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

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

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

Gossamer Feast (Stage 15, Holy Trinity Anglican Church)

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on August 15, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

 

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    

   

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

Posted on August 14, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Hello theatre friends!

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

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

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

Gratefully yours,

Liz

 

 

 

 

 

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

Posted on August 13, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

Triassic Parq, at Edmonton Fringe 2019. Photo supplied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Those who can, teach: a new theatre company debuts at the Fringe

Posted on August 12, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

Almost, Maine. The Vanguard at Edmonton Fringe 2019.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Those who can, do. Those who aren’t afraid to, teach…. And then they get up onstage at the Fringe.

The production of Almost, Maine that opens Friday at the Fringe (BYOV Stage 25) introduces a new theatre company in town. The Vanguard is made up entirely of valiant artists who have the chutzpah to put their money where their mouths are, in a particularly dramatic and tangible way. They’re all high school drama teachers, from eight or nine schools across the city. And they’re ready to practise what they preach, onstage, in public.

“Scary!” laughs actor/ director Neil Kuefler, a founding member of Thou Art Here! (specializing in “site-sympathetic” Shakespeare) and a theatre department teacher at Victoria School of the Arts. “The vision was all about collaboration, professional development, creating opportunities for educators to practice their skills, learn new ones,  hone their theatre craft.” The beneficiaries, in the end, will be the kids, who return to class, and rehearsals, this fall.

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“Immersive and hands-on,” says producer Jake Tkaczyk of the new venture, which he hopes will lead to further productions throughout the year. They’re thinking Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. 

The Vanguard picked Almost, Maine, a quirky and  much-produced 2004 romantic comedy by the New York actor John Cariani, mainly because it’s constructed of nine 10-minute vignettes of love and loss — “a lot of heart, not overly dark,” says Kuefler — in a mythical Maine town near the Canadian border. So the vignettes can be rehearsed separately, with nine directors: great scene study practice. Of the Vanguard team, “everyone acts in two pieces and directs one,” says Kuefler. 

Since it’s the Fringe, versatility is at a premium. And the Vanguard cast brings “a wide diversity of experience” to the enterprise, as Kuefler says. “Hey, I can design the poster. Mark (Mark Vetsch) is great with lighting. Scott (Scott Shpeley, actor/ rock musician/ composer) can do the sound board….” It’s the teacher version of “hey, my uncle’s got a barn. Let’s put on a show.”

“We’re doing theatre on the front line,” says Kuefler. “After all, we’re teaching the next generation of theatre-makers.”

Almost, Maine runs at Strathcona High School Friday through Aug. 23. 

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‘Hello everybody, my name is TJ’ – 25 years of Fringe for TJ Dawe

Posted on August 12, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

TJ Dawe in Operatic Panic Attack. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Hello everybody. Thanks for coming. My name’s TJ. I’m here to tell you a story….”

It’s been 25 years since an underachieving West Coast actor, fresh from theatre school, discovered something unexpected and empowering about the Canadian showbiz. It was called the Fringe; there was a string of them across the country.

And here’s the thing that changed everything for the wry, spectacled, star soloist of the Fringe circuit, it was “a world of people who almost exclusively create their own work,” performed for theatre audiences who “want something new, something that plays with them in a way they’d never been played with before….”

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In the summer of 1994, TJ Dawe found himself unexpectedly with his U Vic pals touring Canadian Fringes, Montreal to Victoria. He’d been cast in Daniel MacIvor’s Never Swim Alone, directed and stage managed by David Cheoros (who would later move to Edmonton and become the director of our monster Fringe for a time). “It was life-changing,” he says,  musing on the improbability of his total immersion, and “the paths that all come back to that first tour.”  

Though the Vancouver Fringe was on the same block as his high school, the 20-year-old artist who would become the highest-profile  solo star of the ever-expanding Canadian summer festival season, had never even seen a Fringe show. Dawe remembers his frustratingly lean “middle-of-the-pack” theatre school years, where he worked hard, but never felt the same visceral attachment to Shakespeare as he did to the Marx Brothers. “They don’t exactly allow you to improvise your way through Shakespeare and Caryl Churchill,” he sighs. “In retrospect it’s so clear…. I was being trained to be an auditioning actor when what I really wanted to do was to tell, to write and perform, my own stories.”

And as Edmonton Fringe audiences have known first hand — Tired Clichés arrived here in 1999, followed closely by Labrador and The Slipknot (Dawe’s breakthrough hit) — that’s exactly what he’s been doing ever since.

In honour of his 25th anniversary of Fringe touring, the nomadic storyteller arrives at Where The Wild Things Fringe with his most-performed show, The Slipknot, and a new show, Operatic Panic Attack. Plus, of course, his usual assortment of backstage collaborations in directing, dramaturgical, writing, including Charlie Ross’s One-Man Star Wars and One-Man Avengers, newcomer Rodney Decroo’s Didn’t Hurt, and Mark Meer’s new solo play Fear And Loathing And Lovecraft, adapted from the obscure cult novel The Damned Highway. 

TJ Dawe in Operatic Panic Attack. Photo supplied.

Dawe is typically self-deprecating.  “I didn’t study ‘dramaturgy’ formally,” he says. “For me, it just comes down to asking questions, probing…. ‘O, that’s interesting; tell me more about that’.” That’s his technique, too, when it comes to mentoring people creating solo shows. “We’re often unaware of the most outstanding and obvious aspects of ourselves. Asking questions gives them another perspective.” His view of directing is similarly open-ended: “I’m the sounding board, there to give feedback and ask questions.” 

The Slipknot has all the signatures of early Dawe, with its intertwined trio of stories about iffy jobs he’s had, and the way he lets the anecdotal strings out then gradually, skillfully reels them back into to a single track. “It’s still fun to do,” he says genially, on the phone from Wells, B.C. where he’s been performing the show at an arts festival. “Not an emotionally taxing show. A lot of jokes and stories. Verbal acrobatics. A happy ending.”

TJ Dawe in Operatic Panic Attack. Photo supplied.

Operatic Panic Attack is much different, Dawe thinks. For one thing, “it’s a straight-up story, without a weave of philosophical or theoretic threads.” The new show, which premiered at the Orlando Fringe this spring,  had its origins in his 11-minute contribution to a Vancouver autobiographical story slam, The Flame.

For another, it ventures into the “deep and emotional territory,” as he puts it, that make it hard to do, “painful but cathartic….” Dawe uses the word “healing” a lot. 

“For the last 10 years the shows I’ve done are a lot more emotional, more personal,” he says. “The risks are bigger, it can be scary. But that’s what makes the pay-off greater.” In early shows, The Slipknot among them, he avoiding referring to himself onstage by name, his own or any other. As of 2008, and Totem Figures, “I used my own real name … an unwritten contract with the audience that I’m telling them what really happened, that I’m sticking to the truth, I’m exploring the real details of my life — without fudging anything to make a better story. I’m not letting myself off the hook.”

After all, that show, he says, was “a sort of overview of my life…. If I had my own Mount Rushmore or Sergeant Pepper album cover, what would be on it?” 

“And that’s what I’ve done ever since,” says Dawe. “‘Hello. My name’s TJ….’ When I receive love from the audience, I know it’s for the real me.” A New York collaborator on a pop-culture parody called 6 Chick Flicks (Dawe was dramaturg), marvelled that the offstage and onstage Dawe, whether in a restaurant or a rehearsal hall, seemed exactly the same to her, in rhythm and energy. Dawe was mightily pleased.  “That’s exactly what I’m going for.”

The shows of the last decade all power up the sense of “you are not alone” in the audience. “Men in particular have a tendency to regard asking for help as a sign of weakness.”

Marathon “was me learning about my ‘social blind spot’, an inclination to exclude myself, to project non-belonging into social situations.” Burn Job, which was his discovery of ‘holotropic breathing’, “showed me how much I’d rejected my inner child.” In Medicine Dawe revealed his “intrusive visions, of a disturbing nature. A form of anxiety.”

As you’ll discover in Operatic Panic Attack, that “real me” wasn’t an opera buff when the college-age Dawe got cast in a non-singing role as a supernumerary in a Pacific Opera production of Verdi’s Macbeth. “I’d never seen an opera; I’d never been interested enough…. But the $75 seemed like a fortune to me.”

Luckily he knew the Shakespeare play from theatre school. “I could decipher a lot of the Italian in the soliloquies. It didn’t seem like the warbling nonsense opera often seems to people who don’t know it…. After it was done, I missed it.”  He got more non-singing opera gigs after that, in heavy-hitters like Carmen, The Elixir of Love, (Atom Egoyan’s) Salomé, Il Trovatore. 

There it is, right in the title: panic. “I had a fling with one of the chorus members,” says Dawe of his opera debut lo these many years. “And it led to a long panic attack : anxiety about sex…. I’d had panic attacks growing up but didn’t know that’s what they were. The shame, the sexual anxiety as a university student when people are having sex a lot and I wasn’t, the anxiety about the dream of being an actor and it really was not going well: it all came to a head at 21.”

“It’s a horrific feeling; I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,” says Dawe. “And it’s so isolating. I thought I was a one-in-a-million freak. And that makes the pain and stress of panic even worse…. The show is a message of solidarity to the younger version of me. Seeing someone talk about this onstage and not be booed off, or struck by lightning — it would have meant the world to me.” 

Dawe, an empathetic collaborator on both sides of the border, has a long resumé of projects that involve adapting web and screen projects for the stage. He’s been in L.A. helping movie star Richard Dreyfuss fashion a one-man career retrospective for the stage. It debuted in London, with plans to tour. He’s working with Mom Truths on a small-scale stage version of their popular podcast.  

Meanwhile, there’s the Edmonton Fringe, and a schedule of tight squeezes and near misses (just like yours). Dawe has two of his own shows, a high-contrast pair, to perform in Edmonton. And he’s had a hand in four other Fringe productions. “I can’t wait to see it,” he says of Meer’s Fear And Loathing And Lovecraft. “He’s such a brilliant and fluent character player…. No one but Mark could do this. With his love of horror and genre fiction, he instantly and effortlessly creates an environment….”

That’s the spirit of collaboration, generous and curious, that’s kept a soloist at the Fringe and on the road for 25 years.   

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

Posted on August 11, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on August 11, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hotel Vortruba, Ragmop Theatre. Photo supplied.

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

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

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

Posted on August 10, 2019 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check Me Out, NextGen Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2019.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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