science nerds and science nerd-y things!” declares Lesiak, whose gallery of clown alter-egos includes Sheshells and (self-help guru) Aggie. She laughs. “I feel right at home (at Beakerhead);  they’re my people!”

Jesse Buck in Bubkus. Photo supplied.

The Play the Fool mainstage lineup includes Bubkus, created by and starring Toronto’s Jesse Buck, among whose credits is a stint with the Cirque du Soleil’s Alegria. “He’s so technically brilliant, a stunning mover and physical storyteller,” says Lesiak. In the all-ages show we’ll see at Play The Fool “he creates a fantasy world onstage out of nothing. It’s minimalist, sparse, the absolute opposite of Mump and Smoot” and their riotously gross assortment of props.

A broad spectrum of clowning styles is captured in the festival triple-bill. My Birthday, for one, is the work of Swedish-born Brooklyn clown Michaela Lind, who’s trained in Moscow and New York. “I’m intrigued by this artist, and the differences in style between east coast clowning with its darker, broodier, more Euro- artistic vibe, and the American circling clowning tradition,” says Lesiak of the melancholy protagonist of the show.

Money Fish. Photo supplied.

Toronto’s Money Fish is an acrobatic trio of (wordless) landlocked synchronized swimmers, an apotheosis of silliness that has propelled Natalie Parkinson Alexa Elser, and Emily Hughes all over the world. “It’s a well-established piece with a life behind it,” says Lesiak of the much-travelled show. 

And an Edmonton trio of actors, who create “site-sympathetic” Shakespeare with the indie company Thou Art Here, have devised a clown show that uses their theatrical specialty in an imaginative way. With One Man’s Trash… Neil Kuefler, Ben Stevens, and Mark Vetch play janitors who, in the course of their duties, discover a theatre garbage can crammed with discarded props and bits and pieces of sets. Each object drops them into a different Shakespeare play.    

The Emerging Artist Triple-Bill assembles a triptych of new pieces from up-and-comers, many of them actors or improv comics by trade. There’s a “festival spectacular” that includes short pieces from such experienced clowns as Chris Gamble and Jacqueline Russell. And there’s an annual Rookie Cabaret, whose participants are mentored by the best. This year’s edition even includes clown puppetry pieces.

“It’s important to us to have world-class international talent alongside the rookies in the festival,” says Lesiak. And the spectrum of styles includes everything from comedy burlesque to bouffon.

So what is the difference between clowns and bouffons anyhow? Lesiak stops to consider. “It’s difficult,” she muses. “Maybe it’s this: With clowning, you’re laughing at the clown, and the clown is innocent. They may think they’re very worldly. But they’re not. Bouffons are. They make you laugh at yourself…. They’re extremely manipulative.”

The free opening night gala Thursday, hosted by Aytahn Ross, is a sampler, with performance excerpts from many of the shows.

Play The Fool runs Thursday through Sunday at the Backstage Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barns (10330 84 Ave.). Tickets and full schedule of shows and events: playthefool.ca.   

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A Newfoundland wake turns into a musical: No Change In The Weather

Posted on September 20, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

No Change In The Weather. Photo by Ritche Perez.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“How many songs do you actually know the words to, that you could sing?” wonders the Newfoundlander on the phone from the Rock last week. “A couple of campfire songs? Happy Birthday? A Christmas carol or two?”

“I grew up with people who knew hundreds of songs, off by heart,” says composer/ musician/ musicologist/ producer Bob Hallett, a founding parent of the late lamented Newfoundland band Great Big Sea. “I spent my childhood and teen years learning to play traditional Newfoundland music, the styles, the instruments, the rhythms, immersing myself in that distinct tradition…. I have a lifetime degree in translating Newfoundland music to the rest of the world.”

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The musical that comes from away and arrives here Wednesday on a westward tour is all about that. No Change In The Weather mines the riches of the Newfoundland songbook by inviting us to a wake in the outpost hamlet of God’s Back Pocket. The characters — a fractious family along with their friends and neighbours — gather on a foggy night to revisit the past and celebrate the life of their matriarch. And in meeting the characters, we also meet up with the story of “the terrible mistake of the ‘60s when everything went wrong for Newfoundland,” Hallett says. 

Under the controversial premier Joey Smallwood, “backed into a corner by the federal government of Lester Pearson,” the province signed on to a losing deal with Quebec Hydro that would “keep the peace in Canada by sacrificing its greatest asset for a song.” Two words: Churchill Falls.

“It’s made 20 times what petroleum has made for Newfoundland,” says Hallett. “And Newfoundland won’t make a cent for another 30 years. People couldn’t understand how that could happen.” And since that moment, Canada’s easternmost province has been given a bad rap for naiveté. “In reality it’s a whole chain of events when Newfoundland took one for the team.… We had two terrible choices; we were dealt a terrible hand, a case of doing the wrong thing for the right reason I guess.”

“It’s a complicated story we try to tell simply, through people,” says Hallett, the producer (and along with Paul Kinsman, the gatherer and arranger of the score) of No Change In The Weather. He laughs. “You can’t give hand-outs to the crowd.” When he signed on to the conception, by Winnipeg philanthropist Walter Schroeder, of bringing Newfoundland’s story to life in musical theatre, the idea was “big events told through individuals….”

The musical theatre repertoire has plenty of examples of that idea. “Titanic is about a couple. Les Miz is about a revolt, yes,  but really, the relationship between three characters. What if one family were witnesses to history? What if we could make the province’s story their story?”

No Change In The Weather. Photo by Ritche Perez.

If you’re marrying the songs and sounds of Canada’s easternmost province to a story in a musical, a wake is a natural setting, says Hallett. In Newfoundland, they’re non-sombre, raucous, celebratory affairs. “Old romances get re-lit. Great emotions are expressed; the conversation goes in many different directions.” And music figures prominently; “they’re great opportunities to sing and dance.”        

No Change In The Weather. Photo by Ritche Perez.

The music we’ll hear in No Change In The Weather comes directly from “the Newfoundland tradition, or was inspired by it,” says Hallett, who was musical consultant on the hit musical Come From Away, by now the country’s most successful Broadway foray ever.

“Come From Away was written by Canadian-Americans, largely for an American audience,” he says of the heartwarming musical inspired by the hospitality offered freely to travellers stranded in Gander Nfld. by the terrible events of 9-11. “This is different,” says Hallett of No Change In The Weather. “It draws on pure Newfoundland music…. So much of the job was finding ways of making the songs work in a Broadway musical context so they still have that pizzaz, that excitement.”

Newfoundland music is “a very coherent block, a style of playing, and a genre, derived from English, Irish, Scottish, French, Indigenous (sources).” Five hundred years of isolation have preserved its unique characteristics. And it was for Hallett to “create arrangements and settings for the songs that makes them work for musical theatre.”

“The big thrust is driven by the button accordion and the fiddle,” says Hallett. “They’re the major stakeholders, and if you’re at a kitchen party, 90 per cent of the time, those instruments will be there. Mandolins, bouzoukis, tin whistles follow from that….” Newfoundland, he says, “doesn’t sound like anywhere else.”

No Change In The Weather arrives here with its original cast of Newfoundland stars and a record-breaking run of 30 sold-out shows in Nfld., followed by stops in Kitchener, Hamilton, Ottawa, and Winnipeg. For the Newfoundlanders, scattered across the country — “we’re assimilating you!” — there’s “tremendous nostalgia” attached to the show, says Hallett, who’s anticipating a striking response in Alberta. “It’s a big tour, very ambitious.” And the hopes for it have Broadway scale: “we have great expectations, nationally and internationally.”

The story of the province is powerful. But “our first goal is a great night out for people,” says Hallett. “We’re taking everyone to a small town in Newfoundland for a night  — very funny, with tremendous singing and dancing, where everything goes upside down.”

“If we can educate and inform, great. But people don’t come to a play to be educated. No one goes to a restaurant and orders porridge,” says Hallett wryly. “Our job number 1 is to be a great show. And I think we’ve done that. Everything else is a bonus…. I want people to walk out singing and clapping, (having had) a good time!”

PREVIEW

No Change In The Weather – A Newfoundland Musical

Created by: Walter Schroeder and Berni Stapleton

Where: Westbury Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 AVe.

Running: Sept. 25 to 28

Tickets and info: 780-409-1910, fringetheatre.ca

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It’s show time in Edmonton theatre: what to not miss this season on E-town stages

Posted on September 12, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

The Invisible – Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Photo by Citrus Photography

The Garneau Block by Belinda Cornish, based on the Todd Babiak novel

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“That was what had been missing from his life all these years. His career, his city, this bonehead province. Mythic Power.” — The Garneau Block.

In Todd Babiak’s wry and funny novel The Garneau Block, reborn as a Belinda Cornish play this season on the Citadel mainstage, a vividly mismatched community of Edmonton neighbours will overcome their differences to save a ‘hood. And in the process, a kind of civic mythology will rise from that Edmonton place where low self-esteem (“an anywhere-but-here disease”) lives. “Edmonton is a real city as soon as we, as Edmontonians, believe it is real.”

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And speaking of Mythic Power, there’s a quintessential demo of it, borrowed from history, in the real-life Allied brigade of kick-ass female operatives who drop behind enemy lines in France 1940 in The Invisible – Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Jonathan Christenson’s new Catalyst musical arrives in February on the Maclab stage after an award-winning premiere at Calgary’s Vertigo Theatre last spring.

Power, and (maybe especially) the lack of it, find their way into stories, large and small, as our artists and their companies return to stages of every size, shape, and budget after another record-buster of a Fringe. The season is starting; what should you look forward to? Seek out? Here’s a little selection of intriguing possibilities.

UNMISSABLE MUSICALS

Can it be mere coincidence? This is the season buzzing with the mythic power news that we’ll see not one but two musicals that pry women — six in one, seven in the other — from real-life history and and give them a story to sing about. There’s the new Catalyst musical The Invisible – Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare (see above) with its fascinating premise and cast of female secret agents. And here’s another: Six: Divorced. Beheaded. Live In Concert, from Britain en route to Broadway.

Six. Photograph by Liz Lauren 2019.

With this hotly anticipated production, the Citadel (temporary home for Broadway-bound Hadestown in the fall of 2017) hosts the only Canadian stop for the Toby Marlow/ Lucy Moss rock musical/concert — à la Spice Girls and starring the much-abused wives of Henry VIII, cutting loose from Tudor times — that had its origins at the Edinburgh Fringe, sold out a U.K. tour, and got its North American premiere at the Chicago Shakespeare Festival in May. It arrives Nov. 1 t0 24 trailing raves (and sold-out houses). 

Here are two more:

Ben Levi Ross as Evan Hansen in Dear Evan Hansen, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

(a) Dear Evan Hansen —the Tony Award-winning Hasek & Paul gut-puncher about a maladjusted high school senior who forges a new identity for himself as a player in a classmate’s tragedy — is the highlight of the Broadway Across Canada season here. It arrives at the Jube Feb. 11 to 16.

(b) From the adventurous (and alluringly named) little indie company Impossible Mongoose, Gef, a new “psychological thriller cum Jazz Age musical” by playwright Jessy Ardern and composer Erik Mortimer. It’s drawn from paranormal accounts of a mysterious voice behind the walls of a remote Isle of Man farmhouse in the 1930s. Our first sighting of Gef come in June at the Fringe’s Studio Theatre.       

OF AND ABOUT THIS PLACE

(a) A play (see above) by an Edmonton playwright (Belinda Cornish) adapted from a satirical but utterly affectionate novel by an Edmonton novelist (Todd Babiak, on secondment to Australia) telling an Edmonton story about a familiar Edmonton ‘hood and its idiosyncratic occupants — premiering on the mainstage of Edmonton’s largest playhouse. That would be The Garneau Block (at the Citadel March 14 to April 5), directed by Rachel Peake. It’s so Edmonton that one of the principal characters is a Die-Nasty improv regular. 

Candace Berlinguette in E Day. Photo supplied.

(b) E Day, a new political comedy from a playwright who specializes in setting up familiar surfaces and exploring the weirdness beneath. Jason Chinn’s latest is set in an NDP campaign office during the orange wave 2015 provincial election that made pollsters look ridiculously off-course. Suspense is galvanized by a parachute candidate, dropped in at the last minute. Dave Horak directs a large all-star cast in this Serial Collective premiere (in Theatre Network’s Roxy Series Oct. 15 to 27). 

(c) After The Fire, running in the Citadel’s new Highwire series (April 18 to May 10) in a Punctuate!/ Alberta Aboriginal Arts collaboration, is the new, re-invented incarnation of Matthew MacKenzie’s black, not to say charred, comedy that originally debuted as Bust (at Theatre Network). It explores (and through Indigenous eyes) the aftermath of the Fort McMurray inferno.

(d) Dead Centre of Town, Catch The Keys’ 12th annual imaginative foray into the dark, dramatic, macabre landscape of Edmonton history, on location at Fort Edmonton. This year, the locale is the intimately spooky Mellon Farmhouse, 4 shows a night Oct. 10 to Nov. 1. 

GENDER, ORIENTATION, IDENTITY

Here are three new plays from young , smart Edmonton writers that play with the political complexities attached to gender, sexual orientation, and their convoluted route through social media. 

(a) Everybody Loves Robbie. In this new comedy by the startlingly versatile artist Ellen Chorley (director of Nextfest and artistic director of Send In The Girls Burlesque), a musical-besotted high school theatre couple, inseparable stars of the drama club and every festival going, have to reassess when Robbie wonders if he’s gay. Trevor Schmidt’s production at Northern Light Theatre has the added attraction of Jayce McKenzie and Richard Lee Hsi.

Happy Birthday Baby J, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

(b) Happy Birthday Baby J. Premiering in the Shadow Theatre season, Nick Green’s new comedy (Jan. 22 to Feb. 9) boldly takes a run at political correctness. A couple invites friends over to celebrate the second birthday of their kid J, whom they’re raising gender-free.

(c) In Tell Us What Happened, by actor-turned-playwright, Michelle Robb, Charlie and her two roommates manage an online support group that catalogues personal experience of sexual mistreatment. Turns out a few members have suffered at the hands of the same guy and here’s a queasy glitch: the guy is Charlie’s best friend. It runs at La Cité May 14 to 24, in a collaboration between Azimuth Theatre and Theatre Yes. 

SHAKESPEARE RE-IMAGINED

As You Like It, Citadel Theatre

(a) All you need is…. OK, how can you not be intrigued by the prospect of As You Like It set to the music (25 songs) of the Beatles? Daryl Cloran’s 60s-style production, which broke every box office record at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach, is at the Citadel Feb. 16 to March 16, with a new cast. And there’s wrestling.

(b) The most deranged prospect of the season — I mean this in a good way, of course — is at Theatre Network. In The Society For The Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius, a gaggle of grotesque bouffon-style clowns  present a version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a Bardian gore-fest of eviscerations, dismemberments, murders, cannibalism, and other anti-social activities. It’s by the star Canadian playwright Colleen Murphy, so there won’t be any polite side-stepping or shirking. Bradley Moss’s production runs Jan. 30 to Feb. 16.

(c) Pawâkan Macbeth: A Cree Tragedy, from Akpik Theatre (the Northwest Territories’ only professional Indigenous company), propels Shakespeare’s swift and brutal tragedy into the war-ravaged world of the plains Cree in the 1870s. In the adaptation by Reneltta Arluk (now head of the Banff Centre’s new Indigenous arts department), the great Okiheitlâw warrior is urged by an evil cannibal spirit, the Wihtiko, to assassinate the chief. Azimuth Theatre presents it as part of Expanse at the 2020 Chinook Series (Feb. 6 to 16).

SO IT’S THE APOCALYPSE, AND YOU’RE INVITED

(a) In her 2012 dark musical comedy Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, the brilliant American playwright  Anne Washburn (10 Out Of 12) conjures a post-apocalyptic world in which the survivors are comforted by pop-culture stories recollected, told and re-told — in this case, specifically the 1993 Cape Feare episode of The Simpsons in which Bart is stalked by the homicidal Sideshow Bob. Blarney Productions and You Are Here Theatre collaborate on the production, directed by Andrew Ritchie, that runs at the Westbury Nov. 28 to Dec. 7, in the Fringe Spotlight Series.

(b) Bright Young Things dazzled at the Fringe with the bright, cuckoo  precision of their revival of Ionesco’s Euro-absurdist classic The Bald Soprano. The company, part of the Varscona Theatre Ensemble, is back (Nov. 21 to 30) with another kind of absurdism, Thornton Wilder’s rarely performed 1942 Pulitzer Prize winner The Skin of Our Teeth. It’s for ingenious director Dave Horak to figure out how on earth to track the Antrobus family of suburban New Jersey (and their pet dinosaur and woolly mammoth) through a series of timeless catastrophes that include ice, flood, and war. In its own oddball way, it’s the perfect response to surviving the declension into chaos of our world. 

POWER DYNAMICS

Here are two new Canadian plays, one by a famous writer, one by an emerging playwright — and both writers to seek out:

(a) Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes. Who would willingly miss the latest from Hannah Moscovitch, one of the country’s premier playwrights, especially if she said it was “the favourite play I’ve written so far….”? Just asking.  A 40-something professor, his young and worshipful student, a romance. Don’t you have butterflies already? Marianne Copthorne directs; Dave Horak and Gianna Vacirca star in the Theatre Network production (April 23 to May 10).

(b) In The Ballad of Peachtree Rose, Nicole Moeller, whose work to date (including An Almost Perfect Thing, Without You, The Mother) is witty, weighty, and complex, has created a thriller about a street kid recruited by a Canadian criminal organization. Brenley Charkow directs the premiere production at Workshop West (Oct. 30 to Nov. 10.)

DON’T WORRY BE HAPPY

With their new musical revue Get Happy! (at the Varscona Theatre in February) the Plain Janes, purveyors of off-centre musical theatre experiences, assemble songs from every corner of the repertoire and marries them to original songs by Edmonton songwriters (they’re currently scouting). The theme? “things we do in the the pursuit of happiness.”

Here’s a thing Edmonton does to get happy (and energized and argumentative): live theatre. It’s show time, my friends. Million Dollar Quartet is already running at the Mayfield. Up very soon are The Colour Purple at the Citadel and Vidalia at Teatro La Quindicina.

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