New plays for size large stages: the Citadel’s Collider Festival is back

Posted on June 17, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Think big. That’s the not-secret agenda of the festival that returns to the Citadel Friday. The Collider Fest, named for the collision of artists and forms, is all about developing new plays for size large and x-large performance mainstages, here and in the big wide Elsewhere.

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As associate artistic director Mieko Ouchi points out, that’s a part of the theatre ecology that the Citadel is uniquely positioned to support and nurture, a niche not occupied by Edmonton’s smaller theatres and indies. “We didn’t want to replicate what other theatres do very well,” she says.

Chosen for the readings are five new scripts poised for future productions on larger stages. The line-up for the four-year-old festival includes readings of two plays commissioned by the Citadel. One is an adaptation — “a fresh new take” as Ouchi puts it — on Cyrano de Bergerac, the Edmond Rostand classic, where wordplay meets swordplay. Playwright Jessy Ardern has retained the 17th century Paris setting, and in an homage to the dexterous verse form of the original adapted it entirely in rhyming couplets. As Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran has said, it has an appealing “contemporary resonance.” Amanda Goldberg directs the Collider reading that opens the festival Friday. And her production is the grand finale (May 2 to 24, 2026) of the  Citadel’s upcoming 60th anniversary season.

The other Citadel commission is from playwright Mac Brock (Boy Trouble), the managing producer of the Common Ground Arts Society. And it’s especially created for the Citadel’s Young Company, a pre-professional teen ensemble training program. A cast of a dozen or so will play characters their own age, the 16 to 21 range, in a prairie story of “two siblings investigating the disappearance of their mother,” as Ouchi describes. The goal of the commission includes “helping young people discover how to approach new work.” The June 22 reading is led by Mel Bahniuk.

Collin Doyle’s new play The Riverside Seniors Village Theatrical Society Presents: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet gets a Collider reading June 21. “A really funny, very charming script,” as Ouchi describes, “that takes us backstage, into auditions and rehearsals at a seniors’ drama club that’s decided to put on Romeo and Juliet.” A “somewhat former” actor-turned-librarian gets talked into directing the show by her aging auntie. And the backstage collision of egos, bodies, and faulty memories in a story about young love, is a rich vein of heart-tugging comedy, says Ouchi who directs the reading.

In this the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, Katherine Koller’s adaptation of Persuasion gets a reading at the festival June 21 at 2 p.m. The Edmonton playwright is an expert on all things Jane. And among Koller’s preparations for creating the script designed for a cast of 10”, she toured every location mentioned in Austen’s sprawling final novel, published in 1817. And there were a lot. The biggest challenge was “distilling key moments, key scenes,” says Ouchi. Workshop West’s Heather Inglis directs the Collider reading, co-presented by Script Salon.

Nowhere With You: An East Coast Musical, by Calgary-based playwright James Odin Wade, is “another approach to adaptation,” Ouchi says. Wade, who’s originally from the Maritimes, culls from the songbook of the well-known singer-songwriter Joel Plaskett.

Citadel associate artistic director Mieko Ouch. Photo supplied

As Ouchi (who directs the reading) describes, at the centre of Nowhere With You is a musician who’s stalled and looking for renewed creative energy. He returns to his hometown of Halifax, and to his parents’ garage where his career really began in jam sessions, to be with his people and find that spark. The homecoming is complicated by relationships with his relatives, his friends, an ex-lover. Wade’s musical is designed for a cast of actor-musicians, says Ouchi, who directs the reading. And Plaskett’s music invites theatre artistry because “his hallmark is that his songs are incredibly conversational…. They flow beautifully from text into song, and back into text.”     

Tapping “original source material, with the extra hook of being somewhat familiar to audiences” is something of a theatre trend happening across the country,” says Ouchi of the appeal of adaptations. Which is why Collider includes a workshop on that subject, led by Amiel Gladstone (Onegin). Beth Graham and Ainsley Hillyard, collaborators on Mermaid Legs, lead a workshop on “equitable devising with choreography and playwriting.”

Full schedule of Collider Festival events: citadeltheatre.com. The readings are free; donations are welcome at the door.

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The season in Edmonton theatre: the 2024-2025 Sterling Award nominations

Posted on June 16, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical. Costumes by Deanna Finnman, set by Hanne Loosen, lighting by Jareth Li. Photo by Nanc Price.

The cast of Ashleigh Hicks’s Brick Shithouse, Found Festival 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A large-scale jukebox musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s most popular comedy and a small-scale bruisingly physical indie production proved the top choices of jurors as the 36th annual Sterling Award nominations were announced Monday. Named for the theatre pioneer Elizabeth Sterling Haynes, the Sterlings celebrate excellence in the Edmonton theatre season just past.

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The top nomination magnets are, to say the least, a study in contrasts. The Citadel production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ‘70s Musical, and fenceless theatre’s body-slamming Brick Shithouse, a collaboration with Common Ground Arts Society’s Found Festival, each have eight nominations in the 26 Sterling categories.

The former dives into the chaos potential of love in the psychedelic forest by pairing the rom-com hit of the 1590s to a jukebox of 25 1970s chart-toppers. Daryl Cloran’s production, a best musical nominee, has nods for Jameela McNeil’s leading performance as Titania the r&b queen, and for both Ruth Alexander and Oscar Derkx in supporting roles as rustic thesps and band members. As well, the ensemble cast of 16 is nominated, along with Deanna Finnman’s flamboyant 70s costumes, Ben Elliott’s musical direction in this Bard meets Supertramp enterprise, and Gianna Vacirca’s choreography.

Ashleigh Hicks’ Brick Shithouse, with its gallery of desperate 20-something under-achievers who opt to jump-start their lives behind the dangerously transparent paywall ‘anonymity’ online, is an outstanding indie production contender. It also has Sterling nominations for the playwright, for Sarah J Culkin’s direction, Gabriel Richardson’s supporting performance, as well as the ensemble of his cast-mates. And designer Even Gilchrist is nominated in both the set and lighting categories.

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski as Frank-N-Furter in Rocky Horror Show, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

Grindstone Theatre’s production of Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show, the opener in its new mainstage series at the Orange Hub, has six nominations, including outstanding musical, Beverly Destroys’ costumes, Simon Abbott’s musical direction, Sarah Dowling’s choreography, Zachary Parsons-Lozinski’s star performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter and Josh Travnik’s supporting performance as Riff Raff.

The SkirtsAfire mainstage production of the Claire Barron play Dance Nation, a glimpse into the fraught lives and tensions of teenage competitive dancers, also has six nominations — for director Amanda Goldberg, for Kristen Padayas in the lead role category and Kijo Gatama in a supporting role, for the ensemble, for Kena León’s soundscape, and for choreography by Julie Murphy and Gomathi Boorada.

Dance Nation, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

 

Alexander Ariate as Horse in Horseplay by Kole Durnford, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and costumes Beyata Hackborn, lighting Sarah Karpyshin

The other top Sterling draws are four productions with five nominations each. Horseplay, an unusual two-hander by newcomer Kole Durnford that premiered at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, has two characters, one a horse and the other his jockey, joined in this exploration of a friendship and loyalty under duress. Its five nominations are in the outstanding production category, as a new play nominee, for Heather Inglis’s direction, for Alexander Ariate’s ingeniously comic and physical leading role performance, and for Sarah Karpyshin’s lighting.

Damon Pitcher, Jacob Holloway, Victoria Suen, Amanda Neufeld in Krampus: A New Musical, Straight Edge Theatre at Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The Workshop West/ Straight Edge Theatre production of Krampus: A New Musical, a macabre seasonal offering, also has five nominations, including outstanding musical, Michael Clark’s musical direction, the score by creators Seth Gilfillan and Stephen Allred, and leading and supporting performances by Amanda Neufeld and Damon Pitcher respectively.

The third of the season’s offerings with five Sterling nominations is Andrew Ritchie’s Cycle. The Thou Art Here Theatre production has its creator and star, a cyclist dangerously undaunted by weather and traffic, atop his bike. It’s a contender for new play, for indie production, for Kristi Hansen’s direction, for Liv McRobbie’s sound score, and for T. Erin Gruber’s multi-media design that sent us careening through the streets.

Andrew Ritchie in Cycle, Thou Art Here Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson

The five nominations for Rachel Peake’s Citadel/Grand Theatre co-production of Disney’s FROZEN: The Broadway Musical include nods for both Chariz Faulmino and Kelly Holiff in leading roles, Andrew Cohen in a supporting role as the nice-guy shopkeeper,  musical direction by Steven Greenfield, and the multi-media design by Amelia Scott.

Of the five outstanding production nominees, a particularly competitive category, two, Kole Durnford’s Horseplay and Colleen Murphy’s Jupiter, are premieres, the former from Workshop West and the latter from Theatre Network. Two are from the Citadel, last summer’s The Play That Goes Wrong (a co-production with Theatre Calgary and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre) and Goblin:Macbeth, the imaginative work of Spontaneous Theatre production. The fifth is Trevor Schmidt’s Northern Light production of Penelope Skinner’s Angry Alan, which has an outstanding director nomination for Schmidt, and one for the solo star Cody Porter as a reasonable sort of guy red-pilled against probability into the online extremism of the “men’s movement,” as well as the online soundscape of Amelia Chan.

Cody Porter in Angry Alan, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

In the always contentious new play category Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre premiered two of the contenders, Kole Durnford’s Horseplay and the new Stephen Massicotte play Stars On Her Shoulders. They’re up against AJ Hrooshkin’s Alphabet Line, a Prairie Strange production which premiered at Edmonton Fringe Theatre, Ashleigh Hicks’ Brick Shithouse, and Andrew Ritchie’s Cycle.

The contenders for the Timothy Ryan Award for outstanding musical include two Grindstone productions, Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show and A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder, which marks the morphing of the company into the seasonal big-time. Their musical competitors are A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the ‘70s musical, Krampus: A New Musical, and Edmonton Opera’s production of Die Fledermaus.

In the end, the Citadel comes away with 25 Sterling nominations, the most of any theatre by far. Workshop West has 11, Northern Light six, with the rest dispersed amongst smaller theatres and indie companies.

The theatre for young audiences categories are dominated by Alberta Musical Theatre’s production of Rapunzel and include nods for The “Away” Project at the Silver Skate Festival. And the Fringe categories disperse the nomination honours widely, alighting on such new musicals like Collin Doyle and Matt Graham’s Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina) for Plain Jane Theatre, Trevor Schmidt’s thriller Black Widow Gun Club for Whizgiggling Productions, and Liam Salmon’s Local Diva: The Danielle Smith Diaries from Low Hanging Fruits.

On Sterling gala night, July 14 at the Westbury Theatre, the indispensably versatile Gina Moe will be honoured with the Margaret Mooney Award for Outstanding Achievement in Administration, Nico Van Der Kley will receive the Ross Hill Award for Outstanding Achievement in Production. And Gerry Potter, the venerable founder of Workshop West Playwrights Theatre and Rising Sun Theatre, will receive an award for his outstanding contributions to Edmonton theatre. There’s a special Sterling this year, too, in “sustainability and community stewardship,” and it goes to Tessa Stamp.

Congratulations to all the nominees. Gala tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

The 2024-2025 Sterling Award nominations

Outstanding Production of a Play: Horseplay (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre); Angry Alan (Northern Light Theatre); The Play That Goes Wrong (The Citadel Theatre, Theatre Calgary and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); Jupiter (Theatre Network); Goblin:Macbeth (The Citadel Theatre and Spontaneous Theatre).

The Timothy Ryan Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical: Krampus: A New Musical (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre and Straight Edge Theatre); A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical (The Citadel Theatre); Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show (Grindstone Theatre); A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (Grindstone Theatre); Die Fledermaus (Edmonton Opera).

Outstanding Independent Production of a Play: Brick Shithouse (Fenceless Theatre and Common Ground Arts Society); Cycle (Thou Art Here Theatre); KaldrSaga: A New Queer, Old Norse Cabaret (Cardiac Theatre); After the Trojan Women (Alma Theatre); The Maids (Putrid Brat).

Outstanding New Play (award to playwright): Ashleigh Hicks, Brick Shithouse (Fenceless Theatre and Common Ground Arts Society); Kole Durnford, Horseplay (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre); Andrew Ritchie, Cycle (Thou Art Here Theatre); AJ Hrooshkin, Alphabet Line (Prairie Strange Productions); Stephen Massicotte, Stars on Her Shoulders (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre).

Outstanding Performance by a Performer in a Leading Role (play): Cody Porter, Angry Alan (Northern Light Theatre); Lindsey Angell, A Streetcar Named Desire (The Citadel Theatre and Theatre Calgary); Alexander Ariate, Horseplay (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre); Julien Arnold, The Woman in Black (Teatro Live!); Kristen Padayas, Dance Nation (SkirtsAfire Festival).

Outstanding Performance by a Performer in a Leading Role (musical): Zachary Parsons-Lozinski in Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show (Grindstone Theatre);  Jameela McNeil in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical (The Citadel Theatre); Chariz Faulmino in Disney’s FROZEN (The Citadel Theatre and The Grand Theatre); Kelly Holiff in Disney’s FROZEN (The Citadel Theatre and The Grand Theatre); Amanda Neufeld in Krampus: A New Musical (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre and Straight Edge Theatre).

Outstanding Performance by a Performer in a Supporting Role (play)
Alexandra Dawkins, The Maids (Putrid Brat); Gabriel Richardson, Brick Shithouse (Fenceless Theatre and Common Ground Arts Society); Sheldon Elter, A Streetcar Named Desire (The Citadel Theatre and Theatre Calgary); Kijo Gatama, Dance Nation (SkirtsAfire Festival); Michael Watt, Bea (Shadow Theatre).

Outstanding Performance by a Performer in a Supporting Role (musical): Josh Travnik, Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show (Grindstone Theatre Society); Oscar Derkx, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The 70’s Musical (The Citadel Theatre); Ruth Alexander, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The 70’s Musical (The Citadel Theatre); Andrew Cohen, Disney’s FROZEN (The Citadel Theatre and The Grand Theatre); Damon Pitcher, Krampus: A New Musical  (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre and Straight Edge Theatre).

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Play or Musical: the cast of Brick Shithouse (Fenceless Theatre and Common Ground Arts Society); the cast of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (Grindstone Theatre); the cast of Dance Nation (SkirtsAfire Festival); the cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The 70’s Musical (The Citadel Theatre); the cast of Goblin:Macbeth (Citadel Theatre and Spontaneous Theatre).

Outstanding Director: Sarah J Culkin , Brick Shithouse (Fenceless Theatre and Common Ground Arts Society); Heather Inglis, Horseplay (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre); Trevor Schmidt, Angry Alan (Northern Light Theatre); Kristi Hansen, Cycle (Thou Art Here Theatre); Amanda Goldberg, Dance Nation (SkirtsAfire Festival).

Outstanding Set Design: Tessa Stamp, Jupiter (Theatre Network); Beyata Hackborn The Play That Goes Wrong (The Citadel Theatre, Theatre Calgary, and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); c.m. zuby, The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow (Shadow Theatre); Even Gilchrist, Brick Shithouse (Fenceless Theatre and Common Ground Arts Society); Daniel vanHeyst, Where You Are (Shadow Theatre).

Outstanding Lighting Design: Even Gilchrist, Brick Shithouse (Fenceless Theatre and Common Ground Arts Society); Whittyn Jason, Brother Rat (ReadyGo Theatre and Edmonton Fringe Theatre); Larissa Poho, Monstress (Northern Light Theatre); Sarah Karpyshin, Horseplay (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre); Siobhán Sleath, Heist (The Citadel Theatre and The Grand Theatre).

Outstanding Costume Design: Deanna Finnman, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical (The Citadel Theatre); Cory Sincennes, Disney’s FROZEN: The Broadway Musical (The Citadel Theatre and The Grand Theatre); Beverly Destroys, Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show (Grindstone Theatre); Patrick Du Wors, Die Fledermaus (Edmonton Opera); Philip Edwards, Goblin:MacBeth (The Citadel Theatre and Spontaneous Theatre).

Outstanding Score of a Play or Musical: Seth Gilfillan and Stephen Allred, Krampus: A New Musical (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre and Straight Edge Theatre); Josh Meredith and Erik Richards, Brother Rat (ReadyGo Theatre and Edmonton Fringe Theatre); Richard Feren, Heist (The Citadel Theatre and The Grand Theatre); Jinting Zhao, Nato Downs and Ari Rhodes, Bear Grease (A LightningCloud Production, presented by The Citadel Theatre); VISSIA , Rapunzel (Alberta Musical Theatre Company).

Outstanding Sound Design: Kena León, Dance Nation (SkirtsAfire Festival), Liv McRobbie, Cycle (Thou Art Here Theatre); Dave Clarke, Monstress (Northern Light Theatre); Amelia Chan, Angry Alan (Northern Light Theatre); Lindsey Walker, Bea (Shadow Theatre).

Outstanding Musical Direction: Ben Elliott, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical (The Citadel Theatre); Simon Abbott, Rocky Horror Show (Grindstone Theatre); Michael Clark Krampus: A New Musical (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre and Straight Edge Theatre); Lyndon Pugeda, The Ballad of Johnny and June (The Citadel Theatre); Steven Greenfield, Disney’s FROZEN (The Citadel Theatre and The Grand Theatre).

Outstanding Choreography/Fight/Intimacy Direction: Sam Jeffery (fight and intimacy direction), Brick Shithouse (Fenceless Theatre and Common Ground Arts Society); Julie Murphy and Gomathi Boorada (choreography), Dance Nation (SkirtsAfire Festival); Sarah Dowling (choreography), Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show (Grindstone Theatre); Gianna Vacirca (choreography), A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical (The Citadel Theatre); Siobhan Richardson (fight and intimacy direction), Heist (The Citadel Theatre and The Grand Theatre).

Outstanding Multimedia Design: Corwin Ferguson, Heist (The Citadel Theatre & The Grand Theatre); T Erin Gruber, Cycle (Thou Art Here Theatre); Matt Schuurman, After Mourning – Before Van Gogh (Shadow Theatre); Amelia Scott, Disney’s FROZEN: The Broadway Musical (The Citadel Theatre); Aaron Macri, The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow (Shadow Theatre).

Outstanding Production for Young Audiences: Rapunzel (Albert Musical Theatre Company); The “Away” Project (The Silver Skate Festival).

Outstanding Artistic Achievement for Young Audiences: VISSIA (composer), Rapunzel (Albert Musical Theatre Company); Maxwell Vesely (performer), Rapunzel (Albert Musical Theatre Company); Even Gilchrist, Tessa Stamp, and Whittyn Jason (designer), The “Away” Project (The Silver Skate Festival); Camille Pavlenko (pPlaywright), Rapunzel (Albert Musical Theatre Company).  

Outstanding Fringe Production: Bright Lights (Blarney Productions); Local Diva: The Danielle Smith Diaries (Low Hanging Fruits); Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina) – A New Musical (Plain Jane Theatre); WROL (Without Rule of Law) (Light in the Dark Theatre0; Bull (High Rise Productions).

Outstanding Fringe New Work (award to playwright): Liam Witte, 27 Pictures (Bicycle Built for Three Productions); Liam Salmon, Local Diva: The Danielle Smith Diaries (Low Hanging Fruits); Collin Doyle and Matt Graham, Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina) – A New Musical (Plain Jane Theatre); Angie Bustos, The Picture of Elias Graham (Theatre Tahanan); Trevor Schmidt, Black Widow Gun Club (Whizgiggling Productions).

Outstanding Fringe Performance by an Individual: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, Local Diva: The Danielle Smith Diaries (Low Hanging Fruits); Lauren Brady, OWEaDEBT (HEYwire Theatre); Robyn Clark, WROL (Without Rule of Law) (Light in the Dark Theatre); Rachel Bowron, Bright Lights (Blarney Productions); Elyse Roszell, The Picture of Elias Graham (Theatre Tahanan).

Outstanding Fringe Performance by an Ensemble: the cast of Bright Lights (Blarney Productions); the cast of Fear Fables (Entertainment Purposes Only); the cast of Black Widow Gun Club (Whizgiggling Productions); the cast of WROL (Without Rule of Law) (Light in the Dark Theatre); the cast of Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina) – A New Musical (Plain Jane Theatre).

Outstanding Fringe Director: Luc Tellier, Bright Lights (Blarney Productions); Kate Ryan, Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina) – A New Musical (Plain Jane Theatre); Owen Holloway, Local Diva: The Danielle Smith Diaries (Low Hanging Fruits); Trevor Schmidt, Black Widow Gun Club (Whizgiggling Productions); Emily Marisabel, WROL (Without Rule of Law) (Light in the Dark Theatre).

Outstanding Individual Achievement in Production: Trent Crosby (production manager); Kat Evans (production manager); Patrick Fraser (technical director); Lore Green (stage manager).

Special Award: Achievement in Sustainability and Community Stewardship: Tessa Stamp

Outstanding Contribution to Edmonton Theatre: Gerry Potter

The Margaret Mooney Award for Outstanding Achievement in Administration: Gina Moe

The Ross Hill Award for Outstanding Achievement in Production: Nico Van Der Kley

 

 

 

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Your last crack at a couple of festivals and a screwball on E-town stages, a small 12thnight survey on a wet weekend

Posted on June 14, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Live theatre lives in the moment (not a new thought but one to consider this wet weekend in Edmonton) It’s your last chance…

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•… And also your first, to see Sprouts, Concrete Theatre’s annual festival of new plays specially planted for kids, today at 12:30 and 2:30 p.m. in the Westbury Theatre. Let a kid take you to see three new plays in one hour, seeded and awaiting further growth. Little Crow and Magpie by Shyanne Duquette, The Club Conundrum by Jasmine Hopfe, and Hayley Moorhouse’s Wanda, Wendy and the What-If Walrus. Concrete’s idea, it being planting season, is to enlarge the Canadian repertoire of plays for kids, by tapping a diversity, in experience and ethnicity, of writing talents. Over the years, some of the authors are playwrights trying their hand at engaging a new and younger audience; some are actors or choreographers, journalists or novelists expanding their skill sets to include writing for the stage. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca. (And there are lobby activities before each performance).

Rachel Bowron and Mathew Hulshof in On The Banks Of The Nut, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

• … to catch (through Sunday) a sparkling homegrown screwball at the Varscona: Teatro Live’s revival of the 2001 Stewart Lemoine comedy On The Banks Of The Nut. You’ll have the fun of watching a take-charge heroine (Bella King) screw up people’s lives, on the principle that, sure, things could get more chaotic, but they also could be a lot more entertaining. The cast, including Sam Free, Rachel Bowron, Mathew Hulshof, and Karen Johnson Diamond, has a larky time with the Lemoine-ian sense of humour. Have a peek at the 12thnight review. Tickets: theatrolive.com.

•It’s the grand finale weekend of Nextfest, the multi-disciplinary festival of emerging artists at the Roxy. The MainStage lineup includes Batrabbit Collective’s clown show Rat Academy 2: Gnaw and Order by and starring Dayna Lee Hoffmann and Katie Yoner as a pair of rodents up against it in a rat-free province. It’s a sequel to their much-travelled Fringe hit, and will be re-worked into a new version especially for the upcoming Fringe. The 12thnight preview is here. I had a chance to see Mika Boutin’s Televangelists and The Most Beautiful Man by Kate Couture. I can recommend both: accomplished in structure, acted with go-for-the-gusto commitment.

The former takes us into the heart of darkness (in a stunningly visceral way) in the Canadian punk rock scene c. 1997. See the 12thnight interview with Boutin here. The latter has a kind of heart-tugging hilarity about it: it’s a stage memoir in chapters of a young woman with a shift job as a Santa’s elf, a rich fantasy life, and a history of  bad experiences with men. There is, after all, a dark side to a guy in a red suit and fake beard, who invites strangers to sit on his lap and tell him their secret desires. You’ll want to see more of the eminently likeable, comically inventive Kelsey Jakoy.

The Roxy is crammed with Nextfest activity. Tickets and a full schedule: nextfest.ca.      

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A Fringe Full Of Stars: the upcoming 44th annual Edmonton Fringe Festival has a theme, and shows

Posted on June 13, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

A Fringe Full Of Stars artwork by Yu-Chen (Tseng) Beliveau, Edmonton Fringe 2025.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Where theatre meets astronomy (by starlight): the upcoming 44th annual Edmonton Fringe has its theme.

A Fringe Full of Stars, this year’s edition of Edmonton’s mighty summer theatre festival, running Aug. 14 to 24, was christened Friday. “Amazingly, we discovered that at the edge of the Milky Way, a fringe of new stars are born,” says Fringe Theatre executive director Megan Dart, a playwright herself. “Our (light-up) constellation is is made up of artists, onstage and backstage, volunteers, sponsors, donors, the team, you the audience … everyone’s a star. It’s the most magical thing; it brings out the joy in everyone.”

The cosmos that is North America’s oldest and largest Fringe festival is lighted by 1600 artists in 223 shows in some 40 venues. As Fringe director Murray Utas explains, 90 of those shows are selected by lottery, and run in 10 official Fringe-run venues, each acquired (and sometimes built) by the festival, at a cost of roughly $15,000 apiece. The other 133 are in BYOVs, bring-your-own-venues acquired and equipped by artists themselves, and mostly in Old Strathcona (with exceptions like the four curated venues at La Cité francophone, and the odd outlier downtown).

The size of A Fringe Full Of Stars represents deliberately modest growth from the lineup of last year’s Find Your Fringe, with its 215 show in 38 venues, and 185 shows the year before that at The Answer Is Fringe. Fringe 2025 assembles shows and artists from here, across the nation, and around the world, nine countries in all. Utas and Dart are determined to “build up the audience and build capacity” before allowing the festival dimensions to expand more dramatically. “We can’t outpace our audience, and our resources,” as Utas puts it. “We’re the largest (of the Fringes on the circuit) in North America, by far. And most of the others, including Winnipeg, have cut back.”

To this starry galaxy are added such Fringe traditions as the (free) nightly music series in ATB (aka McIntyre aka Gazebo) Park. And the (free) KidsFringe, for younger fingers — some 14,000 in number last summer — and their grown-up companions, returns to Lighthorse Park, curated and directed by Alyson Dicey.

The Late-Night Cabaret, a Fringe starry starry night hit of 14 years standing that started out in the Backstage Theatre,, returns to its larger digs at the Granite Curling Club. Last year it sold out all its performances there.

Dart and Utas celebrate the return, for the 12th summer, of the Fringe’s “lead festival partner ATB Financial. Ah, and in their third year Sea Change, “the exclusive beer provider of the Edmonton Fringe,” (which just has to be named from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “a sea change into something rich and strange”). The Sea Change initiative of the summer is a new brew: Fringe Beer Tent Blonde Ale, “a beer with theatre in it,” as Dart and Utas say. It’s available at hospitality hot spots all over Strathcona and a portion of the proceeds from every can sold go to support the Fringe.

Pêhonân (nêhiyawêwin for “meeting place”), the Indigenous-led initiative assembled by the Fringe’s Indigenous Director MJ Belcourt Moses, will be found throughout Fringe site. It includes not only performances on a stage, but “art installations, self-directed tours, (stops) where you might learn how drums are made …” as Utas describes. A “celebration of storytelling” in all its forms, says Dart.

And that’s a theme to which both she and Utas return again and again. “The  Fringe movement is the movement of the future,” says Utas, whose mentorship reach includes countless Zoomed ‘town halls’ with Fringe artists who request it. “In my time, art is more precarious than it’s even been. And it’s more essential than ever. And when it’s gone it’s gone…. We battle back against darkness with stories, with art. And we gather!”

And this just in: More than a thousand volunteers, in teams, make the Fringe possible every summer. And Dart reports that as of Friday, 86 per cent of volunteer positions have been filled (so step up the pace if you want in). The year-old Sustain Fringe campaign to expand the community of monthly donors started modestly last year with 34. That number is now more than 540. And since expenses continue to expand exponentially, the campaign continues: fringetheatre.ca/give. If every Fringe ticket-buyer contributed $5 a month, the Fringe would become “instantly sustainable.”

Festival guides to A Fringe Full of Stars are on sale July 30. Festival passes and tickets August 6.

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Inside the punk rock scene: Televangelists, a door into the dark labyrinth of youth culture, at Nextfest

Posted on June 11, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Televangelists by Mika Boutin, Nextfest 2025. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Televangelists, Nextfest’s biggest mainstage production — cast of eight, huge tech team, the festival’s longest list of warnings — found its way to the stage via an original route. One that’s not well marked on any theatre GPS.

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Playwright Mika Boutin, at 23 a drummer, a singer, a poet, a director with a specialty in intimacy coaching, a theatre school grad — and now playwright — knows the punk scene and its people, from the inside out. “And I grew up in a church,” she explains. “I wanted to see how these things intersect.”

Her first play, an insight into the dark and dangerous labyrinth of youth culture, has a title that reflects this cross-hatching. Televangelists is the name of the punk band at the centre of the play. The boys are in the band; the girls are ‘girlfriends’ or hook-ups, fan/groupies. And we see the Canadian punk rock scene and its cultural surround in all its viciousness, trauma, drug- and porn-fuelled darkness, through the experiences of naive Seven who has her eyes opened the hard way.

“It started from a collection of poetry,” says Boutin who was a poet and short story writer before she was a playwright (“this is my first venture into something live”). “The first poem was a love letter — to myself.” And a play was seeded in the thought that “it sounds more like a character than it does me…. Then I thought about what her friends might be like, then what her community might be like, how she came to be.”

Televangelists by Mika Boutin, Nextfest 2025. Photo supplied

There’s startling poetry woven into the layers of language of this highly unusual, impressively accomplished play, set in the Canadian punk scene of 1997. In the first scene, four girls are summoning their childhood experiences, in a weave of memories joined by a chorus borrowed from a Boutin poem: “we were girls together” And the play is bookended by a memorably visceral blood-soaked last supper scene, Jacobean in vigour and with its own ritualistic poetry. It’ll make you gasp (as I know from first-hand experience at the opening performance this past weekend).

Boutin was struck, she says, by “what childhood looks like for four different girls, who grew up in the same place, doing the same things, but how differently they all experienced it.” And how they stepped into very different lives.

The setting, 28 years ago, is intriguingly historical for Boutin, a Concordia U theatre grad, with an English minor (“English class was where I flourished in school”). She went to theatre school “thinking I wanted to be an actor, and then … wait, I don’t like acting!  I love directing, playwriting, intimacy directing. That’s my jam.” Punk rock is her music, and she’s engaging and articulate about explaining. The activism and feminist potential of punk are attractions. “It’s been such an outlet for people, especially women, to have their thoughts heard by people who wouldn’t usually hear them. And it lets their voices be heard really really loud!”

She chose the ‘90s for being the heyday of the Riot Girls movement, an inspiration for the play. “Riot Girls wasn’t super-introspective,” she says, “which was its downfall.” But it came at a timely moment: rock was focused on “men and boys and what they wanted to say…. Besides, I wanted an excuse to do research,” Boutin laughs. “And what a good way to inject the music I love, the music I listen to….” A period favourite? Bikini Kill. And the sound of more recent bands she likes is heavily influenced by ‘90s punk, among them Die Spitz and Amyl and the Sniffers.

Televangelists by Mika Boutin, Nextfest 2025. Photo supplied

The males of Televangelists are pretty nasty. Seven’s boyfriend/hook-up, for example is “gross and racists and creepy.” The new bassist, a “major major douche,” has just moved from Vancouver, a pattern that is commonplace in the music world, says Boutin. “When they get outed for doing something terrible in a city, they just jump a city over.” The third guy, the girls’ childhood friend, “is the only one on their side.”

“The worst thing is that these characters are based on real people,” says Boutin. “This is very close to reality, people I’ve interacted with, people my friends have interacted with.” Their awfulness is, as she describes with a smile, a challenge for the actors who play them, “the nicest people, people I know and love.”

In fact, “a lot of the play is really close to reality,” Boutin says. “It’s not all personal experience, but “things that have happened to a friend or I’ve heard about. Things I’ve been around.”

Televangelists by Mika Boutin, Nextfest 2025. Photo supplied

The play turns on a double-axis. On the one hand, the grunge reality, and the chronic abuse that goes with it “and makes you angry,” as she puts it. On the other, what she describes as “another world, a heaven-like place called Elsewhere” with its own poetry and lyrical movement pieces devised by director Nicole Maloney. “I couldn’t imagine anyone better to direct this,” says Boutin of Maloney, whose directorial work Fringe audiences have seen in two original festival hits Let’s Not Turn On Each Other and OnPOINT, a clown spin-off from Swan Lake.  

Boutin and Nextfest have a history together. Last year she directed Dog Bite Theatre Company’s inaugural production, the premiere of Tori Kibblewhite’s Your Heart Is Gushing Lavender. This year, for her playwright’s debut, Nextfest and festival director Ellen Chorley have “let us go crazy,” Boutin says appreciatively. “They’ve let us build a whole set, with walls and beds and couches. They’ve let us have a team of 19, and so much tech time. So much support!”

“Really wonderful,” sats Boutin. “They’ve rolled out the red carpet. They’ll do whatever it takes to make whatever is in your head happen. And we’re so grateful.”

And hey, Boutin and friends like Michael Watt and Jacquelin Walters (Let’s Not Turn On Each Other) and Spenser Kells (Brother Rat) have recorded an original song. Purple Sun has a satirical edge: “it’s made to be sung by a shitty boy band, the kind with fake-deep lyrics,” Boutin laughs. You can catch it on streaming services.

Televangelists runs Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday on the Nancy Power stage at Nextfest. Check the times, and get tickets at nextfest.ca.

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Northern Light Theatre announces an upcoming 50th anniversary season

Posted on June 9, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Request Programme, Northern Light Theatre. Graphic supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Northern Light, the adventurous Edmonton theatre company that’s had more eras, mandates, identities, logos, radical reinventions than any other in this theatre town, is turning 50 in the 2025-26 season.

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Its origins were modest half a century ago: lunchtimes in the basement of the Art Gallery (a buck a ticket). Since then, NLT has been a niche-jumper, shape-shifter, skin-shedder par excellence. They’ve done Shakespeare and Shaw in a big striped tent in the river valley (Paul Gross made his professional debut in A Midsummer Night’s Dream there). They’ve had seasons of dark and weird, via the modern Euro repertoire in translation.

They were into multi-media dance-theatre creations before dance-theatre was cool, and they toured the country with original hits. Sometimes Northern Light has been a theatre that does contemporary adaptations of a Jacobean gore fest or a Kafka novel. Or original artist-collective “performance art” installations in found spaces — grotty warehouses or urban pedways. Sometimes it’s been a theatre that does mainstream musical revues of Piaf or Judy Garland, alongside new prairie plays.

When Trevor Schmidt became NLT artistic director in 2002, after nearly a decade of contributing to the company as an actor, playwright, director, and designer, he was looking for a niche, he says. He found it in a challenging assortment of obscure small-cast female-centric contemporary pieces by international playwrights most of us had never heard of — re-imagined and Canadian-ized by a stylized design aesthetic that defies Canadian realism. He’s regularly transformed a  70-seat black box theatre (the Studio Theatre in the Fringe Arts Barns) to be a space that suits.

More of this fascinating, and continuing, history closer to opening night in September; stay tuned. Suffice it say that when COVID took its toll on programming at larger theatres, NLT bounced back better than many companies, says Schmidt. “We were big enough to stay noticed and small enough to dodge and weave through the closures.”   

And now, in honour of this unique 50-year history, Schmidt has announced a three-production upcoming anniversary season that includes a revival of a Northern Light hit of recent vintage, the premiere of a new Schmidt comedy, and as the finale a wordless performance piece of European provenance.

In Request Programme (May 1 to 16, 2026), by the German avant-gardiste Franz Xaver Kroetz, which premiered in Stuttgart in 1973, a solitary woman arrives home at her solitary apartment, goes through her usual evening routine, makes dinner, cleans up, tunes in to a call-in radio show. And something happens that lifts this “ordinary” hour in the life of an “ordinary” woman into a gut-wrencher, for a reason you’ll discover. And that reason, as Schmidt explains, gives a ‘70s piece a visceral contemporary relevance.

Schmidt calls Request Programme “performance art, as opposed to a play … something we haven’t seen a lot of lately.” In this it refers back to the large-scale experiments undertaken in the 90s by his artistic director predecessors D.D. Kugler and the late Sandhano Schultz. As a celebration of the theatre’s history, each performance will feature a different actor who’s worked at Northern Light in the last 50 years — women of different racial backgrounds and ages, 20something to 80, one per night.

“Such a strange and interesting project to do in this way,” says Schmidt. “And scary: I can’t control it, how long it will be before (the woman) turns on the radio show. The actor has no lines, and will not have heard it before.” Every night will be different, and a different length, needless to say.

The cast list Schmidt is assembling for the run is a veritable who’s who of Edmonton actresses, all of whom have Northern Light credits in their resumés. So far they include Linda Grass, Davina Stewart, Kristin Johnston, Melissa Thingelstad, Nadien Chu, Michelle Todd, Holly Turner, Patricia Darbasie, Sylvia Wong, Cheryl Jameson. And there will be more.

“It’s a big project,” says Schmidt, and one that is tuned to the NLT frequency of “speaking to social issues without judgment…. We could have done this play with one actor. But I’m all about sharing the wealth.”

Ten years ago Schmidt introduced Edmonton audiences to the American playwright Eise Forier Edie via a solo play The Pink Unicorn. His production, starring Louise Lambert, was a popular and critical hit. The protagonist is a very conservative church-going Texas widow whose daughter has just announced she’s gender-neutral. It throws her world into chaos; she faces big moral choices. “What was relevant 10 years is even more so now,” as Schmidt points out.

The production that runs Sept. 26 to Oct. 11, Schmidt’s third (it ran at Calgary’s Lunchbox Theatre in 2019, with Elinor Holt), stars Patricia Zentilli who, like Lambert, has qualities crucial to the play, Schmidt says. “She’s intensely charismatic and likeable.… The audience needs to fall in love with the character — she’s so recognizable and relatable and flawed.”

The new Schmidt comedy that premieres Nov. 28 to Dec. 13 has the longest title of the season by far. How Patty and Joanne Won High Gold At The Grand Christmas Cup Winter Dance Competition is all about an unlikely friendship between two women, mismatched in every way, as they prepare for an amateur dance contest.

“I thought I was writing a fluffy little satire,” says Schmidt. But it’s  turned out to be more heartwarming than that, he’s found. “I always want to go for the gut punch.” Jenny McKillop makes her Northern Light debut as one of the characters; the other has yet to be cast.

If there’s an emotional through-line to the trio of shows, Schmidt finds that the women in them all explore “loneliness, isolation, feeling separate from the group.” It’s a recurring theme of his, he says, the tension between “characters who choose to make themselves happy and people who choose to hurt other people, and deny themselves happiness because they’re afraid.”

“In this anniversary season, I’m trying to be brave and push out…. Everyone wants to do safer work. But I think I want to do the hard stuff.”

Season subscriptions are now on sale (780-471-1586, northernlighttheatre.com), with single tickets available Aug. 6.   

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The rats are back in a new show! Rat Academy 2: Gnaw and Order at Nextfest, a preview

Posted on June 8, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Here’s a way to have yourself an existential crisis (or at least an emotional breakdown): be a rat, in Alberta.

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When we last met the stars of Rat Academy, a pair of rats on the lam in a rat-free province, Fingers, the starchy, street-wise one, was coaching Shrimp, a naive, distractible lab escapee, on how to survive in a hostile world.

Since the 2023 premiere of Rat Academy at Nextfest and then the Fringe that summer, Batrabbit Collective’s hit duo clown show has been across the country, to festivals far and wide. This week the rodent creations of Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner are back at the festival where they began nearly three years and more than 70 performances ago. At Nextfest Fingers and Shrimp are in a new show, a sequel that stands alone, Rat Academy 2: Gnaw and Order.

In the course of three years on the road, “it’s grown so much…. We were always discovering new things,” says Hoffmann of the Rat Academy journey. It’s even included the experience of performing for scientists at an invasive species conference in Olds. “Right in the front row there were the people who run the Alberta Rat Patrol,” says Yoner of this unexpected Life/Art meet-up. “They loved it.” And Hoffmann and Yoner have the merch to prove it — posters, stickers, T-shirts with the motto ‘Rat on Rats’.” They’ve been interviewed by a U.K. documentary film maker. Fingers and  Shrimp are rodent stars.

“There are only so many bits we can fit into an hour and we needed a place to put them,” says Hoffman, who plays Fingers to Yoner’s Shrimp. “And we were hungry to to build something new, to fill out again!”

Their main inspiration for Gnaw and Order was “us exploring our definitions of home, where we feel safe, how you can build one,” says Yoner. “To the backdrop of the housing crisis and rents going up, the way the new generation thinks of a home space has been forced to change a lot. That was fuel for the show.”

“Dayna and I have been friends for a long time. We’ve lived together in two different places, been roommates in school (they were classmates in the U of A BFA theatre program), then got an apartment after that…. Now we live separately. Dayna is looking at getting a house. I’ve travelled a lot for work.”

Says Hoffmann, “for me as an artist trying to get a mortgage … well, I’m lucky to have relatives who left me money, there aren’t many people in my position who can do that. And I’ve struggled with that feeling.”

Katie Yoner and Dayna Lea Hoffmann in Rat Academy 2: Gnaw and Order, outside the Fringe Benefit, May 2025. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The original Rat Academy leaned into the idea of the rat as misfit, the ultimate outsider marginalized by a hostile culture. For a couple of rats in Alberta, the notion of home and what it means to be at home is particularly equivocal. Are their rights being violated? “Are we entitled to a peaceful existence?” as Hoffmann says of their rodent characters. Face it, rats rights are a nuanced question in a rat-free province.

Rat Academy was always going to be a clown show, the artists say. “And clowns are pieces of ourselves,” says Hoffmann. She and Yoner, are mentees of masters of the craft Michael Kennard (of Mump and Smoot) and Jan Henderson.  “Fingers exists somewhere in Dayna; Shrimp exists somewhere in me,” says Yoner. “There are many things we’ll explore in tandem with it, but whatever we create together will always, at the core, be about our friendship with each other.” She laughs. “It’s us as people — with a tail on.”

Rat Academy, Batrabbit Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023

The first show conjured a dangerous world, not least through playfulness with scale. The alley was their Manhattan; the rat trap was gigantic. “And there were mentions of the Rat Patrol,” says Yoner. But the first show largely pursued the internal conflict in the characters.” The challenge with the new show was to retain that friction between the characters, while upping the ante in the external world. “There’s an active oppressor out to get them this time.” Says Hoffmann. “The new dangers are scaled up massively.”

The origins of the imaginative, funny push-pull dynamic between Fingers and Shrimp were at the Fringe in 2021. Fringe director Murray Utas Fringe asked Hoffmann to do a between-show interlude on the outdoor stage with her juggling act (Hoffmann is also trained in the circus arts). “I was very scared and instantly went to Katie…. You’ll be the incompetent juggler and I’ll be the competent one.”

Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner in Two Pin Idiot. Photo supplied

The first photo of the pair together onstage is a clown show they devised, Two Pin Idiot. And when COVID shut down live performance, Hoffmann developed “a short film about the last rat in Edmonton…. The voice was different, the makeup and facial expression was different, but the core was the same,” says Yoner.

And so “a duo rat show” was born. “Dayna and I discovered we have a natural chemistry onstage.” It’s one that slides naturally into the traditional clown dynamic of higher and lower status,  the one that tries to keep the other in line, the other more wayward, more curious, “a little bit stupid,” Yoner laughs.

Says Hoffmann, “this new show is a massive growth for Shrimp, who started as a lab rat who’d never been in the world before … never quite hitting the mark. This time Shrimp is doing a little too well. Fingers teaches Shrimp how to steal but Shrimp takes it one step too far…. The biggest question (this time) is how do they find a home, build a home, fight back?.”

“It’s the world premiere at Nextfest, but it’s very much a work-in-progress,” she says of Gnaw and Order. Which is something valuable that the festivities this week are for: giving artists an opportunity to test their ideas in front of an audience, especially vital for a clown show.

Hoffmann and Yoner emphasize that the Rat Academy 2: Gnaw and Order we’ll see at the Fringe will be a completely different show,. “We have seven drafts of things we want to include in the Fringe version…. What needs to change? How much bigger can we make this spectacle?”

Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner in Rat Academy, Batrabbit Productions. 2023 photo supplied.

Nextfest has figured prominently in their development as indie artist/producers and their hit characters, from a 20-minute test version with no real audience interaction (except eye contact) at the Play The Fool Festival. “We were very scared of talking to the audience. And now we have such a relationship with them. The audience is another character!” says Yoner. “It’s one of my favourite parts, interacting,” says Hoffmann. “All of that we got from doing that first show at Nextfest. It broke us out out of our shells!” And Rat Academy “turned into a show that you can’t do without an audience,” and a bona fide hit.

The pair are fulsome in their praise of the festival and its supportive director Ellen Chorley. And not just for the $10,000 or so worth of technical and management support that come with doing a Nextfest mainstage show. “Excellent technicians, an absolutely phenomenal theatre space, an audience!” says Yoner. “Everything we needed to find out more about the show we were creating…. An opportunity we could not have created ourselves.”

“It’s a fantastic atmosphere to create something new. They really set you up well for that!

PREVIEW

Nextfest 2025

Rat Academy 2: Gnaw And Order

Theatre: Batrabbit Collective

Created by and starring: Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner

Directed by: Joseph McManus

Where: Nancy Power Theatre at the Roxy, 10708 124 St.

Running: June 8, 10, 12, 14

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca

  

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An intriguing week in Edmonton theatre: go see a show

Posted on June 6, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Die Walküre, Edmonton Opera. Photo supplied

Graham Mothersill and Michelle Diaz in KaldrSaga, Cardiac Theatre. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s an intriguing week in Edmonton theatre. An influential festival that’s all about getting splashed by the next wave. Not one but two productions, from two vastly different companies, that tap into the rich and weird vein of Norse mythology. A delish screwball comedy.  A backstage theatre mishap comedy. And your last crack at the class of the jukebox musical archive.

•Nextfest, the big, bouncing, forever-young festival of emerging artists, turns 30, imagine that! This year’s 11-day (and night) edition, which runs through June 15, brings 500 category-resistant artists of every stripe (and polka dot) into Theatre Network’s Roxy. And with them comes your chance to find out what the next generation is up to. Stay tuned for more 12thnight posts on the mainstage theatre lineup. Meanwhile the 12thnight preview of Nextfest 2025 is here. Lucky me, I got to talk to the always inspiring festival director Ellen Chorley.  Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.

•On the Citadel’s Maclab stage, a theatre which counts as up-close in the opera world of vast halls, Edmonton Opera unveiled Die-Walkürie Thursday night. It’s part two of Wagner’s four-opera epic Ring Cycle that’s an EO first, and a sequel to last season’s Das Rheingold. It’s a wild swirl of Norse mythology and originals, poised on a treacherous frontier between the gods and the mortals. And Joel Ivany’s chamber production — nine singers and an orchestra of 18, a fraction of full-size forces — finds them in domestic encounters on a stunning Andy Moro set.

At the centre of the cycle is a fateful ring made of stolen gold. Its possessor can rule the world — if the bearer renounces love in favour of power. It’s a big downside (it takes four big operas to explore it). And it causes Wotan (the compelling Neil Craighead), the commander of the godly realm, no end of angst snared as he is in the complex unresolvable tensions between loyalty, family bonds, leadership and the rule of law. We see it in scenes with his fiery wife Fricka (Catherine Daniel) and his go-for-the-gusto Valkyrie warrior daughter Brünnhilde (Jaclyn Grossman). As a non-habitué of things Wagnerian I didn’t expect the nuances of the argument.

In Moro’s design, the stage is dominated by two huge rings each with  a light-up circumference. The characters are between them, at the intersection of a massive clam-shell arrangement. One ring is tilted towards us in the air, towering over the characters, an overwhelming image of fatality, as human close-ups (you can see the gods’ eyelashes) and the natural world play across it. The video is rather breathtaking.

The other ring surrounds a pale, bare playing surface, which seems to be carved from the stage, an abstract installation cracked in the middle by a chiselled chasm. The orchestra, conducted by Russell Braun, sits fully visible upstage, in harmony with the production’s abstractions. The sound, to these ears, isn’t bombastic or lush; it’s vigorous and dramatic, which suits this production to a T.

The lingering image of Wotan and Fricka or Wotan and Brünnhilde, having it out as the great fiery globe turns in the ring above them, cuts to the heart of the whole story. And it has an equivalent of sorts in the human sphere, the taboo-busting reunion of siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde (Scott Rumble and Anna Pompeeva, both powerful singers). Incest is is a deal-breaker for Fricka (Wotan argues for giving the kids a break). Siegmund and Sieglinde’s mutual discovery, oddly in full light (designer Mikael Kangas), is marked in Moro’s projections by the magical return of Nature, and spring, to the world.

Die Walküre, Edmonton Opera. Photo supplied

The visuals are memorable. And the characters really do occupy the Maclab, theatrically, entering from the aisles or threading through the musicians. Once they arrive on that thrust stage, though, there seems to be quite a lot of pacing around and spear-waving, just to remain in motion and visible to the audience that surrounds the action. And when one character observes as another sings (Jonathan Dove’s adaptation leans into intimate two-hander scenes), there’s awkwardness in the standing around, looking apprehensive. The visuals are much stronger than the stagecraft.

But it’s exciting to see grand opera in a new smaller-scale way. Have a peek at 12thnight’s interview with designer Andy Moro here. Die Walküre runs Saturday and June 9 and 10, 12 and 13. Tickets: edmontonopera.com. Next season: part three, an EO production of Siegfried.

Graham Mothersill and Michelle Diaz in “KaldrSaga: A New Queer, Old Norse Cabaret.” Photo: Eric Kozakiewicz Photography

•At the ArtsHub Ortona through Sunday, Norse mythology rocks. It even gets its own built-in TED Talk. Harley Howard-Morison’s KaldrSaga, marking the return to action of the indie company Cardiac Theatre, is “a new queer old Norse cabaret,” which plumbs Norse mythology for its queer friendship origin stories. This archive inspires a flamboyant double-drag number, a Western ballad, a kooky found-object puppet. And the fun of it is that two extraordinarily nimble actors, Michelle Diaz and Graham Mothersill, play not only the title storytellers but all the characters. 12thnight talked to the playwright and Director Sarah J Culkin for a preview, and then went to see and review it. Tickets: cardiactheatre.ca.    

•Wicked Disaster! is the latest from Rising Sun Theatre, a company devoted to discovering and showcasing the theatrical talents of adults with intellectual disabilities mentored by theatre pros. The original comedy, by Maeve Bezaire and the participants, is about a theatre troupe and their backstage setbacks en route to a production of The Wizard of Oz. The principle at work: everything that can go wrong does, which makes the piece a sibling to such theatrical hilarity as Peter Pan Goes Wrong. It plays Saturday  7 p.m. and Sunday 2 p.m. at the Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd. Tickets: eventbrite.ca and (possibly) at the door.

Sam Free and Karen Johnson Diamond in On The Banks of the Nut, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

•The premise of On The Banks Of The Nut, a Teatro Live! revival of the 2001 Stewart Lemoine screwball comedy, will make you smile. A temp with pizzaz and a natural take-charge quality, finds herself working for the federal talent agent for the state of Wisconsin. And instigated by her, the pair set forth into the hinterland and a rustic hotel, hunting for a citizen of rare talent. What this has to do with a romance triggered by a post-horn player’s uncanny resemblance to the late great Gustav Mahler is something you’ll have to discover for yourself. It’s a sparkler and the cast of five is captivating. Read the 12thnight preview interview with Bella King here, and a review here. It runs at the Varscona through June 15. Tickets: teatrolive.com.

Niko Combitsis and Kory Fulton in Jersey Boys, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

•Your last chances to hang with four lads from the mean streets of New Jersey who become a #1 hit-generating band are this weekend. Tony Award-winning Jersey Boys, directed for the Mayfield Dinner Theatre by Danny Austin, charts the rise and fall and re-grouping of The Four Seasons. And the show is crammed with irresistible hits, and a cast (and band) who can really deliver them. Fun fun fun. Meet Austin in this 12thnight preview. Read the 12thnight review here. It runs through June 8. Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca.

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What’s next? Nextfest at 30: three decades of celebrating emerging artists

Posted on June 5, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Where did the time go? Yes, Edmonton’s innovative, free-wheeling cross-pollinating multi-disciplinary festival of emerging artists, is hitting the big 3-OH, all grown up and still asking “What’s next?”

It’s the eve of the 2025 anniversary edition, opening Thursday for an 11-day (and night) invasion of Theatre Network’s Roxy. And it’s getting hard to remember a time when there was no Nextfest to encourage, mentor, inspire, showcase, celebrate up-and-comers emerging into professional careers— and to broker artistic partnerships across theatre, dance, music, visual arts, film, video…. It’s getting harder still to find a professional artist in this theatre town whose career hasn’t been touched in some fashion by the bright idea hatched at Theatre Network in 1996.

Theatre Network artistic director Bradley Moss, who created the festival, says the inspiration was absence: “what there wasn’t in Edmonton” at the time. The Citadel’s Teen Fest had folded, the Kids’ Fest had moved to St. Albert…. Two important theatre schools (the U of A and MacEwan) kept graduating young artists, all at the same time…. But where would they go? Where was the place for emerging artists on the brink of a professional career to take the leap — to get experience, experiment, hone their craft, make contacts, get some momentum going?

[And for us, the audience, how could we find out what the next generation of professional artists was up to, what risks they were thinking about taking?]

Moss considered it vital that Nextfest would be a party, a gathering place for emerging artists to share ideas. Nextfest has always been serious about its playful mantra “come for the art, stay for the party.” And every Nextfest artist got some money, too, albeit a modest honorarium. It said “you are valued, we respect your contribution.”

Nextfest started small, but not that small: 100 artists, six days. And by the time Steve Pirot and Murray Utas were the director/management duo, Nextfest was an 11-day affair, celebrating the work of 500 artists.

Ellen Chorley has been the festival director since 2017. But her history with Nextfest goes back way farther than that. An award-winning playwright/ actor/ director/ dramaturg/ mentor/ teacher/ producer/ curator, who has founded both a kids’ theatre company (Promise Productions) and an experimental burlesque troupe (Send in the Girls), she’s a veritable poster child for the kind of inspiration and bonding that emerging artists discover at Nextfest.

“Nextfest is where it all started for me,” says Chorley, an effervescent spirit to whom the much-overused term “empowering” might properly be applied. Before she got the director gig she was the curator of Nextfest’s high school theatre program for four years (she herself started as a Nextfest participant as a high school kid). She’s acted in Nextfest shows, and directed them. She contributed to the famous Nextfest Nite Clubs. “Before escape rooms got popular Taylor Chadwick and I got the idea of a Nite Club where people went on missions, directed by cellphone messages.” It was a clear Nextfest gambit: “I have this weird idea….”

“My first-ever play was at Nextfest,” she says of her 20-year-old self and Bohemian Perso … not very good!” The honorarium was “my first paycheque as an artist…. It meant the world to me for  someone to say ‘you’re good at this! I believe in you!’”

Nextfest 2021. Image by Danielle Taylor.

The fire that destroyed the old Roxy in 2015 “did change the festival, of course,” says Chorley. Nextfest had shows in all kinds of far-flung places, the Gateway Theatre and La Cité francophone among them. And COVID sent the festival into the online world. But by 2022, Nextfest was live and occupying every corner of the new Roxy, the two theatres, the rehearsal room, the roof, the offices, the spanky bathroom, even the elevator.

Nextfest has always been a cross-disciplinary event. “As an artist I believe you  need to wear lots of hats,” Chorley says. “And Nextfest helps with that.” The participants tend, more and more, not to label themselves as actors, or playwrights, or directors, but “theatre artists.” Chorley agrees, “it’s more multi-disciplinary for sure. We have dance theatre with spoken text, theatre using projection and film; we’ve all learned how to edit a video….” The 10 workshops (on everything from producing a show to drag make-up) are free.

In a way, there’s no use asking “what’s new?” at this year’s edition of Nextfest. “Everything is brand new every year. That’s the point!”  declares Chorley happily. But there’s continuity, too. Nextfest follows new work from play readings and “progress showings” to mainstage premieres. And in a cross-festival venture started a couple of seasons ago, Nextfest will produce two shows at the upcoming Fringe: Jezik Sanders’ Where Foxes Lie and Stretcher Hartout’s drag/ burlesque variety show Four-Way Stretch.

On the mainstage, BatRabbit Productions unveils a much-anticipated stand-alone “sequel” to their hit bouffon show Rat Academy, which had its start at Nextfest before a year of cross-country Fringe touring. In Rat Academy 2: Gnaw And Order the worldly-wise rat Fingers (Dayna Lea Hoffmann) and acolyte rat Shrimp (Kate Yoner) are on the hunt for a home — in a province where they are clearly outsiders.

The protagonist of Kate Couture’s The Most Beautiful Man, a “progress showing” last year, is, as Chorley describes, a “20-something girl who loses her job and has to take one, as Santa’s elf. And she has to come to grips with ‘who is a good man? and who is a bad man?’.” Chorley describes the two-hander as “funny and extremely touching, a new way of looking at feminism … being in your 20s and not having a real job, everything in flux.”

“It’s my story, too…. I’ve lived it in some way,” says Chorley.” “It feels like a Nextfest show, and a homegrown Edmonton story too,” like Sheldon Elter’s Métis Mutt, Kristi Hansen’s Woody, Jeremy Baumung’s Dead Man Walking. 

Mika Boutin’s Televangelists, a Dog Bite Theatre Company production, is on a scale: 8 actors and a huge set, as Chorley describes. It takes us to the Canadian punk rock scene in 1997, “dark and very charged with that energy,” she says. “Eighteen-, 19-, 20-year-olds being new at being adults. And the loss of innocence. A very cool show, very tragic and scary…. Would I have been brave enough to program it nine years ago?” Chorley thinks maybe not.

For Peat’s Sake, which happens up close in the 30-seat Roxy rehearsal hall, “feels very current to the world we’re living in, too. But in very different ways,” says Chorley of the Wondermuck Creations production, billed as “an oral storytelling performance that taps “ecological grief.”

And that’s reflected in this year’s array of Nite Clubs, always a major Nextfest draw and “a great place to experiment,” says Chorley. They’re unpredictable pop-up performance parties with a theme,  roving artists, live music, dancing, and a sense of creative mayhem. Attendees get a map, and then they’re let loose in the building.

Friday night is the first, A Nite At The Circus, with clowns, burlesque and drag artists, magicians aerialists, burlesque, carnival games for adults — all curated by Theatre Tahanan.  The following Friday Jinxx, curated by Gemma Nye, takes as its theme “good luck, bad luck, fortune, fate,” says Chorley, and includes “immersive installations, roving entertainment, and a mainstage showcase,” followed by dancing till all hours. And for the first time, a Nextfest Nite Club goes all-ages for one night, Saturday’s Dungeons and Drag Queens. Chorley describes it as “a sort of renaissance fair.”

What’s changed in the nine years since Chorley became festival director? For one thing, she thinks, it’s become even more cross-disciplinary. For another “there’s way more space for plays about being on the threshold, people in their early 20s not knowing what’s the next step….”

And that’s your cue. The next step: for a schedule, performance descriptions, and tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.

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Taking Wagner on a wild ride into the theatre: Andy Moro talks about designing Die Walküre at Edmonton Opera

Posted on June 4, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Die Walküre, Edmonton Opera. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

When we last saw them, a year ago in Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold on the Citadel’s Maclab stage, the gods were poised uneasily on the doom-laden threshold of their new home, Valhalla.

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The Rhine maidens were still pretty cut up about the theft of their gold buried under the river. The curse of a magic ring fashioned from the stolen had already taken a toll, with more to come…. Face it, Wagner really knew how to leave a cliff-hanger for the sequel.

And here it is. As promised, Edmonton Opera returns again to theatrical setting of the Maclab — instead of their usual cavernous 2500-seat home base at the Jube — with Die Walküre, the second of Wagner’s monumental four-opera Ring Cycle, and the third to be written.

Unless you’re a die-hard Wagnerian you’re off the hook for not knowing exactly how a plot of dramatically juicy complication unravels — a brother and sister madly in love with each other, a baby, a really special sword, a sister act, a warrior maiden surrounded by a ring of fire. But there’s music you can’t not know in Die Walküre. Who can forget those born-again Wagnerians Elmer Fudd as Siegfried and Bugs Bunny as Brünhilde in their timeless “Kill the wabbit!” chase sequence in What’s Opera Doc?, set to The Ride of the Valkyries from Act III of the opera we’ll see starting Thursday.

designer Andy Moro

“If there is an iconic work of art on the planet, this is it,” laughs theatre (and opera) designer Andy Moro. “Marvel, movies, Norse mythology — this is it, man. Everybody taps into that stuff somehow!”

If you saw Peter Hinton’s production of Das Rheingold last year, in Edmonton Opera’s 60th anniversary season, you’ll have seen Moro’s striking design  bringing an epic opera into an up-close 685-seat theatre with the audience wrapped around the stage. The exuberantly articulate Calgary-based designer is back to apply his wits to Die Walküre, a production directed by EO artistic director Joel Ivany. And on a break from setting video cues in the Maclab, Moro talks about “the challenges in doing an opera with this scale, grandeur, power, this kind of gravitas, on a thrust stage, a truly theatrical, Shakespearean, environment….”

Moro, who talks fast and with built-in exclamation marks, calls this nine-singer 18-musician adaptation by the British composer Jonathan Dove  “a hybrid of pop concert, fashion show, opera, theatre! If you’re in the front row you’re going to get singer spirit on your face. It’s wild! It’s cool! It kicks the doors open to being creative!”

“You’re always pushing against time and resources,” as Moro points out. That’s nothing new. But when you’re re-locating Wagner to a theatre with a thrust stage, surrounded by the audience, the ante is upped on challenges. “What about sight lines?” for one thing. “And where does the orchestra go?”

“Why can’t we see the orchestra in opera? I want to see those guys,” he declares. For Hinton’s Das Rheingold, the musicians occupied an upper level in the Wagnerian cosmology Moro designed for the Maclab. The central stage configuration for that Ring Cycle opener was … the ring. “This time “the orchestra is in right in the centre in a cool upstage area,” Moro says. “We’ve kept the architecture, got rid of all the furniture, and stripped it bare, and white…. We’ve moved the rings around. And it’s as if we’re looking at the essence of that world, at its most raw.”

Die Walküre, Edmonton Opera. Photo supplied

The circular platform on which we saw Wotan, the CEO of the gods, waking up from a rumpled bed in an Edmonton hotel room in 1964 (a first for Wagner I think we can say) is there for Die Walküre. “But I’ve updated it,” says the designer, “and cracked it in the middle so there’s a chasm…. If Das Rheingold was a one-night fever-dream of the entire cycle, now we’re in the dream.”

There’s something dream-like, too, about the Windsor native’s own story —  an improvised route into theatre design that’s a true original, full of impulsive left turns. Moro started as a visual artist who “loved sculpture. I was working in 3D but I didn’t know anything about theatre yet.” That introduction came in Toronto via his partner at the time, a contemporary dancer. And then there was the happenstance that sculpture at the Ontario College of Art was fully subscribed, but they had space in the glass program. So Moro was a glass artist for a couple of years before a field trip to a glass mentor’s studio shared by the great Canadian theatre designer Michael Levine changed his direction. Moro was enchanted by Levine’s design maquettes.

But the “real start of it” he says of a theatre design career that has taken him across the country to theatres of every size and shape, happened in a brief stint at the Banff Centre, an artist training institution at the time. And grand opera was involved. By day, there was mentorship with the greats in Canadian design; by night he was a crew member for “big operas, giant sets, big casts.” These days, “teaching at the National Theatre School, I see that the pedagogy does count. I’m not gonna lie; there have been times when I wish I’d just learned this instead of having to figure out things the hard way,” he says cheerfully.

Dylan Thomas-Bouchier, Cheyenne Scott, Tai Amy Grauman, Shyanne Duquette, Todd Houseman in The Herd, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Edmonton audiences who saw his stunning work in the premiere of Kenneth T. Williams’ The Herd at the Citadel in 2022 will appreciate that Moro’s is a career that has leaned heavily into new work (“my favourite!”). He and his partner, the notable playwright and theatre artist Tara Beagan (Deer Woman) are co-directors of the activist Indigenous theatre Article 11. Currently they’re partnering with Toronto’s Necessary Angel and Downstage Theatre in Calgary on a new Beagan piece Nice White Lady. Article 11, he says, is basically the two of us and whoever we bring in on a project…. We were flying pretty high when COVID hit,” with a touring show on the international festival circuit that took them to Edinburgh, Melbourne, Sydney, Wellington New Zealand. Lately they’re been venturing into film (a screen version of Deer Woman is in the works).

From the start Moro worked with such theatre innovators as Daniel MacIvor, “the first person who hired me,” and Michael Hollingsworth of VideoCabaret in Toronto: “all artists who understand you need to all be in the room working together to create, from the ground up….” The example of MacIvor has lingered with Moro. “He calls himself an essentialist. If you don’t have 10 reasons why that stuff is onstage right now, get rid of it…. Every moment has to matter in every way you can think of!” Moro is down with that.

The opera part of  his career began with Hinton’s production of Missing (by the Indigenous artist Marie Clements), which premiered on the West Coast. And lately he and artistic associates have the idea of touring it, in a concert version. As an art form, opera continues to attract him, “both for its scale and its intimacy…. I’m in a sweet spot (with this chamber version of Die Walküre). I’d love to do more!” Not least it’s because “I have so much respect for singers. Like dancers, “these are super-physically-based practices. So Intense.”

Moro searches for an analogy. “It’s cherry blossoms! Everyone goes WOW, and then they’re gone and we live in their memory. There’s something about the intensity of beauty that people will flock to as we become more and more digitized,” he argues. “You jump off the cliff towards the beauty of it, the being IN it, and think of pursuing the goal instead of feeling the barriers.”

PREVIEW

Die Walküre

Edmonton Opera

By: Richard Wagner, arranged by Jonathan Dove

Directed by: Joel Ivany

Conducted by: Russell Braun

Starring: Scott Rumble, Anna Pompeeva, Jaclyn Grossman, Neil Craighead, Catherine Daniel, Giles Tomkins, Leila Kirves, Hannah Crawford, Rachael McAuley

Where: Citadel Maclab Theatre

Running: Thursday, Saturday, plus June 9, 10, 12, 13

Tickets: edmontonopera.com

  

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