Gerald: the man, the playwright, the long-running comedy, and now the Fringe playwriting award

Posted on March 7, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Gerald Osborn (centre) with Fringe directors past and present (from left) Thomas Scott, Murray Utas, Adam Mitchell, Miki Stricker-Talbot, Judy Lawrence, David Cheoros. Photo by Aaron Talbot.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

He’s a playwright with a gift for sassy and subversive black comedy. He’s an administrator who can tap his own sense of cosmic absurdity and wry good humour to broker calm between artists (and their close relatives), media divas, aggrieved theatre patrons, irate jugglers…. And nowhere is Gerald Osborn’s rare assortment of skills more crucial than at the festival that was, and remains, Edmonton’s craziest, best invention ever: the Fringe.   

For 30 years he’s worked at the festival where organization comes face to face — and in Osborn’s case, eyeball to eyeball — with chaos, and the new is born in the tension between order and anarchy. Last night at a rather riotous roast-and-toast tribute, the Fringe honoured Osborn — “the unofficial keeper of the Fringe’s history” and its secrets — with an anniversary launch of the new Gerald Osborn Playwriting Award.

Gossamer Feast by Gerald Osborn, Edmonton Fringe 2019. Photo by Russ Hewitt.

Perfect, since Osborn has himself penned and directed some 19 Fringe premieres, embracing characters as varied as Adam and Eve, Oedipus, bedbugs, and a talking penis. As he pointed out Friday night, it’s great that David Mamet and Sam Shepard show up at the Fringe, but the heart of the matter is new work. 

There were speakers (yours truly honoured to be among them), video clips (including one from Fringe founding father Brian Paisley), and a stellar pool of Gerald anecdotes, many involving his smarts, his deceptively mild-mannered archive of worldly shrugs, eloquent eye rolls, and comic running gags. No matter how big the Fringe has gotten, and how inaccessible it can sometimes feel, there’s Osborn on the front line, in his H. Potter glasses, patiently giving directions to the nearest green onion cake or Fringe ticket, responding to “So, what is this Fringe thing anyhow?” on the phone as if he’s never heard the question before.  

In establishing the playwriting award with Osborn’s name on it, the Fringe’s goal is $10,000 (100 donors at $100 apiece will do it). You can contribute by phone (780-409-1910, online at fringetheatre.ca/give or by mail to Fringe Theatre headquarters at the ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave, T6E 2G9.

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The Roseglen Trilogy: the final instalment. The Blue Hour launches the 2020 SkirtsAfire Festival

Posted on February 25, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Helen Belay, Nicole St. Martin, Isaac Andrew in The Blue Hour, SkirtsAfire Festival.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The award-winning Michele Vance Hehir play that launches the ninth annual SkirtsAfire Festival Thursday at the Westbury Theatre takes us to place we’ve been before.

Welcome to Roseglen, a small fictional prairie town that we’ve visited at different times in its history. In Vance Hehir’s Ruination (3 short stories), which premiered at the 2017 Fringe we were there during the Depression. The next summer, with One Polaroid, we were in Roseglen 1973: the train doesn’t stop there any more; the school is gone; the town is on a long slow fade-out into oblivion. Last one to leave turn out the lights.

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The Blue Hour, Vance Hehir’s full-length full-bodied (seven-actor) play, getting its premiere at SkirtsAfire, takes us back to Roseglen, post-World War II. It’s the culmination of a trilogy with interlocking characters, cultural and religious cross-currents, social hierarchies, generational tensions, ethnic prejudice, fractured families and dark secrets with centrifugal ripples — fuelled by gossip, wrapped in dreams (and disappointments), circumscribed by an ever-present sense of being watched.   

Playwright Michele Vance Hehir. Photo by Nathaniel Vance Hehir.

“It’s a memory play,” says Vance Hehir. “I wanted to spread the poetry that exists in that world.”

But her Our Town, prairie-style, isn’t some bucolic vision of life beyond the clutches of urban corruption. At the centre of The Blue Hour is is a struggling single mother (Nicole Saint-Martin) and her kids: 14-year-old Jonah (Isaac Andrew) and 15-year-old Bonnie (Helen Belay). The latter, suffocated by the rigorous fundamentalist proscriptions shared by her mom, is desperate to leave town and find a place for her musical talents in the big wide world. It’s the relationship between Bonnie and the new Pentecostal pastor (Ian Leung) that will rock the town to the core.   

The playwright is, as she says, irresistibly drawn to the acute minimalism of small towns. And it’s not because she has first-hand  nostalgia to tap. “My parents grew up in Chilliwack, and we moved to Edmonton when I was five or six.… But my mother was a marvellous storyteller.” Her stories of growing up in a smallish town” planted the seed, Vance Hehir thinks. “She’d ‘tell’ a book or a movie, and I’d feel I’d read or seen it.”

The “environment of surveillance” was something Mom did not like about living in a small town,” says Vance Hehir. “At 18 she moved to Vancouver.” When Vance Hehir, as a teenager, fantasized about a reverse migration, moving from city to town, her mom was aghast. “She squelched that idea!”

When she created Bonnie, with her yearning to enlarge her horizons, speak French, sing Piaf instead of gospel, Vance Hehir was taking her cue from her mom’s reaction. “Bonnie feels suffocated. Trapped. And her possibilities, as she’s come to realize, are limited. Maybe she could be a teacher. But there are so few choices.”

The Blue Hour started as a monologue, one of a quartet of 15-minute monologues Vance Hehir wrote while in the Citadel’s Playwrights Forum nearly a decade ago. And it gradually gained characters and storylines, and length, as a two-act play about a young girl and her family.

Her mentor? The great Canadian playwright Colleen Murphy, who advised her “to go back and look at every beat, every pause, to make the script as tight as you can!”

Like Murphy, whose playwright’s mantra is “it’s never good vs. evil; It may be combative, but it’s always right vs. right,” Vance Hehir is a writer of subtlety and oblique angles. And there is nothing simple about her take on (organized) religion or her multi-dimensional characters. The pastor, for example, on paper the villain of the piece, “struggles to be a good person,” says Vance Hehir. “He’s a damaged person, who’s glommed on to religion as a way of controlling (his impulses)…. He’s the most complicated character.”

Helen Belay and Nicole St. Martin in The Blue Hour. Photo supplied.

The mayor, Hank (Robert Benz), who’s a kind of father figure to Bonnie and Jonas, is “a lovely anchor in the town. People are drawn to him; his is the religion of hope.”    

Director Annette Loiselle, SkirtsAfire artistic director, whose eye was caught by The Blue Hour, an Alberta Playwriting Competition winner,  a couple of years ago, says its appeal is “the human connections. It’s very layered that way. Religion can be helpful or hurtful….There is sympathy for all the characters; it’s not black and white. It’s very gray!” The subject matter includes the darkest of subjects, but The Blue Hour, she says, is “funny and charming, too.”

Loiselle, an actor of note and one of co-founders of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, wasn’t a small-town kid herself (she grew up on an acreage north of Namao). But her husband is from Villeneuve; in fact, they got married in the church there. So The Blue Hour feels automatically evocative to her.

With its size, scope, and stage population of seven actors, The Blue Hour is responsible for SkirtsAfire’s move to embrace locations in addition to its home turf on and around Alberta Avenue. “We had to have a real theatre,” says Loiselle of the adventurous mainstage move to the Westbury Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barns. And the lobby board room there is where you’ll find the annual Peep Show of new play staged readings (curated by Tracy Carroll), always a hot SkirtsAfire draw. This year’s playwrights: Jessy Ardern (Kit & Joe) and Giorgia Severini (Border Breakdown).

The festival theme is “Complicated,” as Loiselle explains, a thought with far-reaching reverb, that unspools from The Blue Hour. “Our human impulse is to simplify, to put people in boxes. And that (tendency) can get us into trouble; we create monsters….” “Complicated” gets tangible form in an interactive Westbury lobby installation by Betty Hushlak and Deanna Finnman.

SkirtsAfire is not abandoning Alberta Avenue. “A lot of the programming there is very experimental,” says Loiselle of a plethora of cross-disciplinary events (to which admission is always by donation). At the Nina Haggerty Gallery, for example, She Moves is a multi-ethnic multi-company cross-cultural dance collage. Stephanie Florence’s installation there melds Hayley Moorhouse’s play Suspension to visuals inspired by the March edition of Cardiac Theatre’s Alberta Queer Calendar Project.

On Saturday at the gallery, you can get a first glimpse of Tiger’s Hearts Collective at work: an adaptation and staged reading of Shakespeare’s immensely challenging Troilus and Cressida by an all-female-identifying company. It’s the brainchild of Danielle LaRose of Malachite Theatre.   

New this year is musical programming at Station on Jasper downtown. Check out skirtsafire.com for a complete schedule of events. Available till Thursday are festival passes.

PREVIEW

SkirtsAFire Festival

The Blue Hour

Written by: Michele Vance Hehir

Directed by: Annette Loiselle

Starring: Ian Leung, Helen Belay, Nicole St. Martin, Robert Benz, Isaac Andrew, Bonnie Ings, Elinor Holt

Where: TransAlta Arts Barns (10330 84 Ave.), Alberta Avenue Community League, The Carrot (9351 118 Ave.), Nina Haggerty Gallery (9225 118 Ave.), Station on Jasper (10524 Jasper Ave.),  Bedouin Beats (11805 94 St.), St. Faith’s Church (11725 93 St.), Otto Food and Drink (11405 95 St.), The Nook Cafe (10153 97 St.).

Running: Thursday through March 8

Tickets: skirtsafire.com

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Got To Get You Into My Life: Will and the Fab Four do love love love. As You Like It at the Citadel, a review.

Posted on February 21, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

As You Like It. Photo by Dylan Hewlett.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Party time.

True, there are as many ways to century-swap and play dress-up with Shakespeare’s great romantic comedy As You Like It as there are theatre artists, impresarios, and music industry sages to dream them up.

(And the ‘60s have a particularly hypnotizing effect on all of the above.  Must be the flowers in the hair, or maybe the bellbottoms, or the idea of a camp-out in the woods. If the van’s a rockin’ don’t come knockin’, etc. My theory: In theatre, camping is always funny).

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Still, the idea of pairing Shakespeare at his most genial with the Beatles, a partnership of big-deal heavy-hitters, is a kind of celebrity match-making that makes for classic double-takes. At first. And the opening scene of Daryl Cloran’s larky ‘60s production — a big hit at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach in 2018 and currently cavorting onstage at the Citadel to a 25-song Beatles score — is like no other. It’s a measure of zany exuberance and unstoppable playfulness that it starts with … live wrestling, choreographed expertly by Jonathan Hawley Purvis. And a live onstage band of rockers, who go in and out of the play, as characters.   

As You Like It. Photo by Dylan Hewlett.

Really, you should get to the theatre early, and see for yourself. As a highly comic motormouth announcer in platform boots (Kayvon Khoshkam, who will later turn out to be the court comic Touchstone) is working the crowd, talking the talk. And Charles ‘2 Guns’ Leibowitz (Austin Eckert) is taking on all comers, including an oily ex-matador from Barcelona (Farren Timoteo) and a tag team of Russian twins.

Anyhow, when the show starts, it’s in a wrestling ring (designer: Pam Johnson). And the Act I scene where young Orlando (Jeff Irving) stubbornly challenges the champ (his evil bro has cut him out of their father’s will), he takes a pounding to the strains of She Loves You. It’s in the ring where We Can Work It Out happens too, as a duet between Rosalind (Lindsey Angell) and her cousin/best friend Celia (Jameela McNeil). The evil Duke Frederick, played by Paul Essiembre with a very nasty part in his hair and anger-management issues, banishes Rosalind, and Celia opts to go with her into exile.

At the preview I was kindly allowed to attend, the audience ate up this sassy counter-intuitive placement of songs. As well they loved the moments when the songs seem almost eerily designed for the story. And they were tickled that the exilés, victims of court oppression (the court is symbolized by the martini glass), drop out, turn on, and go back to Nature by gathering in “the forest of Okanagan.” 

This is where the good Duke — Essiembre in a double-turn, this time as a slightly dazed career stoner with an inkling that he looks ridiculous — lives out his exile in an orchard of frankly fake fruit trees. There’s a psychedelic VW van in the back where the band hangs out. Johnson’s design, with its triple-frame of translucent tiles like a sort of light-up Rubik’s cube, is consistently amusing. Gerald King’s lighting glows. 

Incidentally, there must be something inherently hilarious about the word “Okanagan.” Everyone laughed at every reiteration, me included.  Note to aspiring stand-ups: Okanagan is its own laugh line. Ponder, and discuss. 

Rosalind and Celia, who have co-opted the jaded urbanite Touchstone for their camping trip into the wilds (mainly to schlepp their luggage), arrive in “the vast Okanagan” in disguise — as Ganymede and his sister Aliena. “He” might be the only person in history (who isn’t a wine rep) to wear a three-piece suit in an orchard (designer: Carmen Alatorre), but no one seems to notice. Anyhow, Rosalind is keen to conceal her feminine identity (You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away) and play improv games with Orlando. She’ll “pretend” to be Rosalind and he’ll pretend to court her. 

Lindsey Angell as Rosaline, As You Like It. Photo by Dylan Hewlett.

Why? The more you think about it, the ‘why’ doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in this production. This isn’t an As You Like It that wonders much about testing the irrational ecstasy of love and the mysterious byways of passion. They’re comic givens. And Angell’s Rosalind, while vivacious and smarter than she seems when she’s being giddy with Celia, isn’t a heroine who comes to a new sense of self while dressed as a man. This is more about FUN, the fun of performance. 

Fun may, in the end, be a limited rather than a cosmic goal, unencumbered by, say, heartbreak and wonder. But there’s so much of it, fun that is, in the production, and it’s pursued with such single-minded purity of intent, that you can’t help feeling elated.

The muse, to reiterate, is comic, and the performances are cartoon-sized. Revealingly, Jaques, the melancholy forest existentialist, has been transformed by Sharon Constible’s droll, unusually energetic portrait (in startlingly non-melancholic orange tartan pants). Cloran and musical director Ben Elliott give Jaques the wistful Fool on the Hill and the enigmatically whimsical I Am The Eggman.

It’s revealing that Jaques’ famous “Seven Ages of Man” speech about the human track through the world (“All the world’s a stage…”) got a lot of laughs. I’ve never seen that happen. And Jaques’ scenes with Orlando, a droopy, sad-eyed, humourless, perpetually dishevelled character in Irving’s performance, are among the evening’s most amusing.

And what of the bad poetry that As You Like It mocks, when Orlando nails his love sonnets to trees in the, er, orchard? Not to spoil your surprise, I’ll just say the Beatles catalogue steps up on this count.

Emily Dallas and Farren Timoteo in As You Like It. Photo by Dylan Hewlett.

If Orlando is of the desperate school of unrequited lovers, he is outdone by lovestruck shepherd Silvius in this production. He’s played by Timoteo in a supremely acrobatic portrait of romantic desperation, and he’ll crack you up.    

The centrepiece of the evening’s comedy, the m.c. of this cabaret, is Kayvon Khoshkam’s Touchstone. He’s a virtuoso clown in a series of flamboyant Elton John specs, who takes the task at hand to an apotheosis of high-camp engagement with the audience. This flamboyant urbanite, who is not one of the world’s natural campers, virtually levitates in his silver boots. His scenes with the adorable hayseed Audrey (Jenny McKillop), unperturbed by his vast repertoire of upstaging techniques, are a delight: When I’m 64.

The exhilarating sense of discovery and self-discovery isn’t what happens in Cloran’s production; the performances aren’t detailed in that way. What is a bona fide discovery is how appealingly the Beatles canon works as a kind of cabaret of songs about different kinds and intensities of love, As You Like It in comic sketch form.  

This hit production, headed for Chicago and Milwaukee next, is certainly ingenious, full of inventive touches, cartoon gestures and pratfalls, and the insight that love is all you need — except maybe dancing, and OK, sunshine. Like its heroine, it’s As You Like It “in a holiday humour.” There’s a lot to like about that.

(12thnight talked to Daryl Cloran about his adaptation, and his hit production, in this 12thnight preview.

REVIEW

As You Like It

Theatre: Citadel, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Lindsey Angell, Jeff Irving, Kayvon Khoshkam, Farren Timoteo, Jenny McKillop, Jameela McNeil, Paul Essiembre, Sarah Constible, Emily Dallas, Justin Stadnyk, Robb Paterson, Austin Eckert, Oscar Derkx, Sharon Crandall, Benjamin Camenzuli

Running: through March 15

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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What does it mean to live here? A tiny sneak preview of rehearsals for The Garneau Block, coming up at the Citadel

Posted on February 19, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What saves us is our sense of community: theatre has always known it. Cities have to learn it. And coming up is a new play about Edmonton, by an Edmontonian, for an Edmonton audience, that’s all about what it means to live here.

For a brief moment Tuesday morning, I got to be a fly on the wall in the Shoctor rehearsal hall as introductions were made and work got  officially underway for the Citadel premiere of The Garneau Block, Belinda Cornish’s stage adaptation of the Giller Prize-nominated 2006 novel by Todd Babiak, novelist, satirist, polymath, creative thinker, sometime journalist (and a great friend of mine, who has written Fringe reviews for 12thnight.ca!).

The secrets of the rehearsal room are safe with me — unless it’s a secret to reveal a sunny, ebullient mood. Three dozen-plus people (and three dogs) gathered for the meet-and-greet, as Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran was there to welcome director Rachel Peake (the theatre’s associate artistic director), the award-winning playwright (actor and improviser) Cornish, and the actors, who include such Edmonton faves as Rachel Bowron, Julien Arnold, Nadien Chu, Stephanie Wolfe, George Szilagyi, plus actors now based elsewhere who went to theatre school here (and lived for a time in Garneau!). The creative team, including designers Narda McCarroll, Joanna Yu, the production staff, company manager Peni Christopher, stage manager Molly Pearson.… they all had things to say about community and neighbours, and where they live. 

Stay tuned for more. The Garneau Block opens March 14.

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All you need is love: the Bard teams up with the Beatles in As You Like It, at the Citadel. A preview.

Posted on February 18, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

As You Like It. Photo by Dylan Hewlett.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The musical rom-com that opens Thursday on the Citadel’s Shoctor stage, is the work of a starry creative team. All the world might be a stage, yeah yeah yeah, but history’s hottest playwright and most popular rock band haven’t worked together before. His people and their people don’t always connect, if you catch my drift.

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I refer of course to William Shakespeare and the Beatles. Daryl Cloran’s hit 1960s-style adaptation of As You Like It is their debut outing as a team. It marries Shakespeare’s generous-spirited adventure of self-discovery and exploration of the ecstasy of love to … 25 Beatles songs. The production originated in 2018 at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach, where it stirred up the biggest box office activity in that festival’s history, and restored the word “joyous” to the chill West Coast lexicon judging by the critical reaction.  

The current production, a collaboration between the Citadel and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, arrives from the ‘Peg, with a (mostly) different cast of 15. After Edmonton, there’ll be a production this spring at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, and after that, re-cast once more, in Milwaukee Rep Theatre’s upcoming season.

It’s not that the Bard isn’t adaptable, of course. His bold, contemporary summer outings at the Freewill Shakespeare Festival attest to that. Says Cloran, “I directed a production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at Bard on the Beach in 2015, and they let me rip out half of the text and put in a lot of 1920s jazz,” he says. “And as a jazz musical it worked out really well,” and people really liked it.

Then Bard on the Beach artistic director Christopher Gaze put this idea to Cloran: “Hypothetically, if we could get the rights to Beatles songs …

As You LIke It. Photo by Dylan Hewlett

“Wow.” Once you hear a proposition like that, you can’t un-hear it, as Cloran discovered. It’ll tease your brain and tickle your fancy, and generally take hold of your mental playlist. But first there’s the crazy improbability of it all: how on earth do you get the rights to 25 Beatles songs?

“It’s super-complicated, for sure,” says Cloran amiably, of a question he’s invariably asked. “Of the 25 songs we use, the rights are held by seven different organizations. The biggest is Sony, but there are small organizations, publishing companies, even individual people who own the rights to one song…. And for every production we have to go back, and negotiate all over again.” Incidentally, the rights do not extend to using Beatles’ names; there will be no Ringo in the Forest of Arden.

Cloran explains that Bard on the Beach still does all the negotiating for rights, for every production. Baroque complications attach to acquiring rights to Beatles songs, as Paul McCartney himself learned. Cloran laughs. “The only way we could make it happen, financially, is that Shakespeare doesn’t ask for a royalty!” 

As for the songs, “once I started looking for connections, it was pretty quick,” he says. “The story and the Beatles music meshed so perfectly, that some of the songs felt like they were written for this play….” That’s why he could cut the text in half, he says.

Lindsey Angell and Jameela McNeil in As You Like It. Photo by Dylan Hewlett

When bright witty Rosalind finds herself in exile in the Forest of Arden, in disguise, and conceals her growing affection for Orlando, You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away is a natural, as Cloran points out. “That worked so well.” When the melancholy forest philosopher Jaques arrives back at camp exulting to his fellow exilés, “A fool! a fool! I met a fool i’ the forest!” a link to Fool on the Hill is easy to forge.

Cloran was “intrigued and surprised” to discover the uncanny synchronicity between Shakespeare’s story arc and the song arc of the Beatles canon. “The story of young lovers falling in love (aligns with) the youthful, naive, ‘I wanna hold your hand’ of early Beatles…. And when the characters run off to the forest, the play gets a lot more philosophical and spiritual. And so does Beatles canon, in the questions the songs are asking.”

“By the end we’re singing Across The Universe and All You Need Is Love…. The story and the songwriting have grown throughout.” And along the same trajectory. 

As You Like It isn’t a jukebox musical, Cloran says. “As much as I’ve thrown out half the text, it’s still very much a story, a really compelling one, about love in all its varied forms — romantic love between Rosalind and Orlando, the love between a father and daughter…. What works so well about the adaptation is that the songs continue the story. It doesn’t feel like we’re telling Shakespeare’s story and then pausing for a Beatles song, then starting up again.”

If you use Beatles songs in As You Like It, does the setting have to be ‘60s? “I asked myself that,” says Cloran. “And ‘does it have to be British?’” Since the Bard on the Beach tent is in Kitsilano, and “Kitsilano Beach in the ‘60s was the home of the counter-culture movement,” the adaptation took its cue from that. And when the characters flee the oppressive court to the Forest of Arden near the outset of As You Like It, Cloran’s adaptation has them going to the B.C. interior, where hippie sightings are not unknown. “My favourite thing is that ‘Okanagan’ scans the same as ‘Forest of Arden!” says Cloran. “I’ve got to reinvent that for Chicago….”

As You Like It. Photo by Dylan Hewlett.

If As You Like It proves more musically inclined than other Shakespeares, it might be because it has more songs of its own, the most in the  canon. It has another feature that sets it strikingly apart: a wrestling scene in Act I. Young Orlando is set up by his evil brother, who orders a formidable champion wrestler to kill him during a competition he’s entered. “It turns out,” says Cloran, “that Vancouver in the ‘60s had a burgeoning professional wrestling scene,” a precursor to W.W.E.” Actually, so did Edmonton.

Cloran and the ever-inventive fight director Jonathan Hawley-Purvis have front-loaded the production with a pre-show “all-star wrestling match … a fun thing so we get the idea that it’s an enormous risk for Orlando to take on this guy, a champion who defeats wrestler after wrestler.” It’ll be in progress when you enter the theatre, so Cloran advises “be in your set by 7:15” for the 7:30 p.m. curtain.

“Yup, the set is giant wrestling ring, complete with ropes and turnbuckles. And people are jumping off the ropes, putting each other into body slams…. It’s pretty crazy!”

“It’s fun to watch the actors rise to the challenge. We ask SO much of them. They’re characters in Shakespeare, they sing all the Beatles songs, they make up the band and play all the instruments onstage. And  they play all the wrestlers as well.” 

Yes, you’ll see Farren Timoteo (Made In Italy) taking on a size large wrestler in the ring. If he survives, he’ll play love-struck shepherd Silvius in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. 

PREVIEW

As You Like It

Theatre: Citadel

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Lindsey Angell, Jeff Irving, Kayvon Khoshkam, Farren Timoteo, Jenny McKillop, Jameela McNeil, Paul Essiembre, Sarah Constible, Emily Dallas, Justin Stadnyk, Robb Paterson, Austin Eckert, Oscar Derkx, Sharon Crandall, Benjamin Camenzuli

Running: through March 15

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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10 years with the Janes: Plain Jane Theatre celebrates with a new revue, Get Happy!

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Leah Paterson, Jason Hardwick, Camille Ensminger in Get Happy! Photo by Mat Busby.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Happiness. So how’s that going for you?

Is the state of happiness a democratic republic? Is happiness something to be approached gradually, on tiptoe? Something to be pursued vigorously and wrestled to the ground? Or chosen? Something you hit by accident, or pure luck, on the rebound from something else?

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It’s the 10th anniversary of Plain Jane Theatre Company. And after a decade of re-discovering and retro-fitting hidden gems in the musical theatre repertoire, they’ve been wondering about things like that. Call it collective curiosity, naturally attached to an intriguing song list: Get Happy! the new Janes musical revue opens Thursday at the Varscona.

Artistic director Kate Ryan arrives for coffee last week clutching a fat sheaf of sheet music, and a hard-cover copy of a vintage essay collection called The Pursuit of Happiness. “It’s been a year (in the world) when it’s not a given,; happiness is something to question in our own lives,” she sighs.

The Janes ensemble, who live and breathe musicals, have been brainstorming song ideas, as they tend to do. And the ideas have  accumulated exponentially, as they tend to do in a company of triple-threats who know their musicals, but see them from different angles. As Ryan says, “it takes a village to build a Jane show; this very small company does feel like a village…. Every person in the company is an important part of the show.”

“At first,” says Ryan, “it was ‘instructional songs’, with advice. “This is how you get happy … Put On A Happy Face. That’s how we started.”

Turns out you don’t need to consult Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or Bertrand Russell to study up on  happiness. Try musical theatre. “Songwriters are musical philosophers … and throughout history they’ve reacted to happiness. You think of Irving Berlin writing Blue Skies during the Depression, or Harold Arlen writing Get Happy in 1929.…” Ryan could go on for hours, effortlessly free-associating in this vein on her favourite subject. Like her father before her (the late Tim Ryan), Ryan is a veritable song archive. And she’s a highly entertaining conversationalist.   

Ah, Romance. Plain Jane Theatre. Photo supplied.

“Then we went to the repertoire of the ‘30s,” a test case for happiness under trying circumstances. Not by chance, it was a decade, as Ryan says, of “escapist musicals or wacky, wild revues like Hellzapoppin: audience participation, dancing on laps. No, really!” For their musical revue Everything’s Coming Up Chickens, the Janes borrowed a song (Through A Keyhole) from Irving Berlin’s 1933 As Thousands Cheered, in which every song is based on headlines from the newspapers of the day.

Gradually, says Ryan, Get Happy! widened its horizons from a primer with tips on walking on the sunny side of the street. “It’s about when the mind monkeys take over. Songs that tell stories about wanting joy but hitting a wall, making choices or discoveries … or taking a stand. People making discoveries — about themselves, and the world, and what unifies us? We all do share the same fears, desires, hopes. Discovery and survival.”

She beams. “Yup. We opened Pandora’s box.… Give me a happy song and I’ll find the struggle.”

Michelle Diaz in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

It is no accident that Get Happy! includes What’s Gonna Happen, “the anxiety song” from Tootsie, the Broadway musical by David Yazbek (The Band’s Visit, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels).  The Life of the Party, the number Ryan has culled from The Wild Party, a 2000 Michael John LaChiusa musical based on a poem from a 1920s artist, is a character’s too insistent protestation that she’s absolutely fine: “Who needs money? Not me. Who needs fortune or fame?” 

Everything’s Coming Up Chickens, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo supplied.

The sparkling Janes revue archive that includes Ah, Romance!, Everything’s Coming Up Chickens, Wish You Were Here: A Noel Coward Revue, and Café Wanderlust — tends to match-make songs from musicals you’ve never heard of and songs from musicals you have. And even if it’s the latter, it won’t be the title song or the 11 o’clock number. Yes, there’s a song from Mame in Get Happy!, for example. But it’s not the one you’re already humming; it’s the quirky “moon song” which proposes that the man in the moon is a lady.

Ankles Aweigh! Plain Jane Theatre’s debut production in 2010. Photo supplied.

Ten years ago, a cleverly scaled-down version of a deliciously kooky 1955 Guy Bolton Broadway money-loser, Ankles Aweigh — eight actors instead of 45, directed by Trevor Schmidt —  introduced Edmonton audiences to a  new indie theatre company. Plain Jane. Ryan’s bright idea was a chamber-sized heir to Leave It To Jane, the company founded by her father. “We took monsters and celebrated all the wonderful things they had in them — songs, characters, stories,” Ryan says. 

Bells Are Ringing, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo supplied.

Bells Are Ringing, a 1956 Betty Comden and Adolph Green/ Jule Styne musical set in a telephone answering service HQ, was taken up by the Janes in 2011. The production, starring Jocelyn Ahlf, was inspired, says Ryan, “by its strong female characters.”

Donovan Workun in Fiorello!, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo supplied

The next year the Janes revived Fiorello!, a little-known 1959 Tony winner by a team of artists (Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick) a lot more famous for something else, namely Fiddler on the Roof. The same thing happened with It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! It’s Superman!, by Charles Strouse, of Annie fame. And Mack and Mabel by Jerry Herman, a lot more famous for Hello Dolly! and Mame. 

Garett Ross, centre, in A New Brain, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo supplied.

Drat! The Cat!, a musical comedy cum Victorian melodrama spoof (with a cat burglar heroine), has the unlikeliest source in the Janes archive: Ira Levin (Death Trap and Rosemary’s Baby), no kidding. And A New Brain, which won Sterling Awards in 2016 both for the production and for leading man Garett Ross, has the unlikeliest subject:  author William Finn’s experience of having emergency surgery for a brain aneurism.

Historically, the Janes have made a point of incorporating new talent into the ensemble with each project. This time MacEwan musical theatre grad Daniella Fernandez and dancer Camille Ensminger make their Jane debut, alongside five Jane stars. Last year’s hit Sterling Award-winning production of Fun Home, directed by Dave Horak (with Ryan in the cast), introduced both Bella King and Jillian Aisenstat to Edmonton audiences.

Jillian Aisenstat in Fun Home, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Darla Woodley.

It’s in that spirit, the excitement of the new, says Ryan, that Get Happy! includes a quartet version of Stephen Sondheim’s Something’s Coming; the pulsing anthem of forward motion in West Side Story seems entirely à propos for the birth of a new theatre company, and now a new revue.

The easy route to a tenth anniversary revue, of course, is the one that Ryan and musical director Janice Flower haven’t taken. They could have picked a song from every musical from the 10-year-old Jane archive. Instead, the Janes have found themselves inundated in a tidal wave of songs that explore what it means to struggle, to quest, to be human. Ryan laughs. “Why make it easy?.”

It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! It’s Superman!, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo supplied.

Ryan points to Adam Guettel’s Migratory V, from his Myths and Hymns, which ponders the human implications of the formation that birds share in flight. It’s in a show about happiness that includes numbers from the Janes wish list for the future, including Grey Gardens, The Wild Party, Sweet Charity, The Happy Time (a little-known Kander and Ebb musical set in Quebec with a photographer protagonist), Most Happy Fella. Ryan pauses to consider the latter; one of its numbers, Song of a Summer Night, is in the show. “Lush and romantic. Beautiful, sad, heartbreaking and joyous at the same time….”

Working, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo supplied.

What’s next for Plain Jane? “Celebrating new work, new voices,” says Ryan. “Edmonton has so many great writers. And also keep diving into the vault of musicals from the past — there’s so much there to reflect on, to see what still resonates today, what unifies us.” 

“I’ve got a garage full of chairs, so  who knows? Maybe I’ll re-invent a lesser-known Rodgers and Hammerstein musical with four actors. It’s on the list!”

PREVIEW

Get Happy! 

Theatre: Plain Jane

Written by: Kate Ryan (and the Janes)

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Musical direction by: Janice Flower

Starring: Kendra Connor, Martin Murphy, Jason Hardwick, Kirstin Piehl, Leah Paterson, Dani Fernanadez, Camille Ensminger

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Feb. 29

Tickets: varsconatheatre.com/shows

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The sound of many doors slamming: Noises Off at the Mayfield. A review.

Posted on February 14, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Christian Murray, Mary-Colin Chisholm, Tom Edwards in Noises Off, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

As Julie Andrews famously said in The Sound of Music, when one door closes another opens.

She was not in fact talking about farces at the time. But she might have been. The oil business rolls in barrels. The news business is calibrated in clicks, real estate in square footage. The farce industry is measured, internationally, in doors. The deluxe example that’s currently running at the Mayfield (directed by Neptune Theatre artistic director Jeremy Webb) has seven, plus one French patio window. In Michael Frayn’s 1982 Noises Off, the spiralling quantity of manic complication that is unleashed on either side and through them is unsurpassed in modern theatre.

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Not least this is because Noises Off isn’t just one British sex farce. For the price of a ticket, you get two, one within the other, intersecting disastrously in the course of a backwater tour.

Built into the lunacy of every farce is the dark insight that every theatre company in the world knows in its bones: organization and planning and good order in our lives are in the end an illusion. Cosmic chaos, my friends, is just a misstep, a miscue, a misplaced prop, or a slammed door away. And Noises Off is a graphic demo of the fun of panic (other people’s) and our collective flirtation with the near-miss. The first time I saw Noises Off, in the ‘80s at the Savoy Theatre in London — in the aerie reaches of the balcony, of course — one elderly gentleman in our midst laughed so hard he hyper-ventilated and fell out of his seat, and had to be carried out by ushers. I’m slightly abashed to report that this seemed perfectly natural, and in no way detracted from anyone’s enjoyment. Au contraire.

Noises Off, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

But I digress. In Act I we see a cast of B-team Brit actors, some well past their best-before date, and the increasingly harried director in the final technical rehearsal of a relentlessly crappy trouser-dropping door slammer called Nothing On, about to tour hick towns.

The plot, to speak magnanimously of something as skimpy as the ingenue’s underwear, has to do with plates of sardines, a box of tax files, illicit afternoon nookie in a country house that’s supposedly empty, that sort of thing, with a lot of doubling entendres. And the rehearsal, led by the ever-more-exasperated director Lloyd (Cameron MacDuffee), a disembodied voice in the dark, is grinding on, in screwed-up entrances, sardines, overnight bags. “How about the words, love? Am I getting some of them right?” asks Dotty (Mary-Colin Chisholm), a faded TV comic making her comeback as the addled housekeeper Mrs. Clackett. “Some of them have a very familiar ring,” is the terse reply.

In Act 2, a month into the tour, we get the backstage view at a disintegrating Wednesday matinee. John Dinning’s perfectly theatrically tacky two-storey fake-16th century country house set — an amazing fit for the Mayfield stage —  is made to revolve. And the actors and stage management are enmeshed in a fracturing real-life sex farce of their own that hilariously seems to parallel the “farcical” one. Every exit is an entrance onto the stage, and vice versa. It’s a sustained and delirious, mostly silent, comedy of choreographed pratfalls, as bouquets of flowers, bottles of booze, boxes, bits of costumes, and a fire axe get tossed from person to person.

Noises Off, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

By Act 3, we’re in front again, at the final performance of the tour, a conflagration of sabotaged props and costumes, improvised lines, festering on- and offstage jealousies.

Webb’s ensemble of actors, assembled from across the country, play an assortment of recognizable Brit theatre actor types playing badly written sex farce characters. The effect is sometimes smudged by a certain lack of distinction (or at least shading) in performances between, say, Dotty the has-been diva and Mrs. Clackett, the dithery housekeeper whose efforts to enjoy a plate of sardines and watch telly are doomed to ever-more spectacular failure. I must add, however, that Mrs. Clackett’s Act 3 disintegration into muttering wreckage is very funny.

Christian Murray is droll as Nothing On’s slick take-charge real-estate guy Garry whose amorous advances are repeatedly thwarted, as played by an actor (you know the type) who is congenitally unable to finish a sentence to explain his objections to this or that directive from Lloyd.

As Vicki, a statuesque blonde dimbulb who either cavorts around the stage in her knickers as the hair-tosser Brooke, or stops proceedings regularly to look for a missing contact lens, Kelly Holiff forges a grandly fake cadence that lingers on every consonant. She makes every utterance (“that’s not the bedroommmmm; it’s another bathroommmm”) solemn. Amusingly, when the show is reduced to rubble in Act 3, it’s Vicki who remembers all her inane lines and grimly carries on.

Garett Ross and Patricia Zentilli in Noises Off. Photo by Ed Ellis

Garett Ross is particularly funny as an oversensitive leading man who can’t so much as move a box without knowing his motivation. Patricia Zentilli plays the unctuous cast gossip whose sympathetic revelations are all about spreading the dirt — who plays Freddie’s ever-smiling conciliatory wife in Nothing On.

MacDuffee’s performance doesn’t take advance of the obvious comic possibilities in creating a pompous noblesse-oblige Brit director, the kind who’s also staging Richard III at the Aberystwyth Festival. His Lloyd is rather more generic than that, and seems to panic a little too easily. But acid, and exasperation, do escalate. Ben Francis and Gianna Vacirca are the overworked backstage team (and occasional understudies). Their endless duties include keeping an eye on the the old souse (Tom Edwards) who plays the burglar, and never gets an entrance right. 

Noises Off is a sublime reminder that playing bad and mistiming comedy are just as tricky as getting it right. This production isn’t the last word in that kind of finesse. But you’ll laugh, long and out loud. And that’s a noise that’s a rare and precious sensation.   

REVIEW

Noises Off

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Written by: Michael Frayn

Directed by: Jeremy Webb

Starring: Mary-Colin Chisholm, Tom Edwards, Ben Francis, Kelly Holiff, Cameron MacDuffee, Christian Murray, Garett Ross, Gianna Vacirca, Patricia Zentilli

Running: through March 29

Tickets: 780-483-4051, mayfieldtheatre.ca

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Locked out by a union? Whaaaat? Allan Morgan’s one-man show I Walked The Line comes to Chinook Series 2020

Posted on February 13, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Allan Morgan in I Walked the Line. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I could not believe it! I could not get my head around it!” declares Allan Morgan.

The veteran Vancouver-based actor, whose conversation rolls in exclamation points, is known to Edmonton audiences since he was the touring productions of The Overcoat and the Electric Company’s Studies in Motion (“I ran jiggling across the stage naked!”). This amiable and highly amusing theatre artist is talking about the bizarre situation that proved the inspiration for his solo memoir play I Walked the Line. It joins the 2020 Chinook Series Friday for three performances under the Workshop West Playwrights Theatre banner. 

If you’re an actor, “strike” usually means taking the set apart on the last night of the show. But when your day job between engagements is working for a union? And you and your fellow workers get locked out … by union management? Surely that’s a contradiction in terms, right? You’ve fallen down a rabbit hole into the wonderland where contradictions live, right? 

Both theatrically and in subject matter, Morgan’s I Walked the Line has a highly unusual pedigree. For one thing, it was commissioned by a theatre manager friend, who also funded a couple of workshops, the lighting, the design — and even paid for a premiere run at Intrepid Theatre in Victory. When does that happen?

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I Walked The Line started as a classic actorly response to a classic actorly crisis of income. When Morgan had a “dry spell” in theatre gigs five years ago — “it was getting depressing, really black” — he got himself a job working for a union, as a mail clerk. “I was scared shitless,” he recalls.; I knew nothing about mail clerk-ery. Hey, just like the movies, I was the guy in the bowtie who starts at the bottom and rises up!”

Union HQ was a sprawling building. “Everyone worked alone in their own cubicle. And as the mail guy I’d go through twice a day and pick up and deliver their mail, and talk to every single person there…. After a while I started decorating the mail cart, with lights, for national holidays and people’s birthdays. And people would start putting out candy bowls to keep me there longer.” Morgan laughs. “I pollinated the building!”

Mostly his co-workers were “older women from the suburbs, working as clerks or secretaries or assistants to lawyers or labour relations people. And I was the gay actor guy from downtown…. They and I would never normally have met. But over time we became very close.”

Morgan was the de factor building “social convener,” he laughs. For a workplace Pride Week gathering he worked up a piece he called Pride, 0 to 60, “about how my generation had grown up with one foot in the psychiatric/ medical definition of homosexuality” before the era and the social milieu for gays evolved. In time it became a solo show Pride for the Young Gay, the Un-Gay, and the Jaded Queen In All Of Us.

In I Walked The Line, Morgan tells his personal story of going on strike with his fellow employees against the union they worked for. “They were trying to take away sick days, lower our pay… and they locked us out. A union! People were flabbergasted. I was appalled. I come from a union family…. I don’t mention the name in the play. But it was the British Columbia Nurses’ Union.”

When the strike ended Morgan finally went back to work in the mail room — for a day. Then he was summarily fired, and marched out of the building. On a snow day, to add insult to injury.

There was, however, a taste of sweet revenge attached to the whole affair, “Jacobean really,” as he says brightly. Morgan’s face, plastered “on a giant poster … like Norma Rae,” advertised I Walked The Line at the Massey Theatre in New Westminster, at each bridge going in and out of that suburb. And he feels sure the union managers had to drive by it on the way to and from work every day. “They may have won the battle but I won the fucking war!” Morgan says cheerfully.

The other bonus was the affectionate support of his co-MoveUp workers. They showed up en masse on opening night, very excited to discover that they were in a play and “I was telling their story,” as he says. “It elevated every thing they did. They were crusaders!”

PREVIEW

Chinook Series 2020

I Walked The Line: a play about unions, treachery, solidarity, Porta Potties & baked goods

Theatre: Bread & Roses, sponsored by The Other Guys Theatre and presented by Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by and starring: Allan Morgan

Directed by: Ross Desprez

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

Running: Friday through Sunday

Tickets: chinookseries.ca or at the door   

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“Is anybody waving back at me?” Dear Evan Hansen at the Jube. A review.

Posted on February 12, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Stephen Christopher Anthony and the touring company of Dear Evan Hansen, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What does it feel like to live in a buzzing world of cross-hatched ever-escalating and fading images and phrases, a metastasizing, translucent tangle of entries, posts, links, tags, photos? Where the music of the spheres (not to mention the soundtrack of your identity) is swooshing Send’s and dinging Delivered’s?

The moment you enter the theatre, that’s what hits you in David Korins’ design and Peter Nigrini’s gorgeous perpetual-motion projection thicket of Facebook and Twitter feeds for Dear Evan Hansen.

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The 2016 Tony Award-winning musical (nine nominations, six wins including Best Musical) arrives at the Jube under the Broadway Across Canada banner. And with it a misfit hero for our time. He’s a lonely, awkward high school senior, pathologically shy, isolated by severe social anxiety. In fact, as played, beautifully, by Stephen Christopher Anthony, the title character is anxiety on legs (New York magazine once called Dear Evan Hansen, the “feel-anxious Broadway musical” of the decade, a line to savour).

Dear Evan Hansen. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

As Evan, the slightly-built Anthony gives us a character (with a light, supple voice) who hasn’t got the confidence to be lanky. Stooped and cringing at age 17, he’s a bundle of nerve-endings. His responses trail off, sometimes into silence, sometimes into wispy fading giggles. Amongst his nervous tics are tendencies to swipe one hand on his pants (in case it might be sweaty), and brush his hands over his eyes (in case they might be sweaty too). He can’t seem to stop apologizing, for everything including his apologies. His arm is in a cast that none of his classmates feel moved to sign; that’s how invisible Evan Hansen is.

A self-help letter that he’s written to himself, as per instructions from his therapist, ends up inadvertently in the hands of the school bully Connor (Noah Kieserman). Evan is traumatized. When Connor kills himself a few days later, his parents (Claire Rankin, John Hemphill) assume that the letter in his pocket is their kid’s suicide note, and that the boys are best friends.

Stephen Christopher Anthony, John Hemphill, Claire Rankin, Stephanie La Rochelle in Dear Evan Hansen. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

Evan can’t quite bring himself to tell them the truth. Partly it’s desperate eagerness for affection, the kind you get from giving people what they really really want. Partly it’s empathy; he wants to assuage the grief of sad, needy people. Partly he hungers for connection to his secret crush, Connor’s sister Zoe (Stephanie La Rochelle, in a lovely alert performance, full of subterranean longing).

As Anthony’s captivating performance tells us, the motivation for the lie is complex and shaded. But it’s thoroughly believable, both in the musical itself — book by Sam Levenson, music and lyrics by Benj Hasek and Justin Paul, the team who created the La La Land score  — and the excellent performances of Michael Greif’s production. Incidentally, a sizeable proportion of the impressive cast is Canadian, alumnae of the Toronto Mirvish production of 2019. Don’t you wish you’d gone to a high school where the designated bully can sing like Kieserman? 

Hitherto an invisible outsider in his own life as you learn in the knock-out Act I number Waving Through A Window (“step out, step out of the sun/ if you keep getting burned”), Evan finds himself centrestage in a social media storm.

Stephen Christopher Anthony in Dear Evan Hansen. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

It gives him attention at school: kids who had shunned both him and the surly Connor suddenly claim the closeness of the bereaved. Eye-watering loss? Bring it. And it also gives Evan access under false pretences into a dysfunctional family that wants to understand, and embraces Evan as a kind of surrogate son to replace the one they’ve lost. Meanwhile his own single mother (Jessica E. Sherman), scrambling just to keep up with her shift work and her night courses, as well as the travails of her maladjusted kid, is loving but stretched too thin. And Sherman, who creates a kind of breathless, tightly-wound character who always feels late for her own life, shines in a lovely, expansive song, So Big/ So Small, that lays it out.    

More than any other contemporary musical — and hey, it’s a rare example of an original, not adapted from a movie or a book or an animation or a comic — Dear Evan Hansen had a lived-in feel, with its  knowingness about the social media maze, and its uncontrollable, viral nature. Social media are the modern mythologizing machine, fuelled by the illusion of connectivity. The kids barely look at each other when they talk, they face forward or down, since they’re so used to “communicating” via electronic devices.

The world that engulfs Evan wants to own a tragedy and create a myth (the myth of Connor and the redemptive power of perfect friendship), even if the links have to be faked. One beaming over-achiever (Ciara Alyse Harris), keen to chalk up some community service points for her college application, launches a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for “The Connor Project.” Jared (Alessandro Costantini), an amusingly cynical tech-savvy smartass who writes emails from a fake account, flogs Connor merch. “You’re almost ‘popular’,” he tells Evan. “Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles.” Exit lines? “So what else did you completely fuck up?” He’s got a million of ’em; Costantini is note-perfect.

In You Will Be Found, an Act I Evan anthem, powerfully sung by Anthony and reprised in Act II as he is increasingly trapped by his own lie (and “found” begins to mean “found out”), he sets out his existential crisis: “Have you ever felt like you could disappear? Like you could fall, and no one would hear?” Dear Evan Hansen captures that feeling in such an under-the-skin, aspirational way that you can’t help but root for our hesitant deceiver — although the ending is a validation that, later, you’ll wonder how you bought into at the time. 

Suicidal despair and parenting angst, the teen heartbreak of being an outsider observer watching life’s rich pageant go by, the tension between wanting to be an individual and at the same wanting to be, well, extraordinary … it’s all there, the aerial view and view from the ground looking up “for forever.”   

REVIEW

Broadway Across Canada

Dear Evan Hansen

Created by: Sam Levenson (book), Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (music and lyrics)

Directed by: Michael Greif

Starring: Stephen Christopher Anthony, Stephanie La Rochelle, Jessica E Sherman, Claire Rankin, Noah Kieserman, John Hemphill, Alessandro Costantini, Ciara Alyse Harris

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: 1-855-985-5000, ticketmaster.ca

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From beyond the grave, a ghostly contact and a paranormal thriller: Séance at Fort Edmonton

Posted on February 11, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Clare Mullen and Phil Zyp in Séance. Photo by Phil Zyp.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Here’s a clammy thought for a winter night: the boundary between this world and the one beyond the grave is porous.   

In Séance, the paranormal thriller that comes to the vintage Capitol Theatre at Fort Edmonton Park this Valentine weekend, magician/playwright Ron Pearson will demonstrate. Prepare to be haunted; séances are by definition interactive (and sometimes have unexpected results, as we know from Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit). . 

It starts with death. “A woman has been brutally murdered at the Selkirk Hotel,” says Pearson of a show he first unleashed on audiences at the 1998 Fringe, and revived three years ago in a slightly altered story (the woman was buried alive). In any case her ghost will not stay put; she roams the streets of Edmonton. Which is why a pair of paranormal investigators, ghostbusters, are on the case to make contact in the next world, “to put her restless spirit to rest.”

In Séance, Pearson, not only a virtuoso magician/illusionist/street performer himself but a magic history scholar, re-creates a Victorian Spiritualist meeting, of the kind attended by such luminaries as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Abraham Lincoln. And he crosses it with a version of the “Spook Shows” which had their heyday in the 1930s and ‘40s.

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Pearson warms to his favourite subject, with examples and context. The American Davenport Brothers, he explains, famously had a wooden “spirit cabinet” in which they were tied up. “Musical instruments would play, and things would fly out the top.” Late-period Houdini made a point of exposing them as frauds who exploited a repertoire of illusionist tricks to create their “supernatural” effects.

In Spook Shows, “there would be a horror or mystery show on screen. And the lights would go out. And ghosts would grab you,” says Pearson. “By the late 1950s, the Spook Shows had stopped,” not least because when the lights went out, gangs of boys would throw darts at the screen. It’s “one of the great regrets of my life,” he says, that he missed seeing an example in Edmonton in 1972. Magicians don’t forget. 

Clare Mullen in Séance, Ghostwriter Theatre. Photo by Phil Zyp.

Mediums and psychics make their money from people’s intense desire to believe, their hunger to hear from deceased relatives one more time. And most use illusionists’ trickery, says Pearson, whose archive of plays includes Orson Welles’ Last Magic Show and most recently Minerva – Queen of the Handcuffs (about the notable escapologist who came up against Houdini), which premiered at the Roxy last season and then ran at the Fringe. “Most psychics can be exposed,” Pearson says, citing spiritualist M. Lamar Keene’s  book The Psychic Mafia. “There are so many fakes…. But if people want to believe, they will.

Magic and illusions are part of the skill set chez Pearson. Fringe audiences will remember Pearson’s interactive vintage side shows for a toonie in tents on the festival midway, starting with Spider Lady. The current production is a family affair. Pearson’s wife actor/playwright Claire Mullen co-stars with Phil Zyp. Their daughter Molly Pearson, an accomplished stage manager currently preparing for the Citadel production of The Garneau Block, directs.

PREVIEW

Séance

Theatre: Ghostwriter Theatre

Created by: Ron Pearson

Directed by: Molly Pearson

Starring: Claire Mullen, Phil Zyp

Where: Capitol Theatre, Fort Edmonton Park

Running: Friday and Saturday, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.

Tickets: fortedmontonpark.ca or at the door

  

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