They do! Chase and Christina tie the knot, in a Fringe show

Posted on August 17, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Chase Padgett and Christina Garies, in Chase Padgett Gets Married, at Edmonton Fringe 2019.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a love story for the ages. They met at the Fringe after the late-night cabaret. On Aug. 23 2017, “I yelled at him outside Steel Wheels,” says Christina Garies of her fiancé Chase Padgett (Chase Padgett: Heart Attacks And Other Blessings, Six Guitars, Nashville Hurricane).

Exactly one year later, Aug. 23, 2018, “in exactly the same spot,” Chase Padgett proposed to Christina Garies.

On Aug. 23, 2019, at 8:30 p.m., Chase Padgett and Christina Garies are getting married at the Fringe, in the Garneau Theatre (Stage 20). Their wedding is a Fringe show, Chase Padgett Gets Married, and (no pressure) it runs for one night only. Of course it does. It’s a wedding, for gawd’s sake.  

You don’t need to buy them a blender (my go-to all-ages vegetarian-supportive wedding present), check out the bridal registry for their cutlery pattern, or get blotto with a bridesmaid. But you do need to have a ticket.

No wonder Garies is in speed-up mode. She’s pulled the plug on her NGO job. Her lease is up at the end of the month, so she’s packing up her Edmonton apartment to move to Vancouver. 

This “pre-honeymoon summer” Garies has already driven from Padgett’s home turf in Florida (“Chase showed me his high school in Naples”) and the Orlando Fringe back to Canada, and then from Edmonton to Winnipeg for Padgett’s “other” Fringe show, the one that includes him getting a heart attack whilst performing on a cruise ship. “Vancouver (Washington) is our ‘purgatory’ until my visa comes through.”

You see what can happen when the question “wouldn’t it be funny if…?” floats through the air — and, like Garies, who’s a long-time Rapid Fire Theatre improv fan, you’re very apt to say Yes! to promising comic suggestions. Heavens, you could find yourself directing and producing your own wedding. And the flowers, the pedicure and the right underwear for your dress will be the least of your problems, way down the list from getting the posters printed.

Romance, as we all know, is a delicate cosmic arrangement of near-misses, as the ebullient and good-natured Garies concedes. “We met at a not-good time for either one of us,” she says. “I was unavailable. He was not ready to date…. But it was only a matter of time.” The universe, for example, had to cough up a BYOV. Does BYOV really mean Bring Your Own Vows?

There are four flower girls. One is an adult. “She just wanted to be one,” says Garie of her friend Beatrice. It didn’t even occur to Garies to demur.     

The wedding entertainment features Padgett and Garies’ friends, some of the Fringe’s most dexterous and accomplished performers, They’ve very connected: God will host (as Garies points out, “it’s only right”). The MC is Mike Delamont, of God Is A Scottish Drag Queen fame (in fact, his show God Is A Scottish Drag Queen VI happens at the Garneau post-wedding at 11:15 p.m.). The cabaret after the ceremony features such Fringe stars as Christine Lesiak and Ian Walker of Here’s To Science, the sketch comedy duo Marv n’ Berry. “Chase’s Auntie Ann, who used to be a lounge singer, will sing something.”

“Six minutes of vows, then a cabaret,” says Garies cheerfully. “And all our friends get to be part of it…. Very silly and very us. But I’m still getting full bridal stress.” She permits herself a sigh.   

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“Do you know who I am?”: 13 Dead Dreams of “Eugene,” a Fringe review

Posted on August 17, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

13 Dead Dreams of “Eugene” at Edmonton Fringe 2019.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

13 Dead Dreams of “Eugene” (Stage 1, Westbury Theatre)

The story that spawned 13 Dead Dreams of “Eugene” is downright unnerving. A man is found dead in a ditch in small-town Ohio; his unidentified unburied corpse is then put on display — for 35 years. And — this pretty much defines creepy — the townspeople find themselves sharing recurring bad dreams.

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What gives this cool this little ghost story its extra shiver of unease is that it’s true. Paul Strickland and Erika Kate MacDonald, confidential and persuasive Cincinnati-based story-spinners (witness Balls of Yarn, Evacuated, Papa Squat), have the vintage documentary evidence from local newspapers and a locked archive to back them up.

Can an entire town be haunted? And what of the haunt-er — the ghost who haunts them, and infiltrates their nights with his pleas to solve the great mystery of his identity? “Who am I?” wonders an eerie amplified voice, over and over. The body the ghost has exited has died alone, unclaimed by friends or family. 

What enhances the quivery reverb of the story is the theatrical way Strickland and MacDonald set the tale forth. It’s artful, but it’s ingeniously low-tech. The illusion of something homespun gives the show credentials in reality. Shadows flicker, both the human and the puppet kind. The performers, who sing from time to time, are stalked by elongated shadow versions of themselves. The songs are spooky and smart.

The lighting is from hand-held, improvised sources — flashlights, lightbulbs. And the imagery lingers in the mind. Thousands of moths swarm out of an old suitcase. A bullet wound lights up inside a body. Moonlight shines through the holes in the ceiling of a derelict theatre. Tears collect in a glass. Severed skulls become whistles in the wind.

Dreams, after all, are contagious. The mind sees to that. Get a grip. Just saying.   

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A winning homage to one of the greats: Coat of Many Colours, a guest Fringe review by Marc Horton

Posted on August 17, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Gianna Read-Skelton and Andrea House in Coat of Many Colours. Photo supplied

Coat of Many Colours (Stage 41, CKUA Performance Space)

By Marc Horton

In country music there’s Patsy and Loretta, Emmylou and Reba, Kitty and Skeeter, Naomi and Winonna, Tammy, Shania and Trisha.

Fans are on a first-name basis with them all: they know the names of husbands, moms, dads, kids, lovers. They know hometowns, albums, band members, record sales, tour dates. They know song lyrics by the wagonload.

But there is only one Dolly, the magnificent, inspired, funny, brilliant, bewigged country singer with the tumbling cascade of blonde hair and the figure that redefines ”hourglass.” (She’s cleverly self-deprecating too, and once happily confessed, “It’s expensive to look this cheap.”)

You can also add “mysterious” to the list of adjectives that apply to Dolly Parton, one of the greatest songwriters in any genre, anytime and anywhere. Other than the barest of facts —  no kids, a hubby named Carl in a marriage that’s lasted five decades and counting — people know very, very little about Dolly, and it’s clear she likes it that way.

I suspect, however, a playwright is presented with some unique challenges when putting together a show celebrating the genius of a woman who is so guarded. It is a challenge happily met and overcome by actor/singer/playwright Andrea House in Coat of Many Colours, her winning and wonderful homage to Dolly Parton and her long, celebrated career as country star and crossover hitmaker.

And although House and fellow vocalist Gianna Read-Skelton don blonde wigs, this is by no means an impersonation. It is a tribute show, pure and simple, but with crystal clear harmonies from these two superb singers who know they have struck gold with the songs of Dolly Parton. If personal details are scarce, there is always the music, heartfelt and often tender at times, edgy and confrontational at others.

In its own way, it is revealing. In its own smart way, it is enough.

We learn of Dolly’s profound affection for her home state when House and Read-Skelton blend their powerful voices in Tennessee Homesick Blues. We understand heartache with the ballad Jolene, where a wronged woman pleads with another that she leave her man alone. Lifelong yearning is made clear in I Will Always Love You, written by Dolly after she left the Porter Wagoner Show, a television production that lasted an astonishing 19 seasons.

And I have always felt that 9 to 5, a song that earned Dolly an Oscar nomination, is one of the greatest working class songs ever written.

But call me a sap, Coat of Many Colours always gets me. Always. Every time. House and Read-Skelton got me again with their outstanding take on this unforgettable song about a mother’s love for her daughter, a daughter’s love for her mother and the pain of crushing poverty. It’s also autobiographical.

A word here, too, about the back-up players. Mitch Watkins, a Texan who played guitar in Lyle Lovett’s band for over a decade and also played with the likes of Leonard Cohen, Jerry Jeff Walker and K.T. Oslin, joins Harley Symington, resident guitarist at the Mayfield Theatre, and composer/improviser Erik Mortimer on piano. They are flawless.

— Marc Horton was a long time film reviewer and books editor at the Edmonton Journal. He first saw Dolly Parton in the old Edmonton Gardens in the early ‘70s. He was initially bewitched by the wig and the figure but when she opened her mouth to sing, a lifelong fan was born.

 

 

 

 

 

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A brilliant solo tour de force: Fear and Loathing and Lovecraft. A guest Fringe review by Alan Kellogg

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Fear and Loathing and Lovecraft, starring Mark Meer as everyone. Rapid Fire Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2019

By Alan Kellogg

Fear and Loathing and Lovecraft (Stage 13 (Old Strathcona Public Library)

If there is a Fringe godhead, surely Mark Meer and P.J. Dawe are part of it, floating somewhere in the ether. Or perhaps….below, somewhere, in this telling.

Master monologist Dawe directs the always-estimable multi-threat Meer in Meer’s solo tour-de-force/adaptation of The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham. Here, authors Brian Keene (The Rising) and Nick Mamatas imagined a 1972 cross-country journey from Colorado to Massachusetts mingling the gonzo-ness of Hunter S. Thompson and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

Along the way, via Meer’s peerless chops, you’ll experience the likes of “Jack Kirby” LSD, bags of magic ‘shrooms, cases of Wild Turkey and handguns, men in fezs at a literally wired-up Committee to Re-Elect the President meeting (CREEP – true!), a discourse on the pineal gland, scary tentacles, Richard Nixon himself and J. Edgar Hoover, too – not to mention a brain-exchanging apparatus.

It’s all very entertaining, occasionally hilarious, occasionally scary and while we’re at it – very much a story for our time —  vividly told by a master.

 

 

 

 

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“A rich, tempestuous life” comes to the stage: unmissable Josephine, a guest Fringe review by Marc Horton

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Tamysha Harris in Josephine.

Josephine (Stage 1, Westbury Theatre)

By Marc Horton

Last year on a visit to Paris we stayed at a charming hotel where each floor was dedicated to a famous resident of that wonderful city. For example, folks stepping from the elevator on the second floor faced a seven-foot- tall portrait of a pensive and droopy-eyed Marcel Proust. Those on the fourth were treated to seven-foot Lumière brothers, pioneers of cinema.

Those of us on third were met with a seven-foot Josephine Baker, the dancer-chanteuse-spy-civil rights activist-philanthropist-mother of 12, who died in Paris in 1975 after a long, rich, tempestuous life that had begun 68 years earlier in hardscrabble St. Louis, Mo.

Trust me, there are few better things to greet you as you head out for your morning cafe au lait and pain au chocolat than a huge picture of Baker, with her kiss curls, sparkling eyes, bright smile and seductive come-hither look.

And there is no better way to begin this year’s Fringe binge than Josephine, an utterly captivating show, where triple-threat performer Tymisha Harris brings Baker to full-blown life. Harris earned her standing ovation. This show, a Fringe returnee, deserves sellouts.

With a life so crammed with events, playwright Tod Kimbro was faced with making some hard decisions on what to put in and what to leave out. Safe to say, he gets it right, although I was slightly disappointed that he ignored Baker’s Croix de Guerre, awarded to her by the French government for her work with the Resistance in the Second World War. That, however, is a minor cavil when it comes to a production that touches on just about everything else in this colourful life: five marriages, a sexual relationship with artist Frida Kahlo, dalliances with just about everyone who was anyone from Picasso to Hemingway to e.e. cummings, “whose name says it all,” according to the candid Baker.

This is an adult show to be sure and comes with some near nudity and mild audience participation. For example, sit in the front row and you might find yourself hooking up a feathery bra, not an easy thing for any fumble-fingers. And I wasn’t sure how Harris and director Michael Marinaccio would manage Baker’s ironic, sexy dance where she wears a skirt of artificial bananas, but they did.

And while the show is funny it also leads its audience through a history of civil rights by retelling  lessons that should never be forgotten and seem particularly important at this time. In fact, the Harris rendition of Billie Holiday’s anthemic Strange Fruit is as wrenching and as moving as it can possibly be.

Baker was an important figure in the fight for civil rights in America, and worked closely with Martin Luther King. She was feisty, once storming out of the Stork Club in New York after being refused service. Grace Kelly stormed out with her, and later in life as Princess Grace would offer Baker and her 12 adopted children a safe haven when Baker fell on hard times.

This is one of the must-see shows of this year’s Fringe. It has everything: great singing, great dancing, a true story told well, and a performance that is unforgettable.

— Marc Horton is a former movie critic and books editor at the Edmonton Journal. If you want to know more about Josephine Baker he recommends Josephine Baker: The Hungry Heart, an irresistible memoir by her son Jean-Claude Baker.

 

 

 

 

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Back in the fairy ring: Flora & Fawna Have Beaver Fever (and so does Fleurette). A Fringe review

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Brian Dooley, Trevor Schmidt, Darrin Hagen in Flora & Fawna Have Beaver Fever (and so does Fleurette), Guys in Disguise. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Flora & Fawna Have Beaver Fever (and so does Fleurette), Stage 12 (Varscona Theatre)

“Thank you and welcome for coming,” says Fawna, gamely trying to overcome natural melancholy and achieve stage vivacity.

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She’s one of the earnest 10-year-old founders of The NaturElles, an all-inclusive, non-binary pre-teen collective devoted to cultural diversity, equality, democratic consultation, tolerance, helpfulness to the weak and “all people at all times.” Ah yes, and trouncing “antiquated gender roles.” There are, of course, limits: “No mean girls.” 

Fawna’s NaturElle companions are a study (and a sight gag) in contrast. The deep-voiced, unusually husky Flora (Darrin Hagen, in size umpteen rubber boots) is a repository of worthy, progressive liberal rhetoric inherited from her “mom and her other mom.” Fleurette (Brian Dooley) is a shy francophone, smiling a glazed smile, apparently dazed by the glory of the public gaze. Perpetually furrow-browed, Schmidt’s Fawna, on a short fuse (even her pigtails turn down), grits her teeth over Fleurette’s helpful extended French translations.

We last met Flora and Fawna, along with Fleurette (their one-girl proof of cultural diversity) in 2015 in Flora & Fawna’s Field Trip (with Fleurette). We were in the woods, at a NaturElles recruitment seminar. This time out, they’re planning a field trip, to a beaver dam. “Without beavers there would be no Canada….” We’re asked to vote on possible field trip destinations anyway. As Flora says matter-of-factly, “we wanted to be able to say in hindsight that we consulted.”

Sly topical barbs like that, delivered with kid-like gravity, sneak their way into the script by the Guys in Disguise team of Schmidt (who directs) and Hagen. Like its predecessor, this sequel mocks redneckism (Fawna’s step-dad, as she inadvertently reveals, is a piece of work). It both salutes tolerance and has fun with the liberal jargon that goes with it.

As you might expect from the title, there’s a vast reservoir of crass double-entendres to draw from, and tease out, as delivered by single-entendre 10-year-olds. It’s drag with a difference: there are crafts, and audience participation: “how well do you know your beaver?” The “historical re-enactments” don’t quite work. But, hey, this may prove to be the only show at the Fringe with Hudson’s Bay jokes.  

All participants get a prize. As Fawna notes glumly of a politically correct era, “everybody must be rewarded. Even if they’ve hardly put in any effort at all.”

In the end, the show turns good-hearted playfulness into something more sentimental, a manifesto about friendship and change that presses its luck, arguably, just a bit too shamelessly. But Fleurette does get her moment to shine. And by then, your Canuck heart has been won.  

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My three (perfect) sons: Gossamer Feast, a Fringe review

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

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

Gossamer Feast (Stage 15, Holy Trinity Anglican Church)

Ah, the family dinner, site of countless tense dramas: This puckish and salty little 2009 comedy by Gerald Osborn is an antidote for everyone who’s ever doubled down on Tums wondering how on earth the nuclear family ever survives breaking bread together. And to this cosmic question, served up with a bottle of pricey bubbles, Gossamer Feast floats another quizzical thought, about theatre and life, and the scripted nature of parent-kid interactions.

We’re in a snazzy French restaurant; there’s a charming French waiter with a charming French accent to anticipate everyone’s every desire, and remember how Madame likes her filet mignon done. A mother (the amusing Ruby Swekla) is holding court, is basking in a barrage of tributes to her triumphant parenting skills from three devoted, perfectly worldly, impressively achiever sons: a lawyer, a professor, and a doctor-in-the-making, all in their leisure duds.  

It’s a vision of domestic harmony, every mommy’s secret dream, a My Three (professional) Sons right out of central casting. And at the preview I was kindly allowed to attend, Trent Wilkie, James Hamilton, and Braden Price convey the kind of easy, jokey rapport that confident achievers command. Osborn has a way with light, wry dialogue.

So, what could possibly cloud this  domestic perfection? Gossamer Feast twists off on that. And the fun is yours to discover; the secret is safe with me. No offence Tolstoy, but happy families are not, it turns out, all the same. Suffice it to say that there’s a backstage to family life, and its perfectly buffed surfaces conceal as much as they reveal. Surprise! 

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It’s the biggest opening night of the year! And the generations assemble

Posted on August 15, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

 

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“We’ll eat you up – we love you so!” — Maurice Sendak, Where The Wild Things Are

Tonight’s the night, the biggest opening night of the year in this theatre town. And Where The Wild Things Fringe, the 38th annual edition of our monster 11 day-and-night summer theatre festival, is the biggest yet, with 258 shows (up from last year’s 227 ) in 50 venues (up from 38). Growing bigger and bursting its buttons isn’t just a phase: last summer’s Fringe O’Saurus Rex sold 134,276 tickets, up from about 130,000 the year before that. Topsy-turvy has always been the way the Edmonton Fringe rolls. Apparently, neither beer nor green onion cakes stunt growth.  

You know you’re at a festival with a history and decades of connection in the theatre community when the artists who’ve grown up with the Fringe have kids who have grown up with the Fringe — and then they start doing Fringe shows together.

Multi-generational productions are everywhere at Where The Wild Things Fringe.

Check Me Out!, for example, is a new Trevor Schmidt comedy about female friendship specially written by the playwright for NextGen Theatre. The cast consists of two pairs of mothers and daughters. Not that the actors are playing mothers and daughters: the characters are a quartet of cashiers at a small family grocery story.

“Blair (Blair Wensley) and I have worked on productions, but never been onstage together,” says Elizabeth Allison-Jorde. A busy stage manager and director, Allison-Jorde herself hasn’t been onstage for a couple of decades, Wensley for 10 years. They both have 20-something daughters in theatre (they’re MacEwan theatre arts grads). Janelle Jorde and Morgan Donald are both in Check Me Out!.

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“We started the company because there isn’t a lot of indie theatre where the generations are mixed…. And we thought that would be cool.” NextGen productions of Kingfisher Days and Clean Cut! ensued. And next up, they hope, is a show during the season.

Jenny McKillop, Jezec Sanders, Madelaine Knight in You Are Happy, Dog Heart/ Blarney Productions. Edmonton Fringe 2019.

Veteran actor April Banigan makes her directing debut with the Blarney/ Dog Heart co-production of You Are Happy, an oddball black anti-rom-com rom-com by Quebec’s Rébecca Déraspe. Her son Jezec  Sanders is in the cast, along with Madelaine Knight and Jenny McKillop.

Like camping, wall-papering, and learning a foreign language, directing your kid in a play is an extreme test case for a relationship. Banigan reports, happily, that “working with my son has been amazing (and new for both of us!) Last night Jezec and I were coming home together after a late rehearsal, him on his longboard and me on my bike, and I was struck, as I have been many times during this process, by the relevance of this moment. That the stars aligned for us to work together and that it’s been so fun and lovely….it’s pretty special for this mama.”

David Ley and Sebastien Ley in A Life In the Theatre. Edmonton Fringe 2019.

Actor/ vocal coach/ U of A drama prof David Ley is in a Fringe show with his son Sebastian Ley, an early and surprisingly light-handed two-hander by the Chicago heavy-hitter David Mamet. In A Life In The Theatre a failing veteran actor and an ambitious theatre newcomer share scenes in a dressing room and onstage. Kathleen Weiss directs.

For sheer multi-generational theatrical bravado, it’s hard to top Stéphanie Morin-Robert, of Blindspot fame, who arrives onstage in Eye Candy with her glass eye and her year-old baby Olive. Like all stories about motherhood, it’s bound to involve risk — and improv.

    

   

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Step up, be a patron, support theatre coverage: it’ll be fun!

Posted on August 14, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Hello theatre friends!

How did this happen? Suddenly, magically, it’s the eve of the Fringe, the biggest edition ever of Edmonton’s favourite summer festival, best idea, most influential export ever.

Live theatre is on everyone’s mind in this exciting theatre town! I’m hoping you’ve been enjoying the theatre coverage — news, previews, feature articles, reviews — on my website 12thnight.ca, and finding it of value. There’s no charge to subscribe and all the content is free. So I’m hoping, too, dear reader, you’ll be up for chipping in a monthly amount — you choose the amount — to my Patreon campaign to help that continue. Here’s the link: www.patreon.com/12thnight. Spread the word!

In this era of shrinking arts coverage in the mainstream media, it’s worth trying a new way. Join me in this venture as a patron if you can. And I’ll continue to provide the best coverage I can, to be your guide to what’s onstage here. I’m off to Where The Wild Things Fringe, the 38th annual edition of the festivities, for the wild rumpus. I’ll report back: look to 12thnight.ca for news, feature articles, and reviews!

Gratefully yours,

Liz

 

 

 

 

 

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Sing it don’t say it: musical theatre at the Fringe

Posted on August 13, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Crescendo! Chorus Productions and Plain Jane Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2019

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Take a quick flip through the Fringe program, a tome of epic weight and proportions, and you’ll notice there’s nothing run of DeMille about the musicals at this year’s edition of our big alternative summer theatre extravaganza. No Rodgers and Hammerstein. No low-budget chamber-scale Brigadoon or Little Shop of Horrors or The Full Monty. OK, there’s Cats, but ThunderCATS is billed as a parody,, with “even less plot and tighter leotards.”

When it goes to the Fringe, the musical theatre seems to take on new and intriguing angles and shapes, tackle unexpected subjects from unexpected sources, put songs in the mouths of characters you might never imagine singing. As in opera (and, hey, there is one, Gianni Schicchi), happy endings occasionally happen, but they aren’t de rigueur.

Triassic Parq, at Edmonton Fringe 2019. Photo supplied.

There’s an original musical inspired by the lives and loves of servers in the restaurant biz: MEAT The Musical. There’s Straight Edge Theatre’s dark new musical about “child neglect and premeditated murder,” Imaginary Friend. Triassic Parq, born at the New York Fringe in 2010 before it arrived Off-Broadway, revisits the famous movie through the eyes of the dinosaurs. Trummp The Musical, an original by a two-writer team from St. John’s Nfld., stars two White House interns.

The Legend of White Woman Creek, a returning production from Brooklyn’s The Coldharts (Edgar Allan)  does its storytelling in a song cycle delivered by a ghost. The Last Five Years, Jason Robert Brown’s influential game-changer, at the Fringe in a Straight Edge production, chronicles the rise and fall of a relationship both forward and in reverse.  

The Killing Jar The Musical, Scona Alumni Theatre Co. at Edmonton Fringe 2019

The Scona Alumni Theatre Co., specialists in musical theatre (Xanadu, Hedwig And The Angry Inch, Heathers: The Musical) premieres an original new musical this Fringe. The Killing Jar, an electro musical created by, and starring Chris Scott, one of the company, unspools from a mass killing in an exclusive club run by a philanthropist/activist. It’s target: celebrity worship. The production is directed and choreographed by Scona High’s musical theatre guru Linette Smith.    

“I’ve been so inspired by new work,” says Kate Ryan, artistic director of Plain Jane Theatre, an indie company with a bent for (and a distinguished archive in) discovering oddball, obscure, neglected, or mistreated gems of the repertoire. “The form of musical theatre has been changing the last couple of years…. What’s relevant? What do we celebrate?” The answers have evolved.

This past season, for example, the Janes mounted a multi-Sterling Award-winning production of Fun Home, a provocative contemporary coming-of-age coming-out musical adapted from a graphic memoir. “I needed to re-think our next step,” says Ryan, who’s a bona fide expert in the development of the American musical theatre. “We’ve created  revues, of course,” like last summer’s Everything’s Coming Up Chickens, which fashioned an extraordinary assortment of songs from musicals you might never have heard of into an homage to the actor’s life.

But Ryan, who’s been inspired by workshops with Lin-Manuel Miranda in New York and Toronto’s Bob Martin (The Drowsy Chaperone) at the Banff Centre, was drawn to the new. “As a director it’s terrifying but exciting, discovering what can, and can’t work.” That’s why she’s pumped about directing Crescendo! by her old friend and theatre school classmate Sandy Paddick, a collaboration with Chorus Productions.

Two years ago Crescendo! wasn’t a musical — witness a staged reading at Script Salon in which Ryan was one of the readers. “It was a play with characters who are women in a community choir, the joy of singing, of sharing songs,” she says of a script which began with true stories culled from interviews with real women. “Music was the something that made people open up to each other…. Singing together for an hour made people share deeply private stories.”   

A play about people in a choir making music together….So, why not add music and make a musical? Ryan asked Paddick, herself a member of a community choir. Why not? They enlisted Jennifer McMillan, a musician, composer and long-time member of the Kokopelli choir, and she wrote three original songs — including the title Crescendo! — and gathered the rest from a repertoire that ranges from Mozart to Rockin Robin. In future editions of the piece, the proportion of original music will increase. Ryan calls Crescendo! “a play with music … the songs aren’t dramatically driving the story forward….”           

As they worked on the piece, Ryan, Paddick, and McMillan discovered that “the story is really about the choir director. She could have pursued a career in opera. But what makes her happy? What’s the difference between being a solo artist and working in an ensemble?”

In the course of Crescendo! we meet four characters, of different backgrounds and political views. For an hour and a half, singing in a choir, they really listen to each other…. I love the premise, the potential of the storytelling,” says Ryan. “What music does is bring us together from a place where we’re not really sociable….”

“I’m learning so much. It’s what I needed to do next!” Now, there’s a Fringe mantra. 

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