The dystopian vision of Trevor Schmidt: a new season at Northern Light Theatre

Posted on October 10, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Holly Turner and Kristin Johnston in Origin of the Species, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Frankly, I’ve always been more interested in women’s stories than men’s,” says Trevor Schmidt, his dander up on a break last week from rehearsals for Origin of the Species.

The highly unusual feminist two-hander comedy by the English playwright Bryony Lavery (Frozen), gets its Canadian premiere Friday in the Schmidt production that launches Northern Light Theatre’s 43rd season.

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“It’s been my mandate since the ‘90s,” declares Schmidt, a 16-season veteran of the NLT artistic director job, of his record of bringing predominantly women’s stories to the stage.“I find and write the plays that speak to me…. I’m not a typical man, I guess. I wasn’t raised that way; I’m an outsider…. I think I have an affinity to stories that tell that kind of narrative. My sympathies are there. Toxic masculinity frightens me….”

What gets him really riled is the misperception that the striking proliferation of female characters and stories in his own plays and the ones he chooses for Northern Light constitutes

some sort of accommodation to hashtag trend.“No, it’s what I’ve been doing for 20 years! And it wasn’t to appease an agenda that’s forced on us by funders or social media!”

The actor/ playwright/ director/ designer/ producer is remembering The Unconscious Collective, the puckishly named indie co-op he launched here in the 90s at the behest of four actresses who weren’t getting any work. They brought Schmidt, a Calgary transplant, a play to direct. “I thought I could write a better play for them. And I did….” What followed was a series of bizarre black comedies (The Calf Killers, Four-Lane Highway, Precious Goods) and moving portraits of women in plays built from interlocking monologues (The Watermelon Girls, Tales From The Hospital). 

Kristin Johnston with director Trevor Schmidt, getting a trim on the set of Origin of the Species. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Every performer you’ll see onstage in the upcoming three-production NLT lineup is a woman. And that’s not the first time in Schmidt’s tenure that’s happened. In Origin of the Species an archaeologist (Holly Turner) on a dig discovers the skeleton of a four million year-old woman (Kristin Johnston), and since no one wants it — “she was just an old woman and so was I” — takes it home. A kiss, and the prehistoric woman comes to life. Then the archaeologist must teach her new room-mate how to live, to think, to imagine, in the supposed enlightenment of the 20th century world. 

What Schmidt finds irresistible is the play’s union of “the very touching mother/daughter relationship and a lot of slapstick and physical comedy.… It’s this wonderful early feminist play about the empowerment of women, women from different time periods.” 

“I love plays that start out as comedy and become something else. Like my Fringe shows with Darrin (Darrin Hagen, of Guys in Disguise), comedies that have what we call the sucker punch.”

Northern Light seasons are peppered with plays authored by writers whose names don’t ring a bell with audiences here. The Cardiac Shadow by the American Clay McLeod Chapman (he’s the head writer for Spider Man, Typhoid Mary and other Marvel creations) counts as another unlikely discovery by Schmidt, who seems to have an instinct for finding promising scripts in obscure corners. The Canadian premiere production at Northern Light Jan. 1i to Feb. 2 is “a really interesting hybrid of film, dance, theatre that we haven’t seen in Edmonton for quite a while,” says Schmidt.  

The story, chillingly, is borrowed from real-life history: Nazi experiments in extreme temperatures conducted on young women prisoners of Ravensbrück concentration camp. “The first half is a film, with a voice-over of the Nazi doctor,” devised by filmmaker Katrina Beatty of Loud Whisper Productions. The second half, directed by Schmidt, features four dancers from the Good Women Dance Collective, Northern Light’s co-producer, performing to voice-overs.

19 Weeks, a co-production with Azimuth Theatre starring that company’s co-artistic director Vanessa Sabourin (March 29 to April 13), is a true story about the playwright. Emily Steel, a Welsh writer living in Australia, made an agonizing, and controversial, choice to have an abortion when she learned that her baby had Down Syndrome. “The script is so harrowing and difficult. So truthful,” says Schmidt. “And also a story we don’t hear.” It will prove, Schmidt predicts, “extremely emotionally provocative to people…. I’m really looking forward to our “salon” talk-backs. 

Schmidt finds “terribly disheartening” the idea that artists must confine themselves to telling stories exclusively about their own lives (or gender or sexuality or ethnic background). “Can we not look to the universal? I want to see the bigger story…. You have to see yourself somewhere in every story.… You’re not always the protagonist; sometimes you’re the antagonist, and that’s not always a comfortable place to be….”

“For me, a play where everyone behaves the way we wish people behaved isn’t inherently theatrical,” he argues. “We need to show the world as it is, not just as we want it to be. How else can we change what needs to be changed? That means someone in your play may be racist, someone may be homophobic. But it doesn’t make your play racist or sexist.

“Every single theatre piece that I want to do is about your responsibility to yourself versus your responsibility to others…. You’re faced with a moral dilemma whether to do the noble and right thing that will make you a good person or take the cowardly choice, to serve yourself first. That’s the tug of war that makes plays interesting. 

“I tend to program shows where people fail, and things end unhappily. In my experience in life that’s pretty true,” says Schmidt, who self-identifies as a contrarian (“I was that defiant red-head child with an extremely heightened sense of justice”). “They’re confused, the people in my plays; they’re struggling to find their point of view. They don’t always have one yet.”

Tickets for Origin of the Species, and Northern Light Theatre subscriptions: 780-471-1586, northernlighttheatre.com.

 

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Gertrude and Alice go sitcom, at the Grindstone

Posted on October 5, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Gertrude Stein, Basket, and Alice B. Toklas. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Leona Brausen as Gertrude Stein, Gertrude And Alice. Photo supplied.

Gertrude and Alice: They’re the famously eccentric American couple who held court as paid-up members of the glittering Parisian avant-garde of the ‘20s.

And now, once a month, you’ll find Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, large as life, on the tiny stage at the Grindstone Comedy Club & Bistro, in an improvised sitcom starring Leona Brausen and Davina Stewart. Sunday night the pair are back for a Thanksgiving edition of Gertrude and Alice (at their new time, 7 p.m.) that includes their kooky upstairs neighbour L’il Dickie, played by Trevor Schmidt.

Brausen explains that she and Stewart originated the characters in Die-Nasty’s 25th anniversary season in 2015. “Ridiculous stuff!” she declares of an improvised soap narrative that blithely bounced off history into wild left turns of impromptu comedy. “At one point Salvador Dali (Mark Meer) made a statue of Gertrude,” Brausen recalls. “And she came to life and started murdering people, like The Penguin from Batman…. Basically, we’d just hold salons and have guests and parties!”

Davina Stewart as Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude And Alice. Photo supplied.

For every edition, they borrow a quote from the enigmatic Stein (of “there is no there there” fame) to establish the theme. In honour of Thanksgiving: “silent gratitude isn’t very much to anyone.”

Brausen, the Teatro La Quindicina star and costume designer who played Lady Bracknell in the hit summer production of The Importance of Being Earnest, says she’s tried to read Stein novels. “I just couldn’t make it through…. Random weirdness, and not as fast-paced as we might like these days,” she says tactfully, approving of the former, not so much of the latter.

“We are happy weirdoes,” she says of the characters you’ll meet “an hour of totally made-up stuff … with a little Jackie Gleason thrown in.” Gertrude is very apt to arrive onstage, put down her lunchbox, and holler “where’s my dinner, Alice?”

Brausen and Stewart first brought the characters to  the Grindstone last spring, “as a total experiment.” And they quickly realized “we need direction; otherwise, we’re just yapping!” as Brausen puts it.

That’s where the audience comes in: they’re the surrogate director. Brausen and Stewart get the audience to write answers to the questions of the night in the lobby before the show starts. “We put all the little pieces of paper in a bucket onstage, and every time we walk by we pick one out.” They’ve tried “what’s your worst date ever?”; everyone has one of those. Sunday night it’s “what are you thankful for?.”

Davina Stewart (top), Leona Brausen, Trevor Schmidt in Gertrude and Alice. Photo supplied.

The size of the Grindstone stage does make hosting salons a challenge. There are other ways, though, to get guests into the act. Now that the “sitcom upstairs neighbours” L’il Dickie and Fat Frank (Darrin Hagen) have broken up, it’s entirely possible that the former will starting dating. “I tried to write him a Grindr profile,” laughs Brausen. She predicts that L’il Dickie will start bringing guys over to Gertrude and Alice’s place.

Brausen’s witty touch with costumes is currently on display in Teatro’s season finale Skirts on Fire, a screwball comedy set in 1950s Manhattan. She’s having fun with Gertrude and Alice, and the 20s boho look. “I’m the uni-brow; Davina’s the moustache,” laughs Brausen. “ I wear a long women’s jacket, dark socks, shirt and tie, wingtip shoes.  And I’ve cut the worst gray wig in the worst way! Davina as Alice has a dress with a kimono over it….”

“It’s quickly morphing into something unique and fun!” says Brausen. Next month’s edition of Gertrude and Alice, Nov. 4, is a Northern Light Theatre fund-raiser, Frank ’N’ Stein: hot dogs, beer, and a chance to hang out with 20th century celebs.

PREVIEW

Gertrude and Alice

Starring: Leona Brausen and Davina Stewart

Where: Grindstone Comedy Club & Bistro, 10019 81 Ave.

Running: Sunday 7 p.m. and monthly (next month, Nov. 4, 7 p.m. as a Northern Light Theatre fund-raiser Frank ‘N’ Stein).

Tickets: grindstonetheatre.ca or at the door. (Tickets for NLT’s Frank ‘N’ Stein, 780-471-1586, northernlighttheatre.com).

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Exploring space and time, with a dog: Jezebel, At The Still Point

Posted on October 5, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Ainsley Hillyard and Jezebel in Jezebel, At The Still Point. Photo by Tracy Kolenchuk.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

On a break from rehearsal this past week, the cast of Jezebel, At the Still Point are hanging out in the Theatre Network green room.

One of them — the one with the speaking role — is reflecting on the origins of the show, three years in the making, and the relationship that inspired it. The other, back from  casually exploring the men’s washroom and doing a friendly walkabout in the theatre office, is tucking into a small Milk Bone.

Ainsley Hillyard, the innovative dance/ theatre artist who’s the muse of Good Women Dance, and Jezebel, the French bulldog (and retired breeder) who gets the title billing in the Bumble Bear production opening in the Roxy Performance Series Thursday, met nearly five years ago.

“Getting a dog had been a dream of mine for a long time,” says Hillyard, whose bold, creative impulses as a choreographer/ movement designer/ actor/ director have consistently smudged the ancient frontiers between theatre and dance, and for that matter between the species.

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“A companion! A roommate who’s always happy to see you when you get home! Some roommates aren’t like that,” as Hillyard says. Jezebel, who has a gap-toothed smile and a gravely watchful look in repose, snorts her assent.

The theatre life, with its chilly rehearsal rooms, terrible hours, harsh lights, loud noises, epic emoting, isn’t every dog’s cup of kibble, to say the least. “I wanted one who’d be happy with my and my life — in an apartment, with other dogs, in rehearsal halls,” says Hillyard, who’d grown up with a dog, the late lamented Murphy (named after Murphy Brown). She’d spent a dog-free decade, and was having one of those “I’m an adult now, at least in theory” moments.  

It was rapport at first sight. Jezebel was one and a half. Hillyard was 30. 

“Right away” the new dog owner, a Grant MacEwan dance program grad who had returned to Edmonton five years before, after four with Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers, got the idea of creating a dance/theatre show for the pair to be in together (the term “two-hander” does miss the mark in this case). “But I convinced myself it was foolish….”

Not that Hillyard has ever shied away from daring experimental forays into theatricality, either as a choreographer/director or performer. For Matthew MacKenzie’s Bears, she devised a movement-scape that conjured a journey through nature and incorporated an erotic pas de deux between grizzlies. For Northern Light’s Wish, she played a gorilla who learned sign language and fell in love with a man. 

As for sharing the stage with Jezebel, that inspiration found new life in a workshop led by Mi Casa Theatre (Countries Shaped Like Stars) at the Chinook Festival. “They asked all of us to list three things we’d always wanted to do onstage,” without regard to budget, logistics, practical do-ability, Hillyard recalls.“Mine were 1. to do a show with my dog, because that felt very impractical. 2. to do a show set in Outer Space, also very impractical. 3. to be genuinely vulnerable onstage; to cry and not because I was acting.”

This unusually high-risk wish list intersects in Jezebel, At The Still Point, which has had shorter-length workshop outings at the Feats festival here and UNO Fest in Victoria. The short earthly life span of dogs is a heartbreaker. Hillyard the astronaut and her co-pilot Jezebel travel through Outer Space and time in a quest to halt the passage of time and defeat mortality‚ “so that Jezebel never has to die.”  

“It opens with us crash-landing on a strange alien planet. We need to fix the ship to launch ourselves back into space…. I send Jezebel to survey and see if there’s any suitable material.”

Ainsley Hillyard and Jezebel in Jezebel, At The Still Point. Photo by Tracy Kolenchuk.

“I have a general sense of what she’ll do,” says Hillyard of a cast-mate she describes as “untrained.” She amends this slightly. “Jezebel does know how to sit. And she sometimes comes to me when I call. But she only listens to me when I have a treat in hand…. All my pants and jacket pockets are full of crumbs,” Hillyard says cheerfully. Jezebel’s favourite treat, for special occasions only? “Freeze-dried beef liver” which can be broken off in chunks. It is, says Hillyard, an acquired taste.

What “untrained” means, in the course of “a theatre show with a lot of text and movement, and a dog,” is that whatever Jezebel takes it into her cute pug-nosed French bulldog head to do, Hillyard has to go with it. “She keeps me in the present, in the moment.”

Jezebel and Ainsley Hillyard in Jezebel, At The Still Point. Photo by Tracy Kolenchuk.

“Jezebel might wander off. On opening night in Winnipeg (at the Fringe in July), Jezebel left the stage, crossed over behind, and (re-) entered from the other side.” Sometimes she leaves the stage “to meet new people, in the audience.” At one performance Jezebel, tired from a long pre-show walk, “fell asleep in the middle of the stage and started snoring,” says her co-star, amused. 

The self-possessed canine star (for whom the theatre term “grounded” was invented, surely), isn’t freaked out by loud noises or flashing lights; she’s impervious to stage fright. “She’s the chillest dog I’ve ever met,” says Hillyard. She does, however, react to Hillyard’s own moods. “If I’m sad or anxious or stressed, she picks up on it, so I have to be careful about that…. She’s very emotionally intelligent.”

When W.C. Fields advised strongly against ever appearing onstage with dogs or children, he was alluding to the inevitability of getting upstaged. A cock of the head and wham!, all that Method acting agony counts for nought. Hillyard agrees. “I can practice a monologue forever; I can rehearse till I’m exhausted, and Jezebel moves an ear…. Her comic timing is amazing!” What does a human have to do to hold the crowd, under the circumstances? Jezebel has been known to fall asleep onstage while Hillyard was standing on her head. “The curve balls keep coming.”

“Beth (director Beth Dart) warned me ‘she’s going to upstage you at every turn’,”  Hillyard laughs. “It’s a very Jezebel-centred show. And I’m resigned to the fact that I’m there to support her journey.” 

PREVIEW

Jezebel, At The Still Point

Roxy Performance Series

Theatre: Bumble Bear Productions

Created by and starring: Ainsley Hillyard and Jezebel

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

Running: Oct. 11 to 21

Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca

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As fizzy as champagne: Skirts On Fire at Teatro La Quindicina, a review

Posted on September 29, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Andrea House, Ron Pederson, Kendra Connor, Andrew MacDonald-Smith in Skirts On Fire, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There is a crucial moment in screwball comedies when someone sensible, someone with a placid, routine, predictable existence, finds himself having another sort of life altogether — for no reason he can quite put a finger on.

It’s what happens to Porter Lawrence (Ron Pederson), a teacher of seventh grade English composition, early in Stewart Lemoine’s Skirts on Fire, the grand finale to Teatro La Quindicina’s 2018 season.

In this giddy tale of a literary hoax in ‘50s Manhattan, last seen by Teatro audiences in 2003, the circumspect person with the circumspect name will find himself sitting on the floor of a diner with no chairs (it’s called the Sweet ‘N’ Low). He’ll discover he’s having coffee with Hartwood Keane, the notoriously grouchy literary reclusive (à la J.D. Salinger) who wrote St. Margaret’s Lap, “the most anthologized short story in the middle third of the 20th century.”

In an apparently uncontrollable escalation of the madcap in his life, Porter Lawrence will be joined by the breezy socialite charmer Alton Doane (Andrew MacDonald-Smith). And he will be briefly appalled, shortly thereafter, to discover that he himself is in disguise, in the middle of a literary scam. 

None of ordinary rules he lives by seem to apply. “Copying and cheating are so wrong!” he declares firmly, only to be flummoxed by Alton’s blithe rejoinder. “I don’t agree! We all deserve access to the same right answers. That’s what public education should be about. There ought never to be exclusive ownership of the truth….” The same goes for the principle of authorship, which Porter has hitherto regarded as “very important.”

Clearly there are larger forces at work in the cosmos. Complications multiply; deceptions are contagious; the imminence of chaos is enlivening. And momentum doesn’t have u-turns. As Alton says brightly, “there’s no going back with fraudulence.”

There’s no going back, either, on a spirit of adventure once unlocked. A cup of coffee at the Sweet and Low Diner, wham! The ‘let’s see what happen next’ principle is unleashed in Porter Lawrence’s life, in the company of a breezy agent provocateur whose motives beyond fun are obscure even to himself. 

(clockwise) Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Paula Humby, Louise Lambert, Kendra Connor in Skirts on Fire, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby

The screwball sense that life can be more fun extends to the other characters too, who have the advantage of the playwright’s witty wisecracks and throw-aways (and a Teatro ensemble of actors who know what to do with them).

At the Feminine Home Digest, editor Mrs. Evangeline Gold (Andrea House, in hilarious New York grande dame cadence), “a widow; not the overly sad kind, though,” has sailed in to the office to assess articles for this month’s edition — among them “Cuba: Who Needs It?” and “Keeping Children Likeable” — and to meet the elusive literary giant Hartwood Keane. One thing leads — no, races — to another.

Andrea House in Skirts On Fire, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby.

A day that started with coffee ends with champagne, at a party in the smallest hotel room in New York. And Mrs. Gold, who’s been dating Alton Doane (“it’s well within my rights to amuse myself with a good-looking younger man who’s nowhere near as smart as I am”), will be  thoroughly enjoying a different kind of spectacle.

The plucky would-be reporter Claudia Birch (Paula Humby) in hot pursuit of a scoop will have been through a number of outlandish disguises, and arrived at society hostess — even though she’s staying at the Marmosan Hotel For Working Women.

Louise Lambert in Skirts On Fire, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby.

The sassy waitress Shirley Hoople (the delightful Louise Lambert), who knows an awful lot more about everything than anyone else, will be in a maid’s getup, passing around spicy canapés: “this morning I was working in a diner. Now I’m serving champagne to high society.”

Kendra Connor in Skirts On Fire, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby.

Thetis Kipp (Kendra Connor), Mrs. Gold’s grim and purse-lipped secretary whose fierce disapproval would freeze olive oil at 100 paces, will amaze everyone with … no, my lips are sealed; life, like screwballs, should be full of surprises.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith in Skirts On Fire, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby.

MacDonald-Smith and Pederson are a very funny pair as, respectively, the charming playboy instigator and the solid citizen transformed into manic experimenter. Both are first-rate comic actors. And the way their precise physical energies, so different at first, seem to collide and then converge is expertly negotiated in the production.

To see tall lanky MacDonald-Smith fling himself onto a cushion on the floor, or wave casually in Central Park, “oh hey, it’s “Kitty Carlisle and Moss Hart, Here, Kitty! Kitty!,” in Central Park, is a lark in itself. So is watching Pederson exit, a panicky headfirst charge into the unknown from a character who will later declare “it’s time to rush into things without much thought.”

Skirts on Fire is  a dizzy enterprise that seems to invite the much-frayed term “romp” even in its high-spirited scene changes, set to the oeuvre of Louis Prima. Disguise and transformation are a crucial part of the plot: kudos to Leona Brausen’s revolving door of witty period costumes.

For this pellmell cavort through town, Chantel Fortin’s design calls for a diner, an office, or a spartan hotel room to arrive onstage as precipitously as the events of the plot. The pillars, brilliantly coloured by Matthew Alan Currie’s lighting, turn out to be trees in Central Park. Yes, it’s an urban wonderland, to be sure. And as Porter Lawrence notes, “we are not always in control of our destinies.” 

The only proper response is laughter and more bubbles. And there’s plenty of both in Skirts On Fire.

REVIEW

Skirts On Fire

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Ron Pederson, Louise Lambert, Kendra Connor, Andrea House, Paula Humby

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Oct. 13

Tickets: teatroq.com

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Falling slowly for Once: a low-key musical fairy-tale opens the Citadel season. A review

Posted on September 28, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Once, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson for Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I pay you with music,” says the fairy godmother to the despondent troubadour in Once. And lo and behold, making music is the ultimate fairy elixir: it can transform you from half-dead to fully alive, and your world from stifling to infinite.

The title of the strangely low-key Tony Award-winning 2012 hit musical that launches the Citadel season is lifted from the opening line of every fairy tale. Once there was a sad Irish street musician who put down his guitar forever. At that very moment a Czech emigré appears before him with encouraging words about his song and talk of “destiny.” She unblocks his creativity; he unblocks her Hoover. They make sweet music together for a time, and other people join them to make music too.

And as for romance? We’ll return to that shortly.

Emily Dallas and Lawrence Libor in Once, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson for Epic Photography.

Since music is the premise and the talisman, Ann Hodges’ production has started before all that, at a Shoctor lobby bash with guest buskers nightly. And here’s magic: you can actually take a drink into the Shoctor theatre itself (as long as it’s in a spill-proof sippy cup) — an unprecedented liberty and step forward for mankind and theatre revenues. Heavens, you can take that cup even onto the stage, to join the cast who are having at some rousing Irish and Czech-flavoured numbers. However, since the production design isn’t an Irish pub, as in the original and Broadway touring productions, this seems a little contrived, in truth. 

Anyhow, Once was fashioned from a captivatingly small 2006 indie film starring the couple who wrote the melancholy folk-rock songs (Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová). And it finds its magic a long way from the exuberantly aspirational arcs of its achiever Broadway brethren.

If  Guy despairs that no one wants to listen to his songs of unrequited love and general depression, his worries were way off base. Once started small (at New York Theatre Workshop, like Hadestown), and, OK, it stayed small — even when it hit the big time. But eight Tony Awards later, it’s been touring and produced locally ever since, on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Once, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson for Epic Photography.

The characters are the musicians. And Hodges’ cast of 13 are impressively accomplished. They capture with easy zest and startling fluency the signature Once oddity that the making of music is the story. It’s also the tentative romance. 

Guy (Lawrence Libor, a real find for Canadian theatre), the Dublin street musician who works in his Da’s vacuum cleaner repair shop, has hit the wall, dream-wise. His girlfriend is now his ‘ex, and she’s moved to New York.  Girl (EmilyDallas), the Czech immigrant, arrives mysteriously in his life trailing a little daughter (Alexa Zhang) a mother (Ruth Alexander), a bunch of boisterous ex-pat Czech pals, an unresolved marriage back home, and a Hoover that won’t suck.

That’s the set-up. From that Once unfolds in an apparently casual way with music that seems just to happen, and trail off, and start again somewhere else. Hodges’ stagecraft  creates the (hard-won) illusion of informality: ad hoc jam sessions, eruptions into dance (choreographed by Julie Tomaino) or stillness on a Dublin hilltop, impulse sing-alongs in bars (or the bank), snatched moments of filtering in and out of near-romance. Characters drift in an out of focus, inconclusively, and stay on the sidelines till someone needs a drummer, say. 

And this kind of artfulness masquerading as the opposite is especially crucial since the set design isn’t the Irish bar of the premiere production (as required by the rights). Cory Vincennes’ design is abstract, a distressed brick-lined bare chamber, a low curved wall, a tiled floor that hints of interiors, an Emerald Isle hillside that hints of exteriors — in short, a neutral playground for music-making in a variety of locales.

The production owes much to the enchantment of Louise Guinand’s lighting. One captivating scene is a trip through the city in light and sound, place to place, wisp of melody here, fragment of tune there.

Libor, a recent arrival from the U.K. and a first-rate musician with a built-in rapport with his guitar, is absolutely convincing as Guy, the moody singer-songwriter who makes songs from heartbreak, regret, and disappointment. The character is forever being taken aback by oddball, and not necessarily welcome, arrivals in his life. Libor’s performance, always understated, captures in a natural way the reactions of a man trying to get his bearings on the spectrum of bemusement and incredulity as he’s roused from misery. Is he falling in love? Guy thinks he might be. 

Dallas’s performance as Girl is less satisfying, but then the character doesn’t seem quite fully written. It does capture the amusingly disconcerting and brisk qualities of the mystery girl who’s a kind of can-do life coach to Guy. As in other Once productions I find that Girl’s epigrammatic sagacity as adviser is a little hard to take: “You cannot walk through life leaving unfinished love behind you.” Thank god for a morbid eastern European sense of humour. When Girl isn’t talking, though, the performance tends to slide into indistinctness.   

But then there are colourful characters to take charge. Stephen Guy-McGrath is outstanding as Billy, the volatile but forlorn owner of a piano shop who retains an exemplary Irish capacity for outrage. Girl’s equally volatile Czech compatriots (including Oscar Derkx and Benjamin Camenzuli, both excellent) who instantly get into a fracas based entirely on their interpretation of a TV soap, are spirited.

Guy’s tongue-tied Da is conjured in seconds by Julien Arnold. Larissa Pohoreski and Ruth Alexander are the earthy, sensual side of music-making. 

So is there a happily ever after to be spun from the open-ended “once” of the title? This is a musical that proposes that lives are fairy tales in progress. “We’ve still got time,” Guy and Girl sing in Falling Slowly, the Oscar-winning song that bookends the musical. “Raise your hopeful voice you have a choice….”

As for transformation, is it too late to run out and join a band (preferably in Ireland)?  

PREVIEW

Once

Theatre: Citadel

Written by: Enda Walsh from the John Carney film, music by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová

Directed by: Ann Hodges

Starring: Emily Dallas, Lawrence Libor, Ruth Alexander, Julien Arnold, Benjamin Camenzull, Christina Cuglietta, Oscar Derkx, Stephen Guy-McGrath, Richard Lam, Karen Lizotte, Larissa Pohoreski, John Ullyatt, Alex Zhang

Running: through Oct. 14

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com 

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Pinocchio: a new production of an Alberta Opera original opens the Roxy Performance Series

Posted on September 28, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Pinocchio, Alberta Opera. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Seven years ago, a musical-writing duo with a string of sassy re-angled fairy-tale musicals for kids to their credit got their mitts on a different sort of adventure. It was free-wheeling and fantastical, crazily episodic — a kooky (not to say bizarre) series of con men and animals, monsters, underwater encounters, oddball violence, diverse dismemberments. Dark, yes; Grimm, no.

The fairy tale was Carlo Collodi’s 36-chapter 1883 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio. And the hero was a wayward marionette whose dad was a poor woodcutter and whose dream was to become a real live boy.

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The Alberta Opera team of Farren Timoteo and the late composer Jeff Unger, who specialized in original re-angled musical versions of fairy tales, were irresistibly attracted to its oddities. “It was episodic, energetic, eccentric — and Italian!” says Timoteo, by way of explanation. Their award-winning Pinocchio is back this weekend in a new production at Theatre Network’s Roxy Performance Series before it hits the (very) long and winding road to Alberta schools, 298 performances till June. 

“The Adventures of Pinocchio had been serialized in Italy’s first paper for children,” says Timoteo. “And, yes, there were several grim moments… Originally it had ended in a very grisly way; Pinocchio died by hanging.” There was so much outrage from fans that Collodi was persuaded to write another 18 episodes.

“The collection was enormous…. We knew we could do anything with it, and it was so much fun trying everything!” Timoteo says. “Jeff and I would be forever asking each other ‘is it too silly?’ And forever answering ‘nope! let’s try it!’ As long as we were laughing, and the actors in rehearsal were laughing, we felt we were on the right track.”

Playwright/ actor/ director Timoteo, whose family background is Italian, was attracted, too, to exploring his cultural roots. “It was the first time I’d done that,” he says, “before I’d ever even been to Italy.” And it has inspired other Timoteo creations; Made In Italy, his solo show returns to the Citadel Club this season, and runs at the Royal Manitoba Theatre. 

Their Pinocchio is a high-speed theatrically ingenious musical for three actors who play 22 characters constantly moving from location to location, “eight settings in 60 minutes” says Timoteo, fresh from directing Alberta’s first pro production or Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale at the Fringe. He remembers that he and Unger were constantly egging each other on as they created the show: “let’s go further; let’s have more! It was in our DNA….”

Chariz Faulmino in Pinocchio, Alberta Opera. Photo by Mat Simpson.

And Unger, whose appealingly complex, sophisticated musical theatre writing lives way outside the mainstream for kids’ shows, stepped up with a lively journey of styles to parallel Pinocchio’s adventures — Italian tarantella opener, Gilbert and Sullivan number, American gospel number, says Timoteo. “Gepetto’s song One Wish is deeply inspired by Sweeney Todd,” Timoteo and Unger’s all-time favourite musical.

Timoteo and Unger’s joint debut with the venerable touring company in 2008 was a version of Little Red Riding Hood in which the wolf was a school bully with an identity crisis in progress. They followed that up with a 12-character reinvention of Hansel and Gretel in which a cautious, logical sort of girl and her more impulsive little bro have to take a showbiz gamble; their evil step-mother is a sultry German chanteuse who delivers a torchy showstopper I Want It All. 

“Pinocchio, our third full new work was the evolution of a (very theatrical) style we’d stumbled onto, and developed with Hansel and Gretel,” says Timoteo, who has himself toured in an Alberta Opera show (Jack and the Beanstalk, with Andrew MacDonald-Smith). 

“We wanted to do something original, something new …” something that decisively wasn’t the famous 1940 Disney animation. So they went back to the oddball Collodi source material, with its spectrum of whimsical and dark. And they lighted on the idea of focussing on a father-son story for their new musical. Gepetto’s human son Vincento has left home, and Pinocchio, who emerges from a trunk ready to sing and dance, undertakes to travel the world and bring him back to the grieving papa. “It’s an odyssey, a revolving door of characters!” says Timoteo. 

There’s a poignant aspect to reviving Pinocchio, of course; Unger passed away in 2015. But as a colourful new production, with a trio of fresh MacEwan musical theatre grads, prepares to set forth into the world, Timoteo says “it’s amazing to see how an artist lives on his work!” 

PREVIEW

Pinocchio

Roxy Performance Series

Theatre: Alberta Opera

Created by: Farren Timoteo and Jeff Unger

Directed by: Farren Timoteo

Starring: Chariz Faulmino, Cameron Chapman, Josh Travnik

Where: Roxy on Gateway, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: Friday through Sunday

Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca 

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Unlacing Shakespeare’s women: the Bard goes burlesque at the Capitol Theatre

Posted on September 27, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Shakespeare’s Sirens: A Burlesque Revue, Send in the Girls Burlesque. Photo by db photographics.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Think of them as the ultimate theatre buffs: reveals are their speciality.

Send In The Girls Burlesque comes to the stage of Fort Edmonton Park’s vintage Capitol Theatre Friday and Saturday, in honour of Alberta Culture Days. Their hit 2016 Shakespeare’s Sirens: A Burlesque Revue uncorsets the women characters of Shakespeare’s plays, and flings off gender cover-ups.

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Send in the Girls have directed their unusual historical bent, their satirical pizzaz, flamboyant performance style, and sassy sense of humour at such diverse and unexpected subjects as the multiple wives of Henry VIII (Tudor Queens: A Burlesque), the laced-up Victorian literati (A Bronte Burlesque), the women of the Wild West (Soiled Doves), even the unsung women of Canadian history (With Glowing Hearts). With Shakespeare’s Sirens, they unbutton the Bard’s women.

That gallery is a rich vein of burlesque inspiration, from resourceful take-charge types like Rosalind, Viola, Beatrice, or Lady Macbeth to the more demure and put-upon end of the female gallery. 

Admit it, doesn’t it get your goat when the shrew gets “tamed” and makes a speech about the joy of being submissive to men at the end of that roistering Shakespeare comedy? Haven’t you secretly fantasized about giving Ophelia a good shake when her dad makes her plot against her screwed-up boyfriend and she says ‘OK, whatever you say’ (or words to that effect)? And naturally her boyfriend gets really pissed off at her and she just takes it? And let’s not even get into the seduction technique of Richard III with the widows of men he’s assassinated. 

Anyhow, that’s why Queen Elizabeth I (Morgan Smith), a woman in a man’s world and no shrinking violet as history has confirmed, has hauled Will Shakespeare (C.J. Rowein) into court … to account for his female characters. As Ellen Chorley, Send In The Girls’ resident playwright puts it, “she’s asking him ‘what have you got to say for yourself?’”

Chorley, who wrote the script with Smith and Rowein, argues that the female characters who change the course of the plays they’re in, reveal the most chutzpah when they’re in male disguise. In Shakespeare’s Sirens, there’s an all-star a number with Shakespeare’s cross-dressing heroines together onstage: Viola (from Twelfth Night), Portia (from The Merchant of Venice), Rosalind (from As You Like It), and Imogen (from Cymbeline).

There’s a number with Hermia, who has a knockdown brawl with Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The bad girls get down: the witches from Macbeth “really lend themselves to burlesque storytelling — sensual powerful, satirical,” says Chorley. There a duet between Beatrice and Hero, high-contrast cousins from Much Ado About Nothing.

Cordelia from King Lear and  Katerina the “shrew” are in the show. Juliet has her own number; so do the fairies from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chorley herself plays Ophelia, Hamlet’s squeeze. “What I tried to do with her is show show she does Hamlet’s emotional labour for him when he shuts everyone out.”

“It’s a different way of exploring the Bard’s work,” laughs Chorley. “And it’s so much fun.” The musical choices for burlesque numbers are  always amusing in Send in the Girls shows. You’ll hear a wide range in Shakespeare’s Sirens: ’90s pop, 1940s ballads…. The cross-dressing heroines perform to the music of boy bands like the Back Street Boys. For Ophelia Chorley picked a song about going down to the river and praying.

“Whether you love Shakespeare or hate him from high school (encounters), there’s something for everybody!” says Chorley. And the Capitol Theatre, a beautifully restored n old restored old vaudeville house, is “a really good match” for the retro spirit of burlesque. 

PREVIEW

Shakespeare’s Sirens: A Burlesque Revue

Theatre: Send in the Girls Burlesque

Written by: Ellen Chorley with Morgan Smith and C.J. Rowein

Starring: Delia Barnett, Ellen Chorley, Sarah Jackson, Sydney Parcey, C.J. Rowein, Morgan Smith

Running: Friday and Saturday

Tickets: fortedmontonpark.ca

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The fine art of foolery: the return of Play The Fool, E-Town’s “festival of clown and physical comedy”

Posted on September 26, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Chad Bryant and Chris Gamble in Shipwrecked. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Foolery, sir, doth walk about the orb like the sun; it shines everywhere.”

– Twelfth Night III, i.

Edmonton, we are about to have an outbreak — an eruption? an infiltration? invasion? effervescence? collision? conflagration? — of clowns.

With the return of Play The Fool for a third annual edition of foolery, Edmonton’s “festival of clown and physical comedy” sets about demonstrating once again the elasticity of that job description. At the four-day festivities — this year at the Backstage Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barns Thursday through Sunday — you’ll meet up with clowns of every stripe, from the wide-eyed red-nosed innocent to the macabre Euro-fantasist, the existential contortionist to the social satirist.

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And here’s a first, says festival director Christine Lesiak, a clown of note herself who’s assembled the lineup from here and across the country: burlesque clowning. Yes, Fruitbowl, the joint work of Cabaret Calgary Productions and the comedy duo Valour and Tea, is billed as “produce-inspired burlesque.”

Fruitbowl. Photo supplied.

“I have not heard of it myself,” says Lesiak, the exclusive occupant in these parts (to my knowledge) of the space physicist-turned clown category of showbiz foolery, whose most recent show For Science! proved a Fringe hit in the summer. She is highly amused by the concept: “They’re fruit. So they peel.”

That show, four performers strong, is part of Play The Fool’s mainstage 18+ Triple Bill Saturday and Sunday. It’s joined by a new show from the team of Candace Berlinguette and Michael Kennard (the Mump half of “horror clowns” Mump and Smoot). In The Performance, a pianist and singer past their glory days attempt a comeback.

Lesiak herself, whose own clown alter-ego Sheshells has starred in such Small Matters productions as Fools For Love and Sofa So Good, directs the third of the 18+Triple Bill offerings, The Daily Deal With Lady. Created by veteran Regina improv and sketch comedy artist Lindsay Ruth Hunt, it stars a home shopping network celeb.

The Emerging Artist Triple Bill features three new pieces from U of A theatre school grads in experimental mode: Lady Be Good, Doll And Oats, Mona Lisa. And the stylistic range is wide, from traditional red-nose caper to black comedy to thriller.

In the festival’s high-contrast Double-Bill are a red-nosed Calgary duo, Chad Bryant and Chris Gamble, in Shipwrecked and Montreal artist Évelyne Lainel in At Home with Gisèle. The former is a clownly adventure in which Swill and Lavy, beached on a desert isle, discover a mysterious treasure map. The latter — “Québecois-style clowning as Lesiak describes “the heightened comedic character” — is a live TV advice-for-women show. Interestingly, Shipwrecked is directed by Jacqueline Russell, At Home With Gisèle by Jed Tomlinson, Russell’s partner in the clown duo Sizzle & Spark.

The All-Ages Spectacular! pairs a circus/comedy show from The Great Balanzo with magic from  Ron Pearson.

Candice Roberts in Larry. Photo supplied.

There’s a full-length show, too,  from Vancouver’s Candice Roberts. In the gender-bender Larry, she dons a frankly fake Old Testament-style beard to explore male identity, from the hoser beyond.

While the number of shows remains about the same as last year’s Play The Fool, Lesiak says “we’ve increased the number of artists involved by having a cabaret every night.” It starts with the (free) opening night cabaret, hosted by Lesiak, a sneak peek sampler of festival offerings.

Paul Bezaire, a veteran street performer-turned-clown curates and hosts Friday’s “vaudeville cabaret.” The Great Balanzo hosts  Saturday night’s “The Best of the Small Matters Physical Comedy Lab & Friends.” And Sunday, it’s the annual “Rookie Cabaret,” featuring emerging artists of widely varying stylistic proclivities. That’s where Bezaire’s own clown Pie makes his debut.

The Sunday matinee at Play The Fool is a chance to hear a panel of clown and physical comedy artists talk about “audience participation in an age of enthusiastic consent.” If you’ve ever sat in a show praying either “pick me pick me” or “don’t pick me don’t pick me,” you’ll need to be there.  

Play The Fool runs Thursday through Sunday at the Backstage Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barns. Tickets: tixonthesquare.ca (780-420-1757) or playthefool.ca. Full lineup at playthefool.ca. 

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Once … upon a time: meet Ann Hodges, director of the cult film-turned-musical that launches the Citadel season

Posted on September 26, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Once, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson for Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Once … upon a time there was a winsomely offbeat 2007 indie Irish film, about the unlikely friendship between a Dublin street musician and a Czech immigrant. It was made for a dime (well, $150,000), shot in 17 days, full of folk-rock Celtic-flavoured songs written by its two stars (Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová).

And Once … upon a time, an eccentric confluence of talents fashioned a heart-stealing irresistibly odd stage musical from this low-fi low-budget source. And it went to Broadway and won eight Tony Awards, a bona fide Broadway fairy tale.  

That’s the 2012 musical that launches the Citadel mainstage season Thursday. And Winnipeg-based director Ann Hodges, whose career has embraced a spectrum of plays, musicals, and operas across the country, is happy to talk about how far Once lives outside the musical theatre mainstream.

Ann Hodges, director of Once, Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied.

She starts with the book, written for the stage, improbably enough, by the fierce Irish playwright Enda Walsh (Disco Pigs, The Walworth Farce, The New Electric Ballroom). An artist of the dark and gritty persuasion, Walsh is an unlikely match for the delicate love story at the centre of Once. He wryly conceded as much in a 2013 interview with the Guardian, that a friend of his was “particularly appalled…. He said it was like someone giving Charles Manson the rights to adapt It’s A Wonderful Life.”

Guy is on the point of giving up his dream when he meets Girl. He fixes her vacuum cleaner. She re-charges his creative engines, so to speak, by making music with him for a week. And they fall in love, tentatively, sort of.

“The scenes themselves are incredibly efficient, and also deep and dense,” says Hodges. “Within a line or two you know who these people are, what they desperately want, what’s underneath! This piece is incredibly well crafted…. What I get from Walsh’s writing is that he really understands people.”

The songs themselves don’t have the musical theatre vibe, or drive, or even function, Hodges thinks. “They’re often oblique; they’re poetic. They’re expressing what’s going on internally with the characters, whatever the characters’ moment is. They don’t necessarily propel the story forward….” With Once, it’s never a case of “stop, and sing.”

Or “stop and dance,” for that matter. The choreography (by Julie Tomaino) doesn’t aim for high-stepping Broadway razzle-dazzle. “What we’re trying for is illumination rather than fancy steps,” says Hodges,  whose cast of a dozen (led by Lawrence Libor as Guy and Emily Dallas as Girl) has gathered half from here, half from the rest of the country, Vancouver to Halifax. 

Once, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson for Epic Photography.

“The whole cast is onstage the whole time, all involved in telling the story of Guy and Girl, witnessing it, underscoring it.” And the actors play all the instruments. In fact, a lot of the time they move while playing them. Which, as you know if you’ve danced with your cello recently, can be a challenge.

So, in a piece about “the transformative power of music, you actually see that happening onstage: each character transformed by the act of making music,” Hodges says. “You have the excitement of this live music-making, music created right in front of you! (Even) in the transitions and studio sessions, music explodes off the stage!”

Once isn’t the first time Hodges has directed a musical in which the actors are the musicians. At Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon, she directed Dear Johnnie Deere, a jukebox musical inspired by the songs of Fred Eaglesmith. And the much-travelled director, who’s spent at least half the year already working away from her Winnipeg home base, arrives at the Citadel from directing Stories From The Red Dirt Road, an adaptation of P.E.I stories,” in Charlottetown. “It’s a good warm-up for this,” she says, “for figuring out how the instrument trade-offs should work, whether that guitar needs to be over there for the next scene….” 

Once is Hodges’ first time directing theatre in Edmonton. Opera has brought her here before. Not only does she direct operas (most recently, Tosca in Newfoundland for Opera on the Avalon), she is herself a librettist. Witness original Hodges adaptations of Cenerentola, Hansel and Gretel, The Barber of Seville. Her 45-minute  adaptation of the latter, re-titled for every city where it plays (here, The Barber of Barrhead), was remounted across Canada.

The National Theatre School directing grad “fell in love with theatre in high school”; by age 15 Hodges knew she wanted to direct, not act. “In retrospect I enjoyed the competitive aspect of getting a part way more than having it and doing it onstage.”

Music has always figured prominently in her career. As a kid she studied piano and singing, and remembers borrowing scripts and songbooks from the Winnipeg Public Library to play and sing — Harold Arlen, the Gershwins, Cole Porter. “It was my connections in the opera world that brought me back to musical theatre….”  With a play, you’re given the content, and it’s up to you to find the form. With music, you have a form and you need to find the content.”

Thoughts like these she applies to the songs of Once, unusually elliptical and poetic for a Broadway musical. “When our hearts are broken, we express ourselves in a way that’s not straightforward. Once gets to your heart in a way you don’t expect.”

Emily Dallas and Lawrence Libor in Once, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson for Epic Photography.

“All the characters, including Guy and Girl, are stopped in life in some way. Music, and making music together, gets them unstuck. By the end all of them have moved forward.… It’s not your traditional musical. It’s a beautiful, tender love story about people who meet through music, transform through music, and learn so much about love from each other.”

The original Broadway production, and its touring spin-offs like the Broadway Across Canada production that played the Jube here in 2015, were physically set in a mirror-lined Irish pub — “a bold creative choice” as Hodges says of the original design by Bob Crowley. Only two of the 16 scenes, though, are actually set in a pub; the rest happen in a variety of locations including a music shop, a vacuum cleaner repair establishment, a bedroom, a bank, an Irish hilltop. “The original creators insisted that new productions come up with new ideas” for the stage setting. “Our production looks very different!” says Hodges, delighted with Cory Sincennes’ design.  

There’s still a rollicking pub party, though. Before every performance the lobby of the Shoctor Theatre is reborn as a Dublin street, with a bar and buskers. And you can take drinks into the theatre and onto the stage before the show starts, to hang out with the musicians. As Hodges says, “it’s a show about making music. And it’s an opportunity to witness music-making up close!”

PREVIEW

Once

Theatre: Citadel

Written by: Enda Walsh from the John Carney film, music by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová

Directed by: Ann Hodges

Starring: Emily Dallas, Lawrence Libor, Ruth Alexander, Julien Arnold, Benjamin Camenzull, Christina Cuglietta, Oscar Derkx, Stephen Guy-McGrath, Richard Lam, Karen Lizotte, Larissa Pohoreski, John Ullyatt, Alex Zhang

Running: through Oct. 14

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com 

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The exhilaration of chaos: Teatro revives the screwball Skirts On Fire as their 2018 season finale

Posted on September 26, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

(clockwise) Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Paula Humby, Louise Lambert, Kendra Connor in Skirts on Fire, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In a scene that might have been lifted direct from the Teatro La Quindicina archive, a playwright and a leading man were in a tiny Strathcona cocktail bar last week discussing the essence of screwball comedy.

“The actors and the characters and the audience are having the same amount of fun,” says the former. “But for different reasons,” says the latter. They smile.

It’s happy hour. And happiness is on the minds of Stewart Lemoine and Andrew MacDonald-Smith. So, not coincidentally, is Skirts on Fire, the fizzy Stewart Lemoine screwball comedy last seen by audiences in 2003. In this revival, opening Thursday on the Varscona stage. the finale of Teatro’s 2018 season, MacDonald-Smith inherits the role originated by Jeff Haslam; he plays Alton Doane, breezy instigator of a literary hoax in the magazine publishing world of ‘50s Manhattan.

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Andrew MacDonald-Smith in Skirts On Fire, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby.

It is a caper that, once set in motion on a larky impulse, will escalate in complication, camouflage, counterfeit, and outright lies, till a moment of champagne convergence in “the smallest hotel room in New York.” Which, if you’ve ever been to the Big Apple and tried to open the closet door in your hotel room without moving the bed, is an impressive thought in itself. 

Although he’d decided on the cast (a typically Teatro practice), Lemoine remembers that “I had only the vaguest notion of the play … a lot of lying women maybe?” when he picked out a title for a new Fringe screwball in the summer of 2000.  And as for the plot, with its literary scam, “I’d just read Catcher in the Rye,” by the notoriously mysterious and reclusive author J.D. Salinger, who refused either to be edited or have his photo on dust jackets.

And Lemoine remembers, too, the image of “someone walking into a cafe with no chairs” and thinking there’d be a reason for the surreal sight of people sitting on cushions on the floor, with subsequent exchanges on the subject. “It’s that kind of comedy!” grins MacDonald-Smith, the Teatro star whose real-life quick wit seems entirely suitable for Lemoinian comedy. 

And, after all, Lemoine has alluded to the notion of “falling into an adventure” in discussing other screwballs, like his 2001 On The Banks of the Nut. And that’s exactly what happens to Porter Lawrence (Ron Pederson), a prim and circumspect English teacher who writes “didactic anecdotes for people who are 12.”

As Skirts On Fire opens, he’s having a coffee at the Sweet ’N’ Low Diner, getting continuously outfaced by the sassy waitress (we can use the word ‘waitress’, it’s 1958) Shirley (Louise Lambert), waiting for someone. Suddenly, he’s meeting Hartwood Keane, the infamously cranky recluse who wrote St. Margaret’s Lap, “the most anthologized short story in the middle third of the 20th century.” Soon thereafter Porter Lawrence will find himself in costume. And, well, one deception leads to another…. 

Which brings us back to Lemoine’s attraction to the form (shared enthusiastically by MacDonald-Smith), which has given us such frothy enterprises as Hopscotch Holiday (later re-worked as Whiplash Weekend) and Vidalia, a spy caper set in motion by a simple lie about a name, and involving identical suitcases. In the summer of 2001, a year after Skirts On Fire’s debut at the Fringe, Lemoine had a new screwball in the works. But when when tragedy struck on September 11, he knew that it couldn’t be set in New York, or even mention that great city. So Lemoine went rural, with On The Banks Of The Nut, in which the eccentric proprietress of a rustic guest lodge in rural Wisconsin attends a symphony concert in Chicago and is unexpectedly transported by the posthorn solo in the third movement of Mahler’s Third.

Two years later, in Teatro’s season this time instead of at the Fringe, Skirts on Fire was back onstage. And Lemoine characters were back in New York, propelled through a ’50s screwball with an elaborate literary hoax, involving two authors and the Feminine Home Digest, a magazine “at the forefront of current thought.”

“Farce is all about finding comedy in someone’s struggle,” proposes MacDonald-Smith, an in-demand triple-threat leading man (and Teatro associate) who’s been in wide spectrum of farces, screwballs, romantic comedies, musical comedies, romantic musical comedies of all bents. 

Did I say busy? MacDonald-Smith’s past season began with a very funny turn as the boatman in the Citadel’s Shakespeare in Love here and in Winnipeg, followed by three months in the Sherlockian spoof Baskerville at Stage West in Calgary, a couple of months singing close harmony in Forever Plaid at the Mayfield, a trip to Italy and England with his mom, time in Toronto and Stratford.

“I’ve slept in 20 beds so far this year! And no, not in that way!” he amends cheerfully of a life plot that sounds a bit careening comedy in itself. And it doesn’t stop. Next up is Neil Grahn’s The Comedy Company, premiering next month in the Shadow Theatre season, followed by the Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s Matilda here and in Winnipeg. And meanwhile, there’s debonair Alton Doane, for whom the romantic and literary are inextricably linked. 

Andrea House, Ron Pederson, Kendra Connor, Andrew MacDonald-Smith in Skirts On Fire, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby.

Like farces, screwballs are built on teeter-y architecture of deceptions and misapprehensions that threaten chaos at every moment, yes. But in farces, as Lemoine has said, “people are having the worst day of their life.” And in screwballs, “people never stop having fun along the way,” as MacDonald-Smith puts it. He calls it “smooth fun, ‘fake it till you make it’.”

Says  Lemoine, “everyone’s smart and articulate. And while the stakes might be high for everyone, somebody’s really enjoying it.” Alton Doane, the suave “gadabout” who sets the Skirts On Fire plot in motion in order to make life more, well, interesting, is one of those. He’s no brooder on the consequences. “He’s unwilling to think about that,” laughs MacDonald-Smith. “Diligence is not his forte.”

“Everyone is lying to someone about something. The crux is figuring out who knows the most….” says Lemoine. “There is a character who know everything that’s going on. But people are lying to people who know more than they do,” says MacDonald-Smith.

Canadian playwrights who create original screwballs aren’t a dime a dozen, to say the least; for one thing, the form is dauntingly intricate. Lemoine has his favourites in the classic screwball canon. There are the Kaufman and Hart stage comedies (You Can’t Take It With You), of course. But perhaps the apotheosis of the screwball is to be found on the big screen in the Hollywood of the ‘30s and ‘40s.

Like MacDonald-Smith, Lemoine loves Bringing Up Baby, the 1938 Howard Hawks screwball involving a palaeontologist (Cary Grant), a kook (Katherine Hepburn), a dinosaur bone and a pet leopard. And The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942), which ricochets between New York and Florida, is another fave. “It’s almost ridiculously plot-less…. The stakes are high, but I’d never say the characters understood exactly what they are!”

Words to live by, in a screwball comedy. Complications escalate. And Lemoine and MacDonald-Smith are delighted by the thought.

PREVIEW

Skirts On Fire

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Ron Pederson, Louise Lambert, Kendra Connor, Andrea House, Paula Humby

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Oct. 13

Tickets: teatroq.com

  

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