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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Into the woods, a screwball talent search: On The Banks of the Nut at Teatro. A review

Posted on May 31, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In On The Banks Of the Nut, the vintage Stewart Lemoine screwball comedy getting an expertly acted revival at Teatro Live! (its first in 15 years) you’ll repeatedly hear six words bound to up the ante on impending chaos. “I can help you with that.”

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Does Noreen Cuthbert (the delightful Bella King), a premium office temp — she’s an Inkwell Girl after all! —have a plan? Well, no. But neither does her new temporary boss Pinkerton Sprague (Sam Free, a find), the “federal talent agent” for the state of Wisconsin. The “eminent temp” quickly ascertains that he is a civil servant “without a clue of any kind.” And she takes charge, as Inkwell Girls have been trained to do.

“I’m a soldier of fortune in the clerical world,” declares the bright, breezy Noreen in a turn of phrase that, like so many in this nutty, and very funny, 2001 show, is pure Lemoine, floated with breezy good cheer by King at high speed.

What ensues, at Noreen’s instigation, is a quest, in the rural Wisconsin of 1951 — “we must cast our net wide” — to find “a citizen of exceptional talent.” On Chantel Fortin’s evocative green-tinged set, it brings the pair to Nut River Lodge, in the middle of a romantic crisis involving the powerful aphrodisiac effect of great orchestral music. Notably that hit-meister of late Germanic Romanticism Gustav Mahler, and specifically the third movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony, and even more specifically — Lemoine is nothing if not specific about his musical references — the post-horn solo therein.

On a big-city trip to see the Chicago Symphony in concert, the eccentric rural hotel proprietor Vivien Phlox (Rachel Bowron) has had a Mahler epiphany. And she’s fallen for the post-horn player Ingo Flussveld  (Mathew Hulshof). Mahler has spoken to her via this niche virtuoso on an obscure archaic instrument, who has an uncanny resemblance to the late great composer.

Back home the morning after, Vivien is conflicted about her own “misbehaviour.” Bowron, a Teatro leading lady of long standing with a galactic smile, who can speak volumes by arching an eyebrow, turns in a sparkling performance, skeptical and flamboyant and flirtatious; Vivien seems to be auditioning to see who she is (it’s in the plot).

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

The arrival of Ingo Flussveld, still in his performance tux and hilariously (dare one say Germanically?) lugubrious in Mathew Hulshof’s performance, is a challenge, for both parties and for the peppy problem-solver Noreen. Can it be right, Ingo wonders, to have “an immutable love and be forced to pay for it with one’s happiness?” Extravagant unrequited passion intermingled with lush despair: It’s a veritable manifesto of Romanticism.

It need hardly be said that the mainstream screwball repertoire isn’t exactly crammed with surprising developments that put the capital R back in Romantic. The poetry of Tennyson is also rarely tapped by screwball narratives.

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

Wandering through On The Banks Of The Nut, is a tourist who’s arrived for some r and r, hoping to finish reading the Mazo de la Roche series. She’s sometimes in tweed with bird-watching binoculars around her neck, sometimes in a bathrobe carrying her purse. Leona Brausen’s costumes are a stitch, in every way.

Brausen, who originated the role of Sylvia Partangle herself, is a hard act to follow. But the Calgary-based comedy veteran Karen Johnson Diamond in this her Teatro debut, is a riot, perplexed but game.    

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

Suddenly everything goes madcap, as screwball comedies have an inevitable tendency to do (pull one thread, tell one lie, and see what happens). Like all good improvisers, agent provocateur Noreen is a an unfaze-able Yes-sayer, with one exception. She nixes pie-eating before 11 in the morning (it sets up “unreasonable expectations for the rest of the day”). Anyhow she advises the boss that they should remain incognito to get the best results. And in a fine comic performance from newcomer Free, the talent agent tucks energetically, and with serious intent, into his assignment, with unexpected results.

The production directed by the playwright has the cast in perpetual motion. And the scene changes, accompanied by the jaunty Mozart French horn concertos, are fun. Which makes On The Banks Of The Nut the only screwball (to my knowledge) with not one but two kinds of horn jokes. Taking a cue from Gustav, voices intersect, and incipient chaos swells climactically. You just have to shake your head and smile.

REVIEW

On The Banks Of The Nut

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Stewart Lemoine

Directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Sam Free, Bella King, Rachel Bowron, Mathew Hulshof, Karen Johnson Diamond

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday through June 15

Tickets: teatrolive.com

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The moment for a screwball comedy and a take-charge heroine: Teatro Live! revives On The Banks Of The Nut, a preview

Posted on May 29, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Sam Free and Bella King in On The Banks Of The Nut, Teatro Live! Photo by Ryan Parker

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Have you lost your sense of fun?

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If it’s crossed your mind lately to wonder how on earth everything has turned out much worse that you ever imagined, it might just be the moment for a screwball comedy in your life.

Teatro Live! pops the cork on one, starting Friday, with a revival, the first since 2010, of Stewart Lemoine’s 2001 On The Banks of the Nut. In the course of it you’ll meet a heroine who, in classic screwball fashion, takes charge of people’s lives and screws them up — in a good way.

Bella King, who plays Noreen Cuthburt, calls her, appreciatively, “very relentlessly positive. No moments of anxiety. She is never worried…. She does a lot of problem-solving for everyone!” King, who has a kind of sunny buoyancy about her in conversation, does concede that Noreen “tells a lot of lies. But not (maliciously). And she has a way of bringing out other people’s honesty.” .

Built into screwball comedies is “the element of having a good time,” says Lemoine, who’s written more than a few, including Vidalia, Skirts On Fire, Whiplash Weekend, For The Love of Cynthia. De rigueur is “an exhilaration, an exuberance in trying to solve everything.” A screwball, he thinks, is different than the door-slamming frenzy of farces, “hiding things in a contained space…. A screwball is free-range. Kind of amiable.”

He points to one of the classics of the genre, the 1938 Howard Hawks screwball Bringing Up Baby, starring Katharine Hepburn as “a madcap heiress who blithely sails through life, as everyone’s else’s turns to chaos,” as Lemoine summarizes. The heroine in screwball comedies tends to be “a young woman who’s a bit of an imp.”

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

In On The Banks Of The Nut, one of Lemoine’s favourites in his own archive of screwballs, Noreen, a temp, finds herself working for a “federal talent agent” charged with finding “a citizen of rare ability.” Since agent Pinkerton Sprague (Sam Free) hasn’t got a clue how to go about this assignment, Noreen immediately steps up. What ensues is an adventure in the Wisconsin hinterland in 1951. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. So, OK, Noreen takes charge of his life for him,” grins King.

Lemoine calls it “taking temping to the ultimate.” Noreen “steps into a situation,” notes that “this isn’t working, so we’ll try that.”  As she says, “you can’t just put your oars in the water without rowing,” or words to that effect. And she “reinvents everyone’s lives.”

If you saw Teatro’s original musical Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s you’ll have appreciated King’s comic (and musical) versatility.  She played the prim by-the-rulebook manager of the title nightclub, who discovers, during a show-stealing encounter at a bus stop that she might just be a wee bit attracted to the establishment’s bartender (Josh Travnik).

Since she graduated from MacEwan’s musical theatre program, King has taken her air of wholesome innocence and great pipes into an assortment of ingenue roles. Fringe audiences have seen her in musicals, both the homegrown and Off-Broadway variety ([title of show] and High School Musical, for example). In Plain Jane’s 2020 production of the musical Fun Home, she was the middle of the musical’s three Allisons, who discovered she was gay at about the same time she discovered the same thing about her dad.

Bella King in Fun Home, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Mat Busby.

“I look back on it now as a life-changer,” she says of Fun Home, the heartbreaking musical itself, and enhanced for her by the experience of being in it alongside Plain Jane artistic director Kate Ryan, a long time teacher and mentor. And earlier this season King was Janet, half the pair of innocents whose eyes are opened wide in Grindstone’s Rocky Horror Show.

Actually music does figure prominently in On The Banks Of The Nut. But it’s by heavy-hitters like Mozart and Mahler, never big in hum-along circles.  For the first time since high school King is in a play not a musical. But she does find does find “something musical, and lyrical” in Lemoine’s writing for characters who are amusingly literate and articulate. “Really long thoughts,” she smiles. “You know exactly when you’ve said the wrong word!”

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

Lemoine explains why the eminent composer Gustav Mahler makes his long overdue screwball comedy debut at Teatro in On The Banks Of The Nut. This happens when the eccentric proprietor of Nut River Lodge (Rachel Bowron) visits Chicago, goes to a Chicago Symphony concert, and falls for the post-horn player (Mathew Hulshof) in Mahler’s Third Symphony. It’s a work on a grand scale, as Lemoine points out, “with a contralto and also a choir with women and children.” And the post-horn has “an amazing sound and is murder to play, an archaic instrument with no valves.” Lemoine implies that this  is all prime screwball material.

This summer King returns to musicals in two Fringe shows. One is Uniform Theatre’s production of Sondheim’s dark and weird (and timely as hell) Assassins, with its gallery of dreamers who had a go at offing American presidents. Straight Edge Theatre, connoisseurs of dark comedy (Krampus, Conjoined), premieres their latest, Final Girl, spun from the horror movie trope.

Meanwhile, there’s a peppy and positive temp to play, alongside veteran Teatro stars Bowron and Hulshof (and making their  Teatro debuts Karen Johnson Diamond and Sam Free). “They’re so funny, so rooted,” says King, who considers Bowron and Hulshof a veritable master-class in Lemoinian acting. “Their work is so detailed. Great energy to be around!”

And at this point in an exasperating anxiety-making year, Noreen is there, King smiles, “to take charge, give people a bit of hope.”

PREVIEW

On The Banks Of The Nut

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Stewart Lemoine

Directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Sam Free, Bella King, Rachel Bowron, Mathew Hulshof, Karen Johnson Diamond

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday through June 15

Tickets: teatrolive.com

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‘You felt like home right from the get-go’. KaldrSaga, Cardiac’s ‘new queer, old Norse cabaret’. A review

Posted on May 27, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s a very unusual storyteller’s cabaret happening in a handsome brick- and wood-lined room in the river valley. Norse mythology: where friends meet. And if the gods are overseeing the whole operation from their own spot in the time-space continuum, I’m pretty sure they’d be smiling at the effrontery, and the chutzpah, of it all.

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And in the course of it, KaldrSaga, as billed “a new queer, old Norse cabaret,” shape-shifts itself into a play about high-stakes friendship, in this ingenious latest from playwright Harley Howard-Morison and Cardiac Theatre.

In the former Ortona Armoury, reno-ed into a new life as ArtsHub Ortona, two queer ex-friends, a storytelling double-act, are having an awkward, fractious reunion. One of them is the instigator and cajoler; the other, resentful, is the cajöle-ee (it’s an ancient Norse word I just made up).   

When we met them in 2019, Kaldr and Saga were friends, getting together in a pub after a year apart, to tell queer origin stories inspired by Norse mythology. Which is, as we learned, a veritable repository of gender-fluid exuberance. This new cabaret, by Harley Howard-Morison and inventively directed by Sarah J Culkin, has Kaldr (Graham Mothersill) and Saga (Michelle Diaz) singles out queer friendship origin stories — and in the telling, their own emerges.

This is a relationship on the rocks judging by the long (I found it a bit over-long) first “Movement” of four, entitled “Shit-Slinging All Around.” And the question of whether friendship, in particular queer friendship, once lost can be reclaimed, is in the balance.

It will give you some idea of the sense of humour at play to know that as the show opens, Saga (that’s Dr. Saga Steinundötor to you), whose PhD is in nihilism, is delivering a TED talk on meaning. And more specifically on how there isn’t any. Kaldr, who’s crashed the talk rather spectacularly, has been making a name dipping into their shared repertoire of stories to get commercial traction online; Saga calls it selling out.

The actors in Culkin’s production are a study in contrast: Diaz is petite and peppery and Mothersill is strapping and forceful. The performances are go-for-the-gusto in a multi-layered assignment to play storytellers who act in their own stories. And both seem jazzed by connecting with the audience directly — competing for our favour, improvising, annotating. They constantly step outside the frameworks they establish — the multiple gods, animals, people that their main characters Kaldr and Saga play — in order to deliver amusingly barbed asides or critiques of the narrative, the gods, their performances, the odd theatre joke about “main character energy” — and then they step back in. They’re their own stage managers, in a playful way. This will sound impossibly complicated. But the crazy scramble of is part of the fun (this is not a show that turns its nose up at goofiness).

The designer is Whittyn Jason, and they provide knapsacks full of props. A lot of braids and fake moustaches, weaponry, hats fly through the show, with more to come in the grand finale. And Kena León’s sound design is a zinger, with its own punch lines. The pace of Culkin’s production is dizzying. And Howard-Morison’s writing is bright and witty; contemporary asides and Norse idioms jostle together in his script.

The first story Kaldr and Saga re-create, from their best-of vault, is a funny reimagining of that traditional bastion of machismo, the Western. This cowboy vaudeville has queer characters (they ride into the sunrise not the sunset, “two boys, and a horse under each”), a queer attraction-at-first-sight scene with an alluring stranger, frankly fake accents, sight gags, and a generous assortment of double-enten soundtrack to match.

The central feature is the challenge of a female gunslinger who visits a graveyard, dressed in manly Western gear, to summon the spirit of her deceased father from Valhalla and reclaim his sword. The question apparently is whether dad will stay dead or not.

“Dragnarök,” a flamboyant drag revue, has roots in the story of tough-guy Norse god Thor, always accompanied by thunder, who wears a dress to a wedding in order to get his signature hammer back. Howard-Morison imagines a confrontation between Thor, played by Saga, and Thor’s teenage son Mosey, hilariously played by Kaldr, sulking because his dad won’t let him quit martial arts and take musical theatre studies — Hammerstein to Hamilton — instead. How this leads to a go-for-the-gusto double drag number is something I’ll leave with you. Funny, and unexpectedly heart-catching, too.

The final story is about an unusual friendship in a war-centric world, between Tyr, a wayward son of Odin, and Fenrir, a wolf who hasn’t lived up to his billing in monstrousness. And there’s a sacrificial price to be paid for Tyr’s loyalty. There’s a nutty sort of magic to the way it’s told by Kaldr and Saga, using homely objects that will make you smile and test your rapport with the story as it unfolds. A ball of yarn turns in a particularly poignant performance as Fenrir.

It’s fun and spirited. And in the end, as KaldrSaga returns to the academic question of meaning, it turns out there’s a kind of redemption about the act of telling a story in itself. That’s what friends are for. Welcome back, Cardiac.

12thnight talks to playwright Howard-Morison and director Culkin in this preview.

REVIEW

KaldrSaga: a new queer, old Norse cabaret

Theatre: Cardiac

Written by: Harley Howard-Morison

Directed by: Sarah J Culkin

Where: ArtsHub Ortona, 9722 102 St.

Running: Friday through June 8, Fridays through Sundays

Tickets: cardiactheatre.ca

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Making merry with murder: A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder at Grindstone, a review

Posted on May 25, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Oscar Derkx in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudrea

Murder most foul?

Yes, we laughed and laughed. How can you not be tickled by an evening of inspired wickedness in the theatre where you find yourself charmed by a serial killer, and overcome with mirth at the assorted demises of his victims?

Don’t even try to wipe the smile off your face when you see Grindstone Theatre’s lethal musical comedy sparkler A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, at the Orange Hub. The mortality rate is awfully high in the 2014 multiple Tony Award winner by Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak — a clever faux-Edwardian concoction inspired by the same 1907 novel that also inspired the Alex Guinness film Kind Hearts and Coronets. It tips its chapeau to the English music hall, to the sophisticated shrewdness of Noel Coward, to the multi-syllabic daffiness of Gilbert and Sullivan. O death, where is thy sting?

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In a performance of sublime comic bravado, nimbleness, and ingenuity, Ron Pederson dies eight times in the show, as nearly all the aristocratic D’Ysquiths (say “Die-Squith” of course)— a gallery of inbred upper-class twits, snobs, buffoons, and grotesques. It is a true tour de force, perfectly suited to the rather breath-taking multiple talents of Pederson.

I say ‘nearly’ all the D’Ysquiths. BUT, there’s a D’Ysquith Pederson doesn’t get to play. The dispatching of the heirs, one after the other, is done by the forgotten D’Ysquith, the one no one, including him, saw coming. Penniless Montague Navarro is a distant and disinherited relative living in worthy poverty at the outset, who sets out to off every D’Ysquith who stands between him and the title of ninth Earl of Highhurst.

Oscar Derkx in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.

Oscar Derkx, a comic actor of finesse and impeccable timing, is a charmer as the disconcertingly adorable Monty. The show doesn’t work if he isn’t disarming.

Monty’s grievances, and murderous campaign, begin when he finds out in a chance encounter with one of her friends (Ruth Alexander, riotously jaunty as Miss Shingle) that his mother was of noble birth, cruelly banished by the family when she ran off with a Castilian (and worse: a Castilian who was also a musician). And so the blood-letting begins. I’m very partial to the New York Times description from years ago that it’s as if Sweeney Todd were written by P.G. Wodehouse. Derkx delivers the very funny song Poison In My Pocket with a sense of discovery that will crack you up.

Sam Hutchings, Oscar Derkx, Sawyer Craig in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

Monty has not one but two love interests, a romantic complication which escalates as the death count rises along with his fortunes. And both women are perfectly cast in Martin’s production: Sam Hutchings as the sexy social-climbing vixen Sibella and Sawyer Craig as the sweetly daffy Phoebe D’Ysquith. Derkx knows exactly what to do with a romantic ballad. And both Hutchings and Craig are impressive singers, with contrasting soprano voices, the one floating pure musical theatre top notes, and the other trilling away operatically. Monty, Sibella, and Phoebe get a delish operetta trio, I’ve Decided To Marry You, staged as a farcical scene between two doors as Monty scrambles acrobatically to keep his squeezes apart.

Kudos to the ensemble — tourists, mourners, servants, cops — which includes both seasoned performers like Cathy Derkach (a riot as the snorting dragon Lady D’Asquith) and recent theatre school grads, all of whom tuck into the tone and style, both musical and spoken, with comic gravitas.

Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.

The music, played expertly by the first-rate seven-member pit band led by the invaluable musical director/ sound designer Simon Abbott, is complicated. Pederson sings intricately rhymed patter songs, and more Coward-ly musical provocations, in a range of crystalline blue-blood accents (the razzle-dazzle lyrics by Lutvak and Freedman are one of the delights of the evening). Pederson dances, he bends, he seems to change height, weight, and age at will … all at top speed. He exits as one outrageous D’Ysquith and enters, re-costumed and re-constituted, as another — a demented cleric, a fey beekeeper, a eugenicist body-builder in a pith helmet…. The blustering present Earl, Lord Adalburt D’Ysquith, is the most obnoxious of all. His song I Don’t Understand the Poor, complete with chorus (“to be so debased/ is in terrible taste….”) is G&S satire of the highest calibre.

Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.

One of my favourites, and it turns out one of the hardest to dispatch, is Hyacinth D’Ysquith, a career philanthropist/ narcissist, voraciously combing through the British Empire for a cause after her campaign on behalf of imbeciles and idiots goes bust. “We’ll find ourselves some lepers in the Punjab…”

Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.

But as a theatre lover, you may also bestow your particular favour on the family thespian Salomé D’Ysquith, in a hilariously disastrous performance as Hedda Gabler. Her exit proves fatal, a matter of real bullets in the stage gun. Killed, yes, as the culprit admits in his diary, before she could be slaughtered by the critics. The deaths and the death scenes stage managed by Monty are riotously à propos.

This elaborately daft material cries out for a creative hand in stage lunacy to match. Which is what it gets from the musical theatre-savvy director Martin. Sight gags abound, along with amusing tableaux. All this chipper death and destruction happens in a red-velvet curtain-draped vaudeville theatre within a theatre. The designer is Chelsea Payne Evason; the locale changes are assisted by projections. And speaking of changes, which in Pederson’s case happen at a hectic pace, everything is assisted by Lieke Den Bakker’s profusion of apt and witty costumes. The nuttiness knows no bounds.

A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder is the finale (and most ambitious) production of Grindstone’s enterprising premiere mainstage season of full-sized musicals, produced on a scale at the Orange Hub. And they’re killin’ it with this therapeutic comic mayhem. Give your laugh muscles a work-out before they atrophy, times being what they are.

REVIEW

A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder

Theatre: Grindstone

Written by: Robert L. Freedman (book) and Steven Lutvak (music), Freedman and Lutvak (lyrics)

Directed by: Byron Martin

Starring: Ron Pederson, Oscar Derkx, Sam Hutchings, Sawyer Craig, Ruth Alexander, Aniqa Charania, Cathy Derkach, David Michael Juma, Max Fingerote, Tana Bumhira, Zakary Matsuba

Where: Orange Hub, 10045 156 St.

Running: through June 1

Tickets: grindstonetheatre.ca

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