Behind the scenes in Bountiful, a guest 12thnight Fringe review by Alan Kellogg

Posted on August 19, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Bountiful, Dammitammy Productions. Photo supplied.

Bountiful (Stage 35 L’Unithéâtre at La Cité francophone)

Surely there is a compelling theatre piece to be written and staged surrounding the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints community in Bountiful, B.C. For years, Warren Jeffs — the American “Prophet” of the breakaway Mormon faith, now serving a prison sentence in the U.S. — has been in the news along with his Canadian Bishop. In June, Bountiful’s Winston Blackmore (who was found to have taken two dozen wives) and James Ohler (five wives) were sentenced by a B.C. Supreme Court judge to house arrest and community service for practising polygamy.

And the idea to tell the story to a “gentile” audience via a conflicted but still-in-the-fold-church “sister” is a particularly inspired artistic decison, one made by Bountiful’s Edmontonplaywright/ designer/ director Rebecca Merkley. Heaven knows, the sect has had plenty of bad press, most of it richly deserved. But what does it look like from the inside? And from the perspective of women?

Merkley knows something about this from personal experience, too, as she grew up in nearby Creston, B.C. And as she points out in the program notes, the play is indeed inspired by real events.

There’s not much faulting the (generally) perfectly competent cast here, or even the direction or staging. There are indeed some winning musical moments. Actors Kayla Gorman, Jameela McNeil, Laura Raboud and Emma Wilmott give it their all. Gorman, the narrator, is particularly effective and McNeil delivers a typically strong turn. But they aren’t given many favours. Real people — even cultists — just don’t talk like this, do they?

No, the problem here is the storytelling, the script. It’s frankly all-too-often turgid, simplistic,  and doesn’t traverse the basic dialogue believability bar. And while we don’t expect to feel uplifted by the vicissitudes of the Bountiful FLDS, the mild depression you feel on the way out has less to do with a misguided, creepy and sometimes unlawful sect and its blinkered faithful, but with the sense that this is a well-intentioned, well-poised opportunity missed.

— Alan Kellogg

Posted in Fringe 2018, Reviews | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Behind the scenes in Bountiful, a guest 12thnight Fringe review by Alan Kellogg

The ultimate in home births: The Alien Baby Play, a Fringe review

Posted on August 19, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Jessy Ardern in The Alien Baby Play, Impossible Mongoose. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Alien Baby Play (Stage 3, Walterdale Theatre)

“Thank you so much for coming!” beams the cordial, slightly breathless woman we meet in The Alien Baby Play, the latest from Impossible Mongoose. “It means a lot you could come over….” She’s even made cookies.

We’re here to support Bethany in her hour of need. She’s 15 months pregnant, we’ve been invited to the birth, and tonight’s the night. The father will be on hand. And here’s the tricky (but intriguing) thing: he’s an alien.

Bethany, as she tells us, has had a devil of a time trying to figure out how overcome skepticism — even though the Virgin Mary set the precedent for impregnation by the other-worldly. She’s been battered by the prospect of disbelief, and thank god we are different!

Jessy Ardern fleshes out this theatrical premise — a character throwing herself on our mercy — in a dimensional performance that’s full of manic charm, and a kind of brisk forthright practical humour that’s well nigh irresistible. She’s a great performer.

And in Bethany she creates a memorable character up against the cosmic unknown, excitable, apprehensive about the future and yet somehow hopeful. The American playwright Nicholas Walker Herbert gives her a play to work with that opens up expands ease-fully into an odd, imaginative exploration of what it means to be an outsider in the world. And Corben Kushneryk’s Canadian premiere production gives her the room to breathe, to pause, and to reach out to connect with us, apparently on a one-on-one basis. Defences are futile when you’re at a home birth.

Bethany is a former Grade 3 teacher, with that kind of enthusiasm, who knows the value of a show-and-tell, a bulletin board, a pointer. Having retained her own, she values the “sense of wonder” in little kids, witness a devotion to the study ancient ruins visible only from the sky and impossible to explain in pragmatic terms.

The situation in which she finds herself in this oddball play is an invitation to elasticized, expansive thinking — about love, about being a parent, about being human. And it hits your heart in the strangest ways. 

Posted in Fringe 2018, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on The ultimate in home births: The Alien Baby Play, a Fringe review

Puzzling out the paradox of identity: Fetch, a 12thnight Fringe review

Posted on August 19, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Cat Walsh and Lora Brovold in Fetch, Interloper Theatre. Photo by Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Fetch (Stage 28, The Playhouse)

Two women stand before us, in identical dresses, with identical hairdos, holding identical boxes. They are both named Hannah Morgan.

And in Cat Walsh’s clever new mind-bender, which turns the mystery of identity into a kind of unnerving horror story, they seem to be the same woman. And, like the cat in the box in the famous Schrödinger’s Cat quantum physics puzzle, she is both alive and dead.

Or not.

Both Hannah Morgans, played by Lora Brovold and the playwright herself in Suzie Martin’s production, and, weirdly, aware of each other, are haunted by defining moments of childhood. Which is, in itself, a resonant insight into the way the architecture of identities are built, elaborately, on something tiny and long gone. In the case of the two Hannah Morgans, who seem to be alternate versions of each other or mirror images, or doppelgangers, the moments are different, and so are the perspectives. But the location is the same: a Florida amusement park that was the destination of a family vacation of long ago.

“All accidents are a surprise but not all surprises are accidents.” Hold that thought. Or not.

One Hannah Morgan (Walsh) is breezier, apparently more chipper until she isn’t, as she recalls a childhood full of the aggravations of many older siblings. The other Hannah Morgan (Brovold), an only child, is grimmer, more defined at the outset by grievance and loss.

Both stories of growing up — and telling what it’s like to be the Hannah Morgan who grew up — are different, and also the same: they intersect from time to time. At one recurring intersection — and it gets creepier and more disturbing — is a small stuffed toy dog named Mr. Anderson.

Hold that thought. Or not.

Walsh, who gravitates to black comedy, is a witty writer. And in Fetch her writing for the Hannah Morgans as six-year-olds, you’ll be amused (and a little rattled) by her dark insights into the morbid kid mind, beautifully captured by the deadpan gravitas of the actors.

It’s a puzzle of a play, in a fascinating way, teasing and smart. There are many mysteries here, including the one in which there are alternative versions of you, running around telling people about your childhood from another angle. I will not be explaining Fetch; I can’t. I’ve asked my mind to Fetch, but it won’t Sit or Lie Down. 

Posted in Fringe 2018, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Puzzling out the paradox of identity: Fetch, a 12thnight Fringe review

An experiment in other selves: Rig Pig Fantasia, a 12thnight Fringe review

Posted on August 19, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Michael Anderson and Dave Horak in Rig Pig Fantasia, Wishbone Theatre. Photo by Laura O’Connor.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Rig Pig Fantasia (Stage 1, Westbury Theatre)

An eerie boreal forest of tall swaying translucent trees hangs from the sky. Sometimes they’re skeletal, backlit by an ominous red glow. Sometimes they seem to glow from within, lit by dreams and memory.

That’s where Chris Bullough’s new Rig Pig Fantasia happens, in its evocative, meandering, theme-and-variations way. And the design (Michael Peng with lighting by Anita Diaz) gets to the heart of it.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here

It’s not called a “fantasia” for nothing. Rig Pig Fantasia isn’t a play built on a satisfying, recognizable infrastucture — two guys operating heavy oil machinery together, bonding, and learning a lesson, for example, or a man reinventing himself. It’s unhinged from those moorings, having a wander. Go with it. 

There are non-linear dance sequences next to visceral bar brawls, real-guy banter over T-Ho coffee next to memories, real-life morning-after romance scenes juxtaposed to scenes that a born-again artist is fashioning, and casting, from the raw materials of his life. 

All the characters have more than one self. Aaron (Dave Horak) and Brett (Michael Anderson) are the oil co-workers, a heavy machinery duo who party together on the weekends and have views on doughnuts. There’s an affectionate comic vaudeville between them as Brett remembers the world of his unfulfilled boyhood self, who loved to dance; Aaron flinches. And the friction escalates when Brett “meets someone.” She’s an artist (Laura Raboud) who inspires Brett to revisit his true self and has, it transpires, a surprising double-life too. The assumption that art and the natural world are born allies seems built in and, in truth, not questioned. 

The actors in Bullough’s Wishbone Theatre production are first-rate, all three. The chemistry, verbal and physical, is so believable in their scenes together that when the “plot” kicks in, I couldn’t entirely wrap my mind around its revelations.   

Anyhow, Rig Pig Fantasia has an experimental feel about it. It has a wide theatrical embrace — a mixture of real characters in dramatic encounters with their other possibilities (alter-egos, memories, alternative choices). There’s a kind of flickering incoherence about it (enhanced by the lighting). And, although it unspools itself a bit too far at the moment, maybe that jostling of position is the point.    

These days you can start a instant argument by saying the name “Fort McMurray” out loud: environment versus industry, saving the planet versus saving the economy. But the bedrock of the piece is that everyone actually does know at heart that fossil fuel consumption causes climate change, and the planet’s biological sustainability clock is ticking.

Even Aaron, the rig pig who argues fiercely for jobs and against tree-huggers and modern dance, knows it, it turns out. It’s what you do with that knowledge that counts. Witness this show. 

Posted in Fringe 2018, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on An experiment in other selves: Rig Pig Fantasia, a 12thnight Fringe review

Truth and Fiction: Stewart Lemoine’s The Many Loves of Irene Sloane, a guest 12thnight Fringe review by Todd Babiak

Posted on August 18, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Stacey Grubb and Marissa Tordoff in The Many Loves of Irene Sloane. Photo by Russ Hewitt.

The Many Loves of Irene Sloane (Stage 12, Varscona Theatre)

“Chaos will yield to order,” says Irene Sloane, played by Marissa Tordoff. “Music always makes it so.”

In Stewart Lemoine’s universe, this is what music does. And for audiences, this is often the effect of Stewart Lemoine’s alterations on humanity: in his plays we are more thoughtful, more polite, more considerate, and more imaginative than in that other, less ordered world outside the theatre.

The Many Loves of Irene Sloane begins with an introductory book club meeting, where the majority of the members fail to read the book. Yet even in this familiar situation, the not-terribly-literary members speak with an impossibly elevated, self-aware vocabulary that makes us want to escape the like, um, uh, you know, polluted dialogue of the, like, real world?

Nick, played by Ed Picard, is the convenor of the disappointing club. Just when he is about to break it up for the evening, a surprise member arrives. Kristen, played by Jill Gamez, has not only read the book. She has brought her grandmother’s short, unfinished manuscript — The Many Loves of Irene Sloane — for her fellow book club members to read.

They do, and we see the play-within-a-play: Irene and her new amanuensis, the lively Lucette Sans Souci, played by Morgan McClelland, are interrupted by the mysterious Wolcott Smythe, played by Mark Facundo, who pursues Irene for the wrong reasons.

Kristen’s grandmother’s story is not satisfying to the book club members, but in anticipation of one line of dialogue from it haunting them forever they rewrite The Many Loves of Irene Sloane in front of us — with delight and gentle surprise.

— Todd Babiak

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Fringe 2018, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Truth and Fiction: Stewart Lemoine’s The Many Loves of Irene Sloane, a guest 12thnight Fringe review by Todd Babiak

Check in at the Hotel Vortruba! A guest 12thnight Fringe review by Alan Kellogg

Posted on August 18, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Hotel Vortruba, Ragmop Theatre. Photo supplied.

Hotel Vortruba (Stage 37, Auditorium at Campus Saint-Jean)

Welcome to the Hotel Vortruba. You can check out any time you want — but you’ll never want to leave.

Vancouver’s RAGMOP Theatre, who dazzled audiences here last Fringe with Falling Awake, isback with a terrific new production that falls under the somewhat dry rubric of physical comedy, but in fact expertly skips across the genres to delightful effect.

Nayana Fielkov, her character shlepping a road-weary suitcase, resplendent in a double-breasted houndstooth coat — and coming off like a particularly manic Roz Chast character with a Bride of Frankenstein coiffure — has a bit of a time attempting to ding the hotel desk bell. It happens, after a series of yuk-laden  turns.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here

From the depths of the check-in counter emerges limb by limb the long, lanky form of her innkeeper, played by Matthew “Poki” McCorkle, who sports a dubious tux and Phantom-style mask. Outside, the elements are howling, along with occasional stage smoke (that produces a different sort of effect here in Hades this week, but still works). Throughout the story, the two emit a wide variety of sounds — singing wordlessly Cirque-and otherworldly-style, gurgling, muttering, grunting, gargling and more. Only very rarely ( as Mump and Smoot do so well)  do they break into a word or two of English, and to hilarious effect. The audience is enlisted at times to help out, and that works, too.

It seems wrong to go into much detail about the vignettes forever kinking the normal comings and goings of a hotel sojourn. Bending the quotidien dross is a huge part of the charm here. And the two (along with an unforgettable mechanical friend) roll it off with consummate dispatch. The staging involving multiple moveable carts is particularly innovative.

The pair are also impressive magicians, as you will discover. But I will say the pas de deux with a certain creature supposedly rare in this province marks a kind of theatrical first. While we’re at it, let’s toss a bouquet to Soren Olsen, who co-directed with the cast and delivers a first-rate sound design.

We don’t do stars around this operation. But this is about as entertaining as it gets at any Fringe, anywhere. Book it.

— Alan Kellogg

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Fun in roommate hell: Terms and Conditions, a guest 12thnight Fringe review by Todd Babiak

Posted on August 18, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Cynthia Price and Taylor Cassis in Terms and Conditions. Photo supplied.

Terms & Conditions (Stage 18, Sugar Swing Ballroom — Main Floor)

It is terribly awkward to move in with a stranger. They don’t have the same taste in music, the same interest in cleaning, the same attitude toward houseplants. We want to be polite. We want to share. But conflict is inevitable.

Good humour certainly helps settle things. And as we see in Terms & Conditions, by Bossy Flyer from Long Beach, California, so do acrobatic skills and a love for absurdity.

Cynthia Price and Taylor Casas don’t talk much, as they negotiate a small space together, but they aren’t shy about lifting, spinning, flopping and flying about. Why do they partake in duo acrobatics instead of shouting at one another? Why, when one of the roommates sustains a concussion, does the other one partake in a lip-synch performance? It doesn’t really matter, because it’s fun to watch. This isn’t Bertolt Brecht.

Price and Casas are at their best when the living arrangements degrade to bicep-kissing, face-spitting, circus-stunting total war.

— Todd Babiak

 

Posted in Fringe 2018, Reviews | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Fun in roommate hell: Terms and Conditions, a guest 12thnight Fringe review by Todd Babiak

Something tells me it’s all happening at the zoo: The Zoo Story, a Fringe review

Posted on August 18, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Collin Doyle and James Hamilton in The Zoo Story, Bedlam Theatre Concern. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Zoo Story (Stage 17, Roxy on Gateway)

The struggle between what’s socialized and what’s primal about us human animals: that’s what propels the one-act that rocketed Edward Albee into the forefront of American theatre two decades ago.

The Fringe has a long (and, trust me, checkered) history with this apparently — in reality anything but — simple short play. For decades at a time, no Fringe went by without a production, indoors and out, sometimes two a summer. But for years now, no word from the fateful park bench in Central Park where Peter, a decent, cardigan-wearing publishing executive with an upper-middle-class family life, sits reading a book. Until he’s accosted by a chatty, oddly insistent, vaguely menacing loner, Jerry, who goads him into a lethal confrontation over the possession of the bench.      

If there were any lingering doubt that The Zoo Story still packs a power-punch, it’s the moment to hie yourself to the Roxy on Gateway where the excellence of Bradley Moss’s production and performances from two substantial actors make the play’s shocking emotional escalation come alive again.

James Hamilton calibrates, in a natural way,  exactly the way Peter’s mix of muted perplexity and his ordinary tendency to why-not? accommodation gradually gets jostled, bit by bit, into something gradually warier. And Collin Doyle is wonderful as Jerry; the actor’s naturally open-faced, wholesome look and smile give him a benign, disarmingly conciliatory air.  Jerry’s mild, unthreatening charisma — you could call it innocence — and the feeling that he’s reassessing on the spot make the intensity of urge to connect even more startling and powerful. The story of Jerry’s encounter with a malevolent dog has a  compelling sense of a memory revisited vividly in the mind. 

Designer Scott Peters surrounds the bench with the lighting and sounds of urban life. This is a lively, fully engaged production of a play that sneaks up on you in a memorable way; the great man himself would be impressed. 

Posted in Fringe 2018, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Something tells me it’s all happening at the zoo: The Zoo Story, a Fringe review

And the plot thickens: The Real Inspector Hound, a Fringe review

Posted on August 18, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Jenny McKillop, Mat Busby, Belinda Cornish, and Andrew MacDonald-Smith (front) in The Real Inspector Hound, Bright Young Things. Photo by Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Real Inspector Hound (Stage 12, Varscona Theatre)

In Tom Stoppard’s cunning 1968 comedy, you’re watching two theatre critics watch a hoary English country manor house whodunit à la Dame Agatha.

“Has it started?” wonders one of them casually to the other. “It’s a pause,” thinks the other. Gradually, Birdboot (Ashley Wright), complacent and lecherous, and Moon (Mat Busby), deeply resentful at being the eternal second-stringer, are drawn past the fourth wall that critics gas on about all the time, right into the world of the play. Which is amusingly set forth, with all its deluxe trimmings in this Bright Young Things production directed by Mark Bellamy.

Yes, dear readers, shocking as it to report, the absolute objectivity of the critic is called into question and, if I may say so and I think on balance I may, actually mocked in the course of The Real Inspector Hound.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here

“Pilified and viloried,” as Birdboot puts it, in regard to other personal matters pertaining to a certain compromising dinner with a certain ingénue. Stoppard, incidentally, did time as a theatre critic, a notion that should fill actors everywhere with relief — that he moved on. 

Parodies don’t really work if they’re not expertly accurate re-creations of the genre, in this case English potboiler mystery.  Bellamy’s production is — from the lugubrious housekeeper (Jenny McKillop) who answers the phone with annotations that are part of the plot to the suspicious old codger (Garett Ross) in a wheelchair to the bone-headed policeman (Troy O’Donnell). 

Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Belinda Cornish in The Real Inspector Hound, Bright Young Things. Photo by Ryan Parker.

The bright young things of the landed gentry fling themselves extravagantly through every doorway (after pausing dramatically). Belinda Cornish is Lady Cynthia Muldoon, whose husband Albert went for a walk on the cliffs 10 years “and was never seen again.” Louise Lambert is the pert Felicity, who enters in tennis whites, and whose performance Birdboot has already determined in advance is “one of the summits in the range of contemporary theatre.” Andrew MacDonald-Smith is the suavely romantic jeune premier.

The performances are spot on. And the same, I am compelled to admit, must be said for Wright and Busby, who are note perfect, as Birdboot and Moon. Their critical repertoire is sublime. “Faced as we with such ubiquitous obliquity…”

Alas, in my work I will never be using the phrase “I think we are entitled to ask …” ever again. But as for “hysteria is no substitute for éclat,” I’ve put my dibs on that one.

A lark of a show.

Posted in Fringe 2018, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on And the plot thickens: The Real Inspector Hound, a Fringe review

A multi-cultural collision as comedy: FOB, a guest 12thnight Fringe review by Alan Kellogg

Posted on August 18, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

FOB. Photo supplied.

FOB (Stage 10, Acacia Hall)

One of the valuable aspects of any Fringe worth its salt is offering younger, less experienced — or locally less known — performers and creators the opportunity to strut their stuff (or at least try out their ideas) in a high-visibility, professional setting. A nifty by-product can involve work that actually reflects their communities. And, if the audience is lucky, the package can be entertaining.

And that what happens in this agreeable light comedy written and directed by Aksam Alyousef. The story involves the literal collision (cultures and cars) of Samar (Amena Shebab), Adam (Bahaa Harmouche) and Tina (Madonna Gonzalez) on Highway 2 between Edmonton and Calgary.

Adam and Samar have been married for ten years and have immigrated from the Middle East. Tina is local Edmonton lawyer whose divorce practice is itself on the rocks.

(Some) fun ensues as a desperate, rattled Tina attempts to convince the bickering but ultimately solid couple that splitting up is the way to go. Each of the likeable cast members have comic moments. Shebab, in a kind of Charo-meets-Gracie Allen approach, was particularly appealing. And the gentle juxtaposing of cultural clichés – the sheesh hookah, camp chairs, full cooler of Mediterranean snacks vs. constant harried cell phone use and general uptightness — is kind of endearing. Alyousef has a real talent for spinning off one-liners.

At any rate, the packed opening night crowd, which, judging by the hugs after the show included many friends and family, absolutely loved it. You’ll likely walk out with a smile yourself.

– Alan Kellogg

 

 

Posted in Fringe 2018, Reviews | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on A multi-cultural collision as comedy: FOB, a guest 12thnight Fringe review by Alan Kellogg