Adventures Off-Broadway in New York

Posted on July 27, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Kayli Carter, Ryan Foust, Susan Pourfar in Mary Page Marlowe. Photo by Joan Marcus

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

NEW YORK — On a sultry Monday night at 2nd Stage, a signature non-profit Off-Broadway company, the packed house is full of actors, directors, agents.

They’ve stepped through the spicy scent of lilies (courtesy of a corner vendor) and a cloud of eau de Sabretts hot dogs into the spruced-up West 44th theatre to see the latest from a Chicago theatre artist of apparently endless versatility.

That would be Tracy Letts, poster-person for Chicago’s fabled ensemble company Steppenwolf — award-winning actor, director, and the playwright who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for August: Osage County, his funny and fierce multi-generational saga of an Oklahoma clan in full implosion.

With Mary Page Marlowe, which premiered in Chicago in 2016 and arrives in New York in a production directed by Lila Neugebauer. Letts fractures the unremarkable life of a women, an Ohio tax accountant, into 11 scenes and scrambles the chronology. Six actors — seven if you count the doll who plays Mary Page in infancy — the role of the title character at different ages. (Hint, hint … potential producers: every female actor you know will be lining up). 

Tatiana Maslany in Mary Page Marlowe. Photo by Joan Marcus

 They add up, sort of, but not in a serial way: the oldest of the Mary Page Marlowe’s (beautifully played by Blair Brown) herself wonders if there’s any real connection between her former selves. Has she even been the same person? It’s the great mystery of identity, whether it’s fixed or re-invented at every turn. When there’s no progression into consequences, or follow-up in the scenes (sparingly written and powerful in that), it’s a way of saying that you never know what small moments in your life are going to be the seminal ones.

The play starts in the middle, with the 40-year-old Mary Page (Susan Pourfar) explaining to her kids — teenage daughter appalled, son unimpressed — that she and their father are splitting up, and they’re re-locating to Kentucky. It’s a life with multiple divorces, re-marriages, affairs, kid crises, a slide into booze, a tragedy. The most inconsequential, benign encounter of all is the last scene, involving dry cleaning an heirloom quilt (the past is fragile, evidently) of all things. The end.

The audiences was taken aback by the odd abruptness of it all. The woman sitting beside me, evidently a theatre producer, said to her companion “I can’t believe it’s over!”

Blair Brown and Brian Kerwin in Mary Page Marlowe. Photo by Joan Marcus.

In the scenes themselves, though, it’s a play that sneaks up on you with its moving real-ness. And the cast, which includes Emmy-winning Tatiana Maslani of Orphan Black, as Mary Page Marlowe at 27 and 36, is exceptional. 

A revival of Letts’ first play Killer Joe, a  grisly and violent 1993 family dysfunction satire, opened in London in June. Martin McDonagh’s gleefully gruesome The Lieutenant of Inishmore is in the West End; it’s a veritable bloodbath. But the most genuinely shocking play of all, said Michael Billington, the venerable Guardian theatre critic, is one that’s arrived from London at the Public Theater in New York’s East Village.

The Public Theater, NYC. Photo by Alan Kellogg.

 

Cyprus Avenue is a black absurdist comedy that makes most plays that fly under that flag look beige. It’s by David Ireland, whose I Promise You Sex And Violence horrified Edinburgh Fringe audiences and critics alike in 2014 (the reviews alone will make your hair curl). And this latest joint production, a collaboration between London’s Royal Court and the Abbey Theatre in Dublin (where it originated) is directed by the former’s artistic director Vicky Featherstone.

As an attack on the absurdity of sectarian violence in Ireland, Cyprus Avenue (named for a Belfast street) takes its black humour about fanaticism to extremes of violence that will leave you aghast. But don’t get me wrong, Cyprus Avenue is laugh-out-loud funny before it’s way-out-there horrifying. 

The brilliant Irish actor Stephen Rea stars as a Belfast unionist, an Ulsterman who believes that he is British, not Irish, and that the sacred cause is under lethal attack from the Catholics. He comes to believe — and argues with hilarious  articulateness — that his new baby granddaughter not only has an uncanny resemblance to Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams (she has “Fenian eyes”) but  actually is Gerry Adams.

How this position devolves into terrifying savagery, logically and step-by-step, is the way this play ticks, a la Swift’s Modest Proposal. Just when you think it can’t possibly pursue its own comic logic any further into outrage, it keeps going. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a play that takes itself beyond the pale with quite that much fearlessness.

At the end, we all sat mute and appalled, wondering what to do next. A drink? A Valium? A A Sabretts ‘dog? A Disney stage musical? Nothing seems quite right. (In the end we opted for a highly unusual amalgam of theatre and magic, that in its own strange and seductive way is, like Mary Page Marlowe, about the mystery of identity: In And Of Itself by and starring the illusionist Derek DelGaudio). 

Incidentally, Ireland has a new play, Ulster American, at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. It comes with the warning “not for the faint of heart.” Exactly.  

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“The Great Work begins” … again: Angels in America in New York

Posted on July 26, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

NEW YORK — It’s one of those grand, visionary plays that change the way you think about everything  — including theatre. At least that’s how it was for me.

And so last week in New York I was keen to see the production of Angels in America that arrived on Broadway from the National Theatre in London (and won Tony Awards for best revival, and best actor and supporting actor). Would Tony Kushner’s seven-and-a-half hour epic of life in Reaganite American, “a gay fantasia on national themes,” feel as momentous 25 years later? Would its vast, crazy, swirling canvas of America in the plague years — tragedy and comedy, hallucination and gritty drama, wild dislocations of perception — be as thrilling in 2018?

I’d seen Angels In America, in the ‘90s, twice onstage and once on the small screen. True, it feels so much more alive onstage, but I’ve kept the VHS tapes of the HBO movie of 2003 next to the TV, even though the VCR is an antique beyond repair and I can’t remember how to use it anyhow.    

On a hot summer Sunday, after jazz at the Blue Note, off we went to the Neil Simon Theatre. The production, directed by Marianne Elliott (War Horse, The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time), is a knockout experience, with a dream cast, including Nathan Lane, Andrew Garfield, James McArdle, Denise Gough, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. But, more than that was the weird, eerie sense that a scathing indictment of the unregenerate opportunism of America in the 80s, written in the 90s, is of and for this moment.

“The world doesn’t spin backwards,” says the flamboyant black drag queen/ nurse Belize, the voice of hard-ass compassion in Angels in America. Well apparently, disturbingly, it does.

True, much has changed: what it means to be gay in the world, the evolution of AIDS beyond its death sentence in the era of Reaganite denial and homophobia. But what hasn’t is embodied in the character played by the great Nathan Lane. In a visceral, vivid, definitive performance Lane is Roy Cohn, the the ruthless, poisonous, manipulative, endlessly unscrupulous Joseph McCarthy hit man — the “polestar of human evil” who was the personal mentor to the current president of the United States.

In a provocative New York Magazine piece in April, about the Trump enablers between then and now, Frank Rich, theatre critic-turned-political columnist, wrote that when he first saw Angels in America, in its 1993 Broadway premiere, it was the delicate AIDS-stricken figure of Prior Walter, up against everything, who was central to the experience for him. In the revival, as he wrote, it’s the indelibly malignant figure of Lane’s Roy Cohn, who will do anything, anything, for power, who dominates.

I see exactly what he means. The spectre of Trump hangs over the two-part play. Angels in America is alive, and riveting, that way. Andrew Garfield is wonderful as the acerbic, struggling, terrified Prior. But you can’t take your eyes off Lane, in a performance buzzing with vitriol, even as the closeted gay homophobe lies in bed dying of AIDS. 

In Millennium Approaches, part I, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, the convicted Soviet  spy Cohn hounded to the electric chair (and who maintains a death side vigil by his hospital bed), predicts that  “history is about to crack wide open.” At the end of Part I, an Angel crashes through Prior Walter’s bedroom ceiling to announce that “the Great Work begins.”

At the start of Perestroika, part II, the World’s Oldest Living Bolshevik wonders aloud “Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: can we change? in time?” Now, there’s a question. When Prior wrestles with the Angel (in a particularly physical brawl in the production), and climbs a glowing ladder to heaven, God is a notorious no-show. Garfield is immensely affecting as a man who in the end, suffering notwithstanding, just can’t renege on life. “I want more. I can’t help myself,” he says of “the addiction of being alive.” 

The groundbreaking theatricality of it all, in the 90s when I first saw it, opened my eyes to what theatre can do. And in Elliott’s production, reimagined and stunningly lit, the stage magic of a piece that moves effortlessly from hospital room to Mormon Visitor Centre, Salt Lake City to Brooklyn, Antarctica to Heaven, was just as exciting as ever.

Kushner’s re-think of the American political drama includes sexual, religious, cultural outsiders. That vision of broad inclusivity is under threat again; if history has indeed cracked open, it’s to reveal a deep, maybe bottomless, fissure in human progress. On a summer night in Trump-hating New York, it’s a terrifying thought. 

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“Not just prepared but Miss Katelyn-prepared!”: Tiny Bear Jaws takes us to readiness school. A review

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Elena Belyea, Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable. Photo by Mike Tan.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s been a banner year or five for traumatizing apocalyptic anxiety.

It’s nerve-wracking and exhausting to be in a perpetual state of red-alert, barely suppressed. On the other hand, who can call it outlandish paranoid fantasy to imagine that some nondescript pyscho could walk into a school and start shooting kids?

Elena Belyea’s unnerving little solo comedy is about that. Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable, revived in re-written, updated form by Tiny Bear Jaws for this short Edmonton run, starts like satire then escalates into something else altogether. You’re laughing, and then, damn, you pretty much wish you weren’t. It happens over and over.    

Miss Katelyn, who continually refers to herself as Miss Katelyn and uses the collective “we” as her pronoun of choice, greets us at the door with a beaming teacher smile, and eye contact. It’s the last day of school, Miss Katelyn’s last crack at imparting life-saving knowledge to us grade 3Bs. Her six-point program for dealing with worst-case scenarios is designed to make us “not just prepared but Miss Katelyn-prepared!” she tells us brightly. Belyea has the charismatic drive of a Miss Jean Brodie for the elementary school set.

Show-and-tell is Miss Katelyn’s pedagogical forte. “Puppets!” she declares, after roll-call, and produces a macabre sock-puppet fable about two brother beavers. One’s industrious, one’s a lay-about. A hunter with a gun shows up. Would you rather be the slacker beaver who gets shot in the head and dies? Or the hard-working beaver who gets shot in the head and dies?

Miss Katelyn’s educational exuberance has a prosthelytizer’s zeal; she attacks her material with vigour. “Who knows what I mean when I say the word ‘gunman’?” ‘Profiling’ is next. Then ‘lockdown’.And she keeps up a running commentary on her fellow teachers in asides. They’re complacent idiots in her view for the way they discount fear and suspicion.

Belyea’s new and improved version of the 2015 , directed by Emma Tibaldo, is smarter at applying incremental pressure to our instinctive reaction that Miss Katelyn is a crackpot zealot on a roll— until our resistance explodes under the weight of her logic. Bulletproof school supplies? Makes sense, really. Security cameras? Metal detectors?

Potential terrorists sitting next to you at St. Joseph’s Elementary in class 3B? If the world is a lethal place, is it not reasonable, well-adjusted even, to be suspicious of everyone and everything? That’s Miss Katelyn’s argument, but it’s an escalating challenge to meet it, she’s finding. The cloudy question of whether the readiness is all is up for grabs, times being what they are.    

Tiny Bear Jaws sinks its sharp little teeth into queasy and well-meaning responses in a juicy, solo performance from Belyea. Miss Katelyn’s campaign is all about the double-edged nature of fear and practical caution in a world of continual unseen dangers. Knowledge is damning and it has recoil; it’s burning a hole in Miss Katelyn’s mind. 

The frontier between alertness and panic is where she makes her stand. But it’s unstable ground, and things happen to people who live there.

An intriguing piece has become a lot more provocative. Catch performances through Saturday at the Studio Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca. 

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Settle down class: the teacher is back, in a new version of Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable

Posted on July 17, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Elena Belyea, Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable. Photo by Mike Tan.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Imagine: someone loony enough to believe that some unobtrusive terrorist gunman could go into a school and …   

It doesn’t exactly take a paranoid with an apocalyptic persecution fantasy to imagine “a worst-case scenario.” Reality has seen to that.

Playwright Elena Belyea can thank the darkening, dangerous world we live in for ensuring that the what-if? currency of Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable, created three years ago, remains white-hot. In fact, hotter than ever: in the time since  Belyea’s solo play arrived here at the Fringe in 2015, gun violence has proliferated with alarming frequency; a world leader has actually proposed arming teachers, for heaven’s sake. 

“The play has increased in relevance; we keep updating,” says Belyea. Her theatre  company Tiny Bear Jaws (“a little theatre company with teeth”) is bringing a new, re-thought, version of Miss Katelyn to the TransAlta Arts Barns’ studio theatre starting Wednesday. “At least a third has been completely re-written.”

Elena Belyea in Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable. Photo by Laurence Philomene.

Bad things keep on happening to good people, as Miss Katelyn is hyper-aware. Parkland, Columbine, Sandy Hook…. On May 18, while this new version was running at Calgary’s Downstage, nine students and a teacher were killed at Santa Fe High School in Texas. “I had an audience member cry through the entire show,” says Belyea, who briefly wondered if she should address this in the course of the performance before deciding to let the man “have his private space for that.”

At another performance a Grade 3 teacher with seven years’ experience, exactly Miss Katelyn’s professional situation, had just experienced a lock-down at school. Belyea, who led a writing workshop for junior and senior high school kids last week, says the one student had been in three three-hour lockdowns recently.

Tiny Bear Jaws, a joint venture of Belyea and Tori Morrison, experiments with different audience/stage interactions every time out. Everyone We Know Will Be There, which occupied a suburban house in 2017, was an actual teen party, with the audience as guests. Cleave, produced here by Fringe Theatre Adventures, introduced a stranger into a family with secrets of its own. With Miss Katelyn we’re in school. 

Elena Belyea, Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable. Photo by Mike Tan.

Belyea, this year’s winner of the RBC Emerging Playwright Award, traces the origins to Miss Katelyn back to her graduating year in the National Theatre School’s playwriting program — and to her moment of sudden and unaccountable panic and terror when she and her sister were at WEM, surrounded by crowds. “It scared the shit out of me. And I had to wonder ‘where the hell did that come from?’”

The play was the answer. Belyea says she experimented with a ski mask and fake gun. But “that was not what it was….” she says of the play.

Who is the grimly chipper Miss Katelyn talking to when she’s onstage, going through her five-step program for worst-case scenarios? Belyea credits the late great dramaturge Iris Turcotte with the inspiration that the show is “Miss Katelyn is talking to the kids.” Yes, class we are Miss Katelyn’s grade threes.

Belyea, who divides her time between Edmonton and Montreal, worked on the script with her close friend, actor/playwright/director Jon Lachlan Stewart, who’s lately produced a French language version of Miss Katelyn in Montreal. “I tried things on my feet. He’d ask me questions, and I improvised.” Its first outing was at the Fringe in Montreal, a city with “a raw relationship to gun terrorism,” as Belyea says. And she was apprehensive about its reception. It won prizes, and was invited back. 

The new version is under the direction of Emma Tibaldo of Playwrights Workshop Montreal. And, says Belyea, “it feels better to act. The text does more work.”

Pay attention, class: a play for our time has gotten a new life.  

PREVIEW

Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable

Theatre: Tiny Bear Jaws

Written by and starring: Elena Belyea

Directed by: Emma Tibaldo

Where: Studio Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Wednesday through Saturday

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca 

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The importance of being Oscar: a comic masterwork finds a home at Teatro La Quindicina: a review

Posted on July 13, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Leona Brausen (centre) as Lady Bracknell, The Importance of Being Earnest, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It has been called the most perfectly constructed comedy in English theatre. And it’s certainly one of the funniest. Funny, then, how The Importance of Being Earnest is full of serious people.

That’s the hard, crucial comic truth understood that makes the evening at Teatro La Quindicina in the company of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 masterwork so entertaining.

We get to watch as elegant and humourless characters acknowledge the social realities and status quo of their glittering, self-contained high-Victorian world. The play is built on an architecture of dazzlingly paradoxical wit. The inadvertent satirists who inhabit it offer a serious running commentary on  money, status, class, religion, education, morals, manners, smoking, cucumber sandwiches, marriage, romance — did I say money? And they’re in earnest. Which is exactly what makes them hilarious.   

Jeff Haslam’s Teatro production gets the pay-off. If there’s one thing Teatro casts know, from experience with the articulate wit of Stewart Lemoine comedies, it’s the comic dividend paid by gravitas. 

Mark Meer and Ron Pederson in The Importance of Being Earnest, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby

In one of the funniest scenes, two young men-about-town are in crisis mode. Being Ernest is of gravest importance to the objects of their romantic pursuit, whose cranks are turned by the name — and their multiplying deceptions on this count are in immediate danger of exploding. John Worthing (Mark Meer) chastises his friend Algernon Moncrieff (Ron Pederson) for his apparent heartlessness. “When I am really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink,” objects the latter reaching for another muffin. He is not kidding around.

Pederson’s breezy, chatter-y mastery of the play’s constant inversion of serious and trivial (“divorces are made in heaven”), is a fine contrast to the more languid, weightier suavity of Meer as Jack, who will later admit to personal distress that “all his life has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?” Both actors have finely tuned coming timing, and the rhythm of their exchanges is supple, intelligible, and funny. 

Shannon Blanchet and Louise Lambert in The Importance of Being Earnest, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby.

In another highlight moment, two women, one worldly urbanite of maximum ruthlessness and one delicate country flower of steel-belted determination have at each other over tea in a garden. Louise Lambert as the flinty Gwendolyn and Shannon Blanchet as the alleged innocent Cecily rise to the occasion with implacable charm and tooth-gritting smiles. Both are excellent. 

At the centre is the majestic and  terrifying figure of Lady Bracknell, the hard-headed social realist who is the unyielding spokesperson for respectability. Leona Brausen wears a hat with its own hauteur, a veritable architecture unto itself: the ribbons themselves (provided, like a gown with impressively formidable mutton sleeves, by designer Robert Shannon) quiver with grim social certainties. “Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.” 

Lady Bracknell’s catalogue of the male requirements for eligible suitors is one of the funniest assessments ever made of the male of the species. Her first question to Gwendolyn’s potential beau is whether he smokes. Upon hearing a reluctant affirmative, her response is: “I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.” Lady Bracknell, one of the repertoire’s biggest laugh magnets, has views on every aspect of modern society, including education. “Ignorance,” she declares grandly, “is a delicate exotic fruit. Touch it and the bloom is gone.”  

And while Brausen’s performance, at least on opening night, had the odd lapse of decorum — it’s a little hard to imagine Lady Bracknell either shrieking or trotting — the humourless un-ironic delivery, the grim downturned mouth, and the shrewd squint that is light years from being a wink, are on the money. And I do mean money. 

Julien Arnold is a riot as the play’s beaming resident cleric and theological enthusiast Canon Chasuble, whose views expansively include pagan annotations. And his scenes with Miss Prism (Cathy Derkach), Cecily’s fierce governess, are highly amusing (though on opening night, rather startlingly loud). And as a double pair of butlers, the city one sublimely impassive and the country one put-upon (a condition no doubt exacerbated by hair that looks rather unnervingly like an upside-down milk pitcher), are carried off with aplomb by Mat Busby. 

Chantel Fortin’s set, lighted by Stephanie Bahniuk, amusingly requires only small adjustments to take the characters from the countryside to central London — an insight in itself into the Wildean world.

In a production that understands the measure and weight of the title,  the pleasures of a witty masterpiece  are allowed to shine, at a company that is constant in its exploration of the comic terrain. Give yourself a treat.

REVIEW

The Importance of Being Earnest

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written by: Oscar Wilde

Directed by: Jeff Haslam

Starring: Leona Brausen, Ron Pederson, Mark Meer, Louise Lambert, Shannon Blanchet, Julien Arnold, Cathy Derkach, Mat Busby

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through July 28

Tickets: teatroq.com

 

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An all-Canadian trio of mainstage productions for season 44 at Theatre Network

Posted on July 13, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

The Empress & The Prime Minister, Theatre Network. Photo by Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At the centre of Theatre Network’s all-Canadian upcoming three-production mainstage season announced this week is a new play inspired by a remarkable life — and a life-changing moment in our collective history.

In The Empress & The Prime Minister playwright Darrin Hagen unspools history half a century to imagine and explore the real-life connection between a Vancouver drag queen/activist and Canada’s young minister of justice. The former? ted northe, the “Empress of Canada.” The latter: Pierre Trudeau. And the result was the decriminalization of homosexuality in this country. “There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”

Bradley Moss directs the premiere production (April 16 to May 5, 2019) that stars Hagen, the “Edmonton Queen” as northe and Vancouver-based Joey Lesperance as Trudeau. “Both actors play other characters too,” says Moss, who adds that “the younger generation doesn’t always realize just how difficult it was to be gay at that time.”

The connection between Theatre Network and the star Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch continues in the company’s 44th season. And it too is a window on a fraught time in Canada’s past.   What A Young Wife Ought To Know, which premiered in Halifax at Christian Barry’s 2b theatre with dates cross the country before its high-profile Toronto run this past winter, is set in the ‘20s. Inspired by true stories of young women the playwright explores the nightmare implications of this era before birth control, and even knowledge about birth control, was available.

It’s a love story that goes very wrong. “And it’s also a story about poverty,” says Moss of the play, set in working-class Ottawa of the period.

Marianne Copithorne directs the Theatre Network production that runs Nov. 13 to Dec. 2. Casting has yet to be announced.

Damien Atkins, We Are Not Alone. Photo supplied.

Edmonton-born Damien Atkins returns to his home town with his own solo play We Are Not Alone. The production, touring  collaboration between Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre the Segal Centre directed by Chris Abraham and Christian Barry, taps Atkins’ own investigations into UFO’s, alien sightings and abductions, government conspirations.

Plays by Actor-turned-playwright Atkins, who grew up immersed in musical theatre at the St. Albert Children’s Theatre, include Miss Chatelaine, Good Mother (the first new Canadian play to premiere at the Stratford Festival, and the cabaret Real Live Girl. Edmonton audiences last saw Toronto-based Atkins, currently appearing at the Shaw Festival, in The Gay Heritage Project at the Citadel Club in 2016.

“Funny, strange, weird,” says Moss, who’s also fascinated about  alien interventions. “And since most stories about alien abductions and violations come from women, the show “probes that human aspect,” as Moss says. We Are Not Alone runs Feb. 12 to March 3, 2019.

The season finale is the 2019 of Nextfest, May 30 to June 9, which celebrates and showcases the multi-disciplinary work of the next generation of artists.

Pinocchio, Alberta Opera. Photo supplied.

Alberta Opera arrives for the first time at the Roxy to launch theThe Roxy Performance series, Theatre Network’s annual series hosting  independent productions and companies. The touring company, which specializes in irreverent and original musical theatre treatments of fairy tales is reviving their version of Pinocchio, with its bright score by the late Jeff Unger and book by the company artistic director Farren Timoteo. It runs Sept. 28 to 30 as part of a season of touring schools.

It would be hard to identify Jezebel, At The Still Point as a two-hander since paws are involved. In this text-movement piece innovative dance/theatre artist Ainsley Hillyard, the highly original residing muse of Good Women Dance, co-stars with her untrained French bulldog Jezebel as an astronaut and her time-travelling companion. The Bumble Bear production directed by Beth Dart is at the Roxy Oct. 9 to 21.

Ainsley Hillyard and Jezel in Jezebel, At The Still Point, Bumble Bear Productions. Photo supplied.

Burning Bluebeard, the anti-panto Christmas panto, has retired from the festive season at the Roxy. Instead Blunt Entertainment premieres Oh! Christmas Tree, a new comedy by Conni Massing. “There’s an absurdist human quality to her writing,” says Moss of a play about holiday rituals and starring a couple with diametrically opposed perspectives on the fraught season. Brian Deedrick directs the Blunt Entertainment production, running Dec. 11 to 23.

Moss himself returns to the Roxy Performance Series to direct the premiere of Minerva – Queen of the Handcuffs, playwright/magician Ron Pearson’s investigation of a famous female escape artist who came up against the brutal male establishment — including Houdini — in the ‘20s and ‘30s.  

Miranda Allen, sole Edmonton occupant of the actor/escape artist category of showbiz, stars in the Ghost Writer Theatre production running Jan. 15 to 27, 2019. Richard Lee Hsi plays “all the crappy men in Minerva’s life,” as Moss says. He has hopes for touring the show after its run here.

Small Mouth Sounds by the American playwright Bess Wohl is the Wild Side Productions offering of the season. The acclaimed indie company (10 out of 12, Passion Play, Poison, The Realistic Joneses) tried last season to acquire rights to the high unusual award-winner, set among six strangers at a silent retreat. Now it’s happening. Jim Guedo directs the production that runs March 12 to 24.

Two Roxy series that fill niches not much occupied in the Edmonton theatre scene are also in the season. The unique Hey, Ladies!, starring Leona Brausen, Cathleen Rootsaert and Davina Stewart, returns with four new Friday night episodes of their “info-tainment” variety shows, Oct. 26, Feb. 1, March 29 and May 10. And cabaret artist Patricia Zentilli returns with three new editions of PattyZee@TheRoxy, Oct. 27, Feb. 2, and May 11. 

Further information and subscriptions are available at theatrenetwork.ca

  

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Leona Brausen plays Lady B: The Importance of Being Earnest at Teatro La Quindicina

Posted on July 12, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Leona Brausen in The Importance of Being Earnest, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There will be a moment this evening when an actor who has spent a great deal of time in her career providing perfectly vintage handbags to the casts of period comedies will get the ultimate pay-off.

Leona Brausen will deliver the immortal exclamation “A handbag?!” from the stage — and get the laughs that invariably go with it.

The play is Oscar Wilde’s high-Victorian comic masterpiece The Importance Of Being Earnest. And Brausen, the long-time Teatro La Quindicina star, muse, and costume designer, will be playing the redoubtable Lady Bracknell, adamantine repository of social proprieties. “To be born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag, whether it has handles or not,. seems too me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.”

In Teatro’s summer season, the eight-actor production directed by artistic director Jeff Haslam replaces Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, a switch inspired by the sudden unavailability of North American rights for the Simon canon. And by an uncanny (and in itself hilarious) alignment of stars, the cast of the American comedy classic has been re-purposed for Wilde: the Oscar and Felix, Mark Meer and Ron Pederson, are Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff; the Pigeon sisters, Louise Lambert and Shannon Blanchet, are Gwendolyn and Cecily.

But you can’t possibly consider doing The Importance of Being Earnest without real stage presence in its implacable centre of gravity. And in recent years, Brausen, who’s been part of the Teatro ensemble since its very birth at the 1982 Fringe, has been onstage less (with the exception of comic improv) and backstage (designing costumes) more. She had to be cajoled, she admits, with her usual breezy, self-deprecating good nature. “I’ve never read it; I’ve never seen it,” declares Brausen, from whom actor jargon or theatrical pretension of any kind have never been heard. “Jeff told me Lady Bracknell had hardly any lines…. He lied.”

Leona Brausen and Ron Pederson in The Importance of Being Earnest, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby.

So The Importance of Being Earnest was ready for Brausen’s  discovery. “Wait a minute! This play is really funny!” she says cheerfully, “1895, and it’s like Carol Burnett! The Marx Brothers, Three’s Company. Bugs Bunny!” She grins apologetically. “They are all my references.”

Earnest, she has discovered is “just way more work, and really long sentences! Wordy but eloquent! So clever, so biting!” There are ripples, she finds, from the Downton Abbey season of Die-Nasty, the weekly improvised soap opera of which she’s been, till this season, a core member. She played an imperiously snooty matriarch, à la Maggie Smith.

Wilde’s is a kind of sparkling and articulate comic wit Brausen recognizes as having similarities with the playwright with whom she’s worked the most. And for his part, Stewart Lemoine, a huge Wilde admirer, considers The Importance of Being Earnest “a perfect comic construction. No need for a mysterious new interpretation; it’s perfect as it is.” He regards Earnest as exemplary in its “impossibly convoluted plot that lines up and makes perfect sense…. Everyone’s splendidly articulate, even in confusion.”

This makes absolute sense to Brausen in thinking about Lady Bracknell, “a snob, a name-dropper, a dragon, obsessed with society, with manners, with what other people think.” In the society conjured by Wilde, “to raise an eyebrow counts.”

It was 36 years ago that Brausen found herself in All These Heels, a new comedy by her old high school friend Lemoine. “I was a lady spy. I smoked, of course.”

Nothing was the same after that. A theatre company named after the brothel in Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt was born in that debut production. And so was an actor. Brausen, who had an instinctive (and, as she says, untaught) grasp of Lemoine’s witty and articulate playfulness,  starred as a variety of exotically literate characters — heiresses, opera divas, society hostesses, eccentric literary agents … and their sidekicks. For at least 30 of those 36 years, she’s been both actor and purveyor of striking and authentic costumes for a theatre that, like Brausen herself,  often gravitates to the decades of style between the ’20s and the ‘80s.

Brausen’s house is a repository of vintage shoes (the shoe department is in the basement), frocks, suits, hats, frocks. There are wigs on decapitated heads everywhere. And, ah, hundreds of purses. One of her favourites, “a deerskin ‘30s purse,” has appeared in so many Teatro shows it’s been dubbed “the Teatro acting purse.” And doilies (“it looks like grandma lives there”).

Lately, she’s been collecting vintage perfumes. “You used to wear Rive Gauche didn’t you?” she says to me, remembering a defunct French scent from years ago. “They changed the formula,” she says disapprovingly.”They did that to Chanel No 5 too.”

It’s so crammed chez Brausen — especially since one of her three kids has moved back home, into a bedroom-turned-wig room — that she’s having a shed built for the overflow.

In a town with a gigantic Fringe, producers show up at her place armed with nothing more than a bright idea. Actors come to be kitted out in style. “I’m a soft touch,” she laughs. “It’s like playing with dolls,” she says modestly of costume design Brausen-style. “It’s not your usual costume design; I don’t draw pictures…. It’s more like recycling.” For her, shopping is “therapeutic; it’s what I do to de-stress….”

She’s modest, too, about a startling natural expertise in period style. “I don’t know why I know things,” she shrugs affably.  “Turner Classic Movies?” Brausen tries to assess her affection for the 20s and 30s: “they’re very eccentric; people would put anything on their heads.    

Brausen is a natural, and fearless, improviser onstage. In Die-Nasty’s ‘Paris in the ‘20s’ season, she played Gertrude Stein with Davina Stewart as Alice B. Toklas. They’ve taken the characters into a new improv show every month at Grindstone Theatre’s new Comedy Club. 

She laughs. “It’s like Jackie Gleason. ‘Hey Alice, what’s for dinner?’! Darrin Hagen and Trevor Schmidt are our upstairs neighbours Fat Frank and Little Dickie…. Instead of salon nights, we play hearts. Ha! We haven’t figured out what sitcom this is!”

And now, there’s a comedy of extreme intricacy, and lines that glitter with epigrammatic wit. Brausen, who’s designed epic numbers of costumes and wigs for the Mayfield’s Christmas show and Elvis revue All Shook Up among other assignments across town this past season, is looking forward to wearing someone else’s gowns for a change (they’re designed by Robert Shannon) as Lady Bracknell.

“Look what happened,” she laughs. “I never made plans. I’d say I’m livin’ the dream. But I didn’t have dreams….”

PREVIEW

The Importance of Being Earnest

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written by: Oscar Wilde

Directed by: Jeff Haslam

Starring: Mark Meer, Ron Pederson, Leona Brausen, Shannon Blanchet, Louise Lambert, Julien Arnold, Cathy Derkach, Mat Busby

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through July 28

Tickets: teatroq.com

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Found Festival 2018: surprising finds, unexpected encounters

Posted on July 3, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Miranda Allen and Samantha Jeffery in Whiskey Barrel, Found Festival 2018. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Found, the festival that’s all about the find — art and artists in places you never expected to run into them — is back this weekend in Old Strathcona for a seventh annual edition.

It’s all about the experimental, surprising encounters between artists and audiences. Festival director Beth Dart has assembled them and, as she’s said, “once you take theatre out of theatres, you erase the normal rules.”

Have a peek at five intriguing Found finds: 

Meet Me Under The Gnarly Tree, Cardiac Theatre at Found Festival 2018. Photo supplied.

Meet Me Under The Gnarly Tree: And speaking of mysterious encounters in places you never anticipated … a scroll through Tinder, an escalating flirtation, a first date. Harley Marison’s new site-specific theatre piece explores that tense and thrilling human experiment — on location. The production from Cardiac Theatre (The Listening Room, Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes), one of Edmonton’s most inventive indies, takes you to Rollie Miles Athletic Field (Calgary Trail and University Avenue).

Whiskey Business: I feel sure you will never have seen anything like this theatre/ escape arts fusion, a nerve-wracking combo, as billed, of “whiskey, stunts, violence, suspense, comedy: what could go wrong?” Since there will be a live under-water escape from a locked whiskey barrel, there can be no idle theatre chatter about stakes. In fact, you may need a wee dram from Strathcona Spirits (the location),  just to steady your nerves. Actor/escape artist Miranda Allen stars with Samantha Jeffery. Mike Kennard of Mump and Smoot directs. Tickets are pay-what-you-will.

Crime scene simulation, young man lying on floor

Off’d On Whyte: An Old Strathcona Murder Mystery: A prominent businessman has been iced, and there are suspects and clues everywhere in Old Strathcona, every hotel, every bar and bistro. The audience is under the gun, so to speak, to find the perpetrator, in 90 minutes. Created by the newly formed Fox Den collective, led by Carmen Nieuwenhuis, Jessy Ardern, Sarah Feutl. Location: various, along Whyte Ave. 

On The Margin: Elise Jason’s site-specific theatre piece, takes us through the river valley. It’s standing in for Banff National Park, 1982, and Jill’s disturbing vision of a man clutching a beer bottle as he emerges from his old Chevy. Where’s Jill after that? Jason developed the piece as Common Ground Art Society’s 2018 Fresh AiR artist in residence. Meet at Saskatchewan Drive and 104th St.   

Nâsipewin: The title means “going down the hill to the river” in Nehiyawin. And in Jordan Koe’s Found encounter, that’s exactly what you’ll be doing. It’s a sound art performances of field recordings taken in the river valley in order to create a sonic history of Indigenous people and settlers there. Meet at Saskatchewan Driver and 105th St.

And there’s much more — theatre, music, poetry, visual arts — on location(s). Found Festival 2018 runs July 5 to 8 in Old Strathcona. HQ is just behind the Backstage Theatre at the ATB Financial Arts Barns. Tickets, show information, and full schedule for Found are available at commongroundarts.ca 

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Things I learned at the Sterling Awards gala: a coda

Posted on June 26, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

The Legend of Sleeping Beauty, Capitol Theatre, Fort Edmonton Park. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Thoughts from the Sterling gala (directed by Kate Ryan and written by Shannon Blanchet and Belinda Cornish).

•For openers: Co-hosts Rachel Bowron and Hunter Cardinal were sparklers. They opened the show with Beauty, a witty and astute song about reacting to art from Adam Gwon’s 2008 musical Ordinary Days. Needless to say, it’s not a household word in titles or composers. But this is but one of the dividends of having the Sterling gala directed by Kate Ryan of The Plain Janes, who knows the off-centre musical theatre repertoire, every nook and cranny, better than anyone in town. And there was an invocation in Cree from Cardinal, currently playing Hamlet in the Freewill Shakespeare Festival production in the park. 

•A new comedy duo: Margaret Mooney, the wry 81-year-old Citadel legend (sitting at Table 81 right beside me) and Citadel administrator Peni Christopher, onstage together to present the Ross Hill Award for Career Achievement in Production (to the Citadel’s Sheila Cleasby), are a riot together. Something a teeny bit Smothers Brothers maybe about the reductive deadpan of the former and the jaunty sunniness of the other.

•Shows I wish I’d seen and now it’s too late so damn I have regrets which is a drag: Seeing Jameela McNeil and Luc Tellier perform a very witty Erik Mortimer song about a cat from Sleeping Beauty, Jocelyn Ahlf’s Christmas panto at the Capitol Theatre at Fort Edmonton made me long to see this latest in her series of larky Christmas entertainments there. Seeing Amena Shehab onstage to present made me wish I’d seen Hagar, a show about the immigrant experience she created with her husband (it ran at the ATB Financial Arts Barns). She was genuinely funny about being the Arabic outsider. 

•Improv: Rapid Fire Theatre’s “Mother K,” Karen Brown Fournell, den mother to 60 improvisers (how easy can that be?) and manager of a company that does 300 shows a year, pointed out in her acceptance speech (she went home with the Margaret Mooney Award in administration), that it’s remarkable how many actors in this theatre town are also improvisers. Remarkable and telling.

It’s a supportive theatre community, she told us. Sometime we trade tricks of the trade,” she said of her fellow administrators. “Sometimes we just commiserate.”

•In accepting his Actor’s Sterling Award for his performance in the Bright Young Things’ Fringe production of No Exit, Ron Pederson said he wanted to thank Jean-Paul Sartre, but felt the French existentialist might not appreciate this advocacy. He thought it more appropriate to thank Sartre “for nothing, for nothingness maybe.”

In a witty, heartfelt speech, he paid tribute to his actor friend/mentor Jeff Haslam (currently directing The Importance of Being Earnest for the Teatro La Quindicina season). “We are in the transportation business,” said Pederson, as he saluted Edmonton for its supply of “brilliant storytellers.” 

•Upcoming: Actor/ director/ playwright Chris Bullough is writing a Fringe play — and it’s about the oil that runs through our veins. The inspiration for Rig Pig Fantasia can be traced back to Fort McMurray, where he’s originally from.

•Hot on the page: From 44 submissions, the grand prize winner of this year’s Alberta Playwriting Competition is Cipher by Ellen Close and Braden Griffiths. A special initiate award goes to Christine Lesiak for The Space Between The Stars.

•Everyone in the music world here undoubtedly already knew this. But Tommy Banks’ granddaughter Mallory Chipman (gracefully introduced by Sheri Somerville) is a terrific singer. Make Someone Happy (which she recorded with her beloved grandpa) was a knockout. Chipman said that Tommy loved vintage musical theatre; they’d watch the oldies together whenever they could. 

•Sending in the clowns: You can see why Jan Henderson, this year’s recipient of the Sterling for outstanding contribution to Edmonton theatre, is such an inspiring teacher, mentor, and friend. As introduced by her Small Matters Theatre cohort Christine Lesiak, the case she made for hopefulness, for being playful, for the fool as the truth-speaker in a world of truth-concealers, was downright inspiring. Henderson, incidentally, arrived here from Toronto in 1979 to do a show, and never got around to leaving.

A favourite Henderson saying? “As the Irish say, the situation is hopeless, but not serious.”

•In his graceful acceptance speech for the outstanding new play Sterling, playwright Collin Doyle (Terry and the Dog) took the trouble to note the other nominees in the category — and to add two new plays he felt should have been nominated. One was Cleave by Elena Belyea, the other Do This In Memory Of Me/ En Mémoire de moi by Cat Walsh.

His own play Doyel described as 12 years in the making. And he thanked his dad for “allowing him to keep writing plays about him.”

Indie theatre is hard: Dave Horak, artistic director of Edmonton Actors Theatre, explained that he tore down his fence to use the wood in the set for his production of Terry and the Dog. “I would like to thank my neighbours for letting me do it.”

He was droll, as well, on the subject of his cast. “It’s the first time I ever directed my mother-in-law,” he said. “Talk to me later.” He’s lucky: she’s  Maralyn Ryan, nominated in the supporting actress category.

•No one thanked their agent. Or the Almighty. But Amber Gray, of Hadestown, did thank terrible Edmonton weather last fall for the conception of her baby, about to be born in New York on Monday night when she got the outstanding supporting actress Sterling in absentia.

If you haven’t checked out the Sterling awards recipients, here they are, at 12thnight.ca.

 

    

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Nostalgia for a lost age: Forever Plaid at the Mayfield, a review

Posted on June 26, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Forever Plaid, Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In their one review ever, in The Wiltsburg Times Chronicle, a nameless writer delivered the opinion that The Plaids’ sound “is to modern music what Formica is to marble.”

It is a measure of their infinite hopefulness that the guileless lads from Plaid  “chose to take this as a compliment.” And they even saved the clipping.

That’s the bowtie-and-Brylcreem ‘50s evoked by this affectionately cornball jukebox homage to the close-harmony guy groups of the era. The American Dream is still in working order. Sincerity rules over irony, even when it pertains to cardigans. Harmony is a many-splendored thing. Where do unresolved chords go? Not here, ladies and gentlemen, not here.

Forever Plaid, Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

The fun of Kate Ryan’s Mayfield production of Forever Plaid — with its musically dexterous foursome of charmers —  is the playful way it negotiates between nostalgia for a lost age and light-handed mockery of its white-bread squareness.

It’s February 9, 1964. And four earnest amateurs with big dreams are en route to their first pro gig, at the Fusel Lounge in the Harrisburg, Pa. Airport Hilton (amusingly evoked by Ivan Siemens’ set, with Matt Schuurman’s video design). It all ends with a bang: a busload of Catholic schoolgirls going to see the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Yes, the lads meet their untimely end in a head-on collision — with rock.

“We’re the Plaids and we’re dead.” Forever Plaid is their reprieve. Thanks to a convergence of astral plains and an expanding hole in the ozone, not to mention the the cosmic power of harmony, Frankie (Stephen Greenfield), Sparky (Andrew MacDonald-Smith), Jinx (Farren Timoteo) and Smudge (Kamyar Pazandeh) are back from the Great Beyond after 54 years. They file apprehensively onto the stage in the dark, with candles, to do the concert they never got to give in life. O death, where is thy sting (and thy E-flat diminished seventh)? It is, says one Plaid looking on the bright side, “the biggest comeback since Lazarus.”

What you hear, in Stuart Ross’s early jukebox musical (it dates from the West Bank Cafe in New York in the late ‘80s), is a vintage collection of ‘50s guy-group classics, more than two dozen of them: Three Coins In The Fountain, Rags to Riches, Magic Moments, No Not Much, Moments To Remember Love Is A Many Splendored Thing…..

It’s the white end of the pop culture spectrum, the milieu owned by the likes of The Lettermen, The Four Aces, The Ames Brothers, Andy Williams, Perry Como, crooning over sunshine and falling stars. And when four eager-to-please white nerds, inordinately pleased with little staging coups like their plaid cumberbunds, go “ethnic” — they don straw hats to go Latino, or venture into calypso (with palm tree) — the results are, in every way but the musical, amusingly tone deaf.

Forever Plaid, Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis

When the Plaids get a little wistful about the careers they might have had, or they sing the Plaid version of She Loves You (“she loves you … yessiree!”), you realize that the Catholic girls just hastened the inevitable. Sh’boom, dramatic irony.

The shrewd appeal of Forever Plaid is the musical expertise in four-part harmony of a cast who artfully perform as artless amateurs scrambling to do a home-made show. It wouldn’t be funny if the four couldn’t sing, beautifully, together. They do.

They have their little idiosyncracies. Greenfield’s Frankie, the MC, is, as in life, still wheezing asthmatically when the going gets tense. Pazandeh as Smudge, reaches for the Tums periodically. Timoteo’s Jinx has regular nosebleeds on challenging high notes. With his round-eyed double-entendres, MacDonald-Smith’s Sparky is in charge of the prim, deadpan narration, full of inadvertent double-entendres. “We’ll serenade your every affair.” 

Each has a star turn on a song. Pazandeh’s impressive account of the proletariat anthem 16 Tons, accompanying himself on a ketchup bottle, is a highlight, with amusingly bland annotations. “We work hard to sing about men who love, and we love to sing about men who work.”

And Cindy Kerr’s choreography, with its earnest guy-group synchronized moves just slightly gone wrong, is consistently funny onstage,

Their pièce de résistance is a frantic three-minute 11-second version of an entire Ed Sullivan season, a snapshot of life in the ‘50s, complete with Señor Wences, Topo Gigio, the Singing Nun, and a dizzy variety of magic, acrobatic, and animal acts. Holy cannoli, even the acquiring of an audience volunteer for a number seems unusually relaxed, since it’s also a homespun spoof of audience participation.

And there’s the music, songs preserved in amber. Shlock never sounded so tuneful. The rapport between the Plaids and their band, Ryan Sigurdson at a grand piano and Derek Stremel on bass, is supple and fun. And the sound (Harley Symington) is, as usual at the Mayfield, impeccable.

REVIEW

Forever Plaid

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Written by: Stuart Ross

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Steven Greenfield, Andrew Macdonald-Smith, Kamyar Pazandeh, Farren Timoteo

Running: through July 29

Tickets: 780-483-4051, mayfieldtheatre.ca

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