Crossing the great rural-urban prairie frontier: AJ Hrooshkin’s Alphabet Line, a preview

Posted on April 23, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There can be nothing quite like the vast isolating distances of the prairies for locating a play about disconnection — between rural and urban, farm and city, booking learning and blue-collar life experience.

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

And the playwright AJ Hrooshkin brings a considerable store of first-hand knowledge about all of the above to Alphabet Line, premiering Friday as part of the Fringe Theatre season. “Almost everything I do is blue collar, rural, and a little bit queer,” says a good-humoured, droll voice on the phone from out in Sturgeon County north of the city.

A Doukhobor from Veregin, Sask., Hrooshkin (they/them), who signs onto social media as “gayhick,” has been leaving the countryside and driving to rehearsals for the Prairie Strange Productions premiere of their play directed by Giulia Romano at the Westbury Theatre. But only as needed. “Gas ain’t cheap when you drive an old truck.”

Alphabet Line, titled after the alphabetical nomenclature of towns on the rail line across the prairies, is set in Yonker, Sask. (that’s after Xena and before Zelma) in the late 1940s. Duncan (Zachary Parsons-Lozinski), a queer farm kid, reaches out of his isolation by radio. And one day Nicholas (Sam Free), a grad student from Saskatoon answers the call to connect. Will a love story emerge? “I’m a sappy sappy romantic,” says Hrooshkin cheerfully.

“There are bits of me in both,” they say of the two characters in a play inspired by their own experience of “the urban/rural dichotomy, practical education vs book education….” The winner of the 2024 Westbury Family Theatre Award, Hrooshkin, whose dad lost the family farm when they were very young, grew up “all over rural Saskatchewan and Alberta. Nine schools, everywhere from Saskatoon and Prince Albert, acreages, farms, Lamont, Lloydminster, high school in Fort Saskatchewan…. All over the map.” Why? “My mom’s a hippie.” (affectionate laughter).

“What I learned about the land and how to be on it, I learned from my dad,” they say. “Alphabet Line is partly a love letter to that. And partly it’s ‘what could I have been if I’d had the full experience of that life?’.

And then we have the university-educated Hrooshkin: they have an honours degree in gender studies from the University of Saskatchewan. And queerness can be at home in both environments, they’ve found.

Hrooshkin’s dad, as they describe appreciatively, is “a farmer who writes poetry, very supportive of the arts and curious about what I do … farmer, trucker, handyman, contract worker; you name it he’s done it. The fatal flaw of the Hrooshkins: they can’t say No to work.” They come from a long line of “farmers, plumbers, cement pourers; everyone’s done construction….”

It’s a blue-chip blue-collar lineage. And that “did cause a little tension with my peers in urban settings,” they concede, remembering their high school years. “I like to garden; I like to plant things. I come from a family that hunts; I’ve had a firearms licence since I was 16,” says Hrooshkin. “In my late teens I pushed back on my upbringing; ‘I’m gonna get out of this and go get an education’…. I don’t regret it; it got me here and I wouldn’t be myself without it. And education is a beautiful thing. But it’s not a replacement for practical knowledge.”

“My experience is unique, and I’ll own that,”  Hrooshkin laughs. “I’ve been kicked around for my redneck sensibilities…. But I have to say I’ve taken more shit in the city for being a small-town rural hick than I have ever taken for being out and queer in a small town. Ever.”

Hrooshkin is emphatically not in sync with the common view, oft expressed in CanLit and theatre, of small towns as an isolating experience compared to cities, and especially fraught for queer folk. “In those smaller places even if I’m alone I know that I can go the local coffee shop, general store, bar or whatever. I can talk to people. And they talk to you back. And it’s not weird…. I never go in gay first; I go in AJ first. By the time me being queer, being trans, comes out, they already know I’m a person.”

As you’ll glean, Hrooshkin didn’t arrive in theatre via any of the conventional routes, like acting. Though, to be fair, they did turn in a starring performance in kindergarten as a sea anemone in the Clear Water Pageant in Saskatoon. “Then I took a 25-year hiatus.” They thought of themself as a novelist. It took an intervention by friend Samantha Fraughton (one of the creators and performers of the Fringe show Talk Treaty To Me) when they moved in with her during COVID. “You could write a novel,” Fraughton told them. “But a play’s more fun. Just write a play!” So they did.

They laugh. “My saving grace was that I had no idea what I was doing. Theatre was an experiment; I was just going to try it. And not knowing the industry, the conventions, helped a lot.”   

They were a late-comer to the Fringe and, for that matter, to theatre. Hrooshkin was inspired, in a powerful, life-changing experience, by watching Bruce Ryan Costella’s Fringe show Spooky & Gay (“a queer horror storytelling cabaret”). “I laughed. I cried. Such human-ness in that performance; it just sang. And it didn’t flinch away from the realities of what it is to be queer.”

As Hrooshkin remembers vividly, Costella said “Edmonton was the Fringe that made me brave.” And “him saying that allowed me to be brave too.”

Brave enough to take their play Train One To Coal Valley to the Fringe in 2023. As they describe, “it follows two gay men working on the railroad. A bit of a love story, a bit of a retrospective.” The themes are similar to Alphabet Line, they think: “connections, reckoning with yourself…. My goal is to show that there is queerness in these blue-collar spaces. It’s not the preserve of urbanites.”

Spring is “farm time; it’s labour season,” says Hrooshkin. After the run of their play they’ll be back to farm and garden work. “At the end of the day I get to stick my hands in the dirt; I get to be where food comes from. I get to spend time with the community; we‘re all out there together…. Being a redneck was the best theatre education I could ever have.”

PREVIEW

Alphabet Line

Theatre: Edmonton Fringe Theatre and Prairie Strange Productions

Written by: AJ Hrooshkin

Directed by: Giulia Romano

Starring: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski and Sam Free

Where: Westbury Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Friday through May 3

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

Posted in Previews | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Crossing the great rural-urban prairie frontier: AJ Hrooshkin’s Alphabet Line, a preview

We’re all good people, right? Up the property ladder in Radiant Vermin, a review

Posted on April 20, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matkin, Radiant Vermin, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography. Set by Trevor Schmidt, lighting by Larissa Poho, projections by Matt Schuurman

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In a week when “housing crisis” and “starter home” got batted around like pingpong balls (in both our official languages) at the leaders’ debates, here’s a Faustian comedy that’s eerily in sync. It’s dark and smiley, snarky as hell, and very funny. And it was written a decade ago.

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

Radiant Vermin, a 2015 satire by the Brit playwright Philip Ridley, evidently a theatrical denizen of the dark side, is made for the age when “affordable housing” is a breezy oxymoron. Like ours. It’s the perfect finale to Northern Light Theatre’s ‘Making A Monster’ season.

There have been been comedies before now that play in the  real estate abyss — Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross for one; Karen Hines’ Crawlspace for another. But the tale of Ollie and Jill, and their mysterious acquisition of their dream home isn’t really about the sleaze of The Deal, and the treachery and misrepresentation that go into landing The Deal. And it’s not just about the eternal question of whether the end justifies the means. With claws that feel freshly sharpened in Trevor Schmidt’s production, Radiant Vermin digs into wondering about the end, itself, that’s getting justified.

Do you have skin in the real estate game? You do, my friend with the clean hands, even if you’re 35 and still living in your parents’ basement. Mainly because it’s all about moral compromise. Self-perpetuating consumerism and greed … a morality comedy that puts the hell back in Hello. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matkin in Radiant Vermin, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

The couple we meet in Radiant Vermin are charming and peppy, eager to engage with us and get our approval. And our approval will, in the end, damn us. But that complicity is a gradual viral process in Schmidt’s smartly calibrated production.

You’ve got to really like Ollie and Jill for Radiant Vermin to work. And, by gawd, you really do, in winsome, funny performances from Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk. Jill is pregnant, and uses that to rule the roost, in a beaming passive-aggressive way that Matkin captures hilariously, like a screwball heroine. Yaschuk’s Ollie is more awkward, with an improvising eager-beaver nerdiness about him that makes you want him to survive and prosper, in his double role as husband and new father to be.   

The characters these two fine highly watchable young actors create have a kind of full-disclosure wholesomeness as they remember and re-create their dream home experience. There’s no shocking us — and Radiant Vermin is shocking, in its incremental way — without that rapport.

Jill and Ollie are onstage, in front of a chalky white two-dimensional house (designed by Schmidt), to confess to us, they say, and gain our understanding, which they’re pretty sure will be forthcoming. They have a kind of full-disclosure wholesomeness about them, as they remember and re-create their dream home experience, step by step. And they acknowledge us all along the way in asides; at one point Jill even consults us directly, asking for a show of hands.

Our struggling newlyweds live in a squalid council estate, where drug deals and suicide are the chief activity, with no hope of home ownership. Their ascent on the home ownership ladder starts with a letter from a mysterious Miss Dee offering a foothold into the property market. A free fixer-upper in a derelict neighbourhood, no strings attached, can be theirs. They’ve been chosen to be part of a government initiative to reclaim derelict neighbourhoods: Social Regeneration Through The Creation Of Dream Homes.

It’s almost too good to be true. Yes indeed. Ollie has some residual skepticism (is this a joke on the “desperate underclass?”), but he squelches it in the euphoria of the moment. Jill says “we did it all — for Baby!” a justification she’ll use again and again in the course of Radiant Vermin.

Holly Turner as Miss Dee in Radiant Vermin, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography. Set and costumes Trevor Schmidt, lighting Larissa Poho, projections Matt Schuurman.

Miss Dee, played by Holly Turner in grand Mephistophelean style — red power trenchcoat, tigerish smile, a contract as long as the Dead Sea Scrolls to sign — has a star entrance. “You’re good people,” she assures Jill and Ollie. The program, she says, is all about creating a “property hotspot” to attract other buyers. And suddenly, lurid flames seem to flicker behind the blank windows of the white house. The lighting by Larissa Poho and Matt Schuurman’s projections are, to say the least, an active participant in the storytelling, as the renos proceed in room by room transformations. And Chris Scott’s score is horror channelled through sitcom.

After a horrifying accident with a vagrant intruder, suddenly, magically, Jill’s perfect dream kitchen materializes. And it keeps happening, with the picture-perfect hallway. And the bathroom! I’m reluctant to tell you why and how. Let the shock be yours. Anyhow, at every stage, the ante is upped, along with the pace of Ollie and Jill’s self-justifications. Just when you think they’ve  arrived at the finish line, the finish line gets moved. They want more; sorry, they need more,.

Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk in Radiant Vermin, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.

Gradually neighbours do move in; the Never Enough Shopping Centre is about to spring up in the footprint of a derelict factory. And the apotheosis of upward mobility is a garden party to celebrate Baby’s first birthday. Matkin and Yaschuk populate the festivities with all the neighbours, “the party from hell” as Ollie describes it, in a virtuoso comic scene.

Radiant Vermin has things to say about how thin and peel-able the veneer of morality is, and how supple humans are about justifying their choices. Jill has a brilliantly constructed speech about vagrants and social responsibility, beautifully calibrated by Matkin, in which she smugly extolls her Christian values, defends the homeless, and morality gradually gets skinned alive.

“It’s people like us,” she concludes, “who’re standing between civilization and chaos.” As Miss Dee has reassured us, it’s a good thing we’re all good people.

REVIEW

Radiant Vermin

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Philip Ridley

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Eli Yaschuk, Rain Matkin, Holly Turner

Where: Studio Theatre, Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: through May 3

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on We’re all good people, right? Up the property ladder in Radiant Vermin, a review

Four guys under a streetlamp: Jersey Boys at the Mayfield, a review

Posted on April 19, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Niko Combitsis and Kory Fulton in Jersey Boys, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

All jukebox musicals are not created equal. And there’s a notable example, currently running at the Mayfield, that rises above the others the way Frankie Valli’s legendary falsetto levitates off the stage and into your brain. 

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

True, Jersey Boys, the Tony Award magnet of 2005, is here to revisit the impossibly contagious string of No. 1 hits by the ‘60s pop quartet The Four Seasons. And, sure enough, no matter what your age (can nostalgia be inherited?) the first notes of Sherry and Big Girls Don’t Cry and Walk Like A Man, planted in the public consciousness by those helium high notes, are still irresistible, still somehow connected to your shoulders and possibly your pulse. The  Mayfield production directed by Jersey Boys expert Danny Austin, compressed in cast and stage size but not in music , conjures that distinctive Four Seasons sound impressively, before your very ears. The sound is where the hood opens with Jersey Boys.

And speaking of hoods (and ‘hoods)…. What you get with Jersey Boys is a kind of jukebox theatre triple threat: hit songs, a music industry trajectory — obscurity to Top-40 rise, setbacks, fall — and a compelling real-life story that adds rough-edged features like jail time, family breakdown, and the Mob to the slicker surfaces of the American Dream.

The extra lustre the songs get is that the story in which they’re embedded is actually true: four guys from the gritty Italian ‘hoods of blue-collar New Jersey c. 1962. Written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice and directed originally for Broadway by Des McAnuff, the early scenes in the flavourful script are all about members of the band-in-progress, always in and out of the slammer. The program comes with a Jersey language warning from co-writer Elice (“not the language you hear in church, or even in most Broadway shows”).

The hard-ass guitar player Tommy DeVito (Kory Fulton, who digs zestfully into the thuggish deadpan of the character), a break-and-enter specialist with a wit of his own, calls it “the Rahway Academy of the Arts.” The play is full of that kind of wit.

Which makes the design (by Douglas Paraschuk, with contributions by Ivan Siemens) — double-storey metal catwalks lighted glowingly, and sometimes luridly, by Kevin Fraser — entirely à propos. Whether characters are emerging from jail, meeting with mob enforcers or performing in seedy clubs, or (assisted by Matt Schuurman’s projection-scape) bowling alleys. Speaking of the latter, it takes bowling alley neon to finally christen the Four Seasons. Until then the lads have changed band names so often they can’t even remember whether they’re The Four Lovers, The Romans, The Varietones.

Anyhow this is the Garden State sans garden. As Tommy notes at the outset, there are three ways up and out of that hard-scrabble scene: “join the army, get mobbed up, or become a star.” Well, the army isn’t involved in this story.

Kory Fulton, Niko Combitsis, William Lincoln, Devon Brayne in Jersey Boys, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Jersey Boys, which tells its true-life story of dreams and wild success and the pitfalls of fame from four standpoints, sets about individualizing the band members. The hothead swaggerer Tommy takes full credit for putting Jersey “on the map,” and creating a star from a kid with an amazing voice who’s studying to become a barber. “I take this raw clay and make like Michelangelo.”

That kid is Francis Castellucio, soon to be Frankie Vally, soon to be Frankie Valli (Nick Combitsis). His wife-to-be Mary (Jessica Wilson) tells him the spelling has to change because “‘y’ is a bullshit letter and you’re Italian.” And gradually, with much friction and struggle for air play, gigs in dives, backing up other bands, the Four Seasons take shape. Bob Gaudio (William Lincoln, in a wry and appealing performance), writes the hit songs. He’s a thoughtful sort. Amusingly, when he casually drops the name T.S. Eliot and “objective correlative” into bar chat, a girl says “you’re not from around here, are you?” Nick Massi (Devon Brayne) is the laconic bass player. There’s an engagingly wistful reserve built into Devon Brayne’s performance (he played the same role in the 2023 Citadel production).   

And suddenly “four guys under a streetlamp singing someone else’s songs” are singing one of their own. And the world is singing “Sherr-eeee” along with them.

Combitsis is at his best while Valli is singing; he captures the patented cadences, swoops, and improbable range to a T (or a high B-flat as the case may be). In dramatic scenes, though, the character fades away a bit, and flattens out. Even Frankie’s Jersey intonation seems on hold, along with a sense of wonder at the improbable ascension to the pop pantheon.

After the sweet close harmonies (and dippy lyrics) of Act I that turn four scrappy kids into a hit band, Jersey Boys becomes a musical where the songs are actually meant to push the story forward. That’s trickier; it’s a story that contains mob debts, tax evasion, the disintegration of families under the stresses of constant touring, and tragedy, including the death by drugs of Frankie’s daughter. There’s a hard-won comeback. The big climactic moment, Gaudio’s Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You, born of personal tragedy and desperation, isn’t quite the showstopper the musical seems to have in mind.

Robbie Towns is amusing as the flamboyantly quirky record producer Bob Crewe, an astrology disciple devoted to the alignment of the stars. And that certainly applies to the ever-more prickly relationships of the band, too. Nick, in Brayne’s performance, seems to emerge, gradually, into three dimension from two. The scene in which he up and leaves the band is a highlight, comic and poignant. “When it’s four guys, and you’re Ringo …” he trails off sadly. “I just want to go home.”

The women of the piece (Wilson, Robyn Esson Kristin Unrah) position themselves generally in the generic, cartoon, bum-wiggling end of the spectrum. They’re collateral damage to the story — which is, of course, part of a story of fractured relationships, abandonment, the high price of fame. As Frankie’s wife Mary, though, Wilson is impressively fierce in the scene in which he comes home to claim the prerogatives of fatherhood that he’s jettisoned for the sake of his career.

The clockwork choreography of ‘60s pop groups, with their giddy synchronicity of arm movements and those sideways bends from the waist, is as fun to watch as tap-dancing in musical theatre. Originally created on Broadway by Des McAnuff’s choreographer colleague Sergio Trujillo, it’s re-worked smartly here for the smaller dimensions of the Mayfield stage by assistant director Christine Watson.

The musical values of Austin’s fast-paced production are impressively high, both from the singers and from the excellent band led by music director Jennifer McMillan. They do the hit jukebox songs proud.

Jersey Boys is a story of gain and loss, of four guys who struggled their way out of a landscape of low expectations, reached the stars, and paid a big price for that journey. “Some are born great, some have have greatness thrust upon them, some achieve greatness then fuck it up,” says Tommy in one of his more soulful moments.

The show returns at the end to the opening image of four guys under a streetlight, “when it was still ahead of us,” as sadder-but-wiser Frankie says. But it’s Gaudio’s poetic reflection that stays with you. Their fans, he says, weren’t the posh people or the music hippies. They were  the blue-collar people, the truck drivers, the girls with the dark circles under their eyes behind the counters in diners. It’s there, in the gap between performance and real life that Jersey Boys gets its juice, one of the few jukebox musicals that wouldn’t work just as well, or better, as a concert.

But, hey, resist those songs? You’ve got to be kidding. There’s a fun evening out waiting for you at the Mayfield.

REVIEW

Jersey Boys

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Written by: Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice (book), Bob Gaudio (music), Bob Crewe (lyrics)

Starring: Niko Combitsis, Robbie Towns, Connor Meek, Devon Brayne, William Lincoln, Kory Fulton, Demi Oliver, Mayson Sonntag, Kristin Unruh, Garrett Woods, Robyn Esson, Jessica Wilson, Caleb Di Pomponio

Running: through June 8

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca, 780-483-4051

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Four guys under a streetlamp: Jersey Boys at the Mayfield, a review

The high price of a dream home: Trevor Schmidt talks about the dark satire Radiant Vermin, at Northern Light

Posted on April 16, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

 

Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matkin in Radiant Vermin, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography. Set and costumes Trevor Schmidt, lighting Larissa Poho, video and projections Matt Schuurman

Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matckin in Radiant Vermin, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Really shocking,” says Trevor Schmidt cheerfully of the wicked satire that opens Friday as the finale of Northern Light Theatre’s ‘Making A Monster’ season. “And really funny.”

He compares the appealing, perky young couple we meet in Radiant Vermin, to … the Macbeths. Think about that (and shudder): what would — or wouldn’t — that aspirational Scottish pair do to get their mitts on their dream home? Anyhow, Jill and Ollie stand before us to explain, jointly, their amazing shortcut, too good to be true?, up the property ladder to home ownership.

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

“Once we’ve … explained – Why we did – What we did – Then you’ll understand. Because everything we did … We did it all – For baby!”       

At a time in our collective history when the housing crisis is big, and real, and infinitely discussable, the 2015 satire by the controversial Ridley, a leading figure in the “in-yer-face” theatre movement in ‘90s Britain, could scarcely be more timely. “It’s hit a big moment,” as Schmidt puts it. And with Radiant Vermin the playwright “has clearly mellowed since his early stuff, even more twisted and macabre.”

Schmidt himself was slated to be in a Calgary production (it never in the end went forward) of Ridley’s seminal 1990 play The Pitchfork Disney, with Rebecca Northan (Goblin: Macbeth). Among other things, he says of that play, “it’s about a group auctioning off an eight-year-old.” He compares Ridley to Mark Ravenhill, of Shopping and Fucking fame.   

Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matin, Radiant Vermin, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

Schmidt’s production stars Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matkin, the hottest up-and-comers in Edmonton theatre. Recent grads of MacEwan University’s theatre program, the pair, real-life best friends, starred in Jim Guedo’s MacEwan production of Sunday in the Park With George. Since then they’ve impressed Edmonton audiences — Matkin in Romeo and Juliet’s Notebook at the Spotlight Cabaret; Yaschuk in The Noon Witch at Teatro Live!. Schmidt is so appreciative of their professionalism, their work ethic, their level of skill, he says. Their co-star, as the mysterious real estate agent cum facilitator Miss Dee, is the octogenarian actor Holly Turner, a long-time Northern Light fave (The Testament of Mary, Origins of the Species, The Busy World Is Hushed).

The show, Schmidt says, has “a lot of lines and a lot of choreography.” Ainsley Hillyard, a choreographer of the theatrical persuasion, “worked with them for three hours every day.”

At the extreme opposite end of the theatrical spectrum from the dark Faustian satire of Radiant Vermin, Schmidt is also directing this year’s “lawyer play,” Sondheim’s musical comedian dell’arte vaudeville A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. The production, which runs May 9 at the Eva O. Howard Theatre, is the 18th annual edition of Players de Novo’s fund-raising initiative, cast entirely from amongst Edmonton’s legal professionals. It makes for a complicated rehearsal schedule, as Schmidt laughs, with a sigh.”Really I don’t even know what day it is….”

Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matkin, Radiant Vermin, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

Since Jill and Ollie address us directly, and even consult us at one point, “the audience is so implicated,” says Schmidt of Radiant Vermin. “They make conscious choices to let the monster out…. They choose to ignore the red flags. And we’re cheering them.”

Yes, “wicked” is the right word, thinks Schmidt. “It’s about wickedness … the dark side of people’s souls.” The Northern Light archive, including the current season (Monstress, Angry Alan) has its share of plays that live on that dark side. “Horror” has a particular fascination for him. “I’m interested in protagonists with moral dilemmas — between protecting themselves and their responsibility to others. The struggle between being ‘a good person’ and selfish, cowardly things.”

He’s intrigued by characters who think “I’m going to do something that’s going to benefit myself. Can I get away with it, without suffering social repercussions?…. How bad can I be?” If you’re going to sell your soul to get what you want, the price is very high.

There’s a big spoiler alert attached to much about Radiant Vermin. So the application to real estate, property, and upward mobility is something we have to discover for ourselves.

PREVIEW

Radiant Vermin

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Philip Ridley

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Eli Yaschuk, Rain Matkin, Holly Turner

Where: Studio Theatre, Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Friday through May 3

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

Posted in Previews | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on The high price of a dream home: Trevor Schmidt talks about the dark satire Radiant Vermin, at Northern Light

Workin’ his way back to us: Danny Austin comes home to direct Jersey Boys at the Mayfield

Posted on April 9, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Robbie Towns, Connor Meek, Devom Brayne, William Lincoln, Kory Fulton in Jersey Boys. Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Life, like theatre, has its dramatic arcs. Here’s one: I’m sitting across the table with an artist who has heard the close harmonies of Big Girls Don’t Cry (-yi-yi) delivered from stages and in rehearsal halls around the world. Literally thousands of times. For 20 years.

And you think you have Sherry and Frankie Valli’s stratospheric high notes embedded eternally in your brain? Danny Austin has reproduced, re-calculated, rehearsed, and maintained productions of the hit Broadway musical Jersey Boys from New York and London to Tokyo, South Africa to Sydney to Singapore, New Zealand to the Middle East to Vegas. And here’s the kicker: the production of Jersey Boys that opens at the Mayfield Theatre Friday brings Austin back to his home town. Back to the place where a very busy theatre career began.

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

“I just couldn’t wait to leave,” laughs Austin, the most amiable of lunch companions, who left Edmonton as a teenager for points east. “And now all I want is to come home, and create work here. I love it!”

The Tony Award-winning 2005 musical, originally brought to the Broadway stage by Canadian director Des McAnuff, has made of Austin an honorary Jersey Boy. Not that Austin could have predicted that, riding the bus across town every morning from Meadowlark to LaZerte high school.

Austin grew up from the five-year-old triple threat-in-the-making who sang and acted, and did gymnastics. “Though I had no vocabulary for dance I could move really well.” And then when Dasha Goody, the founder and long-time artistic director of Edmonton Musical Theatre, came to see his high school’s production of Godspell, she invited Austin to join.

Jersey Boys director/choreographer Danny Austin

In the Austin story the segues are speedy, and the connections are blue-chip Canadian. In 1982 Austin was in Guys and Dolls at the Citadel, “then I got asked to do Rainbow Stage (a venerable musical theatre company in Winnipeg), then at 19 I moved to Toronto, and started training in ballet/jazz.” He spent three seasons in the Anne of Green Gables company in Charlottetown (and a decade later returned as the ‘resident director’ and artistic director of the Young Company there). And after a period of performing and choreographing internationally, including months in Mexico and four years in Japan — “I grew up in Edmonton, and I wanted to see the world!” — he spent seven life-changing seasons at the Stratford Festival.

“Stratford became my university, my education,” says the multi-lingual Austin (he speaks French, Spanish, Japanese, some Arabic). “I’d gotten jobs but I didn’t know the craft.” At Stratford, “I fell in love with Shakespeare…. It’s the most amazing place, and I got to breathe that air…. Incredible art is being created there all the time!”

“You get to do everything!” he says. Shakespeare, musicals like The Music Man, Brian MacDonald’s hit Gilbert and Sullivan productions, classes in stage combat, or textual analysis, or voice work.” Austin did it all. It was when he found himself behind the director’s table as an apprentice, fascinated by the set and lighting, that Austin found his true métier, behind the scenes. “It was what I loved more than performing!”

What followed for Austin was “five years of apprenticeship to directors and choreographers.” And it was his Charlottetown cred working with young actors, he figures, that got him his New York gig as the resident director of the Broadway production of Hairspray, just after that music won the best musical Tony in 2003. “Welcome to the family!” director Jack O’Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell, heavy-hitters both, told the brand new New Yorker.

“I discovered I was really good at re-creating someone else’s work, maintaining the integrity of it,” says Austin, exuberant in conversation. “I love working with actors, allowing them to make discoveries, to own the part. Why not? There is a vessel of truth you have to honour, but there are many ways to get to that truth. Everyone’s life experience is different. Which is what makes this so fascinating.”

He’d just set up the Toronto production of Hairspray, a touring company, and the West End production in the U.K., when the Jersey Boys offer came. The choreographer of Des McAnuff’s production, Sergio Trujillo, was a pal from Austin’s Toronto dance days. Austin says he hesitated. But the unique appeal of the Jersey Boys book (by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice), based on a gripping real-life story with real-life characters, won him over. “It’s about family — the family you belong to, the family you choose; it’s about musicians; it’s about life!” he says of a jukebox musical in a league of its own, based as it is on the true story of four guys from the mean streets of blue-collar New Jersey who would become the Four Seasons. As their fame rocketed, “there was a chasm between family and career,” as Austin puts it, and the show reveals.

“All relationships are challenging. But you put a million records on top of that, and see how you handle it.”

The chance to be both associate choreographer and resident director was a big draw for Austin, too. “I could do both!. And getting to be in a room with Des McAnuff, honestly, is a masterclass in directing and theatre. Jaw-dropping.”

What came with the show as well, for Austin, was the “incredible gift” of getting to know the real-life people, Frankie Valli, Tommy DeVito, Bob Gaudio and the rest. Valli, says Austin, “struggled with relationships. He has an incredible work ethic, an incredible dedication to his craft. After every show, Frankie still does a 45-minute vocal cool-down, after all this time….” As for the fractured relationships that are part of the Jersey Boys story, Valli and DeVita still can’t be backstage together, Austin reports.

So the much-travelled Austin is back in his home town, happily “full-circle,” as he says. “I can’t tell you what it’s like to get up in the morning and go to work here (at the Mayfield…. I’m working with people who are so invested…. This is a show that belongs to my heart. I had no idea how excellent the quality of the team would be. I have a lot of love for people who put such effort into it.”

The work continues. There are Jersey Boys 20th anniversary tours to co-ordinate, both in the U.S. and a year from now Britain, with shared design ideas “to be more cost-effective so we can play smaller theatres.”

Right after opening night at the Mayfield, Austin flies to Seattle to rehearse understudies for Jersey Boys aboard a cruise ship to Alaska. But “I want to be here; I want to work here,” he says of Edmonton and his family here that includes his mom and his brothers (he’s even become obsessed with the Oilers since his return). “I’d love to get connected with the Edmonton theatre community…. I’ve got ideas, projects, new material, stories to tell. It’s all about the stories….”

PREVIEW

Jersey Boys

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Written by: Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice (book), Bob Gaudio (music), Bob Crewe (lyrics)

Starring: Niko Combitsis, Robbie Towns, Connor Meek, Devon Brayne, William Lincoln, Kory Fulton, Demi Oliver, Mayson Sonntag, Kristin Unruh, Garrett Woods, Robyn Esson, Jessica Wilson, Caleb Di Pomponio

Running: through June 8

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca, 780-483-4051

  

Posted in Reviews, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Workin’ his way back to us: Danny Austin comes home to direct Jersey Boys at the Mayfield

A 10-year Marv n’ Berry retrospective at the Varscona

Posted on April 8, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Chris Borger, Sam Stralak, Nikki Hulowski, Quinn Contini, Mike Robertson in Marv n’ Berry. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Where do hit sketch comedy troupes come from anyhow?

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

Ten years ago, the once-upon-a time of the Marv n’ Berry story, five improvisers found themselves hanging out, onstage and off-, at the Bonfire Festival. They were veterans of Rapid Fire Theatre’s annual extravaganza of experimental long-form improv comedy, where no idea is too crazy or impossible.

Bonfire 2015 lit something in Chris Borger, Quinn Contini, Nikki Hulowski, Mike Robertson, and Sam Stralak. “Chemistry!” declares Borger. Hundreds of Marv n’ Berry sketches — and thousands of air-miles on tours that have taken them to festivals (and awards) across the country and the continent — started happening in the decade that followed. The 10th anniversary Marv n’ Berry special that happens Thursday live at the Varscona Theatre is a ‘best-of’ special that “brings back a lot of audiences faves,” dating back to their first show, says Hulowski.

When the idea of writing sketch comedy became irresistible, Borger had only ever done improv and stand-up. As theatre constantly wants to know, what was his motivation? Improv, as Borger says, “lasts a second; it doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, you kinda celebrate the failures. So I was excited by something that would be more polished, something you can refine a bit more, have more control of … and you’d have a product at the end.

He makes Marv n’ Berry sound almost inevitable. “We had a lot of chemistry, from our very first sketch show, and became great friends…. And we decided to keep on making dumb jokes together!”

“We needed a name, and we’d asked the audience to help with that,”  says Hulowski. The people in the house seats came up with “The Dirty Teasers.” Hmm, no wonder she and her sketch-mates, in need of a name for their first out-of town venture (to the Vancouver Sketch Comedy Festival) decided to take nomenclature into their own hands. And the result was Marv n’ Berry, a comical steal from Marvin Berry of Back To The Future fame by one of their early sketches, about an office with a time machine that could only be used to fix minor clerical errors in filing.

In the Marv n’ Berry archive there’s no shortage of retrospective possibilities. Hulowski reports that when they were polling each other about their favourite sketches for Thursday’s special, they whittled down the possibilities, by means of a voting system, to a 64. “Impossible!” she laughs. “It would have been a five-hour show.” Further editing ensued. Their upcoming summer Fringe show will offer a different selection.

The variety in the Marv n’ Berry sketch vault is impressively wide. There are musical sketches. There are parodies, physical comedy, political satire, wordplay, and virtuoso scenes that call for special skills like a top-speed tongue-twister, or special choreography that demands a head-stand, or  logic puzzles that set about “convincing the audience of an insane idea through logic.” The “Your Welcome” sketch available on their YouTube channel is a protracted step-by-step argument that insists that “your,” not “you’re” is the correct spelling. The brainy and the goofy co-exist shoulder to shoulder.

Hulowski, a theatre school grad with a BFA from the U of A, arrived at improv, then sketch comedy, from “a comedic family,” as she puts it. “My mom was a clown and puppeteer for a long time; my dad was a master tradesman.” Growing up in a small town north of Athabasca, “my brothers and I would write sketches and, when we got our first video camera, film them…. ” She went into theatre, both performing and writing (she was on a writer’s retreat when we talked last week), and will soon be onstage in Shadow Theatre’s at season finale Where You Are. There are multiple films in her resumé.

Mike Robertson, Chris Borger, Sam Stralak, Quinn Contini, Nikki Hulowski, of the sketch comedy troupe Marv n’ Berry. Photo supplied

Her Marv n’ Berry mates have intriguing resumés, too; the route into sketch-writing rarely follows a straight line. Borger’s kid self “made dumb videos” with his sister on the family acreage. And he arrived at comedy from … the gym. “I was going to be a gym teacher and immediately hated it so I decided to pursue comedy….” There’s signature Marv n’ Berry logic in that decision.

As Borger and Hulowski describe, Marv n’ Berry sketches are collaborative creations. “We come to each other with pitches,” says the former, “then we all riff on them. Then whoever pitched it takes all that juice, back to their computer and comes up with a script.” Then, it’s back to the group for a trim, or a punch-up of a joke, or a new one, or a switched-up ending. “We don’t really have them finalized till we’ve performed them three or four times, based on what the audience like, what they react to, what they don’t react to….”

Sometimes characters recur in multiple sketch series. A small French boy named Lucien, played by Contini is one, “in several iterations, playing the recorder, or doing magic tricks, or just screaming….” Gary and Deb are a recurring pair who go to couples counselling to learn how to fight.

At the beginning, whenever a Marv n’ Berry sketch needed a female, Hulowski was the automatic choice. “But that didn’t happen for long,” she says appreciatively. “We each started by writing a lot for ourself (to perform). That’s changed over the years, too.“We write characters for each other.” When you’re a member of a sketch comedy troupe, perpetually on tour, “essentially you’re in a long-term relationship with the others; you’re building a family together.”

As Borger points out, sometimes a joke just won’t work “coming from a straight white guy. But if Nikki does it, it’s hilarious.” One sketch he wrote for a show called “Clearly A Pyramid Scheme,” was about the MeToo Movement; it was set in a gym called Me Too Movement. Borger and the other guys were understandably wary; Hulowski “loved the sketch and fought for it to be included.”

Their sketches vary from 30 seconds to 12 minutes, but sometimes we’ll play within that and “a sketch written to be five minutes will turn out to be 12.”  Sometimes, they just want to surprise each other onstage. For a sketch called “Interpretive Lap Dance,” with Borger as the customer, Hulowski deliberately didn’t tell him what would happen — until it was in progress n front of an audience. “What makes us different from other sketch troupes is that we like to play with each other onstage…. We’re all professional improvisers, and we like to have fun!”

“We grew up together over 10 years,” says Hulowski, who was 23 when Marv n’ Berry was born. “And it was at an important developmental stage in life!”

PREVIEW

Marv n’ Berry Presents: Best Of … 10 years

Starring: Chris Borger, Quinn Contini, Nikki Hulowski, Mike Robertson, Sam Stralak

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

When: Thursday, 8 p.m.

Tickets: eventbrite.ca

Posted in Previews | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on A 10-year Marv n’ Berry retrospective at the Varscona

A family haunting: Jupiter, Colleen Murphy’s new Canadian epic at Theatre Network. A review

Posted on April 4, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Gabriel Richardson and Ellie Heath in Jupiter, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“The future doesn’t happen ahead of time,” says a character in Jupiter, clinging to shards of hope for change. But the baleful grandeur, and dark vivid theatricality, of this new multi-generational family epic from the dauntless Canadian playwright Colleen Murphy argue otherwise.

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

Jupiter premieres in a stunning Bradley Moss production at Theatre Network. The grand finale of the company’s 50th anniversary season, powerfully acted and directed, reunites a playwright and director with a long-time association (Pig Girl, Armstrong’s War, The Society for the Destitute Present Titus Bouffonius). And it populates the stage, a single living room designed by Tessa Stamp, with three generations of the working-class Hutchinson family (five humans and a dog) in a present (2015) that’s simultaneously embedded as the past in a three-decade time span (2030 and 2050).

“Kill me yesterday,” says exasperated mom and step-mom Violet (Cathy Derkach) in a throwaway line that echoes tellingly in the sealed time chamber in which the Hutchinsons struggle. Exactly. This is a family that has a lot of trouble burying their dead — people or dogs, bodies or ashes. And in time, beer-soaked patriarch Winston (Brian Dooley), who refers to newspaper astrology columns as “horrorscoops,” will have trouble remembering who’s alive and who’s dead.

No wonder. The Hutchinsons are haunted — by ghosts, chronic dysfunction, dark secrets, whole subterranean veins of passion, grievance, and guilt.

Ellie Heath, Cathy Derkach, Brian Dooley in Jupiter by Colleen Murphy, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson.

Welcome to Murphy’s working-class, hourly-wage House of Atreus. As the play opens, the Hutchinsons are preparing a 21st birthday celebration  — with balloons, cake and wieners, all Vi’s doing — for Toby (Gabriel Richardson), Winston’s son by his first wife. And against the backdrop of criss-crossed bickering you realize is chronic, we meet Emma (Ellie Heath), Vi and Winston’s daughter. She’s a bright and brainy high school achiever kid immersed in a science experiment involving germ cultures and dog saliva, with dreams of med school. And she’s in tough chez Hutchinson.

Near the outset we also meet Axel, the stage debut of charismatic golden retriever Monk Northey, a scene-stealer in his brief time onstage. His presence is a fractious family’s bond; his entrance is greeted by the audience with a collective sigh of happiness. Axel is effortlessly redeeming himself from having dug around in Vi’s peonies. No other redemption in Jupiter has the same unqualified success.

Ellie Heath, Brian Dooley, Monk Northey in Jupiter by Colleen Murphy. Photo by Ian Jackson

Designer Stamp creates the Hutchinson living room, in detail, complete with plastic plants, time-worn couch, and crocheted afghan, lighted by Larissa Poho as a sort of working-class headquarters. It’s by no means a dive, as tended by the indefatigable Violet; the empties accumulate invisibly in the back yard and downstairs. The sound design, by Darrin Hagen and Morag Northey, has a curious combination of lyrical cello riffs and a sort of ticking pattern, the metronome of passing time?

One of the challenges to which Moss’s excellent cast rises impressively is that the same actors play the characters at different ages. Jupiter doesn’t live in one-directional chronology, forward or back. The characters so seamlessly slide into older versions of themselves, leaving to grab a beer or find the dog and re-entering 15 years later — or the reverse 15 or 30 years earlier— that it comes to seem almost simultaneous. Are we inhabited inevitably and forever by our future and past selves? Jupiter has us wonder about that. It’s a disturbing line of inquiry. But when has Murphy ever shied away from human disturbances? The list of those here, as you’ll glean from a fulsome warnings list, includes addiction, suicide, and more.

Brian Dooley, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Ellie Heath in Jupiter, by Colleen Murphy. Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson

This might sound free-form. But Jupiter has an infrastructure. In a terrific performance by Heath, the arc of the play belongs to Emma. What happens to the promising kid, the vivacious smartie and her big plans, as she ages into her ‘30s, cracking a beer before work, and then furiously into her ‘50s? And Heath is compellingly watchable in transformations, back and forth in time, scene to scene.

The performances in Moss’s production are unafraid of harshness, and there’s a certain morbid hilarity in that. The Hutchinsons aren’t exactly shy sentimentalists; they call each other out and interrupt furiously at top-volume, in an intricate texture of overlapping shit-talking that’s captured, and vigorously, in the production. They have views, and they’ll argue about, well, any damn thing. Who ate the rest of the jam? Should poems rhyme? Is rehab just for “recovering losers”? They’re hard to impress. And as for family togetherness, consider that one of the few images of that is the comical moment they’re clustered around a controversial small portable fan in a heat wave.

Dooley’s alcoholic Winston, who has a work history in oil and meat-packing, seems to unravel before us, foul-mouthed, prickly, judgmental, full of denial and grievance and all-round negativity, with a certain dead-pan sense of humour. You kind of wince and kind of smile when you hear him describe his daughter’s seniors’ home care-giver job as “diaper-whisperer.”

Violet, the bustling mom/step-mother who waits tables in a diner, does the heavy lifting for the family. There’s a softer side to her, which seems to come from reading homilies and borrowing mantras from women’s magazines. Forgiveness, she says quoting Gandhi, is for strong people. Derkach is funny and convincing as a tough cookie whose ground zero is exasperation. “Do I look like I speak French?” she snaps, in a rejoinder to a gambit. Or “there are very few things I look forward to. A decent salad is one,” she says, briskly countering Emma’s incredulous look when prodded to do the croutons for the Caesar.

Richardson as stepson Toby, a screw-up car mechanic with a love for his truck only matched by his love for his dog, conjures a young man up against limited prospects. And as played by the excellent Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Emma’s daughter Avalon, the third generation of the play and the character least fleshed out by the script, sets her surly teenage self resolutely on a course apart. Whether she can find the exit to the living room, so to speak, is the question the play leaves with us.

An epic of unfulfillment, of disappointment, of anger and lost love, unfolds. “Sometimes you have to force yourself to dream up a happy ending,” according to Violet. And repeating a favourite quotation from something she’s read, she says “hope is like a bird that senses dawn, and starts to sing when it’s still dark.”

Well, it’s still dark, and the bird has been let out of the cage. And as this new absorbing new Canadian play sets forth, our options for self-creation are curtailed by what we inherit, and what we’re prepared to give up.  Murphy has never been afraid to have her doubts, and face the tab.

Meet the playwright in this 12thnight preview.

REVIEW

Jupiter

Theatre: Theatre Network

Written by: Colleen Murphy

Directed by: Bradley Moss

Starring: Ellie Heath, Brian Dooley, Cathy Derkach, Gabriel Richardson, Dayna Lee Hoffmann, Monk Northey

Where: Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre, 10709 124 St.

Running: through April 20

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on A family haunting: Jupiter, Colleen Murphy’s new Canadian epic at Theatre Network. A review

New plays, revivals, festivals, cabarets, improv, genre switcheroos: we survey an intriguing week in Edmonton theatre

Posted on April 2, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Ellie Heath, Cathy Derkach, Brian Dooley in Jupiter by Colleen Murphy, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A big opening by a premier Canadian playwright, an improbable steal by big-budget theatre, a powerful verbatim-theatre production, a musical by a new-ish company — and another two-festival week on Edmonton stages, one devoted to the body in motion and another devoted to crazily inspired innovations in making stuff up. Intrigued? Keep reading.

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

•A new play by Colleen Murphy is always a Canadian theatre event. Jupiter, premiering Thursday at Theatre Network, in a Bradley Moss production, sets a working class family (with dog!) onstage, in motion through three decades. The playwright, one of the country’s most fearless theatre risk-takers — did you see The Society For The Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius? — is trying something new with Jupiter, she says. 12thnight.ca had a fun, and as usual provocative, conversation with Murphy by way of preview for the new play. Moss’s production, starring Ellie Heath, Brian Dooley, Gabriel Richardson, Cathy Derkach, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, and Monk Northey runs through April 20 at the Roxy, 10709 124 St, the finale of the company’s 50th anniversary season. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.

Priya Narine, Gillian Moon, Alexander Ariate, Devin MacKinnon in Heist, Citadel and Grand Theatres. Photo by Nanc Price

At the Citadel, Heist continues to defy probability in a witty way with a  play by Calgary-based Arun Lakra that steals, for your amusement, a genre right from under the nose of the movies. That would be the crime caper. And Haysam Kadri’s production, a collaboration between the Citadel and the Grand Theatre in London, Ont., references the cinema in its array of snazzy visuals — lasers, drones, aerial feats. The creative team, including Beyata Hackborn (set), Siobhán Sleath (lighting), Corwin Ferguson (video and projections), Richard Feren (composition and sound), costumes (Jessica Oostergo) are on the money. 12thnight.ca had a chance to talk to the eye surgeon-turned-playwright in this preview. And here’s the 12thnight review. It runs through April 13. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.

At the U of A, Studio Theatre’s 75th anniversary continues with a production of The Laramie Project. The 2000 play, by Moisés Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Company, is a powerful verbatim-theatre response  — fashioned from on-location interviews with townspeople — to the 1998 torture and murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. It’s been produced at professional theatres, community theatres, theatre schools, colleges, and high schools across the continent and beyond ever since. And, needless to say, at a fraught moment in our collective history, when human rights are teetering everywhere and the 2SLGTBQIA+ community is under pressure, it continues to be important, and timely. Melanie Dreyer-Lude’s student production opens Friday and runs through April 12. Tickets: showpass.com.   

Screenshot, at Bonfire Festival 2025, Rapid Fire Theatre.

Rapid Fire Theatre’s Bonfire Festival, an annual play-with-fire excursion into irresistibly  combustible innovations in long-form improv, returns Thursday at their Exchange Theatre headquarters in Strathcona. The festivities open with Made in Japan, which proposes reimagining your favourite book, movie, TV show as an animé. The audience gets to choose the world that gets improvised onstage. Crazy! In Nonsense and Sensibility, improvisers make up an entire Jane Austen novel, in all its Regency complexity and witty banter, on the spot. Clearly impossible, or is it? Screwball is an improvised screwball comedy, in the great Preston Sturges tradition. Also intriguingly impossible. Poetrysports is a collaboration between Rapid Fire’s deluxe improvisers and the Edmonton Poetry Festival. Will a haiku be created, and set in motion, on the spot? Or (no, it can’t be!) a sonnet? Needless to say, you have to be there to find out; Bonfire is graduate studies in the unpredictable. Check out the whole roster of Bonfire shows and the schedule, plus tickets (pay-what-you-will): rapidfiretheatre.com. 

Miles From Broadway, a three-year-old Edmonton theatre company devoted to the musical theatre repertoire, is bringing their production of the 2008 rock musical Next to Normal to the Gateway Theatre Thursday through Sunday. A Pulitzer Prize winner, the challenging, much-awarded musical by Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt broke new and rockier ground at the time for the musical theatre: it took us into the heart of a suburban family where the mother is struggling to find her footing in a treacherous and mapless terrain. Diane is bi-polar. And the ripple-effects tear through her family.

Martin Galba, the actor/director/artistic director who founded the company with the amusingly worldly name, directs the production of Next to Normal that stars Erin Foster O’Riordan. And he also plays Dan, the father, with his real-life daughter Cassidy Galba as Diane and Dan’s troubled daughter Natalie. And Galba’s cast also includes Liam Lorrain, Jayden Leung, Nicole Gaskell.

Miles From Broadway is not the first theatre company the enterprising and versatile Galba has started. The semi-professional Two One-Way Tickets To Broadway produced some 22 productions in its 10 seasons before its grand finale production of Rent in 2016. So far the Miles From Broadway archive includes The Last Five Years and Nunsense. Tickets:  showpass.com.  

Also continuing….

Sissy Fit: Battle Cry, by and starring Brett Dahl, Expanse Festival 2025. Photo supplied

•the 20th anniversary edition of Azimuth Theatre’s Expanse Festival continues at the Fringe Arts Barns. You can still catch Brett Dahl’s Sissy Fit: Battle Cry and Hot Dyke Party continue Thursday and Friday. Check out the 12thnight.ca preview here. Tickets (pay-what-you-can): fringetheatre.ca.

¶at Spotlight Cabaret, a riotously localized version of Romeo and Juliet, in a cabaret concoction by Aimée Beaudoin and Jeff Halaby. Will the young lovers prevail against the ancient grudge of the Hendays vs the Yellowheads? Romeo and Juliet’s Notebook runs through May 15. Have a peek at the 12thnight review. Tickets: spotlightcabaret.ca.

After Mourning – Before Van Gogh, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and lighting design Ami Farrow, Costume design Leona Brausen, multi-media design Matt Schuurman.

•at Shadow Theatre, Michael Czuba’s new play After Mourning – Before Van Gogh, is a chance to be immersed in the visuals of the great artist’s paintings, embedded in the story of the persistent woman whose self-imposed mission it was to rescue the work of the troubled genius from dismissal and obscurity, and shine the light of history on it. Check out the 12thnight.ca preview interview with the playwright, and the 12thnight review here. It runs through Sunday; tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

Posted in Features, Previews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on New plays, revivals, festivals, cabarets, improv, genre switcheroos: we survey an intriguing week in Edmonton theatre

A family, a living room, a dog, and, yes, conflict! Colleen Murphy’s new play Jupiter premieres at Theatre Network

Posted on March 31, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Ellie Heath, Brian Dooley, Monk Northey in Jupiter by Colleen Murphy. Photo by Ian Jackson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The last time a Colleen Murphy play was onstage in this town, a Theatre Network production five years ago, the gore flew so enthusiastically that the front rows of the audience were equipped with splatter shields and bibs.

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

That was the riotously funny (very) dark comedy The Society For The Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius, Murphy’s first adaptation (that signed over to bouffon clowns a particularly grisly Shakespeare tragedy she described at the time as “really boring”).

The fearless Canadian playwriting star arrived at Theatre Network in 2020 with two Governor General’s Awards for plays exploring the repercussions of horrific acts of public violence (The December Man and Pig Girl). And an archive of theatrically adventurous, risk-embracing pieces, including films, and opera librettos. Consider, for example, a 23-actor play with a time span of 500 years and a polar bear protagonist (The Breathing Hole). Or a six-hour two-part 33-character epic designed to challenge assumptions about the 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham (Geography of Fire/ La furie et sa géographie). Or an opera (with composer Aaron Gervais) about a young Ukrainian woman lured into the sex trafficking world by a Russian recruiter (Oksana G.).

playwright Colleen Murphy

Back to the present. After a three-day cross-country train trip (she doesn’t fly) from her Toronto home base, the intrepid Murphy, now an Order of Canada recipient, is back at Theatre Network, her favourite Edmonton destination. And her favourite director, Bradley Moss, is in charge of the world premiere of her latest, Jupiter, the fourth of her plays to be produced at Theatre Network (after Pig Girl, Armstrong’s War and Titus Bouffonius). It opens Thursday at the Roxy, the grand finale to the company’s 50th anniversary season.

On St. Patrick’s Day, we’re sitting in the light-filled rehearsal hall at Theatre Network. And after a conversational dissection of the depressing political news from south of the border, Murphy is describing her new play with a certain wry understatement, as “not just a family in a living room with a dog.”

True, there is a family (multigenerational, working-class, five in number). And there is a dog (an appealing golden retriever played by Monk Northey, who was the first of Moss’s ensemble to be cast). Hold on, has Murphy gone domestic on us? “It’s an experiment in time,” she says of Jupiter, a commission from the Morris Foundation which seeks out “plays that touch on mental health and addiction.”

Brian Dooley, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Ellie Heath in Jupiter, by Colleen Murphy. Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson

“I thought I’d show the consequences of a life,” Murphy says, “so you could see the future coming out of the present…. Jupiter happens during four days in 2015, the present, and how that plays out in the near future in 2030, and in the far future, 2050 — in the same living room. And the same actors play the characters at different ages. “I’ve always loved cause and effect in human behaviour…. I’m not saying that everything that happens to us when we’re young affects us later. But a lot of things do.”

That was a choice, says Murphy of her decision not to have different actors playing the same character. “I didn’t want that…. This is a bit harder and perhaps a bit more limiting. But I also felt that audiences have a relationship, however unconsciously, with the actor who’s playing the character.” Actors love that kind of challenge. And, on a pragmatic note, for a small theatre “five actors instead of eight is more practical.”

There has to be a dog; he’s crucial for the story as it unfolds. So Moss and his cast have put aside the famous old W.C. Fields showbiz saw about never working with children or dogs. “In 2015 a young girl in the family (Ellie Heath) is doing a science experiment with dog saliva and bacteria and stuff.” Murphy has already bonded with Monk, who belongs to Moss’s partner. “I’ve always had golden retrievers, and Monk is the dearest thing…. He’s not on for very long, but he has to hang around rehearsals so he feels at home; he has relationships with the actors and the director.”

Monk is the latest animal to get a plum role in a Murphy play. In the Murphy canon, animals figure prominently: “it’s so interesting, the audience’s instant emotional response.” In The Breathing Hole, which premiered in 2022 at the National Arts Centre, “the audience was extremely compelled by, emotionally connected to, the bear, a puppet with a man inside.” Of the 45 characters in Geography of Fire, 12 are animals and birds. For the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver, Murphy is working on a commissioned adaptation of Ibsen’s whistle-blower drama An Enemy of the People, “and I want an orangutang…. It’s set in the 21st century, with an emphasis on climate change.” And she’s changed Ibsen’s locale —spa baths, a town’s prime tourist draw, are found to be polluted — to the zoo.

Ellie Heath, Cathy Derkach, Brian Dooley in Jupiter by Colleen Murphy, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson.

The family we meet in Jupiter, infiltrated by addiction and alcohol, is not some fictional version of Murphy’s own family. “I never try to do that,” she says. But the Hutchinsons are from the same kind of working class mining community environment in which Murphy, the daughter of a miner originally from Rouyn-Noranda in Quebec, grew up in northern Ontario.

The explosively contained milieu of a family in a room is a first for her, she says. “There’s no drama without conflict,” is the Murphy mantra. And, ah yes, family has turned out to be a fertile ground for her sensibility. “There’s no family on this earth without some kind of conflict. Just by the nature of family. We love and we hate, and sometimes when we’re older we forgive. Or we regret….”

As Murphy, an artist who’s not apt to hedge, told 12thnight.ca in 2017 before the premiere of Bright Burning (she’s renamed it I Hope My Heart Burns First) at the U of A, “our big fat myth is that we are a classless society.” In the play, commissioned from Murphy by the Lee Playwright in Residence program, the characters were meth addicts, prospect-less kids who loot an upscale suburban mansion to settle a drug debt.

She takes up that theme now. “You do not see the working class onstage nowadays. That is my observation,” Murphy declares decisively. In the world of Canadian theatre at the moment, “they’re contaminated…. We do not exist!” And now, onstage at Theatre Network, they are here. And I’m happy about that.”

“I love the working class. I am from the working class.”

It’s a language she knows. “I never want my audience to work hard to figure out what’s going on. My plays are not intellectual; they’re not abstract…. “My dialogue and plays are (a pause and a smile) pedestrian. Which sounds like not a good thing. I mean just straight-up. Ordinary people talking the way ordinary people talk. Nothing high fallutin’. I like to make an offer to an audience … to come on a journey.”   

As usual Murphy is working on multiple projects at the same time. She’s co-directing a film version of Armstrong’s War (“in English Canada, an endless process!”). As well as the Arts Club commission, she’s in progress with a new play for Brian Dooley, who’s a member of the Jupiter cast, an actor with whom she’s regularly worked, in projects across the country. “He’s been after me for ages to write a play for him. And I’ve always told him ‘I don’t write for actors. I can’t think that way’…. But then one morning I woke up with an idea.” And the result is a two-hander, a comedy about (laughter) death. One of my favourite subjects. Funny and charming.” It’s heading towards a production in Quebec.

Meanwhile there’s a working-class family (Dooley plays the dad), three generations, and what happens to them and their dog in the three-decade aftermath of the Jupiter‘s present moment unspooling into the future.

“There’s Greek in this play,” Murphy thinks. “I love Greek tragedy…. There’s a reasons those stories continue to be interesting in the modern world. They’re psychological; they’re deeply emotional; they’re always about human behaviour, why we do what we do. That’s the most fascinating thing about drama. I never tire of that.”

PREVIEW

Jupiter

Theatre: Theatre Network

Written by: Colleen Murphy

Directed by: Bradley Moss

Starring: Ellie Heath, Brian Dooley, Cathy Derkach, Gabriel Richardson, Dayna Lee Hoffmann, Monk Northey

Where: Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre, 10709 124 St.

Running: Thursday through April 20

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca

Posted in Previews | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on A family, a living room, a dog, and, yes, conflict! Colleen Murphy’s new play Jupiter premieres at Theatre Network

High-level thievery in an elaborate plot: Heist at the Citadel, a review

Posted on March 28, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Gillian Moon in Heist, Citadel/Grand Theatre co-production. Photo by Nanc Price. Set design by Beyata Hackborn, lighting by Siobhán Sleath, projection and video by Corwin Ferguson, costumes by Jessica Oostergo.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s complicated high-level thievery going on at the Citadel.

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

Just for fun, a genre has been lifted, improbably, right from under the nose of the cinema, its natural owner. Heist is a theft on behalf of live big-budget theatre, for your amusement. It comes with the trimmings — a crazily convoluted plot and stop-motion flashbacks to its set-up, a gang of criminal specialists, an appetite for technology, an assortment of double-crosses that might be triples. Ah yes, and a con (or two, or three) with the bends, and the cheeky theatre add-on of speculation designed to make you wonder who’s an actor “acting,” and who’s an actor acting but “real.”

Live theatre stealing from cinema is kind of like running a half-marathon uphill with a broad-sword attached to your ankle, hoping you don’t nick an artery en route. Or so you’d think. Read on.

All-Canadian in its creation and execution, Heist, by the Calgary-based playwright Arun Lakra, is no mere back-alley stickup. Judging by the ingenious, visually lavish Citadel/Grand Theatre co-production directed by Haysam Kadri, it’s more like high-tech graduate studies in shell games, incidentally the lowball street-level fall-back of one of the gang who’s fallen on hard times. What you see (and it’s an eyeful) is not what you see.

Alexander Ariate, Devin MacKinnon, Gillian Moon, Callan McKenna Potter in Heist, Citadel and Grand Theatres. Photo by Nanc Price. Set design by Beyata Hackborn, lighting by Siobhán Sleath, projection and video by Corwin Ferguson, costumes by Jessica Oostergo

As connoisseurs appreciate — Ocean’s Eleven being the industry standard — heists are all about humans exercising their wits against formidable odds, in pursuit of the apparently unattainable. Naturally, this is even more gratifying if the target is morally suspect (i.e. filthy rich and crooked, as opposed to some worthy not-for-profit regional theatre), which gives a Robin Hood lustre to the whole enterprise. But really that’s hardly a necessity. As Marvin (Devin MacKinnon) the gang boss notes, “it’s not the pay-off, it’s the thrill.” And part of that thrill, the ’can they pull it off?’ suspense, is, in this case, the sheer unlikeliness that the heist is live onstage.

A heist is the ultimate test of what the endlessly overused corporate jargon of the age calls “strategic planning” and everyone else calls “planning.” And as Heist begins Marvin, a bluff guy with a shifting Irish accent in MacKinnon’s performance, is assembling a team, member by member, a process that includes, in an assortment of flashbacks that involved either random chance (or is it?) or personal baggage with each other. The goal: to steal a big-ass ruby encased in glass and lasers, and every other kind of sophisticated security.

Priya Narine, Gillian Moon, Alexander Ariate, Devin MacKinnon in Heist, Citadel and Grand Theatres. Photo by Nanc Price

Angie (Gillian Moon, who thinks nothing of conversing upside down from a wire) is the impossibly agile aerialist Angie, the “Mary-Ann,” whose skills are crucial to any jewel heist. Ryan (Callan McKenna Potter) is the “Gilligan,” the handsome but unthreatening guy with the con-person gift of likeability. Kruger (Alexander Ariate) is the “Popeye,” the muscle, crappy at shell games and on a short fuse. He’s a big-mouth blusterer who gets the funniest lines (and Lakra is a witty writer). Fiona (Priya Narine, genuinely amusing) is the “Geek, a be-spectacled awkward IT brainiac with no social skills (and an unlimited data plan), attached permanently to her laptop.

Developments (I’m being vague here on purpose, on your behalf), setbacks, dissension within the ranks, shifting alliances, doubts ensue. Is there perhaps a traitor on Marvin’s team? A second heist is set in motion, the plucking of an even more valuable diamond on a mission even more impossible.

Lakra’s heist plot is elaborately formed and layered; I predict you won’t see developments coming (at least I sure didn’t), until later, and even then…. You have to unspool the scenes in retrospect, in flashbacks — six months, two weeks, two days — that pause the ongoing action.

Anyhow, we meet the second target, the Spider. She’s formidably self-possessed, polished, and possibly lethal, of mysterious mittel-European provenance, the collector of expensive wines. And, as Belinda Cornish’s wonderfully icy performance atop red-high-heeled boots (costume designer Jessica Oostergo) makes clear, not to be trifled with. Scruples? Are you kidding? She even defrauded UNICEF. She’s bad. She arches a perfect eyebrow with incredulity at the activity of the Keystone Kriminals at work. And by then, it’s Act II, and we’re inclined to agree with her.

Priya Narine, Alexander Ariate, Devin MacKinnon, Callan McKenna Potter, Gillian Moon in Heist, Citadel and Grand Theatres. Photo by Nanc Price.

The visual preface to Kadri’s production, including an amusing set of projected credits (hey, just like in the movies!), is outstanding — swooping aerial shots of the magic kingdom of Manhattan, a swoop down toward the twinkling cap of the Chrysler Building, glittering urban streets at night from every angle, close-ups and long shots. They transform, back and forth, into the imagery of labyrinthine computer blueprints and circuitry. This 3-D illusionist wizardry, that puts us at constantly shifting distances from the action, is the brilliant work of projection and video designer Corwin Ferguson, partnering with Beyata Hackborn’s set.

Her design, lighted by Siobhán Sleath, is dominated by a screens — one large and two towers of multi-angled smaller screens — and an angled staircase that cuts the space like a wink at the audience. A lot of plexiglass died for this production.

The music (score, composer, sound designer Richard Feren) references James Bond and The Pink Panther, and is underscored with a suspenseful thudding cinematic heartbeat.

What seems a little cumbersome in the production by contrast is the deliberate way the plot loops back to re-visit scenes and reassemble the disbanded team — by repeating the member by member enlistment after they’ve been dispersed. It’s not because the script is deficient in ingenuity. Partly a certain sense of theatrical unwieldiness is because the characters have a tendency to bellow at each other in group scenes. They may be able to detect the sound resonances from a diamond in a hidden safe (who knew?). But when you next hire a team of top-drawer criminals for a secret mission to steal one, you might want to consider operatives who talk less, and more softly, than this shout-y bunch.

It’s a commonplace that live theatre should be wary about trying to imitate what cinema does best; cultural appropriation of that sort tends to be self-defeating. It’s entertaining, though, to see what happens when theatre defies the wisdom of the ages, and steps up, brazenly (big budget in hand), to that kind of larceny. Heist looks great; it unleashes  big-theatre resources and a creative team at the top of their game and gives them a playground for their impressive skills.

The dramatic scenes … well …. It’s true that the broadness of the acting is partly at the service of a plot that, in a comic nod to the theatre, deliberately wonders about acting as a form of deception. Or is it a satirical shiv at the tropes of heist movies? Marvin even says, in tribute to the aerialist’s alleged histrionic chops, that of all the skills of master criminal con-persons, acting is the most under-valued. Maybe that’s true here, too.

Did you see the 12thnight PREVIEW interview with playwright Arun Lakri? It’s here.

REVIEW

Heist

Theatre: Citadel Theatre and Grand Theatre

Written by: Arun Lakri

Directed by: Haysam Kadri

Set design: Beyata Hackborn; Costume design: Jessica Oostergo; Lighting design: Siobhán Sleath; Projection design: Corwin Ferguson; Sound design and composer: Richard Feren

Starring: Alexander Ariate, Belinda Cornish, Devin MacKinnon, Callan McKenna Potter, Gillian Moon, Priya Narine

Running: through April 13

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on High-level thievery in an elaborate plot: Heist at the Citadel, a review