A horror show from history: Dead Centre of Town is back to haunt the Fort

Posted on October 12, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Vincent Fortier in Dead Centre of Town. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s the chilly season when the veil between the present and the past is at its thinnest. And this, my friends, is a haunted place.

Catch The Keys Productions is once again leading us on an expedition to exhume Edmonton’s long-buried stories on location. Dead Centre of Town, at the 1920 Johnny J. Jones Midway in Fort Edmonton Edmonton Park starting Friday (the 13th, surely no coincidence), is the 10th anniversary edition of original creations — researched and custom-made for a site  where our ghosts linger and our dark collective secrets lie composting.

A decade ago, Megan Dart and her sister Beth were living across the street from The Globe, a bar on the corner of Jasper Avenue and 109th St. “It was the site of one of the first mortuaries in Edmonton,” says Dart who discovered it was surrounded by coffin-building and embalming establishments during the First World War. In the macabre local lingo of the time, that corner was “the dead centre of town.”

“We knew the manager of the Globe,” says Dart. “She said ‘we’ll give you the bar for one night and see how it goes.”

A fateful offer: an Edmonton theatre tradition was born that Halloween night. Dead Centre of Town started, modestly, with two technicians, a $500 budget, and a cast of five, a couple of whom (Adam Keefe for one) are still with the annual ventures into Edmonton’s surprisingly strange and lurid past. “150 people showed up, so it was technically sold out!” says Dart.

“I look back it now, at how quickly we put it together, honestly just a couple of weeks. And I go back to the script and see something I wouldn’t share with anybody!” Dart laughs. “Site-specific, yes,” she laughs, “though we didn’t have the word for it. We just knew we didn’t have the money to rent a theatre!”

She remembers that as soon as that experimental first show ended at the Globe, “people were out on the dance floor, in their Halloween costumes, drinking Jaeger shots.”

Since that darkly festive debut Catch The Keys has specialized in immersive, site-specific theatre that, as Dart puts it, “offers something immediate to put the audience inside the experience.” Dead Centre of Town has sent shivers up the collective spine with horror stories — true ones and urban lore —  in such ghostly locations as abandoned trainstations, nightclubs that were once vaudeville houses, tinsmith shops-turned-theatres, the long derelict upper floors above the Whyte Avenue cafe Block 1912. And for the last three years, Dead Centre has unleashed its dark vision at Fort Edmonton, “Edmonton’s only living museum,”  on the banks of the river.

One year we followed characters along 1885 Street, in and out of the schoolhouse, the saloon, and other buildings. “We ran three km. of cable that year,” Dart recalls of the extreme technical challenges for scary lighting and sound off the grid.

One year we found ourselves in the Selkirk Hotel. One year we went into the fort itself and, to an eerie soundtrack of coyotes, met such horrifying characters as the first man hanged in Edmonton who had cannibalized his wife and seven others while under thrall to a demonic spirit.

Adam Keefe and William Mitchell in Dead Centre of Town. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

This year, prepare to be unnerved, and possibly out-and-out terrified, 40 at a time, in the skeletal circus midway at Fort Edmonton Park. Beth Dart directs a cast of 15 in “a series of vignettes and short scenes inspired by true history,” as playwright Megan puts it. “We’ve been dreaming of that midway ever since we started coming down to the park.”

“Amazing how many characters met their end in untimely and unsavoury ways,” Dart says cheerfully. “Edmonton was a bustling city between 1918 and 1926,” and rich in horror story potential, she’s found. Ten years of research into a civic history few of us know have unearthed a startling vein of the weird, the violent, the morbidly fascinating, as she says. “Edmonton was a rebellious young frontier town. So much happened here, a rich Indigenous history, the fur trade, the railroad….”

Inspired by this year’s midway setting, “we’ve married each story to a circus act,” Dart says of the 2017 edition. “You’ll see an aerialist, a snake charmer, an escape artist….”

We’ll meet Filumena Lossandro, the only woman ever hanged in Alberta (heroine of John Estacio’s opera of that name). We’ll be on hand for the strange disappearance of teacher Felicia Graham. One of Dart’s own favourite stories, a real winner, is the 1926 arrival in town of the Sells Floto Circus. “As they set up, 14 elephants got loose and stampeded down Jasper Avenue,” Dart explains, with delight. “Eight of the 14 were captured immediately; the rest kept going, led by the smallest elephant Mad Mary…. They rampaged through town till she ran out of steam.”

“Our acting company doesn’t shy away from a challenge,” laughs Dart. “We’ve thrown some wild ones at them this year! And the run is  34 shows, two a night (7 and 9 p.m.), outside in the elements and within the grasp of the audience…. We’re the Iron Man of theatre!”

PREVIEW

Dead Centre of Town X

Theatre: Catch The Keys Productions

Written by: Megan Dart

Directed by: Beth Dart

Where: Fort Edmonton Park, Johnny J. Jones Midway

Running: Friday through Oct. 31 except Mondays, 7 and 9 p.m.

Tickets: fortedmontonpark.ca

  

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Embracing the other: Ubuntu’s cross-cultural journey at the Citadel

Posted on October 11, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Andile Nebulane in Ubuntu: The Cape Town Project. Photo by Murray Mitchell.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The play that opens on the Citadel’s Maclab stage Thursday wasn’t born, like other plays, in a story, a character, an image.

Ubuntu would end up with all of the above, unspooling in dance, movement, music, and dialogue in both English and Xhosa. But  “we started with nothing. Nothing but a desire for connection,” says Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran of the origins of the play he co-created with Canadian and South African actors. Ubuntu borrows its name from a South African word that’s a veritable ode to human interconnectedness. Rough translation: “I am because you are.”

Like its creators, its characters, and its cast, Ubuntu has a pedigree that spans continents. And a history that goes back a decade and a half, to the moment Cloran went to Cape Town to bring the Baxter Theatre Centre there, in person, a cross-cultural proposition.

Who was the Daryl Cloran of 2004? He and a bunch of his Queen’s University theatre school pals, as the man says with a smile, “had moved to Toronto to make it big and start a company…. At first you do plays with your friends. But as it evolved we wanted Theatrefront to be a company that didn’t have a building but (instead) worked internationally. So we started to build partnerships.”

One was a collaboration with Bosnian artists that became Return: The Sarajevo Project, which garnered a name in innovation (and a cluster of Dora Award nominations) in its Toronto premiere a few years later.

Meanwhile, Cloran had contacted Mannie Manim at the Baxter Theatre Centre in Cape Town, a notably tri-cultural city with large black African, Afrikaans and Muslim populations. “He’d been the artistic director at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, the first theatre there to have black and white actors onstage together,” says Cloran. “We reached out to companies that had an interesting performance style, theatre that was a voice for social change, theatre that was more than just entertainment….”

So it came to pass that Canadian and South African actors found themselves together, scriptless but game, in a rehearsal room in Toronto.  For Mbulelo Grootboom, a South African actor/co-creator who’s been in every incarnation, workshop, and touring production of Ubuntu, the attraction was “different cultures; how we’re similar, how we’re different: the interconnections.”

Andile Nebulane and Mbulelo Grootboom in Ubuntu: The Cape Town Project. Photo by Murray Mitchell.

His cast-mate and fellow creator Andile Nebulane, another original member of the Ubuntu creative team, echoes the thought. “It’s the excitement of waiting to see what’s going to come out when we co-operate and collectively create, starting with a blank page. You don’t know what to prep; you just get there first day, you have this bunch of creatives in a room, and the aim is to end up with a play!”

What happened, grins director Cloran, was a study in cultural  contrasts. Canadians hauled out pen and paper, and prepared to take notes. “These guys start dancing, moving,” he says affectionately of the South Africans. “They get up!” 

Grootboom and Nebulane laugh. “Africans are, naturally, physically expressive people,” says the former. “Canadians come from the head first, then the body will follow.”

“For me personally,” says Nebulane (whose English, incidentally, is excellent, with a poetic flair), “it’s rooted in a language barrier. You’re in a room, and you have to make sense in English, which is my third language. I know exactly what I want to express, but I cannot explain in words. So, let’s do it!”

“Our characters came from that, from improv,” he says. And so did the story. The narrative, Cloran explains, happens in two time periods, 30 years apart. “A young South African’s father left him when he was a year old. Now that he’s 30 the son comes to Canada to find his father. And when he gets here, the mystery surrounding his father’s departure starts to unravel.”

“It becomes very much about identity and belonging and family, our connections to each other across the globe, the idea of ubuntu that a person is a person through other persons, how much people are entwined in each other’s lives….”

Andile Nebulane and Eric Goulem in Ubuntu: The Cape Town Project. Photo by Murray Mitchell.

Grootboom, who plays the father Philani, says the character “came from the body first,” and from “personal experience” of a fractured family that is the dramatic engine of Ubuntu. “You don’t have a script so you have to tap on yourself…. And it’s a universal thing: we all have dysfunctional families. We all have our baggage, our skeletons….”

“At one point we had seven hours of material,” says Nebulane, who plays the son Jabba, whose quest for a long-lost father takes him across the world. “You have to be truthful, and not precious, about your creativity. A lot was stripped away. So you can’t be saying ‘Oh no! It took me 20 minutes to create this monologue and now it’s gone!’”

Time has passed since Ubuntu premiered at Tarragon in 2009. Cloran has a tangible reminder of that: “Our now nine-year-old son was six months old when we did it; we have a picture of him sitting on one of the suitcases of the set….”

In 2012, while Cloran was artistic director of Kamloops’ Western Canada Theatre, Ubuntu toured the West. Except for Grootboom and Nebulane, other members of the original collective, including Cloran’s actor wife Holly Lewis, have come, left for other projects, returned, left again. One of the originals, David Jansen, is back for the Edmonton production. 

Tracey Power and Mbulelo Grootboom in Ubuntu: The Cape Town Project. Photo by Murray Mitchell.

“Partly because of the strength of the African performers, this is a very physical show. For the first 20 minutes, there’s almost no dialogue. There’s a lot of movement and the scenes that do have dialogue are entirely in Xhosa. So it (invites) very physical storytelling…. Watching it now in rehearsal, I’m struck by how layered it’s become over the years, how many great ideas we discovered as we began to know each other, each other’s beliefs and ways of telling a story.”

For Nebulane, the cross-cultural collaboration that created Ubuntu is inseparable from its point. “The process of making the play actually IS the play. How it was created is exactly what the play is talking about.”

And it’s not as if its insights into the immigrant experience have been dulled by time. Au contraire. “What’s happening in the world is so painful,” sighs M. “The fear of the other, the unknown: the play explores that…. Because America is the most powerful system in the world, whatever happens there trickles down through the world….” 

“I don’t see Ubuntu aging,” says Nebulane. “This is a play of a lifetime. Any time, anywhere, anyone can relate.. It’s about breaking walls and the bubbles that people are living in. Sometimes I’m backstage, listening for my cue. And I think ‘Wow! How did we come up with THAT?’”

PREVIEW

Ubuntu: The Cape Town Project

Theatre: Citadel/ Prairie Theatre Exchange

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Mbulelo Grootboom, Andile Nebulane, Erin McMcGrath, Tracey Power, David Jansen

Running: through Oct. 22

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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The sounds of silence: What It Is brings The Aliens to the Roxy

Posted on October 9, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Chris W. Cook, Michael Vetsch, Evan Hall in The Aliens. Photo by db photographics.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Sunday crack of noon on a harsh fall day. Four guys, slightly bleary and hoping coffee will change that, are sitting around talking in a chilly theatre.   

The director and cast of The Aliens, verbal high-achievers all, are getting themselves ready for a day rehearsing a piece where, as the playwright’s stage directions indicate up front, “at least a third — if not half — is silence.”

The play is Annie Baker’s The Aliens. And the three characters in this funny, minutely observant 2010 breakthrough play by the much-awarded young American playwright — a couple of 30-ish guys and later a 17-year-old high school kid hanging out behind a small-town coffee shop — probably don’t speak a single complete sentence before trailing off into pauses that, as prescribed, “should be at least three full seconds long.” With “silences that should last from five to 10 seconds” with further extensions as needed.

This has taken some getting used to, say the three actors in Taylor Chadwick’s What It Is production opening in Theatre Network’s Roxy Performance Series Thursday.

“You say something, you wait for 30 seconds, you say something again,” grins Chris W. Cook. He plays KJ, who seems to have been hanging out behind the coffee shop with his friend Jasper ever since they didn’t graduate from college. “It doesn’t seem like it should work. But it makes sense; it just takes a while to get it into your body just how much of it is communicated without speaking….”

Evan Hall, who plays Jasper, laughs in sympathy, along with Michael Vetsch, who plays the kid Evan (a double-Evan confusion that has led to Chadwick regularly mixing up acting and character names). “Living through those! Onstage 10 seconds  feels like an eternity…. so uncomfortable, so awkward until you’e done it a few times. I’d start to hold my breath….

Director Chadwick, who has a comradely rapport with his trio of rising Edmonton stars, nods vigorously. “A lot of waiting! A lot of laughter comes from that…. They’re just staring at each other. And we’re making people watch!” (laughter from all).

Chris W. Cook, Michael Vetsch, Evan Hall in The Aliens. Photo by dbphotographics.

“In rehearsals we’ve spent a lot of time talking about what’s really going on. In some of the scenes, especially later on, the silences say more (than the words) about the questions being asked.”

Cook, who partners with Chadwick in the What It Is arts podcasts (and has appeared in Chadwick’s revival of the raucous black comedy Nighthawk Rules), cites the stage directions at the top of Act II which indicate that KJ “sits by himself, thinking. He sits by himself for a long time. This should be at least 20 seconds. Finally he says ‘If P then Q’.”

“Usually you take 90 per cent of the stage directions and keep 10. Just the opposite here…. When we’ve struggled, and then gone back to the stage directions, we’re, like ‘let’s try this! Why did we try anything else?’”

Chadwick, Theatre Network’s marketing director, says “Annie Baker has created such a strong map of how to get through the play — the stage directions, the punctation, the costumes, what the set looks like, all very specific!” After an early read-through he remembers telling the actors “guys, if we don’t fuck this up, it’s going to be pretty great. All the pieces are there….”

Chris W. Cook in The Aliens. Photo by db photographics.

Chadwick muses on his choice of this mysteriously engaging play, with its smart but inarticulate, stalled characters. “It really spoke to me: it’s a play about working through tough parts of your life. And it’s also about discovery, about characters who fail and succeed. And it doesn’t put any judgment on them…. It’s about loneliness.  It’s a snapshot of life. Characters are never talking about one thing; they’re talking about several different things….”

“When I read the play I saw opportunities for actors to work on something really rich. And I wanted to challenge myself…. I just knew I was interested in finding out what was at the core of it.” 

Says Hall, “there’s a reason people keep doing this play about three white men, in a world’s that’s trying to move away and diversify from that. There’s something universally engaging.”

Cook grew up in Camrose, a town roughly the size of Baker’s fictional Vermont town of Shirley (for which she’s created a startlingly detailed history elsewhere). And he had an instant glimmer of recognition. “So many things in common,” Cook says. “I know so many people who are just like this…. I could go back to town and it’d be ‘hey, man!’: the same people would still be hanging out in the same spot….”

Evan, the awkward coffee shop employee who stumbles on the KJ/Jasper scene as he takes the recycle out back, is “in a constant state of humiliation,” as the play memorably describes him. “There are aspects of him I can find within myself,” grins Vetsch, a 2014 MacEwan grad who caught Chadwick’s eye in Nextfest productions. I remember times when I was lonely, or I didn’t quite fit in. These guys are a new experience for him. It shifts everything….”

“My breakthrough day with Jasper,” says Hall, “was the day I realized how desperately he needs other people. These are three people who aren’t just (casual) friends or guys who hang out. They need each other; they don’t have someone else….”

Cook echoes the thought. In a play laced with original songs — KJ and Jasper have been in a band — and a chunk of Jasper’s Bukowski-esque novel, “it’s about people wanting to be heard,” he thinks. “From the outside, their lives seem to be going nowhere. But both of them are creating things they need to put out there,”  even if the audience is only each other.

Hall, who made his directing debut this past Fringe with A Quiet Place (and appeared in Gruesome Playground Injuries), had to learn the guitar, pretty much from scratch, for The Aliens. “I wouldn’t say I play the guitar,” he demurs modestly. “I play a particular song.”

The Frogmen is a strange rhyme-laden offering. “It’s catchy; the other ones aren’t and I sing them a cappella. They’re so interesting, so lyrically rich. They don’t make sense all the time but you can make sense of them. One is math equations….”

Learning fragmentary lines interlaced with lengthy silences hasn’t been as arduous as you might predict. The four agree on that, though they add that being together makes things a lot easier than solitary practice at home. “A lot of the learning has come from doing scenes over and over, just listening to each other. And it’s come really naturally,” says Chadwick.

“All the silences are so charged with the thoughts of the characters that trying to run lines without fully feeling through the moments is hard,” says Vetch. After a certain interval, at least at first, the actorly instinct is that someone’s forgotten a line. “And it’s no no no,” laughs Vetsch. “I’m supposed to wait this long!”

“The thoughts feel full,” says Hall. “It has a natural flow,” says Cook. “It’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever got to work on. And it’s so simple. It’s her writing that turns it into something more.”

Chadwick smiles. “Let’s just let it breathe and come naturally.”

PREVIEW

The Aliens

Theatre: What It Is Productions

Written by: Annie Baker

Directed by: Taylor Chadwick

Starring: Chris W. Cook, Evan Hall, Michael Vetch

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

Running: through Oct. 22

Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatre network.ca

   

    

    

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Openers and finales: an exciting weekend to be thankful for theatre

Posted on October 6, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Andrew Chown and Bahareh Yaraghi in Shakespeare in Love, Citadel Theatre. Photo by David Cooper.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s Thanksgiving, and the perfect moment to consider — in person — the bounty of Edmonton theatre. C’mon, you can’t eat turkey ALL weekend.

In the Citadel’s splendidly entertaining, beautifully staged season-opener, we get to go backstage in a theatre town where rival companies are trolling for new scripts, and a young up-and-comer playwright with a bad case of writer’s block is having a hell of a time making a bunch of conflicting deadlines.

The town in London in the 1590s. The playwright is one William Shakespeare, whose creative fire is ignited when he falls in love, and writes Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare In Love, a fine launch for the artistic directorship of Daryl Cloran, is a play-with-a-play that’s a love letter to theatre itself. The last performances are this weekend, before the Citadel/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre production leaves town and graces Winnipeg with its jokes and romantic chemistry. And a dog. Give yourself a big, lush, funny treat! (here’s my 12thnight.ca review of Shakespeare in Love).

Melanie Piatocha and Richard Lee Hsi in Shocker’s Delight! Photo by Mat Busby.

At Teatro La Quindicina, the finale of the company’s summer season at the Varscona (through Octd. 14) is the captivating Shocker’s Delight!, a strange and wonderful ode to friendship, loyalty, and what it means to grow up and launch yourself into the big wide world. Stewart Lemoine’s 1993 comedy is here revived with a terrific young cast — Melanie Piatocha, Ben Stevens an Richard Lee Hsi — who capture unerringly the combination of breezy and anxious that animates this  funny, heartbreaking coming-of-age piece. Have a look at my 12thnight.ca review of Shocker’s Delight.

Other possibilities:

Cory Christensen, Christine Lesiak, Fortuitous Endings…. Photo of 2015 production by Marc J. Chalifoux.

 

Toy Guns Dance Theatre, specialists in playful, highly theatrical mergers of dance and theatre, launches a full season of shows with a revival of  Fortuitous Endings: What To Do When You Wake Up Drunk Wrapped In A Barbecue Cover In Your Neighbour’s Backyard. You have to admit, it’s a title that conjures (and redefines relationship angst). 12thnight. ca talked to creator/ choreographer/ director/ company artistic director Jake Hastey. The show runs through Saturday at the Westbury Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns.

Soul Sistas, Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

I haven’t seen it yet. But I hear that Tara Jackson and Tiffany Deriveau really rock it as Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner in Soul Sistas at the Mayfield Dinner Theatre (through Oct. 29).

Rapid Fire Walk With Me. Photo by Andrew Paul.

And here’s an idea that will invade the edge of your consciousness, and possibly haunt your dreams. Rapid Fire Theatre launches a series of David Lynch-style improvs Saturday nights in October at Zeidler Hall. Idyllic small town, dark secrets, future that’s really the past…. I talked to Paul Blinov about Rapid Fire Walk With Me.

 

 

 

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What dark secrets lurk under the small town idyll? Rapid Fire Walk With Me improvises a mystery series a la David Lynch

Posted on October 6, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Rapid Fire Walk With Me. Photo by Andrew Paul.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Through the darkness of future past/ the magician longs to see/ one chants out between two worlds/ fire walk with me….“

In the 1992 David Lynch horror film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me — a prequel to the celebrated television series that unnerved us all — worlds, realities?, intersect and collide in mystifying ways. And so do the past, present, and future.

The surreal Lynchian vision is the inspiration for Rapid Fire Walk With Me, an improv series that runs every Saturday night in October (starting this very Saturday) at Rapid Fire Theatre’s Zeidler Hall headquarters in the Citadel.

It’s the brainchild of Paul Blinov, one of the company’s elite Chimprov improvisers, and two of his Rapid Fire cohorts Bob L’Heureux and Tara Koett. Says Blinov, “we tried it out at the Bonfire Festival,” Rapid Fire’s annual repository for “”our weirdest ideas.” 

Here’s the Blinov proposition: Improvisers, who create storylines on the spot from cues, have a natural affinity to the playful illogic of surrealism. “Our interest in playing with ideas of surreal” led the Blinov trio to the creator of Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. He is, after all, a master of “getting the pieces of a narrative and putting them together in the wrong order.” In many ways, Lynch’s free-associative story-spinning and imagery, unhinged from the linear, sits with uncanny ease in the world of improv, Blinov has found.

“At heart David Lynch is an improviser!”

It’s no accident, Blinov argues, that favoured Lynch settings are “small idyllic towns with dark secrets … a stable structure to depart from, a veneer of the normal peeled back to unearth darkness and strangeness.” Maybe that’s why Lynch movies retain a spontaneous feel, Blinov muses, “the sense of assembling a mystery as they go … with some narrative satisfaction at the end.”

Blinov cites a Lynch anecdote about seeing a bare-branched tree in the small-town backyard of his boyhood — and suddenly realizing it was swarming with ants everywhere. “Super-normal surfaces that turn out to be super-strange….”  In Lynch’s book Catching The Big Fish, an exploration of creativity through meditation, the auteur argues that “you have to go deep to let yourself find the big fish,” as Blinov puts it. In filming Twin Peaks, the character of the evil Bob was improvised in an instant: catching a glimpse of a  make-up man in a mirror and opting spontaneously to include this non-actor in the narrative. 

As a model for long-form improv, it’s tricky, Blinov says happily.  “The narrative isn’t A to B, pieces of information are in the wrong order, or withheld; it’s the journey rather than (the arrival) at B….” He argues, though, that all improv grapples, moment to moment, with “what turns out to be a red herring.”

Since his graduation from Theatresports to long-form Chimprov initiatives, Blinov, a Fort McMurray native who arrived here to go to the U of A, has been part of such experimental ventures as The Imagineers, Gossamer Obsessions (with Amy Shostak) and Sneak Peek (with Rapid Fire artistic director Matt Schuurman and others). In the latter, the improvisers show up with a movie trailer each, the audience chooses, and they improvise the entire movie.

With this new venture, improvising à la Lynch, the marriage of scary-dark and funny is a tricky one, concedes Blinov, “There’s something inherently funny in watching people have to stick to their guns. Or abandon their guns!” And the unexpectedness factor increases exponentially with a large-cast show. For the Saturday series this month, a company of 14 performers will yield a weekly ensemble of seven, depending on availability.

For the Bonfire outing of Rapid Fire Walk With Me, earlier this year, “anyone (in the company) could sign up,” says Blinov, an 11-year improv veteran who divides his time between teaching improv workshops and a job at the Art Gallery of Alberta launching spontaneous conversations about visual art with the public experiencing it there. 

Some improvisers who signed on for the Lynchian experiment at Bonfire were, like Blinov, knowledgeable David Lynch aficionados. Some were only sketchily acquainted with the sacred canon. “We got everyone in a room and watched clips from across film and TV, to get the feel of the tone. ‘These are the touchstones’.”

“They occupy their own territory,” Blinov says of the Lynch oeuvre.  “Whatever made them powerful still lands….” Rapid Fire Walk With Me isn’t a copy or a parody; it’s not to Lynch what Hitchcock homages are to that great men. “We have to create our own authentic world…. It’s not just cherry pie and solving a mystery.”

For the evening’s cue each week, “we’ll ask the audience for an image from a dream or nightmare.” After that there’s just no telling where the narrative may go, in what strange byways it may linger, what “detours” it may take, what minor characters may find themselves on the narrative engine. Blinov uses the word “exciting” to describe what more timid souls might be inclined to call nerve-wracking.

“I always feel nervous when I go onstage. It’s about using nerves to your advantage!”

PREVIEW

Rapid Fire Walk With Me]

Theatre: Rapid Fire Theatre

Created by: Paul Blinov, Bob L’Heureux, Tara Koett

Where: Zeidler Hall, Citadel Theatre

Running: Saturdays in October, 7:30 p.m.

Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com

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The reigning monarch of the long title is back with a dance theatre season: Toy Guns’s Jake Hastey

Posted on October 3, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Cory Christensen, Christine Lesiak, Fortuitous Endings…. Photo of 2015 production by Marc J. Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls. 12thnight.ca

The titles of are a tip-off. They float through the air, free-associating in a long, whimsical, adventurous accumulations. They’re not shackled by mere practical considerations. They’re ample, to say the least. 

The titles of Toys Guns Dance Theatre productions are like the shows themselves that way. Welcome to the mind of Toy Guns director/choreographer/resident muse Jake Hastey.

Hastey opens his new season — Toy Guns’ first full-length season — Thursday at the Westbury Theatre with Fortuitous Endings: What To Do when You Wake Up Drunk In A BBQ Cover In Your Neighbour’s Backyard. Theatre audiences caught a debut glimpse of that intriguingly named piece at Workshop West’s 2015 Canoe Festival.

Hastey’s cast of 10 is divided equally among bona fide actors (Chris Bullough, Christine Lesiak, Corben Kushneryk among them) and professional dancers from across the country. “Two acts, full length, huge conclusion. Thousands of props!”: Hastey laughs a little ruefully — but only a little. He’s in his element.

The innovative dance theatre company Hastey founded, which made its debut in a 2013 workshop of Bright Lights Cold Water, made a startling entrance at the Fringe in 2014 with a pair of  original offerings. Red Wine, French Toast, and the Best Sex You’ve Ever Had was a playful, high-spirited exploration of romantic attraction, an inventive series of couplings and uncouplings. Propylene Glycol, Maltodextrin, Retinol Palmitate, And Other Words I Don’t Understand, Like Love had a typical Hastey sense of scale: it featured 11 actor/dancers, an opera singer, a storyteller, and 300 pillows (not to mention its own pillow sponsor). Typically, Hastey and co devised such promotional gambits as join-in pillow fights outside the Fringe box office.  

Fortuitous Endings: What To Do When You Wake Up Drunk In A BBQ Cover In Your Neighbour’s Backyard — a title with its own come-hither array of narrative possibilities — is, says Hastey, “the artists’ favourite” among his Toy Guns show. Why? “This one reached a different maturity and depth,” he muses. “An intensity, a cohesiveness of vision, I think…. It was so resonant with the audience from the start.”

“In the others, the visuals take centre stage…. This one really highlights the performers. The base level for every one of them is so high!”

Photoof 2015 production of Fortuitous Endings…. by Marc J. Chalifoux.

“At its core,” says the ebullient dance theatre auteur, “it’s got a five-couple narrative going through relationships…. Intimacy and (as per the title) endings,” in an intricate weave of journeys that he’s been working on, in one way or another, since 2010. His original inspiration, he’s said, was a sadder-but-wiser personal relationship arc experience. 

As often happens in Hastey productions, the audience and the performance engage with each other in unusual ways. Sometimes they’re site-specific (the “pillow show” has been done in mattress shops); sometimes Toy Guns shows have extrapolated from the props. This time the audience will find soft balls Velcro-ed under their seats, ready to be thrown at the stage in propitious moments. And there’s always live music; for Fortuitous Endings it’s the work of Must Be Tuesday.

It’s taken Hastey six years to broker the grants and venues, and to develop the ensemble he needs for an entire season of his large-cast work. This upcoming debut season also includes a January debut for Hastey’s mask show What Colour (Color) Is Your Dress? which follows a young woman into the afterlife. In March, the company revives Propylene Glycol…. 

PREVIEW

Fortuitous Endings: What To Do When You Wake Up Drunk In A BBQ Cover In Your Neighbour’s Backyard

Theatre: Toy Guns Dance Theatre

Created and directed by: Jake Hastey

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

Running: Thursday through Saturday

Tickets: toygunstheatre.com

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A funny and wistful season finale at Teatro La Quindicina: Shocker’s Delight!, a review

Posted on September 29, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Melanie Piatocha and Ben Stevens in Shocker’s Delight!. Photo by Mat Busby.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I’m concerned about our ability to function outside the academic world,” says Julia, a ballroom dance major at the University of Continental North America, to her childhood friend Markus, who’s in philosophy.

The college pals are on the eve of graduation into the big wide world where life begins, and choices have to be made. Four years of college education have buffed their analytical skills. And, as Stewart Lemoine’s sad and funny 1993 coming-of-age comedy Shocker’s Delight! reveals, in its strangely resonant way, applying them to something as unmapped, unknowable, and bruisable as the human heart … well, it can produce the most startling and painful results.

Melanie Piatocha and Richard Lee Hsi in Shocker’s Delight!. Photo by Mat Busby.

The word Julia tosses off, brightly, in this lovely Teatro La Quindicina season finale revival, is “unfathomable.” We are, she says, “floating over unfathomable depths.” And she’s right. One of the many things Ron Pederson’s production gets so hilariously and heartbreakingly right is the disconcerting discovery, by all three ‘50s characters, that in the laboratory of real life, syllogisms backfire, philosophical deductions go on detours, and  metaphors have a way of returning to haunt you. Life is both simpler and more complicated than you think when you’re thinking.

All three characters? The third is a passerby. Rory (Richard Lee Hsi) is a golf major, hailed randomly by Marcus — mainly because there is no reason not to — as he and Julia banter, wittily, about whether the logical next step for her is to look for a husband. Rory has no reason to reject Julia; he doesn’t even know her. And for his part Marcus dismisses the idea of marrying Julia himself,. “I’ve known you too long…. I’d be your husband and you’d have no friends left at all.”

Stevens and Piatocha have a very amusing and natural buddy chemistry, full of whimsy, as a bickering couple of long standing. “Do you think my single-mindedness limits my prospects?” Julia demands.

This playful experiment in intellectual clarity ends up in something emotionally fraught and chaotic: a love triangle. Tears will be shed. A calamity involving a golf ball will interpose itself. Panic will be unleashed; accommodations will be made after intermission.

This is comic sparkle with slivers. And there’s consolation to be found in art, the elegant simplicity of Biedermeier furniture (Marcus’s chief consolation), or dance (Rory talks about the “grace” of harmonious partnerships), or the Schubert piano music that wafts through the piece.

Hell, or even golf. In one scene, Rory addresses, as a formal college presentation, the pressing question of which is more important to the success of a golf swing? The grip or the stance? And he opts for the one that doesn’t change, that gives you a fixed point from which to be creative. You’ll need to hold that thought. 

Melanie Piatocha, Ben Stevens, Richard Lee Hsi in Shocker’s Delight! Photo by Mat Busby.

   

Pederson, who played Marcus himself in a 2004 revival of Shocker’s Delight!, has assembled a captivating trio of young actors. Piatocha is a delight as the impulsive, alert, quick-witted romantic heroine, forthright in all matters but discombobulated by the waywardness of her own heart.

There are perfectly judged performances, too, from Stevens as her sassy pal Markus whose devolution into confusion will break your heart; and Hsi as the baffled but bemused Rory, the third party co-opted by the others, scrambling to keep up, and in the end standing up with grace and fortitude to the competing claims of love and friendship.

Together these actors negotiate the extreme oddities of the structure: the formal extended academic “lectures” that happen from time to time and play against Lemoine’s amusingly offhand dialogue and sweet romantic moments. The essay — remember those? — is the way college kids are schooled to grapple with meaning — in a way that’s absurd and kind of admirably serious.

The play is affectionate about that, as Pederson’s spirited, playful but unforced production reveals; the weight of it seems just right. As do Matthew Alan Currie’s romantic lighting, the grave outsized academic pillars of Chantel Fortin’s set, and the fun of Leona Brausen’s ‘50s costumes.

“The prospect of regret makes the future seem like a bit of a pain, doesn’t it?” ponders Marcus. That’s the wistfulness of the view from the graduation threshold. Rory on the other hand argues that “there’s a future in everything….” And this season finale lets you stand with characters there, musing on the what’s next and the might-have-been.

REVIEW

Shocker’s Delight!

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written by: Stewart Lemoine

Directed by: Ron Pederson

Starring: Melanie Piatocha, Ben Stevens, Richard Lee Hsi

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Oct. 14

Tickets: teatroq.com

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PattyZee@TheRoxy: Theatre Network launches a new cabaret series

Posted on September 29, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Patricia Zentilli. Photo by Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Music and storytelling merge at close range!”

Actor/singer Patricia Zentilli, one of the country’s most accomplished cabaret artists, says that’s the closest she can come to a definition of cabaret.

And Edmonton audiences will have a chance to share both with her Saturday night when Zentilli launches PattyZee@TheRoxy, a series of five themed cabarets that thread through the upcoming Theatre Network season on Saturday nights.

For the inaugural edition, her chosen theme is friendship. “I try to find songs that fit perfectly the moment,” Zentilli says of a repertoire that extends through the musical theatre, familiar and obscure, into the byways of pop, and beyond. “Songs that strike a big emotion with me”: that’s the prime requirement, she says.

In the course of the friendship cabaret, you’ll hear songs by Cyndi Lauper, Randy Newman, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jacques Brel in a new and personal context. Brel’s La Fanette is always sung by a man; Zentilli plans to sing it, from the perspective of a young girl whose best friend has moved on to other BFs. There’s a number from the Tony Award-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen.…

“It’s me singing as me.” 

Pianist Liz Han shares the stage with Zentilli Saturday. Zentilli values the relationship. Cabaret is “a beautiful collaboration with a pianist. I think of us as musical partners, a team,”  not as singer and accompanist.

Zentilli originally pitched Theatre Network artistic director Bradley a monthly cabaret series to run on Mondays, when theatre takes a night off. It was Moss who proposed that Saturday night’s all right for singing — the Saturday nights immediately following the five Friday night Hey Ladies! “info-tainment variety/talk show episodes scheduled for the Roxy Performance Series.  

Each cabaret features special guests, one “seasoned pro and one emerging artist,” says Zentilli. “Young performers can come and sing a song in its entirety. It’s not an audition; it could be a part you’re never going to get!” Zentilli herself is the musical guest in the season-launching episode of Hey Ladies! Friday Sept. 29, along with actor/photographer Ryan Parker. 

For her first PattyZee@The Roxy cabaret Saturday night Zentilli is joined by the veteran singer/actor Susan Gilmour and relative newcomer Vanessa Wilson. The October 28 cabaret is dedicated to the theme of fear, with the guest artist actor/singer/songwriter Andrea House. Citadel star John Ullyatt is up for the Dec. 2 edition. In February, the guests are from the cast of the Citadel’s upcoming Mamma Mia! (in which Zentilli herself stars as Donna).

And in May, Mother’s Day month, Plain Janes/ Teatro La Quindicina star Jocelyn Ahlf, who is one (a mother that is), will reprise her hilarious show-stopper from The Irrelevant Show. The Tantrum Song is a full-throttle operatic aria treatment of a tantrum from Ahlf’s then-four-year-old daughter. “O God! WHY do I have to be the responsible one!”

Zentilli, who easily straddles the frontier between cabaret and theatre (The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, I Love You You’re Perfect Now Change), has done cabarets in Edmonton before. Feels Like Home, created with pianist Don Horsburgh, was spun from personal experiences on the road to true love, and a new life in theatre and motherhood in Edmonton. “It nearly gave me a heart attack,” she laughs. “I put it all on my credit card! The night before, there were exactly four tickets sold…. And then it was packed!” 

For Saturday’s stories of friendship, Zentilli has a script. But she won’t be shackled to it. “I leave myself open to the dynamic of the audience on the night … sort of feel the evening out.

“I like to be authentic, to show my vulnerability. It’s fun. It’s terrifying,” she laughs.

PREVIEW

PattyZee@TheRoxy

Theatre: Theatre Network, Roxy Performance Series

Starring: Patricia Zentilli, Liz Han

Running: Saturday Sept. 30; also Oct. 28, Dec. 2, Feb. 3, May 12

Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca

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Play the Fool sends in the clowns

Posted on September 28, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Jacqueline Russell and Jed Tomlinson in Hushabye. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Those that are fools, let them use their talents….”

— Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

An outbreak of clowns is at hand in this theatre town. And, as you’ll see at Play The Fool, the “festival of clown and physical comedy” running through Sunday at L’UniThéâtre, they come in every size, shape, and disposition, from the round-eyed innocent and antic prankster to the macabre Euro-brooder.

True, “the red nose is a good indicator” of clown identity, as Play The Fool artistic director Christine Lesiak says. But, as the re-naming of the festivities from last year’s debut Edmonton Clown Festival hints, “the art of clowning” has a wider, more elastic embrace than nasal ID. And Lesiak herself, a space physicist-turned-theatre artist, is proof of that.

Edmonton audiences know her from such clown alter-egos as Sheshells, in Small Matters productions like Fools For Love, or Aggie, the chatterbox advice guru who dispenses worldly counsel in the Ask Aggie shows that have toured the country’s Fringes. In late November at the Backstage Theatre, Small Matters explores mother-daughter relations in Over Her Dead Body, a new physical comedy à la Buster Keaton and Mr. Bean.

She finds that site-specific theatre — she’s been in Toy Guns Dance Theatre and Catch The Keys productions — that blithely ignores or eliminates the barrier between performance and audience is in synch with clowning.

“I tend to apply my training to theatre,” Lesiak says of her own clown proclivities. But “clown”  (“a trigger word,” as she says)  invites a wide and liberal application. Which may be why the Cirque du Soleil is scouting Play The Fool. “The Fringe program this year listed two shows as ‘clown shows’,” she says. “But I saw 15 shows I’d call clowning….”

So, the clown festival has become a festival of fools, or as Lesiak puts it, “the foolish and fanciful.” Unique in Western Canada (and only the third of its kind in Canada, after Toronto and Montreal), the festivities, 45 performers strong, assemble a mainstage lineup of three full-length shows.

One of them, Hushabye, was picked by all three Canadian festivals. Directed by Michael Kennard of Mump and Smoot fame, Jed Tomlinson and Jacqueline Russell star as Sizzle and Spark Fandango, in a dark comedy about family relationships and the relentless quest for the perfect life. “It is wacky; it is extreme,” says Lesiak. “Grotesque in the Mump and Smoot tradition….The birthing scene is worth the price of admission!”

Iman Lizarazu in Basquette Quese, at Play The Fool. Photo by Cornicello Photography.

A Banquette Quese stars the French artist Iman Lizarazu who, like Lesiak, was originally a scientists (she has a PhD in astrophysics from the Max Planck Institute). By every kind of antic ploy, “a clown is desperately trying to fall asleep,” says Lesiak of the all-ages show directed by Avner the Eccentric and Julie Goell, which has travelled the world since 2007. “Circus clowning, classical skills, within a narrative….”

The Monkey Do! International Collective is a trio of artists — Pratik Motwani from India, James Peck from the U.K. and Sarah Peters from the U.S. — all instructors at the Dell’Arte School in California. “Wacky. Very silly. They bring cultural lenses to their work,” says Lesiak of a show billed as “a daredevil freak show of magic, chaos, and sorcery.”

The festival’s double-bill includes Vancouver’s Chris & Travis (Chris Ross and Travis Bernhardt), who improvise comedy in a made-up language, and Aytahn Ross’s The Great Balanzo!.

Chris and Travis, Chris Ross and Travis Bernhardt. Photo supplied.

Since festivals in Edmonton work better when they’re rooted in the local, Lesiak has included an emerging artist series of triple-bills in Play the Fool. The lineup includes Mar and Briefcase, the clown alter-egos of playwright Jessy Arden and actor Carmen Nieuwenhuis (who brought the Fringe circuit a bona fide hit, Prophecy).

The Opening Night Cabaret is “a teaser,” says Lesiak. The Great Balanzo hosts.

PREVIEW

Play The Fool

Where: L’UniThéâtre at La Cité francophone, 8627 91 St.

Running: Thursday through Sunday

Tickets and show schedule: playthefool.ca

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Shocker’s Delight! Ron Pederson directs his favourite play at Teatro La Quindicina

Posted on September 27, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Melanie Piatocha and Richard Lee Hsi in Shocker’s Delight! Photo by Mat Busby.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In 1993, a kid named Ron Pederson fell deeply in love.

With a play.

The object of his affection struck him as funny and wistful, complicated but simple, and sad, a highly unusual kind of comedy. It had questing ‘50s characters, a trio just out of college, who find themselves in a knotty love triangle and somehow rise about it.

Pederson still remembers the wonder he felt seeing Stewart Lemoine’s Shocker’s Delight!, “staged on a runway” at an ex-artillery space just east of the old city market (the Phoenix Downtown). He read it. He dreamed about it. He floats the word “mystical” to describe this kind of attraction.

Ron Pederson at the Varscona Theatre. Photo by Mat Busby.

Eleven years later, when Pederson was living in L.A. working on the late-night FOX sketch comedy series MADtv, he was still regularly lobbying his Teatro La Quindicina pals for a revival of Shocker’s Delight!. Pederson laughs. “Is it time yet? Can we do it yet? I must be old enough now….”

And then he was. He came back from L.A. specially to be in a 2004 revival with Jocelyn Ahlf and Josh Dean. And now 25 years after that life-changing premiere, his appreciation undimmed, Pederson is directing his favourite play. Shocker’s Delight! opens Thursday as the Teatro season finale with a younger generation cast: Ben Stevens (For The Love of Cynthia) with Teatro newcomers Melanie Piatocha and Richard Lee Hsi.

Melanie Piatocha and Ben Stevens in Shocker’s Delight!. Photo by Mat Busby.

“So rich,” Pederson says of the play after rehearsal last week. “Great laughs, plot twists, highly romantic resolutions. A certain balance at the end…. It’s surprising; it sneaks up on you.”

Shocker’s Delight isn’t the first Lemoine that Pederson, Toronto-based, has directed; in fact, he’s made it a mission of sorts to bring the oeuvre of the Teatro founder, resident playwright, and muse to the east. “His plays should be picked up all over the country!” The Exquisite Hour, for one, (seen earlier this season here at Teatro) was the Lemoine he and fellow Edmonton ex-pat Daniela Vlaskalic, chose to launch their Toronto company The Theatre Department in 2012. Until that production, starring Vlaskalic and Ted Dykstra, Toronto hadn’t seen a Lemoine in 17 years. Pith! (directed in the end by Ron Jenkins) and the farce A Grand Time In The Rapids were other Pederson initiatives at disseminating Lemoine.

Pederson, who spent this past summer in the Freewill Shakespeare Festival repertory company and then Bright Young Things’ Fringe production of Sartre’s No Exit (his idea), arrived onstage as a kid in a way that was more like osmosis than career planning. By 14, he was skipping school so much to watch director Robin Phillips’ rehearsals at the Citadel, that he ended up in Oliver! and The Music Man.

His history with Teatro isn’t archival pinball. It’s more like a calling; Pederson has often called Teatro his education. The young Pederson of 1993 had already been in such Lemoine comedies as The Spanish Abbess of Pilsen (as a Gypsy sidekick named Jaunty, a nickname that stuck with him for years). He’d seen Lemoine’s Two Tall Too Thin, a curious comedy about the romantic and aspirational entanglements of Siamese twins and The Book of Tobit, (“a crazy imaginative play!”). The Fatty comedies, specially written for him by Lemoine — Fatty Goes To College and the rest — were still three years away. 

And so was a long string of roles Lemoine custom-made for Pederson who, from the start, seemed to have a natural instinct for styles and cadence and timing. His first paid pro gig was a Lemoine: in Neck-Breaking Car Hop; he played Mitchell Styx, the ghost of a guy who died when the title car hop stuck his head in a deep fryer.

Improv has always figured prominently for Pederson, both in acting and directing. Witness his Die-Nasty affiliations, and then,  in Toronto, The National Theatre of the World. That’s the dexterous much-travelled company that, impossibly enough, improvises whole plays by famous authors — Miller, Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, Tony Kushner among them (“a Strindberg Halloween special!” he laughs) — under the title Impromptu Splendour.

“I learned so much about storytelling!” declares Pederson, who directed, made sets (“have you ever tried to find a hay bale in Toronto in February?”), set up an onstage phonograph for scoring. He’s amused to remember one Impromptu Splendour  excursion to the improv stronghold of Chicago. The playwright of the night? French-Canadian star Michel Tremblay. The Time Out Chicago reviewer expressed his initial disappointment (“who the fuck is Michel Tremblay?”), then admitted that by the end of evening he was moved to out, buy some Tremblay plays, and find out more. Pederson finds that highly gratifying.

“It’s conjuring,” he says of a venture that, like Lemoine’s evocation of Hitchcock thrillers in Evelyn Strange, is always more about homage than parody. “I’m a big proponent that improv is an evening in the theatre!”

Pederson’s new idea for improvised plays, Wonderstruck Live! (subtitle: “Theatrical Masterpieces Suddenly”) gets workshopped at the Citadel Club Jan. 21 and 22, at Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran’s invitation.

Pederson thinks there’s a quality of improv, a certain spontaneity, that animates Lemoine comedy, Pederson thinks. “Maybe the velocity with which he writes carries into it? Improv is somewhere in the DNA of it, the moving forward, the sense of rising to the occasion, the bubbly matrix of the dialogue….”

And ahah, as Pederson points out, the playwright’s musical choices for scenes and transitions in Shocker’s Delight! are from Schubert Impromptus. 

If Lemoine comedies turned Pederson into an actor, they’ve invited his analytical skills as a director. He loves their literate wit, their dialogue, plots that happen onstage, scenes between people.

In this respect, the comedies of Neil Simon cross his mind. Pederson is in an exclusive showbiz subset: “In high school I was a Neil Simon nerd,” he grins, bemused at the image. “Maybe because of the movie The Out of Towners?  His first foray into directing was The Last of the Red Hot Lovers (“it always makes me laugh….”) He says he’d like to have a crack at directing Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue. 

Pederson, who was in the Stratford Festival company in 2013), cites Stratford artistic director Antoni Cimolino’s idea of “the science of comedy.” and the notion of “taking the fat out” of an equation to arrive at elegance. Which brings him to his continuing admiration for the late director Robin Phillips, who was all about removing clutter, and the merely decorative.

Melanie Piatocha, Ben Stevens, Richard Lee Hsi in Shocker’s Delight! Photo by Mat Busby.

And that brings him, by a typically Pederson kind of free association, to the Biedermeier furniture that’s a strand — along with golf and ballroom dancing — in Shocker’s Delight! “Simple, elegant lines, free of spurious decoration,” as Pederson puts it. “The answers are inside of the play. Organic. Daoist. You don’t have to struggle…. It’s like music that way.”

PREVIEW

Shocker’s Delight!

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written by: Stewart Lemoine

Directed by: Ron Pederson

Starring: Melanie Piatocha, Richard Lee Hsi, Ben Stevens

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Oct 14

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