Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs: a bloodthirsty cabaret to launch the season at Northern Light

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Kristin Johnston in Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Everyone’s grandmother has an accordian in the basement,” says Kristin Johnston, pointing at a battered case with judicious applications of duct tape.

This venerable objet is not some sign of random self-improvement on Johnston’s part. She’s learned to play the accordion especially for Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs, the black — no, blood-soaked — cabaret comedy that launches the Northern Light Theatre season Friday. It references lurid tales of Elizabeth Bathóry, the infamous Transylvanian countess thought to have killed hundreds of children and bathed in their blood. 

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As director Trevor Schmidt has described the piece, by the South Africa-born Australian playwright/songwriter Joanna Weinberg, “it is a one-woman accordion musical; I’m not kidding. It is bizarre. It is crazy.” The ‘one woman’ at the heart of this enterprise has a passion, an obsession, an escalating fetish … for blood. The nursing profession has never had a more enthusiastic recruit. Yes, the Baroness is an addict, we are her fellow addicts, and she’s in confessional mode.

Johnston is more diplomatic. “She is unusually interested in blood, shall we say. And there is a reason for that,” she says of the vaguely eastern European protagonist she plays.

In acquiring an instrument and a new skill, Johnston has been tutored by accordionist extraordinaire (not to mention composer, arranger, musical director) Darrin Hagen. His statuesque drag alter-egos, including a pulchritudinous mermaid, have been known to strap on the accordian and have at it. And he has warned before now of the dangers of getting a pneumatic boob caught in the squeezebox. Johnston has learned her lesson the hard way: “always wear a bra when playing the accordion.”

He started her “on a baby beginner’s accordian,” as she puts it. And she’s graduated. At a recent dinner party at Johnston’s place, people passed the accordion as well as the salt. Everyone had a turn.

If you saw the tall, willowy Johnston playing older and then some as Victoria, a four million-year-old skeleton come to life (and learning to walk upright and wear a cardigan) in Origin of the Species at Northern Light Theatre last fall, you already know something about comic fearlessness.

Just before a stint with the Citadel/Banff professional program — she played a grotesque arriviste in Sense and Sensibility — she injured her knee. Squatting as Victoria required a certain trouper’s fortitude. “I was so grateful for the team we had,” she smiles. “I was more worried about the nude body suit; I was thinking ‘I’m not sure anybody needs to see that’…”

The Stettler gymnast-turned-theatre kid who went to Red Deer College and then to the Canadian College of Performing Arts on the West Coast, has a theatre resumé that’s a veritable gallery of oddball characters. In Rebecca Merkley’s appealing 2016 musical comedy The Unsyncables — about an underdog synchronized swim team beset by slick mean girls — there she was, in a bathing cap throughout, hilarious as a glum eastern European who can’t float and needs water wings.

The skeptical look on Olga’s face as the concept of synchronized swimming is explained to her is something I still remember. “Playing 12 when you’re not, well…” Johnston smiles benignly.

“I feel comedy; I’m comfortable with comedy,” says the actor, who’s funny and very self-deprecating in person. “I do have a strong sense of comedic timing; that I do admit.”

Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Her initial attraction to Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs, she says, was to the comedy of the title character. “She’s fun. Ridiculous but fun,” says Johnston, who has three kids and teaches music theory when she’s not in a show. “The way (the Baroness) speaks has infiltrated my life.” Especially when the word “vampire” (that would be “wampire”) comes up in conversation.

Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs is set forth as a cabaret, not a play, “a beverage, a microphone stand, an accordian. And that’s a relief,” says Johnston, who added to her theatrical arsenal of skills last summer by stage managing Guys in Disguise’s Flora and Fawna sequel. Of the 10 songs, eight are originals and two — one by Queen, one by Tom Lehrer — are not. Stage manager Liz Allison says “they’re real ear-worms.”

Everyone has an addiction of some sort, Johnston muses. Hers is chocolate (her husband challenged her to go without for a month). Director Schmidt, she says, admits to an addiction to terrible TV. She smiles. “You have one, too.” 

PREVIEW

Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Joanna Weinberg

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Kristin Johnston

Where: Studio Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Friday through Nov. 2

Tickets: 780-471-1586, northernlighttheatre.com

    

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Simone et le whole shebang: the season opens at L’UniThéâtre

Posted on October 16, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Crystal Plamondon, Nicole St. Martin, Gaetan Benoit, André Roy in Simone et le whole shebang. Photo by dbphotographics

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the intricate dark comedy that launches the L’UniThéâtre season Friday, a couple of 60-something-plus strangers from elsewhere, sporting symmetrically opposed damages, meet  — in a nursing home in Fort McMurray, the unofficial Canadian home of improbable encounters.

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They’re both haunted by their younger selves. Jessy (André Roy), an erstwhile Acadian, is a musician who turned oil field worker a couple of decades ago, and paid the price in physical mobility. Simone (Crystal Plamondon) is a Quebec actress suffering from the mind- and memory-erosion of Alzheimer’s.     

In Simone et le whole shebang, by the young up-and-coming Quebec actor-turned-playwright Eugénie Beaudry, they are joined onstage by two 35-year-olds — the young-man version of Jessy (Gaetan Benoit) and Simone’s daughter (Nicole St. Martin), a Quebecer working in the oil patch.

And speaking as we are of the whole shebang, consider the director. The perfectly bilingual actor/ dancer/ improviser Vince Forcier, who recently directed some 30 of the 50-hours of the annual Die-Nasty Soap-A-Thon — and is slated to direct Die-Nasty’s upcoming vaudeville season — makes his professional directing debut with this asymmetrical quartet. He calls it “a three-person play with one ghost.”  

The whole shebang includes the nuances and pluralities of the Canadian francophonie, Forcier has found. It’s something he knows about first-hand. The Montreal-born theatre artist who’s been here “as long as I have memory” learned to speak French from his Québec parents. He calls himself a franco-albertain, though his accent eludes easy categorization. “In Quebec they think I’m from somewhere else, from Alberta. In Alberta people think I’m from Quebec. “The class structure of French,” as Forcier puts it, is part of Simone et le whole shebang. The two versions of Jessy are Acadian, but the older man’s accent has been smoothed out by decades of living in Fort McMurray. Simone’s daughter is a transplanted Québecoise, of more recent vintage, but that accent is getting subtly altered by Alberta.

The title is revealing. “There’s a lot of franglais in the play,” says Forcier of the characters. “They throw English words into French sentences. And I do it too…. If I’m saying a sentence in French but think of the English word first, I just throw it in, then continue in French.” Most of the performances, incidentally, include English surtitles.

Forcier has a long history of directing indie productions. For a time he was a founding partner in Surreal SoReal Theatre — the resident director role in a collective that has since moved on to Québec. And now, his directing career takes a step forward with a four-person production that includes two actors “who are celebrities within the French community,” as he says, “both playing older than themselves.”

Nicole St. Martin and Crystal Plamondon in Simone et le whole shebang. Photo by db photographics.

The 35-year-olds “are at the age where they’re worried about turning 40…. What should I have accomplished by this age? Is this age my last chance to change my life? Am I doing what I want to be doing? And am I doing enough of it? What’s my next chapter?” These are questions, that resonate with him, too. Forcier grins and shrugs. “It’s close to my own situation.” 

“In this whole process, I’m realizing with the older characters that you don’t stop asking those questions.” For him, the answer that threads its way through the thicket of questions is … directing.

Gaetan Benoit and André Roy in Simone et le whole shebang. Photo by dbphotographics.

The old man is exhorted by his younger self to “do something with your life. You’re not done with it. Don’t let all the hard work I’ve put into your body go to waste.” as Forcier describes. “He’s haunted, by himself.” Simone “feels betrayed” by the daughter who’s re-located her to Fort McMurray. But then, “she can’t stay mad very long at a daughter she keeps forgetting exists.”

If the playwright comes to the see the show, and she might, it will be her first time in Alberta, says Forcier. “She wrote a play set in Fort McMurray and she has never been there, but gets a lot of aspects of it, of Alberta, right.” The play has attracted attention (and award-nominations) in Quebec. “It’s interesting to produce it in Alberta where it actually takes place.…”

Forcier himself was in Fort McMurray recently when Grindstone Comedy Theatre took their hit show The 11 O’Clock Number, a wholly improvised musical, there for a late-night performance. “Hey, good research!”

“I think we’ve done a good job of focussing on the heart of the play, keeping the story and the people alive, not caricatures,” says Forcier of Simone et le whole shebang. “It talks about intense, dark things … in a way that makes you laugh.”

PREVIEW

Simone et le whole shebang

Theatre: L’UniThéâtre

Written by: Eugenie Beaudry

Directed by: Vincent Forcier

Starring: André Roy, Crystal Plamondon, Gaetan Benoit, Nicole St. Martin

Where: La Cité francophone, 8627 91 Street

Running: Friday through Oct. 26. In French, most performances with English subtitles

Tickets: lunitheatre.ca

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E Day: Jason Chinn’s new political comedy inspired by the 2015 election sweep

Posted on October 15, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Candace Berlinguette in E Day. Photo by Dave DeGagné

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“How did we get here?” Playwright Jason Chinn remembers a night four years ago, a night like no other in Alberta.

And since he was volunteering with the campaign that swept Rachel Notley’s NDP into office, in a province where political change is generally measured by the half-century, it was the backstage view of a dramatic landscape no one really expected to see. Except perhaps in the mind’s eye.

“The stakes of waiting for those phones to ring, for results to come in,” muses Chinn. “Your heart stopped beating … until you started to see how it was going. Tense. The most tense environment. Every vote mattered. We didn’t know how it would turn out till the very end.”

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E Day, the new large-cast Chinn play premiering Thursday in Theatre Network’s Roxy Series — in a Serial Collective production directed by Dave Horak — can trace its lineage back to the inspiration of that spring night in 2015 when Alberta surprised itself mightily. “I worked backwards from that,” says Chinn, who stopped for a pre-rehearsal coffee with Horak last week en route to the theatre. Back to the campaign. Back to campaign workers who invested their time and juggled their lives, anything but confident of victory.

“I never thought a change of government would happen in my lifetime,” muses Horak. “We were so used to being the underdog. Jason’s play captures an intensity I remember in 2015. It was building. More and more orange signs. More people talking about it. They were cautious, but they felt a momentum. A feeling of possibility?” 

“I thought about all the people who came together, a community of people who volunteered their time, and worked on it,” Chinn remembers. “It was my first campaign. And every campaign I worked on after that was a losing one….”

“For me, it took days to sink in…. Even after the victory party I’d hear ‘Premier Rachel Notley’ on the radio and it seemed surreal,” says Chinn, a soft-spoken, wry sort.

“I didn’t think I’d like going door to door; I’m a pretty shy person. But it just felt good to talk to people about politics. OK, sometimes the reception was ‘get off my f—ing step!’ But sometimes you’d have a really great conversation.”

Both playwright and director find politics a compelling subject for theatre. Horak, who grew up in Calgary, says his parents were “pretty political, both Conservative for a long time until they switched when I was in high school and started working on Liberal campaigns,” motivated by Ralph Klein’s cutbacks to education. “We always talked about politics around the table.” The years he spent living and working in New York honed a fascination with American politics, in all its gruesome reaches.. 

Chinn, born in Newfoundland, grew up here when the family relocated in search of work. “When my mom took me to Edmonton we had two Safeway bags with all of our belongings…. She worked in child care for many years. And it wasn’t financially supported.” He has views on the correlation between political engagement and financial stability. Chinn is “not one of those people who live and breathe politics,” as he says of himself. “I’m a theatre person on the periphery. But it’s not good enough to just vote. You need to participate, donate time, and money if you have any: that’s how things get accomplished….” 

Nearly everything about E Day represents a departure for Chinn. One of the country’s true originals, his signature is very black comedies in which placidly familiar surfaces peel back or crack open to reveal abysses of lurking violence, madness, chaos, maybe even the apocalypse. Bitches, set in an office typing pool, introduced us to the Serial Collective, an indie company that exists to produce Chinn’s plays in something of the way Teatro La Quindicina’s raison d’être is to produce Stewart Lemoine’s.

Happy Kitchen took us into the cheerful domesticity of the ‘50s, where a housewife goes completely bonkers. In Lavender Lady, the life of an listless slacker is shaken up irrevocably with the arrival of a servant who turns into a dog. In The Ladies Who Lynch, the end of the world happens while Judith and her chic well-heeled girlfriends are having lunch in their favourite bistro. Murderers Confess At Christmastime turns seasonal festivity on its head (it premiered in May of 2014) in a triptych where someone dies in each scenario.

E Day doesn’t sound much like any of the above — except that the campaign office setting, the petty irritations about the office coffee or the snacks or the work load, will ring a bell. “I’ve always liked the absurdity and the banality of workplace environments,” Chinn says, “the contrast between bickering with a co-worker about office supplies and huge high-stakes problems that jeopardize the campaign.…”

Candace Berlinguette in E Day. Photo by Dave DeGagné

As Chinn describes it, E Day is a play in which a disparate community comes together. “I do think it’s unexpected in this environment that’s so divisive and so angry, to present a friendly, community-based play that’s grassroots, not top-down. It’s so going against the grain.” 

“The majority of theatre about politics is about the top-down. And I want audiences to see the positive, inclusive elements of this process, not just the scandals of people high up…. This is the kind of legwork that needs to happen for change to happen.”

The grassroots gathering of a community that fuels the political campaign in E Day is Horak’s rationale for staging the play in the round. The cast of 12 — veteran stars like Sheldon Elter, Beth Graham, Lora Brovold, Candace Berlinguette (who’s been in all of Chinn’s plays) alongside newcomers — “keep moving and keep talking, just as it would happen in an office.” And they’re “surrounded by an audience that sees each other as well as the characters. It feels a little interactive since they’re so close. It feels right.”

And, inspired by a real-life event that ended in celebration, there might even be a happy ending, though Chinn and Horak refuse to confirm that. “There were some unhappy endings in drafts,” says Chinn. “It’s been a challenge for me to balance the excitement of (potential) victory vs. the reality of how much people put into efforts that don’t always end up in stability or a job.” Or a win.

“When you write a play hooked into an historical event, people have expectations,” says Horak, who was in the cast when E Day was workshopped as part of the Citadel’s erstwhile Playwrights Circle.“Should I leave it a secret whether or not we subvert those expectations?” grins Chinn, currently doing a master’s degree in theatre practice at the U of A. “Will it end in a musical number?” Horak teases.

Never before has Chinn written for so many actors. And he adjusted his script to fit them, draft by draft. “I wanted to make sure the text isn’t one-person’s voice but everyone’s voice.” His most recent draft has them using their real names. Horak thinks “it gives the actors real ownership when they’re playing versions of themselves.… We’re watching people working, overhearing snippets of conversation, and then a play emerges every so often. I’m still figuring out what the tone is; people still have to follow a story.”

“All the characters have a history, and lives outside the office that they bring in,” says Horak. “Actually, it’s a lot like putting on a play. You know you have an opening night. You form bonds quickly and in some cases deeply. You become friends even though you know it’s sort of ephemeral and will disappear or become different once election day happens.”   

PREVIEW

E Day

Theatre Network Performance Series

Theatre: Serial Collective

Written by: Jason Chinn

Directed by: Dave Horak

Starring: April Banigan Candace Berlinguette, Lora Brovold, Asia Bowman, Sheldon Elter, Sue Goberdhan, Beth Graham, Linda Grass, Ian Leung, Shingai David Madawo, Amena Shehab, Kiana Woo.

Where: Theatre Network at the Roxy, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through Oct. 27

Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca

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Why do we vote the way we do? Fight Night is on it

Posted on October 14, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Fight Night, Ontroerend Goed. Photo by Sara Eechaut.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

No doubt about it: the star avant-garde Belgian theatre collective Ontroerend Goed has an exquisite sense of timing. This week they bring to the Citadel’s new alternative Highwire series a show that throws this question at you, a paid-up member of a democracy: Why do you vote the way you do?

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Fight Night, opening Thursday, hands you a clicker that gives you the power to eliminate one candidate after another as they appeal for your attention, your support, your love. How do you wield the power that democracy gives you? How do you make the choices you do? Fight Night is intrigued by that; the audience decides how it will end.

The last time Ontroerend Goed’s much-travelled interactive hit came to Canada — the Cultch in Vancouver and Mirvish Productions in Toronto — was in October of 2016. Yes, just before the fateful U.S. election that would defy the pollsters and reinforce the obsessive media-fuelled attraction to celebrity, no matter how grotesque.

The provocative company, two decades (and a lot of mispronunciations) old by now, gravitates to unsettling experiments in what theatre means to an audience and/or what an audience means to theatre. The Ontroerend Goed archive includes a controversial trio of one-on-one shows, including one in which one audience member at a time is blindfolded and carried around in a wheelchair (The Smile Off Your Face ) or seduced into a revealing a secret that is broadcast to the group later on (Internal). The third, A Game Of You, continues to tour.

Director Alexander Devriendt. Photo supplied.

“We chosen the worst name for an international touring company, I think,” laughs Alexander Devriendt, the amiable co-founder and the artistic director of Ontroerend Goed, on the phone from home base in Ghent. “It’s unpronounceable in any other language than Dutch. Even the Germans and the French can’t do it. And now it’s too late to change!” It won’t help you to toss off the name in conversation, but as Devriendt explains, Ontroerend Goed is a pun on “real estate” that gives it the nuance of “emotionally moving.” Just so you know the “t” in Ontroerend is the decisive factor.   

“It doesn’t always feel like experimenting to me,” says Devriendt of a history of shows that have galvanized strong reactions on four continents. “It just feels like using what the black box of theatre makes possible.”

In the hands of Devriendt and his collaborators, Fight Night, like other shows in the company repertoire, seems to take on the colours of the zeitgeist, the Now, wherever it goes. Even though “I never change anything in the show, and avoid talking about specific social issues.…”

Fight Night, Ontroerend Goed. Photo by Yvon Poncelet

“Devriendt traces Fight Night, a 2014 collaboration with the Adelaide Festival, back to the time when “Belgium was without a government for 329 days” due to “the weird outcome of an election, and the difficulty of finding a new coalition….”

“I realized I was not very interested in democracy — left, right, they’re all the same I thought — and I suddenly thought how painful that is, considering it’s something so hugely important, something so many people fought for. So I wanted to make a show that questions why do I vote? what do I believe in?”

“For me, I’m more of a green socialist liberal on the political spectrum, I guess ”  he says. “I lean toward that … no matter what (the candidates) really said…. But what if there was no specific politics?” He pauses to come up with a Canadian example. “What if Trudeau wasn’t left or right, would you still vote for him, for instance?”

“The polarizing nature of politics,” especially in America, means that a voter’s identity as Republican or Democrat seldom changes, even if conditions change. “A lot of people realize by now they don’t want to defend Trump, but they keep saying they’re Republican.”

Fight Night. Photo supplied.

“Fight Night is like that. If I take that (label) away, what do I believe in?”

“The Greens won in my city. But only rich people voted for them,” he says of Ghent. “That’s completely wrong, I think. I don’t want Green to be a privilege.…” He laughs and sighs, thinking of his own voting habits. “I always voted for this guy. Until Fight Night I never looked into what his program really was. Do I really believe what he was defending? I mean, he was completely opposite of me; he was even a bit Catholic and I was, like, an atheist. Wow, my vote was just a feeling, detached from reality.”

From the start Ontroerend Goed seemed to have a natural aptitude for rattling their audiences. Devriendt and his cohorts weren’t so-called ‘theatre people’; “I never wanted to be an actor,” he says. And the only directing schools around were “really text-based and classical. And I always found that wasn’t my trade.… We were at university studying Dutch and English literature. And we started a poetry performance group…. We experimented with that and kinda of rolled into theatre.”

Their first show — “well, the first one where people came to us afterward and said ‘whoa, that was interesting!” — was Porror, an amalgam of “poetry, porn, and horror” that played night clubs and jazz bars. “Outrageous!” declares Devriendt. “A really weird onstage performance….” They didn’t realize they were theatre “until they got invited to a theatre festival and won a prize.”

“It gives you freedom to ride,” says Devriendt of his younger self and this oblique entry point into theatre. “We never had to position ourselves to an older generation. We just did what we wanted without looking forward or backward, just looking at Now. And it helped us redefine theatre a little bit…”

“When photography (came along) painting had to redefine itself. When film and TV came, theatre should have done that. But, of course, there will always be nostalgia from the people who like portraits and painting.”

“The question for me,” says Devriendt, is “what does theatre have that no other medium can do better?” His view, a left hook to acting school truisms, is that belief in the real-ness of characters onstage “isn’t theatre’s strength.” Why? “You always realize there’s an actor there.”

“If you watch Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet, he will pretend to be a prince from Denmark with suicidal tendencies. And the best compliment will always be ‘look how good he did that!’.” Devriendt finds that reaction unsatisfying, “a part of theatre I don’t want to go for….”

While Fight Night is getting Citadel audiences to ask themselves questions about democracy and voting, Devriendt will be in Adelaide with an Ontroerend Goed show called Lies, spelled £¥€$. “We invite you to sit around a table and play the 1 per cent,” says DeVriendt, who was motivated by the realization that “I didn’t understand anything about the financial world; I didn’t have a clue!” The idea is to create, on the spot, a financial system: seven people around a ‘croupier’ who’s an actor. Though the latter is following a rigorously structured script, “people don’t realize this person is acting.” 

The company’s current repertoire is five shows strong. “We stop touring a show when it doesn’t feel relevant any more, or when another show is stronger in that ballpark,” says Devriendt. They were at this past summer’s Edinburgh Fringe with a show about climate change, its title a long palindrome: Are We Not Drawn Onward To A New Era?. The company is working on a new show in which “we try to defend the right.” He laughs, “we try to dive into the enemy mind,” as he puts it, “of Trump and Brexit people.”  

With Fight Night, which has been touring internationally for four years, “we will never know which candidate will make it to the end; we don’t control that.” But the overall structure, which leads to a referendum, is constant.

Devriendt was struck at first by “the differences between countries,” then for the last couple of years “by the things that feel the same, bigger than the differences.”

At one point, the audience will be asked “are you a little bit racist? a little bit sexist? a little bit violent? Or are you none of the above?” Overwhelmingly world-wide, “none of the above” prevails. “I tend to not believe this,” says Devriendt drily. The exception is Australia. “A little bit racist” is invariably the answer of choice.

Fight Night has an uncanny knack for adapting perfectly to local conditions. The show uses a snippet of text from an old Ronald Reagan ad about a bear in the woods. “If there’s a bear wouldn’t it be smart to be as strong as the bear?” Says Devriendt, “the funny thing is that everywhere we play the bear means something different…. In Hong Kong, it’s China. In Russia, Putin. In France, terrorism….”

Devriendt often gets asked ‘how did you do it, being so in tune?” He says “I didn’t really do anything. I just keep it open.”

PREVIEW

Citadel Highwire Series

Fight Night

Theatre: Ontroerend Goed

Written by: Ontroerend Goed

Directed by: Alexander Devriendt

Where: Citadel Maclab Theatre

Running: Thursday through Oct. 27

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com 

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

Posted on October 11, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

 

Dead Centre of Town XII. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LAST CHANCE…

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

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

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

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

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

Silent Sky, Walterdale Theatre.

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

Open Invitation, Saint Maggie Productions.

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

CONTINUING …

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

 

    

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Dead Centre of Town unearths our dark civic secrets

Posted on October 8, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

© Marc J Chalifoux Photography 2018

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

Dead Centre of Town XII. Photo by Mat Simpson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREVIEW

Dead Centre of Town XII

Theatre: Catch The Keys Productions

Written by: Megan Dart

Directed by: Beth Dart

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

Where: Mellon Farmhouse, 1920 Street, Fort Edmonton Park

Running: Thursday through Nov. 1

Tickets: catchthekeys.ca, eventbrite.ca

  

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

Posted on October 4, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Hey Ladies!

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

And there’s Hey Ladies!!.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silent Sky, Walterdale Theatre.

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

Open Invitation, Saint Maggie Productions.

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

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

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

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

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

•This town is nuts for improv.

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

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

    

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

Posted on October 3, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REVIEW

Vidalia

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

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

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Oct. 12

Tickets: teatroq.com

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

Posted on October 2, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REVIEW

The Color Purple

Theatre: Citadel, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre

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

Directed by: Kimberley Rampersad

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

Running: through Oct. 13

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

 

  

  

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

Posted on September 25, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREVIEW

Vidalia

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

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

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday through Oct. 12

Tickets: teatroq.com

Posted in Previews | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Vidalia and “briefcase syndrome”: Teatro ends the season with a larky Lemoine screwball.