A “rolling world premiere” at the Fringe: The Trophy Hunt

Posted on August 11, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Elena Porter and Graham Mothersill in The Trophy Hunt, Broken Toys Theatre. Edmonton Fringe 2019

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a damn big, unwieldy country, coast to coast. And no one knows that better than theatre artists — playwrights, actors, directors, producers.

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That’s partly what makes Trina Davies’ experimental initiative on the Canadian Fringe circuit so intriguing. It’s the brainchild of Vancouver-based playwright Trina Davies, well-known to Edmonton audiences for such plays as Shatter (produced by The Maggie Tree) and The Romeo Initiative (produced by SkirtsAfire Festival). The opening of Davies’  The Trophy Hunt at the Fringe here Friday is one of a rolling series of premieres of the play at the country’s Fringe festivals this summer.

Five premieres from June to September. Five different local theatre companies from Montreal to Victoria. Five different productions, with five different directors, concepts, casts. When does that ever happen in Canadian theatre?

Inspired by the story of Cecil the lion and his death at the hands of a  an American dentist/ trophy hunter, The Trophy Hunt has already had two Canadian Fringe premieres. And, says Davies, “they were apparently very different.”

The Trophy Hunt, Rabbit In A Hat Productions at Montreal Fringe. Photo by Van Ness.

The first, which happened outdoors at a “secret” location at the Montreal Fringe in June, was Paul Van Dyck’s Rabbit In A Hat production. It took the audience on safari, in a production with masks and choreographed sequences for a sort of animal chorus of non-speaking roles.

In July in Toronto, Nancy McAlear’s MadFandango Theatre production took audiences through Richmond St. West into a warehouse space. In Edmonton, where The Trophy Hunt had its origins in a “one on one” festival — one performer, audience of one — in nooks and niches at the citadel Theatre — the Broken Toys production reunites Davies with director Clinton Carew. They go back. Back to a little  theatre company, Bad Dream Theatre, in the early ’90s, with an assortment of productions. Back to Davies’ award-winning Multi User Dungeon in 2001 and West of the 3rd Meridian after that, directed by Carew.   

The Edmonton premiere of The Trophy Hunt is the only production that happens in a bona fide theatre, the Roxy on Gateway. November Theatre’s production in Vancouver happens at Granville Island, with the actors forging space amongst the crowds there. In Victoria, Whitehorse’s Open Pit takes it to Fan Tan Alley, reputed to be the narrowest street in Canada. 

Davies got the idea for the “rolling world premiere” from her time in the land across the 49th. Shatter, set in the aftermath of the Halifax Explosion of 1917, ran Off-Broadway in 2014, The Bone Bridge garnered her the Woodward International Playwriting Award. And Waxworks, inspired by Mme Tussaud, was recently workshopped in Massachusetts. The National New Play Network in the U.S. is a coalition of professional companies that launched the notion of serial premieres. “I wondered if anyone here was crazy enough to sign on,’ laughs Davies. “I thought it would work well for Fringes…. And I got a great response from professional artists.”

For playwrights, “it takes some pressure off the first production,” by demonstrating a range of interpretive possibilities. Ditto for audiences. And for producers, it’s an invitation to be local and embrace diversity;  means you don’t have to go to the (often prohibitive) expense of touring to gain wider exposure.

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As Davies explains, the play is constructed as a trio of monologues: one belongs to the dentist, one to an outfitter/guide, and the third to a local. “I don’t consider it activist,” she says. “I don’t even consider the content to be ‘anti-hunting’…. It’s a broader piece, about the nature of human nature, how we navigate the world we’re in. Each character is, in some sense, both hunter and hunted.”

The Trophy Hunt runs at the Roxy (BYOV Stage 17) Friday through Aug. 25. Clinton Carew’s production stars Graham Mothersill, Elena Porter, and Natasha Napoleao. 

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Have you seen Minerva? Further thoughts on what to catch at the Fringe

Posted on August 11, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Miranda Allen in Minerva – Queen of the Handcuffs. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Take a chance! True, the kingdom where the wild things fringe is unpredictable. By very definition. Check out a selection of promising, intriguing what-to-see prospects for your fringing in the companion piece HERE. 

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But there’s this: In browsing the record-breaking lineup, 258 shows (up 30 from last year’s edition) at the 38th annual edition of the Fringe, I’ve noticed a few  productions I’ve already seen and liked — at other festivals, at other editions of the Fringe, at other Fringes. Will they be refined, re-thought, re-worked? Dressed up? Dressed down? Maybe. Probably. That’s what artists do. But here’s a smallsampling for you to consider: 

Miranda Allen in Minerva – Queen of the Handcuffs, Photo: Marc J Chalifoux Photography 2018

Minerva – Queen of the Handcuffs. A fascinating play (by magician/ illusionist Ron Pearson) with a fascinating star. In Bradley Moss’s production, which premiered this past season in the Roxy Performance Series, actor/ escape artist Miranda Allen plays the real-life Edwardian escape artist Minerva Vano, whose sensational prowess (and novelty as a woman demonstrating it) made her a rival of Houdini. Have a peak at my review HERE.

Max Hanic in Boy Trouble, Edmonton Fringe 2019. Photo by Kaylin Schenk.

Boy Trouble. Mac Brock’s play, affecting and funny, premiered at this year’s Nextfest. Max Hanic, an impressive newcomer to the scene, stars as a 17-year-old gay kid who’s emerging into the treacherous world of online dating. He turns in a witty, rueful, self-aware performance. See my preview HERE.

My Dad’s Deaths. The title sets the tone of storyteller Jon Bennett’s wry memoir of a troubled relationship with his dad. He has a signature way, skeptical and edgy (but with heart), of moulding the personal into something shareable.

Stéphanie Morin-Robert in Blindside. Photo by Tristan Brand.

Blindside. If you’ve somehow missed Stéphanie Morin-Robert’s memoir of  growing up different (she lost an eye to childhood cancer) in several reappearances at the Fringe here, most recently last summer, you have another chance. Blindside is funny, touching, unsentimental (a perpetual winner of the Fringe’s ‘fearless use of a prop’ award).

Hotel Vortruba, Ragmop Theatre. Photo supplied.

Hotel Vortruba. The fun of Ragmop’s highly entertaining dark inventive comedy is in its expert physicality — circus skills, theatrical brains.  The 12thnight.ca REVIEW of last summer is HERE. 

The Legend of White Woman Creek. The Brooklyn duo The Coldharts return with this 13-song cycle of love, betrayal, and revenge that is also a dexterous piece of gothic storytelling. A mesmerizing show.

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Where the wild things fringe: what to see at the monster bash

Posted on August 10, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Fear and Loathing and Lovecraft, starring Mark Meer. Edmonton Fringe 2019.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Amazing but true: starting Thursday the Fringe, Edmonton’s favourite summer festival, is back — back in the theatre town where the continent’s fringe phenom began (and “fringe” was reinvented as a verb).

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Where The Wild Things Fringe, the 38th annual edition of our monster alternative theatre bash, the continent’s first and still biggest (and bigger than ever), has a record number of shows (258) in a record number of venues (50). So many choices, so little time.

12thnight.ca  is here to help you with that. What looks promising? What looks intriguing? What looks too weird, or too risky, not to take a chance on? Just to get you (and me) started, here’s a selection of possibilities that caught my eye — whether for the company, the playwright, the play, the premise, the cast, the director, the form….

Llysa Holland as Koroviev, in The Master and Margarita. Theatre Simple at Edmonton Fringe 2019

The Master and Margarita. With this show, back at the Fringe in a new, updated version after 22 years, Seattle’s ever-ingenious theatre simple — a frequent and distinguished visitor to Edmonton Fringes past — wrap their considerable theatrical wits around an intricately hefty underground novel by the Russian renegade Mikhail Bulgakov. The arrival of Satan in ‘30s Moscow and a hallucinogenic nightmare whirl through town, is interwoven with the story of the “master,” labouring on a novel about Pontius Pilate. Five actors, two onstage musicians (armed with a new score), 35-plus characters.

Queen Lear Is Dead. In all that famous Shakespearean brouhaha about dividing the kingdom (bad idea, dad), haven’t you always wondered how the Lears ended up so dysfunctional? In this new King Lear prequel by Jessy Ardern (who explored another famously screwed up clan in The Fall of the House of Atreus), we get to find out. Mom has passed away, and the Lear girls invite us to a “celebration of life” in her honour. Yes, Goneril, Regan, and  Cordelia find themselves in Strathcona Baptist Church (BYOV stage 46). As Ardern describes the choose-your-own-adventure, “we’ve rewound… the three of us are waiting for dad to show up.” You can choose who to follow through the church — there are 15 tracks through the storytelling.  — “and you’ll still get the full story.”

Sarah Feutl, Carmen Osahor, Jessy Ardern in Queen Lear Is Dead. Edmonton Fringe 2019.

It’s not a pastiche, says the playwright, “not a cheesy wink-y nod to King Lear. Shakespeare’s tragedy is “a jumping-off point for a contemporary play … about how your family can shape you, how your family can mess you up.” There are “a lot of jokes,” says Ardern. “And cupcakes.”

Fear and Loathing and Lovecraft. There is nothing predictable and everything wild and impossible about the prospect of this solo show wrested by the formidably multi-talented Mark Meer from an obscure freak-out novel, The Damned Highway. It’s a nightmare journey across America which puts together the gonzo (Hunter S. Thompson), the weird (H.P. Lovecraft), and the soon-to-be infamous (Richard Nixon). TJ Dawe has a hand in this, as dramaturg/director.

Candice Roberts in Larry, Edmonton Fringe 2019. Photo by Christine Kofsky.

Larry. Big buzz attaches to this comedy by and starring Vancouver’s Candice Roberts, which premiered at the Toronto Clown Festival last June and played, in an earlier incarnation, at the Edmonton Clown Festival last fall. Roberts’ alter-ego, the title character, was inspired by growing up in rural B.C. in the ‘80s. At 50 paces, Larry, son of Moose Creek, B.C., might look like just one more of those hard-drinking hard-cussin’ macho guys’ guys . But he’s on a discovery quest into his own psyche.

Elena Porter and Graham Mothersill in The Trophy Hunt, Broken Toys Theatre. Edmonton Fringe 2019

The Trophy Hunt. R.I.P. Cecil. He’s the magnificent 13-year-old lion from Zimbabwe whose death at the hands of a gross American dentist/trophy hunter sparked a global outcry. The latest from Trina Davies (The Romeo Initiative, Shatter, Waxworks) is spun from the story of Cecil’s fate. In an unusual venture, the production — from E-Town’s adventurous Broken Toys Theatre (Betrayal, Star Killing Machine) — is one of a cross-country series of rolling premieres of the play, at Fringes from Montreal to Victoria, each with its own local cast and director. 

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

Crescendo. The Plain Janes, whose chosen turf is the unearthing and re-buffing of forgotten and obscure gems from the musical theatre repertoire, depart from their usual métier with this new “play with music.” By Sandy Paddick, with music by Jennifer McMillan, it’s about the intersecting lives of women who join a community choir. So you don’t need to wonder why people onstage are suddenly bursting into song.

Mathew Hulshof and Luc Tellier in A Momentary Lapse. Photo by Ryan Parker

A Momentary Lapse. Teatro La Quindicina returns to a 2005 comedy jointly created by Stewart Lemoine and Jocelyn Ahlf in which an unlikely pair of miscreants — well, breachers of the Criminal Code — find themselves in enforced community service. The new cast includes Ahlf herself, star of Plain Janes’ recent production of Fun Home, as an over-achiever homemaker/ Hansard stenographer/ Lancôme cosmetologist. Her co-stars are Luc Tellier (who should have had a Sterling nomination for his hilarious work in the Citadel’s The Party and The Candidate) as an exasperated high school student, and Mathew Hulshof as (I’m not kidding) The Law, in all its grand permutations.

The Flying Detective, Accidental Humour Co. at Edmonton Fringe 2019.

The Flying Detective. The Accidental Humour Co., purveyors of genuinely multi-media inventions that propel actors from stage to screen and back again (Happy Whackin’ Jim McCrackin, Cowboy: A Cowboy Story), depart from their usual deadpan genre comedy to tackle a real Alberta story, Canada’s first aerial police pursuit. A commission from the Edson And District Historical Society, it launches a provincial tour with this Fringe run. Taylor Chadwick directs.

13 Dead Dreams of “Eugene”. Expert storytellers Paul Strickland and Erika Kate MacDonald (Balls of Yarn, Ain’t True & Uncle False, Papa Squat, Evacuated!) step way outside their smart, seductively affable comic mode with a horror “shadow puppet folk musical.” It’s based on a creepy true story from small-town Ohio: an unburied body and recurring shared nightmares.    

Stéphanie Morin-Robert and Olive in Eye Candy. Edmonton Fringe 2019.

Eye Candy. Call her fearless. The award-winning Stéphanie Morin-Robert, who might well be the only Canadian theatre artist ever to pop out her glass eye and play with it, theatrically (Blindside), is back at the Fringe — with a new and multi-generational comedy also spun from real life. In Eye Candy she shares the stage with her year-old baby Olive — and her high-risk motherhood journey with the audience. A warm and engaging presence, Morin-Robert is an expert in transmuting personal confession into resonant but light-of-touch comedy.

Brianne Jang in Look At The Town! Photo by bb collective.

Look at the Town! I admit it: I’m a sucker for miniature worlds. How will I pass up a play that happens in a tiny village, with tiny characters (and life-sized actors)? The latest from Kenneth Brown has an 11-year-old heroine whose task is to save her town “from the forces of mass production and fear,” as billed. Cast-mates Brianne Jang and Candice Fiorentino of Poiema Productions have been creating miniature houses on a miniature high street. And, as they demonstrated at the Fringe launch this past week, they have the hot-glue gun burns to prove it.     

Check Me Out, NextGen Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2019.

Check Me Out. As Edmonton audiences know from an award-winning archive heavily weighted to female roles, playwright Trevor Schmidt is drawn to writing for women. So a genial comedy of female friendship, set amongst a quartet of check-out personnel at Pennywise Family Grocery, is a draw. That the characters are played by two mother-daughter pairs — Elizabeth Allison-Jorde and Janelle Jorde, Blair Wensley and Morgan Donald — is the kind of bonus you could only find at a venerable institution like the 38-year-old Edmonton Fringe. (More about this multi-generational phenom in a 12thnight.ca post coming soon).

The Green Line. At last summer’s Fringe Makram Ayache made his playwriting debut, impressively, with Harun, a (very) intricate and ambitious exploration of the immigrant kid experience, in all its haunted complexity. He’s a writer to keep an eye on, and there’s a new Ayache to check out: The Green Line follows two queer relationships through war-torn Beirut.

Juliet: A Revenge Comedy. Shakespeare’s women, even the feisty or regal ones, do have a tendency to end up dead (to be fair, so do a lot of the guys). Monster Theatre — which has previously galloped blithely through vast tracts like Canadian history (The Seven Lives of Louis Riel), Napoleon’s tumultuous bio, War and Peace, or Jesus’s lost years — wonders about that. In the new comedy by the quick-witted Ryan Gladstone and Pippa Mackie, Juliet doesn’t die. Instead she enlists the assistance of such heavy-hitters as Lady M and Cleopatra to confront their author. I’m up for that argument.

Michael Peng as Mark Rotho in Red, Wishbone Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2019.

Red. The indie company Wishbone Theatre has always hung out in the hefty, dramatic, substantial end of the repertoire, where the plays (as opposed to the shows) live. You just can’t be blasé about finding a play of provocative ideas about art, and artistic creation (through the lens of abstract expressionist Mark Rothco), at the Fringe. But that’s what Red is. Wishbone’s 10th anniversary brings Michael Peng back to the stage after a decade to star in Red. The company is also premiering Bluebirds, Vern Thiessen’s new companion piece to Vimy. Wishbone’s co-artistic director Chris Bullough directs.

A Can of Worms, Ragmop Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2019.

A Can of Worms. If you were attracted to the macabre playfulness and precise physicality of Falling Awake and Hotel Vortruba, there’s a new Ragmop Theatre show by the team of Canadian clown/movement artist Nayana Fielkov and circus artist Matthew “Poki” McCorkle. This one’s billed as an exploration of our animal nature. 

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

Somehow, every Fringe “list” turns out to be elastic-sided. This one started out as 10 prospects to be curious about, and it’s gotten completely out of hand (I’ve got to stop sleeping with the program under my pillow). I haven’t even mentioned A Life In The Theatre, an early David Mamet (from before he became a right-wing gun nut) I’ve always wanted to see. Or (speaking of wild things) Triassic Parq, an Off-Broadway musical that revisits the famous movie through the eyes of the dinosaurs. Or It’s Rabbit Night! a new show from the brilliantly eccentric Australian storyteller Jon Bennett. Or  ThunderCATS, an original satire of the Lloyd Webber musical I’ve seen way too many times. “Queer disco talk shows” aren’t thick on the ground, even at the Fringe. NIUBOI has one;  “Earth” gets the director credit for NIUBOI x Earth. I can’t even imagine that conversation….

Wait, there’s more…. Lots more. It’s time to set forth.

   

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Let the wild rumpus start: Fringe tickets go on sale at noon today

Posted on August 7, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

And what a wild rumpus it will be….

There’s really no stopping Where The Wild Things Fringe. Tickets go on sale today at noon for the monster 38th annual edition of our summer theatre extravaganza (Aug. 15 to 25), the first and still biggest of the continent’s fringes. And there’s more than one way to get your terrible claws on them.

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You can order show tickets online at fringetheatre.ca. You can call the Fringe box office at 780-409-1910. You can show up live and wild at the box office in Fringe headquarters, the ATB Financial Arts Barn (10330 84 Ave.). Or you can hit TIX on the Square downtown in Churchill Square.

After the wild things start their 11 day-and-night rampage through Old Strathcona and beyond, there are more ways to scoop up tickets. Eight satellite box offices are scattered through the site.  And, who knows, you might run into an artist clutching a fistful of freebie tickets to drum up a crowd that includes YOU. 

The sweetest deal for fringers looking for an immersion experience? the “Frequent Fringer Pass” at $115 for 10 tickets, the “Double Fringer Pass at $230 for 20. But there aren’t many (600), and they get snapped up in a flash. 

Discounts happen daily, at the whim and/or entrepreneurial calculation of Fringe artists themselves. What hasn’t changed in years is the ticket tab. The Fringe artists themselves set the price, to a $13 maximum (that they take home), with a $3 Fringe “service fee” on each ticket. So, you’ll be shelling out 16 bucks tops for a show ticket. Most Fringe artists do opt for tops, as you’ll see when you tour the hefty $10 166-page glossy program. There are exceptions, though. The Splendiferous Quagmires of Mr. Filliam Crowe, for example, at $11 (students and seniors $9), is one. Or Anna and the Substitute Teacher at $10, to light randomly on a couple.

Where The Wild Things Fringe is a record-trampler before it even starts, with its unprecedented roster of 260 shows (up from last year’s 228) in 50 venues (up from last year’s 38). Most (but not all) are in Strathcona. Eleven of the 50 stages are “official” Fringe stages, outfitted by the festival and programmed by lottery; the rest are BYOVs, acquired and outfitted by artists themselves.

The 39 BYOVs include bona fide theatres (the Varscona, the Roxy on Gateway, the Playhouse, L’UniThéâtre, the Al and Trish Huehn Theatre at Concordia University among them), along with a variety of venues that have non-theatre identities in the non-Fringe season. Churches, an assortment of bars and lounges and clubs, a public library, community league halls, schools, cultural centres, an artisan brewery (Polar Park Brewing Co.), hotels, a youth hostel. There are 23 shows at the  Grindstone Comedy Club and its two new Fringe venues across the street at the Lutheran church. There are 26 shows in the French Quarter — at venues in La Cité francophone and across the street at Campus Saint-Jean.  

So … more shows on more stages. It puts you smack up against the question of what to see in the 260-show land of Fringe. And that’s something 12thnight.ca can help you with!  Tune in to this site for previews, suggestions, features, and reviews by me, and special-guest reviewers. 

It’s an exciting theatre town, as the Fringe continues to demonstrate so vividly. I hope you’ll find the 12thnight.ca content entertaining and worthwhile. And I’m hoping, too,  you’ll be able to support my continuing theatre coverage on the free site — my two-year-old online experiment I launched after 35 years as the Edmonton Journal theatre writer — by chipping in a monthly contribution to my Patreon campaign (click here).

Let the wild things roar their terrible roars. It’s (nearly) showtime.

Where The Wild Things Fringe runs Aug. 15 through 25. Tickets and further information: fringetheatre.ca.

   

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Hello. He’s Johnny Cash. Ring of Fire at the Citadel, a review

Posted on July 26, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Quinn Dooley, Jonas Shandel in Ring of Fire. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s one of the signature showbiz openers of the 20th century: “Hello. I’m Johnny Cash.”

That greeting is the raison d’être of Ring of Fire, the musically fulsome/ dramatically skimpy jukebox musical that’s currently eliciting full-house cheers at the Citadel. It’s a musical biography with the biography mostly removed. And although it doesn’t quite land quite that deep rumbling cadence of the original, Jonas Shandel’s striking performance  does reference the man in black as he circles the turntable of his life, watches, and conjures his younger self (Lawrence Libor) and his muse, puckish country music aristocrat June Carter (Quinn Dooley).

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The first-rate director Tracey Flye has her work cut out for her making artful an odd piece that makes considerable musical demands on its versatile six-member cast without giving them much chance to be characters or have personalities. Let no one accuse Ring of Fire of wallowing in lurid minutiae, or colorizing a dramatic arc, shouldering an oppressive baggage of exposition or (like Mamma Mia!) concocting a flimsy play to go with the songs. Its landing on narrative events is, to say the least, light. And Flye’s production is cool with that: it doesn’t try to lard out what’s not there. Hard-scrabble Depression era origins, family tragedy, touring, addiction as a result of touring, the Grand Ole Opry, rescue by June Carter…. they’re alluded to, fleetingly, but you have to know how to take the hints and add them up to arrive at anything like a story.  

The “dialogue” runs to non-zingers like “remember that song we wrote? let’s do it, guys!” Survivors, like me, of countless revues with portentous and embarrassing expository annotations, are in a position to appreciate the restraint.

Jonas Shandel in Ring of Fire, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

If you’re looking outside the songs he either chose or wrote to understand Cash’s empathy for the outsider, or the struggle between religion and the temptations of the flesh, or ambivalence about the essential conservatism of the South, etc., you are definitely looking in the wrong place. Johnny Cash fans won’t feel the lack; there is, after all, an ample song list –  34 songs strong  — and a cast with the wit and chops to deliver it. For the rest of us, though, it feels a little thin. Ring of Fire is no Million Dollar Quartet, with its resonant glimpse of legendary figures in their earlier incarnations, brought together in an unexpected configuration.

Apparently, Johnny Cash wasn’t a character in the debut edition of Ring of Fire, which fizzled on Broadway in 2006. And although the man in black is corporeally present here, both singing and observing songs sung by his younger self, he’s still not really a character. He’s more of a reference guide to an icon. Shandel’s performance is livelier and more charismatic in Act II. And Flye’s production weaves motifs, including the train whistle (“the man who gets off at the last stop, is he a good man?”), in an attempt to fashion a real piece out of a bunch of indelible songs.

Quinn Dooley and Jonas Shandel in Ring of Fire, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Dooley, who captures the sprightly, multi-angled vocal delivery of June Carter in uncanny ways (and plays a cluster of instruments including fiddle, piano and guitar in the course of a multi-character assignment), is winsome June Carter. Her delivery of I Still Miss Someone is a highlight of the evening, along with duets including While I’ve Got It On My Mind. And Libor, who can’t fall back on physical resemblance to Johnny Cash, nonetheless applies himself with intensity to conjuring a younger version of the star. 

The ensemble, which includes Julien Arnold, Matt Blackie, and Daniel Williston (on a variety of instruments), is impressively animated and versatile. To them (under the able musical direction of Steven Greenfield) falls the comic business of the Grand Ole Opry. They tuck in to the occasion with zest, and there are nice vocal harmonies on display throughout. 

June is dressed in a succession of perfectly detailed frocks by Cory Sincennes. His set design – slotted wood and rusty corrugated tin backlit by Jareth Li— has an atmospheric kind of distressed road house look.

That’s perhaps a tip-off for your own experience of a show that hints at a story but doesn’t deliver it. You get to hear a lot of classic music, live and up close, delivered impressively by a cast of six. And of a summer night, there’s entertainment value in that.  

REVIEW

Ring of Fire

Theatre: Citadel

Created by: Richard Maltby Jr. from a conception by William Meade

Directed by: Tracey Flye

Starring: Julien Arnold, Matt Blackie, Quinn Dooley, Lawrence Libor, Jonas Shandel, Daniel Williston

Running: through Aug. 11

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Directing the man in black: a homecoming for Tracey Flye

Posted on July 23, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Jonas Shandel in Ring of Fire, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“’Til things are brighter, I’m the man in black….”

There’s a story built into the Johnny Cash songs you’ll hear in the  jukebox musical that opens on the Citadel’s Maclab stage Thursday. Via a catalogue of some 34 songs from the famous canon, Ring of Fire leads us through the tumultuous life of the black-clad American singer-songwriter country cum folk cum pop artist who allied himself with the world’s outsiders.

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“I’m a big storyteller,” beams director Tracey Flye, on a dinner break from Ring of Fire rehearsals last week. “I love stories; I love tellers of stories.” It’s an attraction that gets a workout in the 2006 musical which bombed on Broadway and got a transformative re-fit five years ago into more of a chamber/cabaret piece, more intimate — and with Flye’s production, more focus on “using Johnny Cash’s music to let him tell his own story,” as she says. 

With her return to Edmonton and to the Citadel, Flye’s own colourful narrative takes on a sort of circle of life configuration. The Citadel’s first theatrical foray into the summertime musical season, tucked between the Freewill Shakespeare Festival and Fringe, is the Toronto-based director/ choreographer/ actor’s first time back in the brick and glass playhouse since Frog and Toad in 2007.

Tracey Flye. Photo supplied.

There are a dozen Citadel shows in the well-stocked Flye resumé, strikingly shared between the classics and musical theatre. Many of them happened during the Robin Phillips regime. “I choreographed Robin’s last show here, The Beggar’s Opera,” recalls Flye, a quick-witted, self-deprecating, good-humoured sort. “I did movement for Richard III and The Cherry Orchard. I was in Cyrano….” It’s because of what she learned from Phillips about classical theatre that she calls rehearsal “going to school…. I’ve got everyone, big and little, trained to say that!”

In fact “my first Equity theatre gig ever was at the Citadel,” says Flye. “1987. Nunsense. In the Rice.” She choreographed, and played Sister Mary Leo, the ballerina novice.

So Ring of Fire represents a homecoming of sorts for the Winnipeg-born Flye, whose family moved here when she was eight. “I consider Edmonton my home,; it’s where I did all my schooling,” including, unexpectedly, a bachelor of commerce degree from the U of A. Her major? Human resource management and industrial arbitration. Might there be the odd oblique application for a theatre artist? Flye laughs. “It’s useful every day…. Directing is a negotiation, right?”

Flye’s roots are pure showbiz; her pedigree is uniquely Canadian. Her dad, one of the Altones on radio in the ‘50s, had a CBC TV show in the ‘60s, Red River Jamboree. “My mom was a child vaudevillian and acrobat, on the (touring) circuit from age two-and-a-half through seven as Baby Joyce…. She fronted bands, did musical theatre.”

For Flye and her brother “music and fun were so much a part of our growing-up lives,” she says fondly. “The music of the 40s, 50s, 60s, the big band stuff, Frank Sinatra, the MGM musicals….” Flye would practice all the tap choreography. 

She was the kid who grew up dancing, starting with Irish and tap and moving on to jazz. When the family arrived from Winnipeg, she joined Alberta Ballet “and went all the way through the school to be a (company) apprentice…. Then I got boobs and hips instead of a tutu. And that was that,” Flye says cheerfully. “But my first love was dance. If I could have been a ballerina….”

Instead Flye discovered musical theatre and the rarefied world of the  triple-threat. “I came to realize I wouldn’t been as happy doing (ballet)…. I’m a storyteller!”

In the course of working on shows in Edmonton she met a kindred spirit, the late great Tim Ryan, founder of MacEwan’s theatre arts department; Flye considers him one of her seminal mentors. And her resumé includes many quirky under-the-radar chamber productions with Ryan’s Leave It To Jane Theatre — Diamond Studs, a musical Measure For Measure, On The Verge, Brownstone, Kander and Ebb’s Flora The Red Menace and The Rink among them. Flye has always wanted to revisit the latter, in Ryan’s honour. And John Kander himself, with whom she worked on a TV special, gave the idea his blessing.

Six months after Flye moved to Toronto in 1993, she found herself in the Broadway touring production of the Lloyd Webber concoction The Music of the Night, then toured in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Mamma Mia!. There are Stratford musicals (West Side Story, Kiss Me Kate, Evita among them)  in her career; there’s a continuing relationship, to date a dozen years long, of working with touring productions of the Queen musical We Will Rock You. She’s worked on Mirvish productions as widely divergent as Once and War Horse.

Performance has given way to a career in directing. “I’d want to know, in a big-picture way, how it all connected,” says Flye.  “And with directing, in a way, I still get to act. As a director you have to explore the world through the eyes of other characters…. When would I get to play Rochester in Jane Eyre?” she says of a Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre production she worked on. “Never!”

Quinn Dooley, Jonas Shandel in Ring of Fire. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

The same would be true, needless to say, of the man in black, whose rags-to-riches story is the fabric of Ring of Fire: Depression era Arkansas share-cropper to the Grand Ole Opry and the country music hall of fame, via the tribulations and temptations of life on the road and a complex relationship with the country music aristocrat June Carter (played, like all the women in Cash’s life, by Quinn Dooley). Flye’s production has two Johnnys, one older (Jonas Shandel), one younger (Lawrence Libor). “Loosely it’s a biography, using music, told by someone looking back,” says Flye, who’s enjoyed the liberty of fashioning a piece without much in the way of stage directions, or the weight of a history of productions (she’s never seen the show).

Ring of Fire, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

As in Once, the actors, six in number, are the band. They each play three to five instruments, says Flye, of a piece in which movement, as opposed to choreography, figures prominently.  “Ring of Fire is far bigger, more difficult (than Once),” she says. “It’s almost completely played and sung through, except for the small bits of dialogue which create a transition from one era to another…. The actors never stop moving and jumping off stuff, while playing instruments. They have to carry their instruments with them!”

PREVIEW

Ring of Fire

Theatre: Citadel

Created by: Richard Maltby Jr. from a conception by William Meade

Directed by: Tracey Flye

Starring: Julien Arnold, Matt Blackie, Quinn Dooley, Lawrence Libor, Jonas Shandel, Daniel Williston

Running: through Aug. 11

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

 

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The Bad Seed returns to chill at Teatro La Quindicina. A review.

Posted on July 13, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Lilla Sólymos and Nicola Elbro in The Bad Seed, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

That angelic smile. That impeccable posture. Those unassailably perfect braids.…

“Too good to be true,” someone says admiringly of eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark near the start of The Bad Seed. It’s meant to be the ultimate compliment.

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The unlimited potential of the “ideal child,” to achieve, to acquire, to decapitate resistance and incinerate skepticism gets a chilling  demonstration in the 1954 Maxwell Anderson thriller that’s back at Teatro La Quindicina after three decades.

And, in Stewart Lemoine’s production, built on incremental unease, it’s fascinating to watch the startling 12-year-old actor Lilla Sólymos as Rhoda as she negotiates the separation of smarts and human empathy. Timely and judicious applications of child-like charm and innocence are Rhoda’s specialty. Appeals to adult sentimentality about parenthood and the family, she knows innately, are the perfect antidote to … well, truth.

Rhoda is an actor, as Sólymos’s alert and detailed performance conveys with every toss of a braid, every jaunty sashay out the door with a shrewd backwards glance, every curtsy and arrangement of a crinolined skirt. Her theatre is so ‘50s. And so now.

Lilla Sólymos in The Bad Seed. Photo supplied.

Based on a disturbing William March novel, the play and this suspenseful Teatro production, conjures a world of middle-class surfaces: loving spouses, adorable offspring, helpful neighbours. And the discoveries belong to Rhoda’s loving mother Christine, in a beautifully calibrated performance with a period cadence from Nicola Elbro, making a welcome return to Edmonton.

The crux is a mysterious drowning on a school picnic. The deceased? A little boy who has won a penmanship medal coveted by Rhoda. Christine’s escalating apprehension, which frames the play and gradually seeps into every encounter, intensifies into horrifying suspicions about her perfect little daughter, who gets 100 in “deportment” every month at school.

And that’s about where I should stop telling you about the plot. Except to say that everything in Christine’s world, which unfolds in knocks at the door and phone calls, is a suspense-enhancer. It embraces the tightly wound purse-lipped teacher (Kristi Hansen) who has her doubts about the “official” version of the death, the sly and abrasive handyman who tends to lurk (Mat Busby), the gabby cheerfully Freud-obsessed neighbour Monica (engagingly played by Cathy Derkach). “I know I shouldn’t take things into my all-too-capable hands.”

Lilla Sólymos and Nicola Elbro in The Bad Seed. Photo by Mat Busby.

There’s even a crime writer, Mark Bellamy as Reginald, and in the person of Christine’s father Richard Bravo (Jeff Haslam), an eminent crime journalist who used to write murder mysteries. And The Bad Seed gives them the forum to argue about the nature of sociopathic killers, with their incapacity for remorse or moral choices. “They imitate humanity beautifully,” proposes the writer Reginald Tasker (Bellamy), who compares them to wax rosebuds. Richard Bravo  is nervously evasive. Is it possible for chilldren in lovely households to be murderous criminals? Is heredity the decisive factor?

The drunk mother of the dead boy arrives — a melodramatic part that’s arguably written with a little too much drunk unravelling attached to it. She’s a lurid, tragic portrait of disintegration in the accusatory no-holds-barred performance from Andrea House: “you know more than you’re telling.” 

Chantal Fortin’s design, lit by Daniela Masellis, conjures the reassuring domestic symmetries of the ‘50s nuclear middle-class family. Leona Brausen’s vintage costumes, with their snazzy suits and dresses, don’t just conjure the period, but nail it. Rhoda, who wears a series of starchy and ravishing little girl frocks, is kitted out like Alice of Wonderland fame. And for a child with her instincts for presentation, out in a world full of things she wants, that’s about right.  

REVIEW

The Bad Seed

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written by: Maxwell Anderson

Directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Nicola Elbro, Lilla Sólymos, Jeff Haslam, Andrea House, Cathy Derkach, Mark Bellamy, Kristi Hansen, Mat Busby

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through July 27

Tickets: teatroq.com

   

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The Bad Seed at Teatro: the “perfect little girl” and her mom. Meet the stars

Posted on July 10, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Lilla Sólymos and Nicola Elbro in The Bad Seed, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“She’s perfect perfect perfect,” grins Lilla Sólymos, cheerfully assessing the lethally goal-oriented little girl she plays in the 1954 thriller that returns to the Teatro La Quindicina repertoire Friday after 30 years. “And she uses that.”

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Nicola Elbro plays her perfect perfect perfect ‘50s mother in The Bad Seed, scrambling to fortify herself against unwelcome suspicions about her kid in every scene. Elbro smiles thoughtfully. “When you don’t see the monster under the (perfect facade) it’s even scarier….”

As you might expect, the two cast-mates, who made time last week for a pre-rehearsal chat, have arrived in Maxwell Anderson’s chiller by different routes. Sólymos, who’s 12 and going into Grade 7 at Victoria School of the Arts, comes to Teatro from starring as the resourceful and feisty title character in the Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre/ Arts Club production of the Broadway musical Matilda. Like nearly every adult in Matilda’s world, her mom and dad, pinhead comic grotesques, sell her short. 

Toronto-based Elbro is making a rare return to theatre (and to the city of her theatre school alma mater, the U of A) for the juicy role of the beleaguered mother who grapples with a terrifying kid in this vintage psychological thriller. And here’s irony: Elbro works these days — “my Muggle job,” she says — as a “children’s grief councillor and play therapist.” The Bad Seed’s vision of childhood is a test case, almost a punch line, for both aspects of her work.

Rhoda “wouldn’t have benefited from any therapy, I don’t think,” laughs Elbro, whose last time onstage in Edmonton was as the yellow piano in a touring puppet production of Splash ‘N Boots.

Elbro was attracted to the show partly because of a lingering regret,  leaving Edmonton for Toronto, that she’d never worked with Teatro. “I loved the writing. I loved the sense that they seemed like such a fun group of people.” All big draws for an actor made cautious about her chosen profession by “harassment and bullying” experiences in Toronto theatre. 

Lilla Sólymos and Nicola Elbro in The Bad Seed. Photo by Mat Busby.

Sólymos’s attraction to the production came via her Matilda cast-mate Andrew MacDonald-Smith, a Teatro artistic associate, who admired her quick wit and uncanny grasp of motivation. The hardest thing about being Matilda, who’s onstage for much the show? Solymos doesn’t hesitate: “It was so hard to keep a straight face around John!” (John Ullyatt, who played, in high comic style, the formidable head mistress Miss Trunchbull). 

Sólymos, who saw Teatro’s recent premiere production of A Likely Story and before that, the Plain Janes’ Fun Home, has been enjoying the camaraderie of the Teatro ensemble. “They’ve all been really supportive. They help you, guide you.” Says Elbro, “they want to tell the story, and tell it really well. That’s the objective.” 

With The Bad Seed, and the intriguing chance to be a villain, it was “Let’s try it! It’s a new challenge; we’ll see how I do!” says Sólymos, whose professional theatre debut was Tiny Tim in the Citadel’s now-retired production of A Christmas Carol. Needless to say, there will be no “God bless us, every one!” from the kid you’ll see starting Friday.  

True, Rhoda does, er, dispatch people who stand between her and her goals, like the penmanship medal that classmate Claude wins, before he mysteriously vanishes on a school outing. But really, thinks Sólymos, murder per se is not Rhoda’s objective. It’s not so much a matter of evil, in all its stereotyped manifestations. For Rhoda “it’s simple logic.… She wants what she wants, and she’ll do anything to get it.” You can’t fault Rhoda for lack of focus. 

Rhoda, incidentally, is eight. “I’ve always played young,” smiles Sólymos, who started dance training at age three. “I’ve never played anyone my age.” That gap didn’t prove problematic. For one thing, she says, “there’s a mature quality in Rhoda that makes her seem older than she is…. When she’s in a good mood, I try to make her younger; when she gets mad she acts more mature. She does what she has to do to get what she wants.”

It’s that kind of analysis that impresses her co-star Elbro. “Lilla is very smart…. She takes Stewart’s (director Stewart Lemoine’s) notes and acts on them right away. Faster than any of us. (Rhoda’s)  transformations are very terrifying!”

“The focus, the maturity, the artistry Lilla has brought is pretty much mind-blowing. She’s the perfect scene partner!”   

Environment vs. genetics, conditioning or DNA: that’s at the kernel, so to speak, of The Bad Seed. “Christine,” says Elbro, “has offered this loving home, the perfect nuclear family, the perfect environment….” The Bad Seed is “a portrait of the period: she doesn’t have the option to go get a job or explore the world. Her only option is to be a model mother; it’s the one thing she’s meant to do.” And in the course of the play, the gleaming surfaces of that idealized ‘50s family get harder and harder to maintain. “It’s so isolating; she’s so alone!”

It’s that plight, a woman trapped in a home and a vision of family that’s gradually becoming a prison, that intrigued Teatro’s Lemoine enough to take up the thriller again after three decades. He understands it in a different way now. “The last time we did it, it was a stylish piece on the verge of being funny.” People, after all, “are amused to see a child that wicked.”

“There’s an enjoyable edge of thriller, mounting dread,” he says of his continuing attraction to the play. “There’s fun, witty dialogue — erudite people saying amusing things about Freud….” For a company that specializes in comedy in all its expansive possibilities, it’s an intriguing choice, he thinks. “It has the energy of a comedy” even if it doesn’t wear that mantle. 

And as for Christine, says Lemoine, “hers is such an interesting predicament. She’s an investigator of a crime, but a protector of the perpetrator.”

PREVIEW

The Bad Seed

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written by: Maxwell Anderson

Directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Nicola Elbro, Lilla Sólymos, Jeff Haslam, Andrea House, Cathy Derkach, Mark Bellamy, Kristi Hansen, Mat Busby

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday through July 27

Tickets: teatroq.com

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A strange fairy tale, rescued magically by Time from tragedy: The Winter’s Tale in the park

Posted on July 8, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Belinda Cornish, Christine Nguyen, Nadien Chu, Sheldon Elter in The Winter’s Tale. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There is a strange magic about a play where brute tragedy gives way to pastoral comedy, realism mixes it up with romance, and dramatic scenes abut presentational vaudeville.

The Winter’s Tale has the optical weirdness of seeing the world through glasses that are half 3-D and half distance correction. In Shakespeare’s late-period fairy tale, a 16-year adventure in separation and reconciliation, death and rebirth is fuelled by a sense of wonder. Big events aren’t caused — they just happen and sink in.

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And right from the start Dave Horak’s Freewill Shakespeare Festival production (which alternates with another odd play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona), invites you to a place at the campfire, where stories get told. The price of admission is telling a tale. And a little kid claims his spot — “a sad tale’s best for winter” — with a story in which he will be a character, figure prominently, and be transformed.

Chris Bullough (centre) as Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

In the course of The Winter’s Tale, you’ll see sheep out strolling in the park. You’ll see a royal baby in a basket rescued by rustic shepherds; you’ll see a rogue balladeer perform, sell sheet music, and steal wallets. A man gets eaten by a bear (ingenious theatrical trickery with a playful surreal image); a king gets a moral flaying and re-education from a woman.  Time passes, 16 years worth. A wintry court becomes a summer revel. And then, magically, a statue grows warm and comes to life. 

It starts with a human mystery: a king is suddenly overcome by violent, unmotivated jealousy that blackens his world, and reduces it to ash. How could it happen, and why? There is no answer.

“My life stands in the level of your dreams,” says Hermione, as she stands accused of adultery with his best friend Polixenes (Jesse Gervais) by King Leontes (Sheldon Elter). Dream has turned to nightmare, on a single line: “too hot! too hot!” And nothing can every be the same, feel the same, look the same, as Elter’s performance, with its feverish mixture of rage, panic, and a kind of perplexity at himself, captures so insightfully.

His smile — and likeable Elter has one of the great ones — suddenly seems pasted on. His heart, as he says, has become “a burden to me.”

For her part Hermione, in a performance of natural high spirits and cordiality from Nadien Chu, is shocked, and defiant. And in the trial scene, her eloquence embraces righteous anger. As the fearless Lady Paulina— who’s dressed like Zelda Fitzgerald on a bender, oddly eclectic costumes by Megan Koshka — Belinda Cornish summons her stalwart defences of Hermione’s honour and and spits them, like an acid shower, at Leontes for his folly.

The scenes in Bohemia, which replace the awkward diffuseness of the court scenes, are introduced by Time — as embodied in the ghostly figure of the dead Mamillius, Leontes’ little son. The idyll is led by Nathan Cuckow and Ben Stevens as an endearingly gullible shepherd and his sweetly dim son, who rescue a lost baby, with delayed complications.

This pair of kindly rustic worthies is no match for the showbiz flamboyance of Autolycus, a shameless troubadour/ pickpocket (“what a fool Honesty is!”) in whom histrionic and capitalist urges find unexpected harmony in Darrin Hagen’s rich array of songs. Chris Bullough is a riot. And as the young lovers Florizel and Perdita, Oscar Derkx and Christine Nguyen have alluring life-affirming charm.

It takes a “wide gap of time” and penitence and magic (with a human stage manager) to restore what is lost in The Winter’s Tale. On the weekend “ambience director” Mother Nature took perverse pleasure in being counter-intuitive: at the moment of supreme imaginative rebirth — “be stone no more” — the thunder roared, the sky darkened still further, and the drizzle became a torrential downpour.

“Winter in storm perpetual,” as Paulina had cursed Leontes earlier, at the moment his little son and wife are declared dead. We know a lot about that; we need our big moments of theatre. And with its strange combination of intimacy and spaciousness, Horak’s production delivers us into rebirth. Wonder – full. 

REVIEW

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

The Winter’s Tale

Directed by: Dave Horak

Starring: Sheldon Elter, Nadien Chu, Belinda Cornish, Jesse Gervais, Christine Nguyen, Oscar Derkx, Nathan Cuckow, Ben Stevens, Chris Bullough

Where: Heritage Amphitheatre, Hawrelak Park

Running: through July 14, odd dates (and July 14 matinee), alternating with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, even dates and matinees.

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com

 

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Sleuth: a vintage thriller at the Mayfield. A review.

Posted on July 5, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Michael Hanrahan and Tyrone Savage in Sleuth, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a tricky business to give a theatre audience a spine-tingle of suspense, clenches of tension, periodic jolts of surprise, an invitation to exercise their own puzzle-decoding skills — ah, and laughter.

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That’s the fun of Sleuth, Anthony Shaffer’s devious and intricately plotted 1970 comedy thriller/ satire, which arrived on the big screen a couple of years after that (with heavy-hitters like Laurence Olivier, Michael Caine, and then Jude Law). It’s at the Mayfield, in a deluxe production directed by the distinguished Canadian artist Marti Maraden. And an expert cast of five, led by Michael Hanrahan and Tyrone Savage, undertake to propel you into a hall of mirrors.

Sleuth is, in effect, an elaborate mystery about the creation of mysteries, a charade about charades, a puzzle about the construction of puzzles, a power game about power gamesmanship. Classic high stakes, yes, though the stakes keep changing, as you discover along with the characters. And it’s all underwritten by Shaffer’s satire of English-ness — its snobbery, its class-consciousness, its pompousness, its xenophobia and anti-Semitism — rooted in the old-fashioned murder mysteries that Sleuth parodies in its self-referential way.

We meet Andrew (Hanrahan), a well-heeled, blustery, hale-and-hearty lord of the manor — fond of noblesse-oblige openers like “my dear boy…” He pens his hit murder mysteries, in the Dame Agatha style, from his stronghold in a grand Wiltshire country house. “I set my work among the gentry,” declares Andrew suavely to the young man (Savage) he has invited to visit.  And even “in these squalid times, people seem to enjoy it. In spite of the welfare state.”

John Dinning’s two-storey set, incidentally, the most impressively elaborate I can remember at the Mayfield, is crammed with toys, trunks, paintings, expensive objets d’art, knick-knacks of the playful sort, all lit by Stratford veteran Louise Guinand.

If his genial host is old-school — “some of my best friends are half-Jewish” — Milo on the other hand represents something of the new man in England. He’s a second generation Italian immigrant scrambling to find a way up into the English middle-class via his south London travel agency. Since it comes up right away I can tell you that Milo has been having it off with Andrew’s wife. But I’m really off the hook for revealing anything much about the plot after that, save that it thickens (“and it nearly always does when the subject of insurance comes up”).

Almost immediately, the wary young Milo, along with the audience, is taken aback by this gambit, from Andrew: “I understand you want to marry my wife.” Andrew has a proposition. And now you’re on your own.

Anyhow, both principal characters are skilfully conveyed in exemplary performances from stage veterans Hanrahan and Savage. The former conjures the easeful brocade-clad complacency of the English gentry, tossing off Shaffer’s epigrams about everything from marriage and sex to taxes with lordly suavity. Is it acting? Is it a game? To Savage falls the ticklish assignment of a character who finds himself on the wrong foot at the outset and has to re-calibrate his responses constantly without visible signs of effort. Is it acting of another sort?  He delivers. 

As Sleuth “proceeds” (now there’s a studiedly vague word), you’ll get to wondering if it’s all some sort of game, and what the rules are, and  and who’s in charge. The pair are backed up by a compelling set of comical and menacing rustics. 

It’s a convoluted entertainment that makes fun of convoluted entertainments, expertly done, from our ever-surprising dinner theatre.  

REVIEW

Sleuth

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre, 16615 109 Ave.

Written by: Anthony Shaffer

Directed by: Marti Maraden

Starring: Michael Hanrahan, Tyrone Savage, James Blakely, Gavin Montgomery, Wade Nugent

Running: through Aug. 4

Tickets: 780-483-4051, mayfieldtheatre.ca

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