The moment of truth for a country: Children of God, a musical about the ripple effect of residential schools

Posted on March 7, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Children of God, Urban Ink. Photo by Emily Cooper.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the musical that opens at the Citadel Thursday, you’ll meet a smart kid with potential and hopes, a dreamer with a sense of possibility.

And then school happens.

You’ll meet Tom years later, in a family torn apart by official oppression, and feel in your bones the terrible price tag of cultural dislocation, and the ripple effect of trauma through generations.

Seven years in the making, Children of God is Canadian through and through — in its heartbreaking story, its creation, its nine-member cast and band of four. It brings to mainstages across the country for the first time an Indigenous story that belongs to all us, a story from our shared history long shrouded in silence. And it gives voices that have been mute for 150 years songs to sing and dances to dance.

It’s the story of the residential schools that systematically set about “taking the Indian out of the child,” as its dazzlingly multi-talented Oji-Cree creator Corey Payette puts it in his forthright fashion.

And it moves that story in the highly accessible framework of the musical theatre, as its engaging writer/ composer/ lyricist/ director Payette, artistic director of Vancouver’s Urban Ink Productions, explained over lunch last week.

Children of God, by Corey Payette, Urban Ink Productions at the Citadel. Photo by David Cooper

Children of God “started seven years ago from a place of anger and frustration,” says the artist with the starry talent set and communication skills to match. “Growing up in northern Ontario, we just weren’t taught about residential schools; it was kept from us,” says Payette. “The extent of the narrative was that the First People were here and now they’re gone…. That was about it.”

”My grandmother spent her whole life telling people she was French,” says Payette, who grew up in the little Ontario town of New Liskeard (now Temiskaming Shores). “Why would you tell people you were Indigenous? She figured people would think you’re lazy, and you wouldn’t get a job.”  Residential schools? “Not something we talk about,” ” the young Payette and his sister got told.

It was that silence, and silencing, that launched Payette into writing Children of God, he says. He travelled around B.C. meeting residential school survivors and their families; he visited residential school sites, many abandoned and some, as in Kamloops, reclaimed. In fact, an early workshop of Children of God happened in the chapel of a Kamloops residential school turned community centre, on Tk’emlúps First Nations territory. And it was, says Payette feelingly, “the most profound experience of my life….”

Survivors who’d gone to school there and their families (who brought gifts) told him “you need to do this work everywhere in Canada, and not just for Indigenous people!”

“There was a real grace that was shown to  me by so many survivors,” he says. “And I felt, I knew, that every Canadian needs to know this history, the history of the Canada they received…. All of us!”

“It’s an opportunity for our settler allies to experience the story seen through the eyes of Indigenous people,” says Payette of his creation. “What would it have been like if it had been your child? Once people put themselves in those shoes, we’re going to see huge changes!”

It was a survivor in Williams Lake, B.C. who “changed the development of the show in a big way,” he says of the turning point moment the show embraced “healing and forhgiveness, not just anger…. He told me that if he had not forgiven he would have died.” And he had the tragic stories to prove it, friends consumed by alcohol, drugs, despair.

“There we were, sitting on the back of a pick-up truck together and I was so struck by the enormous resilience and strength of survivors — to grieve their losses, and still hold a life together…. What does it take?” Payette pauses to consider.  “I don’t know that I have it in me. It seems impossible.”

”That was the journey that led to the show.”

Children of God, by Corey Payette, Urban Ink Productions at the Citadel. Photo by David Cooper

And, as Payette points out, it’s not as if residential schools can be shelved as a historical relic. “We’re only one circle out from that; the last one was closed in 1996! In my generation there were kids growing up who’d been to schools in the Northwest Territories!”

“If people knew that, they would have a different understanding,” Payette argues energetically. And he explains that Children of God happens in two time periods, 1950 and 1970, in order to convey something of the lasting trauma of a blistering system. We catch up with Tom, the little dreamer, 20 years later back on the reserve when he’s living on a couch at his mom’s house.

“He’s lost his job; he’s given up drinking finally. And at a job interview he meets a classmate of his from the residential school and starts to have flashbacks of a part of his life he’s pushed down….”

Children of God was always going to be a musical, says Payette — not least because of his own pedigree. “I’ve always been a musician; that’s how I started out, with a record deal when I was really young.” At York University, studying musical composition, he got theatre gigs to make money, starting with his debut in Grease at CanStage, at 19. In Toronto he wrote music for Shakespeare adaptations; he got musical director gigs on new musicals.

When he started working on Children of God, Payette still would have identified as a composer, not a playwright, he says. “But I just felt I couldn’t not write the story.” Four years into its development he studied musical theatre writing with guru Sybil Pearson at NYU. And she even accompanied Payette and his cast to Kamloops to try the piece out with audiences.

Children of God, by Corey Payette, Urban Ink Productions at the Citadel. Photo by David Cooper

In a profound way, he says, Children of God had to be a musical; the musical theatre form suits the storytelling perfectly. In Indigenous culture, as he explains, “you cannot tell a story without having a song. And you cannot have that song without a dance…. It’s built into the heart of the culture, that multi-disciplinary performance storytelling.”

“It felt very natural,” Payette says of the natural escalation of big deep feeling into music. “For me, musicals work best when the songs are used to express emotions that are beyond words.” And since the narrative of residential schools is all about silencing people, separating them forcibly from  their language, the traditional musical theatre form is, however unexpectedly, an eloquent fit.

The 19 songs are mostly in English, sometimes in Ojibwe. And just hearing Indigenous language onstage is a dramatic and moving experience for many survivors.

Payette, who’s currently working on another musical Les Filles du Roi, premiering this spring at the Cultch in Vancouver, has found it momentous to tour Children of God to Canada’s big theatres, with mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences.

Four years ago, when he pitched his residential school musical to artistic directors across the country, he heard No again and again. Honourable exception to Jillian Keiley at the National Arts Centre and the Citadel’s Daryl Cloran who supported its development in his time at Western Canada Theatre in Kamloops, (he programmed Children of God into his first season here even before it had  premiered in Vancouver). “What a fantastic gesture of confidence!” Payette exclaims.

The No’s have turned to Yes’s, with further national and international tours in the works. “It’s an exciting time! Artistic directors get it! It’s a different conversation now!.”

Children of God, by Corey Payette, Urban Ink Productions at the Citadel. Photo by Emily Cooper.

PREVIEW

Children of God

Theatre: Urban Ink Productions at the Citadel

Created and directed by: Corey Payette

Starring: Cheyenne Scott, Sandy Scofield, Michelle Bardach, Raes Calver, Sarah Carle, Dillan Chiblow, David Keeley, Aaron M. Wells, Kaitlyn Yott

Running: through March 24

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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Romantic comedy turns spy thriller: The Romeo Initiative at SkirtsAfire

Posted on February 28, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Heather Cant, Aaron Hursh, Sarah Feutl in The Romeo Initiative, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by BB Collective.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Against the odds, it’s happening. He’s been a little late in his entrance but your leading man has appeared, finally. Yes, you’ll star in your own romance, finally. Your footing on the terra firma of being single, long maintained, is shaky. You’re ignoring the signs and you’re falling, falling, falling … in love.

What could go wrong, right? A girl’s gotta have her dreams, right? 

The mainstage play that gets a 10-day run under the flag of SkirtsAfire — the six-year-old  multidisciplinary festival that showcases, celebrates, supports, promotes women artists — goes to real-life Cold War history for its setting, and its stinger. Trina Davies’ The Romeo Initiative is set in the dreary government town of Bonn in the 1970s.

A lonely West German secretary with a drab life has unexpectedly met her perfect man — a handsome, busy aid worker — on a Black Sea beach. Amazingly, he’s single. Amazingly, she runs into him again, by chance, at a Bonn bookstore. She can hardly believe her good luck when he’s interested.      

The 2011 play, the 100th new Canadian play to premiere at the late lamented PlayRites Festival at Calgary’s Alberta Theatre Projects and a Governor General’s Award nominee, is the third by Vancouver-based Davies to be produced this season in Edmonton. Her “theatre home town,” as Davies has put it, has already seen Waxworks at Concordia University and Shatter at Walterdale.

The Romeo Initiative is a romantic comedy — till it’s not. And it’s also a spy thriller. And a drama that probes the anxiety, tension, insecurities and and paranoia that colour relationships.

There’s a spoiler built into the SkirtsAfire show description: The Romeo Initiative is based on a real East German espionage program, administered by the Stasi, that profiled and targeted the romantic insecurities of shy, underachieving West German secretaries.

SkirtsAfire artistic director Annette Loiselle couldn’t believe her luck when she found the script while hunting down plays for her adult scene study class at the Citadel. “How come we haven’t produced it?” she says. “You think you’re in a great romantic love story. And then it goes sideways!”

As Loiselle points out, Davies has made something of a specialty of “taking great historical events and making them contemporary, relevant.” Waxworks is based on the remarkable career of Marie Grosholz, aka Mme Tussaud, on the eve of the French Revolution. Shatter is set in the fearful aftermath of the 1917 Halifax explosion.

This is the fourth year that SkirtsAfire, which has expanded in its Alberta Avenue venues every time out, has produced a MainStage play for a run that beings March 1 as an overture to the four-day festivities (March 8 to 11). The initiative, which “doubled our audience from 600 to 1200 the first year,” began with Nicole Moeller’s The Mothers. Johnna Adams’ Gidion’s Knot followed,, a confrontational mother/ teacher drama. And last year, Tracy Carroll fashioned 10 original 15-minutes from Edmonton playwrights into The Mommy Monologues, a cross-section of insights into motherhood.

“Enough about mothers!” laughs Loiselle. Very different are the two women characters of The Romeo Initiative, the one shy and the other more flamboyant, who end up in a love triangle that is “both a battleground and a betrayal,” as Loiselle puts it.

The ambiguities of the piece are meat and drink to director Nancy McAlear, who brought to the stage the most enigmatic piece of theatre seen in Edmonton last season: Bryony Lavery’s The Believers. Ambiguity, she says, “forces the audience to engage.”

“There’s an expansive romantic feel to Act I,” says McAlear of the set-up where Karin meets an alluring man on a beach vacation. “In a series of ‘coincidental’ events she gets swept away….” An eligible single man “at a time when a whole generation of men were lost to the war” is almost too good to be true. “Especially for someone quiet and introspective, resigned to a life of being single,” as Karin is.

Aaron Hursh in The Romeo Initiative, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by BB Collective.

“Then the play flips, in a very cool way, in Act II” says McAlear, who will direct next season’s Citadel mainstage production of something a lot more light-hearted: Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley. “You see the same events from the man’s point of view…. You get to see that when he was doing this, he was thinking that. At least two or three scenes are repeats — almost the same but with little deviations.

“It’s a romantic comedy, and then you see it again with new eyes…. Trina (playwright Davies) has opened the door for ambiguity in the character of the man. To what degree was he just doing his job? ” The scenes get shorter and shorter and come at you non-stop: “every character has at least one scene where they’re not telling the truth, and there’s so much that’s not said, underneath the dialogue….”  

As she points out, “this makes it very challenging for the actors,” not only forgetting which act they’re in when they say something, or saying in a way that doesn’t take into account ‘we don’t know that yet’.” McAlear sighs happily: “so much subtext! So much betrayal!”

And there’s another allure for McAlear, who’s moved back to Toronto, where she was before she arrived in Edmonton to do a master’s degree in directing (and ended up staying three years longer than she’d intended). “The ’70s! My favourite decade!”

The ’70s, really? Think of all that polyester. “I was a kid,” McAlear laughs. “I was still happy, before I realized how challenging life could be. I loved my clothes! I loved disco!”

PREVIEW

The Romeo Initiative

SkirtsAFire Festival 2018

Written by: Trina Davies

Directed by: Nancy McAlear

Starring: Sarah Feutl, Heather Cant, Aaron Hursh

Where: Cabaret Theatre, Alberta Avenue Community League, 9210 118 Ave.

Running: March 1 to 11

Tickets: From March 1 to 7, TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca); during the festival itself, all tickets by donation.

Morgan Nadeau in Silenced, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

Other theatre at SkirtsAfire:

Silenced by and starring Morgan Nadeeau (directed by Jan Henderson): a bravely personal solo show that explores that great double-taboo: depression and anxiety. Nadeau is the founder of Fool Spectrum Theatre, and runs the E-Town Clown Cabaret. SkirtsAfire’s Loiselle says it’s the show most requested by schools for their kids. March 10, Cabaret Theatre, Alberta Avenue Community League, 9210 118 Ave.

Peep Show: Curated and dramaturged by Tracy Carroll. A double-offering of new plays: 27/37 by Bevin Dooley and In The Place Of Stars by Christine Lesiak. March 10 and 11, Cabaret Theatre as above.

 

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A diary, an inheritance, and a struggle come to life in Blood of Our Soil

Posted on February 27, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Lianna Makuch, creator of Blood Of Our Soil. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“How can our land not be fertile when so much blood, both Ukrainian and foreign, has seeped into it?”

Five years ago Lianna Makuch discovered a handwritten book that would have a seismic impact on her creative life as a theatre artist. 

It was the 1944 journal in which her grandmother chronicled her emigration from Ukraine. She fled a war-ravaged homeland that was trapped between the competing brutalities of of the Soviets and the Third Reich. And her writing was breathtakingly eloquent. “It shows that our enemies must love our land more than we do, for they fight for it ceaselessly,” writes Makuch’s grandmother. “Will we live to see that moment when our people join the circle of free nations?”

“Such an intelligent, intuitive woman,” says Makuch of the Baba with whom she and her sisters spent their summers as they grew up. “And in her own way an artist, a Ukrainian folk artist.” Makuch remembers her grandmother traumatized by night terrors, screaming in her sleep. The recurring motif of those terrible nightmares was “people coming to steal us.”

The inspiration of the woman herself, both sets of her grandparents, and that powerful first-hand World War II chronicle of a flight made on foot continued to reverberate for Makuch. And she made a play, as theatre artists are wont to do.

Blood Of Our Soil, premiering Thursday on the Westbury stage in a Pyretic production directed by Patrick Lundeen, is that play, full of Ukrainian folk music and dance, two intense years in the making. It “brings her journal to life,” says Makuch of a play she describes as “semi-autobiographical.”

The discovery of the journal five years ago had a companion piece in the news of the day. In 2013 a revolution happened in Ukraine, when the Kremlin puppet government formalized closer ties to Russia, instead of to the European Union. As Makuch explains, “what began as a peaceful demonstration in Independence Square in Kiev,attracted a million people. And protests continued for three months….”

“That was the catalyst,” says Makuch of Blood of Our Soil. The eve of our Family Day holiday “was the four-year anniversary of one of the deadliest fights of the revolution…. Huge for the Ukrainian diaspora, huge for my family. And my grandmother’s words, ‘will we live to see that moment …?’ really ring true.”

The Ukraine’s struggle has continued, lo these many decades — witness political complications, and the aggression of Russian-back separatists in eastern Ukraine. To Makuch, for whom the Ukrainian culture is a defining part of her identity, it invited a double-optic.

Hania, the character through whose eyes we discover the world in Blood of Our Soil, is, like Makuch, “a Ukrainian Canadian trying to understand her cultural inheritance.” She travels to her ancestral homeland, so beautiful and so traumatized by a war that may have slid from the slippery slope of the world’s headlines, but has never ended.

Which is exactly what Makuch, Lundeen and fellow playwright/dramaturg Matthew MacKenzie (Bears, Bone Wars) did in October, 2017. More on this eye-opening trip momentarily.

Blood of Our Soil, Pyretic Productions. Photo by Mat Simpson.

A year ago, Pyretic Productions had workshopped a production that drew from the journal and personal stories and memories from  both sets of Makuch’s grandparents. It touched on the current conflict in Ukraine. And, says Makuch, it seemed to touch a shared, bruised heart. “We were really successful…. The Ukrainian community responded resoundingly. And people drove in from from Ukrainian communities outside Edmonton wanting to see the show.”

“Afterward, people pulled me aside to tell me this own stories, stories about their own grandparents.” It was, she says, an vindication of the power of theatre, and the way “the personal can become the political.”

Strathcona MP Linda Duncan, who came to see it, referenced the play in Parliament in a debate (led by Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland) about this country’s role in Operation Unifier, in eastern Ukraine. “That emboldened the project,” says Makuch.

But to continue, Makuch needed to be on location. She “gathered the troops,” she laughs. Pyretic Productions went to Ukraine. First, the trio sought out the ancestral villages of her grandparents, including the one from which her journal-writing Baba had fled. “I saw the house she grew up in,” says Makuch of a big M Moment, “a cute little pink cottage on a little plot of land. She had described the mountains, and you see the rolling hills.”

In her grandfather’s village, the graveyard was overgrown, but in the brush, the Pyretic trio managed to find the tombstones of Makuch’s great-great grandparents. In the village of her maternal grandmother, who’d been abducted by the Germans, there was no trace of house or document. In a film-worthy encounter, they ran into “two old babas on a park bench, and they remembered her.” And in the ensuing conversational complications, “my great grandmother’s brother’s grandchild” came bounding out of a house. “She greeted me as if I were her own daughter! She showed me pictures and scarves, and letters from my grandmother in the ‘70s.”

Lianna Makuch, Blood of Our Soil. Photo by Mat Simpson.

The experience was emotional and dramatic, and had its funny moments too. Lundeen and MacKenzie speak zero Ukrainian; in the countryside where English was non-existent they relied entirely on Makuch’s language skills. “They were hopeless!” she laughs. “I left them alone for one day. They got lost. They somehow ended up spending 80 Canadian dollars for lunch — in a country where the average dinner might be 10 bucks.”

The first part of the trip was a family pilgrimmage. The second took them near the front lines of the conflict. “I’m taken aback by how little Canadians know about it. “During the revolution, it was a hot topic. But it feels like, four years later, it’s kind of faded into the background….”

In Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, Makuch and her Pyretic compatriots hired a “fixer”/translator  to help set up interviews. They met war veterans and displaced people (there are three million in Ukraine). They approached the front lines, and saw signs where the people had painted poppies around the bullet holes. 

In the Russia-supported rebel strongholds near Donetsk, people are living in their cellars. Eight kilometres from the danger zone, they’ve become acclimatized to the nightly boom of mortar attacks and shelling. “I’ve never heard anything like what I heard, and people didn’t even flinch,” Makuch says.

The three were apprehensive about being thought “disaster tourists,” Makuch says. “Would people resent us? As soon as they discovered we weren’t journalists they reacted positively, and opened up to us…. A lot didn’t want to be filmed and we were OK with that.” One veteran said he thought that artists, in their own way, were like soldiers. “It was very inspiring; people thanked us for coming, and for telling their stories…. Blood of Our Soil is a play, yes, but it feels like more than that.”

In true multi-disciplinary Pyretic style — which Edmonton audiences have seen in such productions as Bears and The Other — there’s a chorus of dancers (choreographer: Alida Kendell) who become the landscape, the people, the places. There’s music (assembled and arranged by Larissa Pohoreski). And there’s an immersive projection design, which Nicholas Mayne (“a genius with technology,” says Makuch) has fashioned from photos the trio shot in Ukraine.

“Act I is more historical. In Act II, the chorus becomes the people we met, with first-hand accounts.” There’s a lobby installation that chronicles 100 years of Ukrainian history. And on March 2, there’s a panel discussion with MP Duncan and war veteran Dmytro Lavrenchuk. 

“It’s a blend of personal heritage and artistry,” says Makuch of her labour of love. “And it’s been an honour to bring it to life.”

PREVIEW

Blood Of Our Soil

Theatre: Pyretic Productions in association with Punctuate! Theatre and Theatre of the New Heart

Written by: Lianna Makuch

Directed by: Patrick Lundeen

Starring: Lianna Makuch, Oscar Derkx, Julia Guy, Maxwell Lebeuf, Tanya Pacholok, Larissa Pohoreski

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

Running: March 1 to 9

Tickets: 780-409-1910, tickets.fringetheatre.ca

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Gimme gimme gimme … the past! How can I resist you? Mamma Mia! at the Citadel, a review

Posted on February 23, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

John Ullyatt, Patricia Zentilli in Mamma Mia!, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“We’ve done it all before, now we’re back to get some more….”

Mamma Mia! There: you’re looking at two words that, just on sight, will weasel their way into your brain, and unlock an entire archive of blissful ABBA hits — not to mention the memory album in which your younger, trimmer, more glad-hearted self is dancing fab platform boots and conjuring fun gone by. 

Which is, after all, the main point of a canny 20-year-old world traveller of a jukebox musical that’s a virtual guarantee of money money money at the box office (oops, that’s the other point, directly related to fun).

Never underestimate the power of nostalgia. Especially in an pleasant setting, with pleasant costume choices that include, as a bonus, buff guys dancing in their bathing suits. No matter what your rational views of the ABBA canon — a manufactured Swedish confection from the 70s that’s lighter (and sweeter) than the national meatballs — it’s the guilty-pleasure soundtrack to something you secretly think you might have lost. 

And I was reminded of that at the Citadel this week, at the enthusiastic full-house preview I was kindly allowed to attend. Twice, as an intermission passerby, I got asked to take a cellphone photo of clusters of women looking happy and hoisting glasses of wine in classic Dancing Queen posture.

I’m here to report that Mamma Mia! earns its exclamation mark in the Ashlie Corcoran production that’s singing and dancing and wearing Cory Sincennes’ amusingly flashy costumes on the alluringly turquoise Greek island the designer (with Kimberly Purtell’s golden lighting) provides for the Citadel’s Maclab stage.

Mamma Mia! doesn’t shirk its god-given duty as a jukebox musical to spin a storyline thin and bendable, OK generic, enough to string 22 slick, ridiculously catchy ABBA hits together — without even changing the lyrics. And Corcoran’s joyful production, with its cast of theatrical super troupers and a first-rate band led by Don Horsburgh, doesn’t shirk its own duty: to deliver the hits in a fulsome way while trying to conceal the dramatic flimsiness of it all — except, that is, when it actively embraces that thinness and has spoofy sport with it.   

In 1999 Brit playwright Catherine Johnson hit gold with this serviceable and non-taxing premise: a wedding on a Greek island. Donna (Patricia Zentilli), a spirited single mother who used to sing in a girl group, runs a taverna. Her 20-year-old daughter Sophie (Tess Benger), who has for some reason a compelling need to know her dad’s identity (“my whole life has been one unanswered question!”) has nicked her mom’s diary and secretly invites three possible fathers to the wedding. She gets to sing I Have A Dream as she mails the invitations.

And there you have it: the plot that the songs have to attach themselves to. 

For once, Sophie and her beau Sky don’t look like they’re 30-something survivors of gruelling one-night tour stops in Wichita and Winnipeg. Berger is a wide-eyed charmer with a genuine sort of innocence, and the performance by Michael Cox gives off the guileless air of the sweet, nerdy  guy in your Grade 10 math class.

As of the preview, the breathless high spirits and hyperactivity of the opening scenes, which involve a lot of arrivals of friends and dads and shrieking and ricocheting through the taverna, seemed a little forced, even by the heightened standards of jukebox artifice. Who, you wonder, put the Red Bull in the blue waters of the Aegean? I’m imagining that the performances will acclimatize. 

But then there’s Donna. Zentilli, who’ terrific in every way, negotiates an impressive combination of starchy self-determination and vulnerability as the ex-boho mother with a double trauma. She’s about to lose her daughter not only to marriage but to the conventional white wedding scenario. And she’s suddenly confronted after two decades with three men she thought confined to the past.

The three dads, as written, are a quirky high-contrast trio; Donna’s taste was evidently eclectic . And there’s unusual acting heft in all three performances: John Ullyatt as Sam the architect; Ashley Wright as Bill, a self-regarding travel writer; Leon Willey as Harry, whose main — well, only — feature is being English.

Mamma Mia!, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Epic Photography.
Photo by Meryl Smith Lawton/Epic Photography

Great cabaret singer as she is, Zentilli applies herself to the songs with dramatic skill and attention they don’t invariably deserve — without squashing them.

But I still find that what’s fun about Mamma Mia! are the playful scenes that don’t take themselves (or the premise to which they’re attached) very seriously. Ah, or even grin at their own preposterous brio, a quality reflected in both Laura Krewski’s witty and contagious choreography and Sincennes’ flamboyant resort costumes.

Corcoran’s ingenious stagecraft on the thrust stage that we surround — it is, after all, an island — includes consistently amusing use of a bed that rolls into the scene like the prop, metaphor, and bandstand it is. You’ll be captivated by the scene in which Donna’s erstwhile band-mates reach into the tickle trunk of their old costumes, which they use as a shameless excuse for an impromptu version of Dancing Queen. They deliver and they have larky fun with memories of their former selves.  

There’s a funny pageant of guys in flippers, slapping their feet across the stage, as an excuse for Lay All Your Love On Me. And as for Under Attack, well, I won’t spoil the fun of the sight gag, as Sophie’s nightmare comes to life around her spinning bed.

If you’re a multi-time Mamma Mia! fan you’ll be saying ‘tell someone who cares,” but to me the self-dramatizing, tortured numbers where the show takes itself seriously and gazes tragically off into the mid-distance are hard work. Chiquitita, smartly staged, is one; despite the charismatic talents of Zentilli both as a singer and an actor, The Winner Takes It All, is another.

Kudos to Ullyatt, whose dramatic and musical chops are second to none. He actually manages to make the Knowing Me, Knowing You number make some sense, in a context that’s usually faintly embarrassing. As ABBA wisely tells us elsewhere, “don’t go wasting your emotion.”

Anyhow, what you’ll find at the Citadel is a production that looks and sounds dreamy, has a veritable barrage of sequins at the end, and tickles you to remember yourself. Indelible tunes, performed by the best musical forces around: “how can I resist you?”

REVIEW

Mamma Mia! 

Theatre: Citadel

Directed by: Ashlie Corcoran

Starring: Tess Benger, Patricia Zentilli, John Ullyatt, Christy Adamson, Jenni Burke, Ashley Wright, Leon Willey, Michael Cox, Robbie Towns, Tara Jackson

Running: through March 18

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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Mamma Mia, here we go again! Meet director Ashlie Corcoran

Posted on February 21, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Tess Benger and Patricia Zentilli in Mamma Mia!, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life…

It is no surprise to find that the director of a certain big full-bodied jukebox musical — you may have heard of it — opening Thursday on the Citadel’s Maclab stage, loves the score.

After all, Mamma Mia! didn’t get to be a global phenom — a contagion in the world’s bloodstream that has never gone into remission — with songs that are in any way humanly resistible. The 1999 musical, which has grossed billions worldwide in a staggering array of currencies, gathered 22 ABBA hits and brought them to the stage. And it’s watched people dance in the aisles on six continents ever since.

There are those who consider ABBA a kind of airy pop confection. Not Ashlie Corcoran, the exuberant new artistic director of Vancouver’s multi-stage Arts Club Theatre. “The music is so powerful! And it’s not trivial music! ABBA’s music is actually quite complicated,” she exclaims. One of the country’s brightest new directing stars in both theatre  and opera, on stages of every size, Corcoran talks at a rate that suggests a secret hunch that the world will be ending soon. She made time in a crazily hectic bi- and tri-city schedule last week to (a) eat and (b) explain her enthusiasm for Mamma Mia!.

As Corcoran points out, “having a cast of 20, 20 voices!, means that the layering of harmonies is really sophisticated…. When people come to the show, they’ll realize there’s so much more singing than what’s happening onstage. As soon as they go offstage, everyone in the ensemble, principals too, finds a monitor and sings tracks.”

But Mamma Mia! isn’t just a concert, though it ends with one. As you might know by now, there’s a narrative to which the songs are attached, the inspiration of English playwright Catherine Johnson. Single mom Donna, who used to sing in a girl group, Donna and the Dynamos, now runs a taverna on a Greek island, a location which makes lighting designers world-wide very happy. Her daughter Sophie is getting married and, unbeknownst to her mother, invites three men who might be her father to the festivities.

Mamma Mia!, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Meryl Smith Lawton/ Epic Photography.

“Dramaturgically, it’s so well structured,” argues Corcoran. There are sets of three characters (three dads, the three Dynamos, Sophie and friends, her fiancé and friends); the relationships between the sets are quite Shakespearean. And the Aristotelian unities are observed: it “all happens in 24 hours, in one place. There’s really one plot, not a whole bunch of subplots. Everything drives towards Sophia finding her dad.”

“In addition to the music, which everyone knows, it’s a story about being a child. Or being a parent. And that’s a very accessible entry point: the complications of wanting freedom and also wanting to hold on to something, wanting to hold on to your child, and also knowing they need to go off into the big world….”

“A really strong narrative, and characters to root for. And then at the end, a concert. You get the best of everything…..”

Director Ashlie Corcoran. Photo supplied

All this and nostalgia for your youth, too, a repeatable indulgence by definition. Corcoran’s Citadel production of Mamma Mia!, is the fifth to arrive onstage here since 2005 to remind Edmontonians who they were (and were with) when they first danced to Super Trouper or heard that fateful slide in Dancing Queen.

And you could even argue for a certain inevitability: In Stockholm’s ABBA Museum, which opened in 2013, Edmonton figures prominently. There’a mock-up of the change rooms at the Edmonton (then) Coliseum where ABBA launched their final world tour. As Benny and Björn, those Swedish philosophers, have said, “And here we go again, we know the start, we know the end.”

Corcoran, originally a West Coast-er from White Rock, arrives back in B.C. at the mighty Arts Club — Vancouver’s largest theatre company with a $13 to $14 million budget (a little bigger than the Citadel’s $11 to 12 million)— from five seasons as artistic director at the Thousand Islands Playhouse in Gananoque, Ontario. The regimen there of back-to-back productions April to October gave Corcoran, as she says, “the opportunity for breadth of programming.”

From Corcoran you won’t be hearing lamentations, endemic to regional theatre artistic directors, about the oppression of serving up something for everyone. You’ll hear broad-spectrum enthusiasm. “I love all kinds of theatre. I’m so thrilled to be directing Mamma Mia! right now! One of the projects I directed this year was about the Syrian conflict, and I loved that too. I love directing opera, one-person shows, classics, new work. And as an audience member I love going to all these kinds of shows too.”

Corcoran’s choices in Gananoque reflect that perspective. Ron Pederson directed Stewart Lemoine’s farce A Grand Time In The Rapids there in 2016. Two seasons ago, a lineup that had begun with A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline, ended with a contemporary  German play, The Thing (Das Ding). “They couldn’t have been further away from each other!” says Corcoran happily.

Which brings us to Corcoran’s other company, Theatre Smash (“my baby theatre), which she started in order to “do contemporary plays from around the world that haven’t happened in Canada before.” Like Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran, a close friend from college days, Corcoran is drawn to make international connections.

Das Ding, for example, which introduced Toronto audiences to the work of innovative young German playwright Phillipp Löhle, was the show Theatre Smash brought to its two-year residency at Canadian Stage.

Mamma Mia! is her fourth production since Corcoran left Gananaque in October: The Canadian Opera Company’s family friendly The Magic Victrola, The Electric Messiah (“Handel’s Messiah but in a bar”) at the Drake in Toronto, a Tarragon remount of Mustard by Kat Sandler, the playwright also favoured by Cloran, who will premiere not one but two new Sandlers next season.

Last Monday, the traditional day-off in theatre world, was the first since Mamma Mia! rehearsals started that Corcoran hasn’t flown back to Vancouver for the day to make plans at the Arts Club. Instead she went to the wave pool at WEM to re-read Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker.

It’s one of three shows the indefatigable Corcoran will direct in her first season at the head of the Arts Club. She’s programmed 18 productions for that 12-month-a-year operation, divided amongst three resident stages and a tour (this year, Onegin), and starting with her own production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

And it includes a striking number of co-ventures with the Citadel, including Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and Matilda the musical, as well as Hardline Theatre’s Redpatch. In fact, Hardline will be the resident company at the Arts Club for the season — a way, says Corcoran, of paying forward Theatre Smash residencies with larger companies.

Mamma Mia!, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Meryl Smith Lawton/ Epic Photography.

Meanwhile Corcoran is in Edmonton, where the only production of hers to play before now has been The Gay Heritage Project, at the Citadel Club in 2016. The last time she directed a big musical was at the Shaw Festival in 2017: the 30s charmer Me And My Girl. And she wrapped her considerable wits around The Lambeth Walk, the jaunty Act I closer number that started a multi-continent dance craze in 1937. In that contagious dance-y-ness at least, it has a link across the decades to Mamma Mia!.

“The Maclab is a big theatre but feels so intimate,” says Corcoran. “You can feel the heat off the actors and see them breathing. No chance to stop and re-set, so there’s a virtuosity about it.”

“With Mamma Mia! people are coming to see a show they know and love. But we want to surprise them, too.… I’m having so much fun that I’m using my air miles to fly my parents up (from Arizona) for opening night!”

Corcoran’s favourite ABBA song? “In the evening I’ll put on some ABBA Gold, and I like some of our fuller arrangements better! I really love our version of Name of the Game. Under Attack was my least favourite when we started. Now it’s definitely one of my favourites….”

PREVIEW

Mamma Mia!

Theatre: Citadel

Directed by: Ashlie Corcoran

Starring: Patricia Zentilli, Tess Benger, Christy Adamson,  Michael Cox, Ashley Wright, Tara Jackson, John Ullyatt, Jenni Burke, Leon Willey, Robbie Towns

Running: through March 18

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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A coming-of-age play called Métis Mutt comes of age: a review

Posted on February 17, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Sheldon Elter in Métis Mutt, at Theatre Network. Photo by Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s always started with jokes. A lot of jokes. “What do you call an Indian on a bike?”

And since the man onstage is remembering his time as a teenage stand-up comic, empowered by audience laughter, the old advice ‘write what you know’ takes on a queasier, more accusatory hue: ‘write what everybody knows’. After all, that’s what stereotypes are, the Coles Notes of cultural perception.

Sheldon Elter’s Métis Mutt, which started small in 2001 as a theatre school experiment, has always put the punch back in punch line. In every incarnation since, on stages small and large, here and abroad, jokes and laugh tracks and their harsh implications for him, and for us his audience, have framed a harrowing true story of domestic violence, alcohol and drug abuse, bullying, racism. 

Like its formidably talented Indigenous creator and star, Métis Mutt has a history. It’s travelled far and long and wide in the last 17 years, playing along the complex fault lines of comedy and tragedy, the personal and the social, the past and the present. And now, in this stunning new production directed by Ron Jenkins, even the punch lines have punch lines.

What was an artful one-man show with a startling — no, horrifying — story to tell, in a furious weave of song and memory and dramatic scene, has become a high-impact coming-of-age play that’s really come of age.

How many anecdotes does it take to make a play? Hard to tell when they become a multi-layered story. What you’ll see onstage at Theatre Network, one of the first homes of Métis Mutt from the start, is a bona fide play, a fully realized theatrical world full of vivid characters — aunties and uncles, step-dads and cousins, schoolyard bullies, a dad who’s a terrifying drunk on a short fuse, a much-abused mom who steps bravely up to a realization. And a little Métis kid named Sheldon who thinks he’s failed, slides into booze and drugs, and becomes, in a variety of incarnations, the artist who’s populating the Roxy stage — with his story, and with himself at seven or 14 or 20. Or 39.

Métis Mutt has always been a love story — last-minute rescues from near-disasters by loving mentors, theatre, powerful Native spirituality,  and a wife named Kristi (the theatre world knows her as actor/ Azimuth and Maggie Tree co-artistic director Kristi Hansen). And, in its variously fragmented way, it’s always been a show about perception, its ripple effects, the ways it can change. The laugh track has always been its chief satirical weapon. There’s a new punch line now. What do you call an Indian on a bike? A cyclist. But it’s not just that.

In sight and sound Jenkins’ production conjures a world that is both infinite and  claustrophobic: northern Alberta with its small town pool halls, its living rooms, its wilderness, its back yards through which a grizzly might wander.

Ahah! And its theatre school, where 19-year-old Elter is more of an anomaly than the bear in his uncle’s yard.  There are hilarious moments where Elter, in reality a dexterous physical performer, attempts the moves in a Grant MacEwan dance class. And there’s a charming little moment when the theatre school grad sings a bit from Sondheim’s Marry Me A Little in reference to Kristi. “I was starting to like this shit,” he grins, amused at the thought of his reinvented self as a theatre guy. And that, after all, is why we’re experiencing this story on this stage in this season. 

Tessa Stamp’s design is beautiful, dominated by a sort of stretched skin semi-circular screen (with inverted teepee buttresses) that lights like a window into a life. And it feels alive, as animated by the virtuoso projections of T. Erin Gruber. Aaron Macri’s soundscape, with its Indigenous rhythms, is a dramatic participant, too.     

Elter is a charismatic performer onstage, with a smile like a lighthouse beacon. The multiple characters he conjures for us, in judiciously edited voice and gesture, are filtered and propelled, in a more clearly narrative way, through the memory of the grown-up artist before us.

What feels different now is the way comedy and tragedy live together in Métis Mutt, less confrontationally perhaps but more fruitfully. There’s a universal human reverb to its sense of self-reinvention, day by day. And we get to discover it along with the artist onstage. It’s a smart, brave, and beautiful piece of work. You shouldn’t miss the chance to see it.

REVIEW

Métis Mutt

Theatre: One Little Indian, at Theatre Network

Created and starring: Sheldon Elter

Directed by: Ron Jenkins

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

Running: through March 4

Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca

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The Plain Janes get dizzy in Madrid: Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown. A review

Posted on February 16, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Michelle Diaz and Jocelyn Ahlf in Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Welcome to the edge, the verge, the ledge….” sing five agitated women who find themselves thrown together, teetering crazily, in the Act I finale of the riotous musical screwball that the Plain Janes have brought to the Varscona. 

“You’ve lost your voice, you’ve lost your will, you lose your mind. And yet it’s kind of thrilling when you step up to the line….”

Men — the pursuit of, the treachery of, the disconnect with, the abandonment by — may be the undertow of Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, the David Yazbek/ Jeffrey Lane musical inspired by Pedro Almodóvar’s indelible 1988 film comedy. But women — and their improbable resilience, kooky emotional energy, and powers of survival — are the heart of it.

And that heart is what holds Kate Ryan’s production to the ground and keeps it from levitating altogether into the ether where farces get adrenalized. The characters are big. The performances are big. The crazy plot — which sends everyone and everything careening and colliding madly through post-Franco 80s Madrid, on foot, on motorcycle, by taxi — is big. The accents are big. The colours, heck, they’re big too, in Matt Alan Currie’s hot colour-drenched cityscape backdrop and Leona Brausen’s fab ‘80s costumes.

There’s nothing pastel going on here. Desperation isn’t quiet and introverted; it spikes the gazpacho with Valium, drives like a bat out of hell, and carries a gun.

At the centre is a performance that has something focussed and intense about it, a performance that, despite the precarious footing, plants its (red) high heels on an irreducible sense of absurdity and self. 

Jocelyn Ahlf is Pepa, an actress who’s just been dumped by her lover — by voicemail. Spinning her wheels, she sets about finding the vanished Ivan to make him explain. Ahlf, lustrous-voiced in a wider variety of styles than any performer in town, memorably creates a a character who might be losing her equilibrium and possibly her mind but never her wry and rueful intelligence.

Characters accumulate. Lucia, played by Andrea House, another first-rate singer, is Ivan’s abandoned, nutso ex-wife, just out of the asylum where she’s spent the last 20 years and hot for vengeance — and for attention. Her knock-out song Invisible starts as a description of Ivan’s vanishing act and ends up a description of what happens to middle-aged women.

The other show-stopper of the evening, Model Behaviour (delivered entirely on the phone), belongs to Michelle Diaz, who delivers a hilarious comic performance as a jittery fashion model with a specialty in panic, a short attention span, and a lover who has turned out to be a terrorist. “The minute I saw the grenade belt I knew something was wrong.”

An over-produced bust on Broadway in 2010, the musical was revived in London, in a form less oppressed by big-budget set and technology. And now the Plain Janes have at it, with staging that relies on ingenuity and atmosphere: people not stuff. 

Andrea House, Madelaine Knight, Michelle Diaz, Jocelyn Ahlf, Gianna Read-Skelton in Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Every woman in Women On The Verge has, as people say of more earnest shows, a problematic relationship with men. The exasperated Marissa  (Madelaine Knight) is finding her wedding plans continually dampened by her fiancé, Ivan’s feckless son Carlos (newcomer Gabriel Gagnon). Paulina (Gianna Read-Skelton) is a feisty lawyer whose feminist manifesto principles disintegrate completely when it comes to her lover.

As the elusive serial womanizer Ivan, who seduces with his velvet voice, Vance Avery is a hoot. Ivan and son have a terrific Act II duet, The Microphone, in which the one teaches the other to make love to that indispensable objet. 

It all works like a farce, but feels like a screwball. And its particular kind of disorder just feels very different from the escalating complications of, say, an English-style farce which are all about getting found out, not finding. And there’s music: Yazbek’s sharp-eared score, from an expertly stylish onstage band led by Erik Mortimer and including a trio of seasoned Mayfield pros (Van Wilmott, Steve Hoy, Paul Lamoureux). Cindy Kerr’s choreography picks up the mambo vibe that’s in the air.

The Taxi Driver (Jason Hardwick), the show’s most consistent appreciator of chaos, sings that “it’s like living in a dream.” A dream where everything is speeded up and everything that could go haywire pretty much does. “What else could go wrong?” wonders Pepa who’s having the mother of all bad days. Except for … and then that goes wrong too.

It’s giddy, it’s fun. And it strikes a chord.

REVIEW

Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown

Varscona Theatre Ensemble

Theatre: Plain Jane

Created by: David Yazbek and Jeffrey Lane

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Jocelyn Ahlf, Andrea House, Jason Hardwick, Michelle Diaz, Vance Avery, Madelaine Knight, Gabriel Gagnon, Gianna Read-Skelton

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Feb. 24

Tickets: varsconatheatre.com/ensemble/

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The thorny issue of Consent: Concrete Theatre steps up

Posted on February 15, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Consent by Mieko Ouchi, Concrete Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Was there consent?

It’s the timeliest of questions — confusing, contentious, discussable. It’s the stuff of headlines. And it’s the raison d’être of Mieko Ouchi’s Consent, the play that Concrete Theatre has bravely been touring to teenagers this season. And the company brings it to the stage tonight and Saturday, at La Cité francophone (8627 91 St.).

Concrete Theatre has stepped up to the thorniest questions of the day before now, drug and alcohol abuse, bullying, and racism among them. This one, starring a young couple after a sexual encounter, is designed to help students 13 and up learn about their rights and responsibilities, about gender equality and respect.

Its companion piece, for younger kids (five and up), is a revival of Jared Matsunaga-Turnbull’s award-winning 2013 charmer Paper Song, which uses origami and shadow puppetry in an elegant way to combine a Japanese folktale about a crane with the story of a mouse and her grandfather struggling in an oppressive regime.

The two productions share a director (Ouchi) and a cast: Carmela Sison, Bobbi Goddard, and Richard Lee Hsi. Consent runs tonight at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m; Paper Song Friday at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 11 a.m. Tickets: at the door. 

  

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Taking a taxi through ’80s Madrid: Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, the musical

Posted on February 15, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Jocelyn Ahlf and Andrea House in Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the first song of the musical comedy cum romantic screwball that ricochets across the Varscona stage Thursday, a Madrid taxi driver apostrophizes his beloved home town in the ‘80s.  “Give me directions straight into the hurricane.…”

Tip the driver. As Kate Ryan says, that’s exactly the careening route of Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, the 2010 David Yazbek/ Jeffrey Lane musical with the blue-chip pedigree. It’s based on the celebrated 1988 film by the Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar, who based it on the 1928 play La Voix Humane (The Human Voice) by Jean Cocteau. And it took The Plain Janes, the theatre company Ryan leads, a couple of seasons, against the wind, to get it to Thursday’s opening night.

“It’s ‘80s splatter art!” grins Ryan, reflecting on the colourized look and feel of her eight-actor (five actress!) production. “Women breaking out, breaking down, breaking up — all at the same time … In colour!”

At the centre of this high-speed turmoil through ‘80s Madrid is Pepa (Jocelyn Ahlf), a TV actor who wakes up to the news, via phone message, that her lover has dumped her and vanished. A pursuit follows, in which women with connections to the missing Ivan guy accumulate farcically around Pepa: his deranged ex-wife, a woman who’s discovered that her lover is a terrorist, Ivan’s son’s frustrated fiancée — plus  assorted cops and the philosophical taxi driver. 

As you’ll know from their history — Drat! The Cat!, Little Fish, Ankles Aweigh, It’s A Bird It’s A Plane It’s Superman — the Janes shine their light on the kind of off-centre, quirky, obscure, or neglected musicals tucked into the corners of the repertoire. As Ryan explains, Women on the Verge comes from the archive of bright musicals that got over-inflated on  Broadway, and flopped — this despite the starry New York talent it attracted, including director Bartlett Sher, Patti LuPone, Sheri Rene Scott, Laura Benanti, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Danny Burstein, Salma Hayek.

“It was overdone,” thinks Ryan, who’s studied arrival footage from that Broadway premiere. “So many bells and whistles: the world was too big….” The London production of 2015 was much more successful, a smarter, scaled-down version that “focussed more on the people, less on the world.” Director Sher famously joked that the Broadway production was the most expensive out-of-town tryout in history.

Yazbek and Lane are the team behind such stellar movies-turned-musicals as The Full Monty and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and the lovely current New York hit The Band’s Visit. And Women On the Verge reveals something of that expertise with particular styles, thinks Ryan. “Yazbek’s music really invests in the style of the movie … rock, tango, bossa nova…. And with Lane’s verbal art, the combo so captures the Spanish spirit…. So smart, so naughty.” And this time, the Janes have sprung for a live band, with Erik Mortimer, Van Wilmott, Paul Lamoureux, and Steve Hoy.  

Almodóvar, says Ryan, “is not afraid of the beauty, the joy, and the ugliness….” And Yazbek/Lane are exactly the team to capture that human quality, she thinks. After all, it’s “a romance where no one falls in love. You turn a corner and you don’t know what’s coming.”

Michelle Diaz and Jocelyn Ahlf in Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

The filmmaker’s career took off in the late ‘70s, in the cultural/ sexual renaissance of post-Franco Spain. It was a veritable revolution. Says Ryan, “Almodóvar is in love with women, every single colour a woman has: rage, jealousy, the joy, the passion…. These women are fighters! They have resilience!” They scream, they cry, they hit walls, they spike the gazpacho (really, the only scene in a modern musical with blender accompaniment). 

Ah, and they sing. It’s a musical, thinks Ryan, that “doesn’t have to justify what happens. People appear. Anything is possible…. The world from the beginning is in a state of madness. And that suits theatre musicals quite well. A song is the perfect place for that kind of heightened emotion.”

PREVIEW

Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown

Varscona Theatre Ensemble

Written by: David Yazbek and Jeffrey Lane, based on the Pedro Almodóvar movie

Theatre: Plain Jane Theatre

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Jocelyn Ahlf, Vance Avery, Michelle Diaz, Andrea House, Gabriel Gagnon, Jason Hardwick, Madelaine Knight, Gianna Read-Skelton

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Feb. 24

Tickets: varsconatheatre.com

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Métis Mutt: Sheldon Elter’s journey beyond the punch lines

Posted on February 14, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Sheldon Elter in Métis Mutt, at Theatre Network. Photo by Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Hello. My name is Sheldon Elter. And I’ll be your Native comedian for this evening.”

Sheldon Elter, the startlingly multi-talented Métis actor/ playwright/ screenwriter/ musician/ director, shudders when he thinks of the jokes he told as a teenage stand-up comic. There’s a blistering barrage of them, escalating in awfulness, volleyed humourlessly from the stage in Métis Mutt.

The younger self he conjures is, he tells us from the comedian’s mike, half Indian half white. “Half of me wants to assimilate you into my culture. And the other half is just too lazy to do it.” It gets worse. And worse. 

After 15 years, the solo show Elter built from the raw material of own tumultuous life, is back at Theatre Network, one of its original homes. And it’s newly rethought and rewritten for this One Little Indian production directed by Ron Jenkins — and for the thoughtful and accomplished 39-year-old that Elter is now. 

It’s a story of horrifying domestic violence, turmoil and guilt, racism, constant relocations, booze and drugs and craziness and showbiz in all their bizarre reaches. And it’s told in songs, fragments of comedy routines, a succession of younger Elters in dramatic scenes.

They immerse us in the life of the boyhood Sheldon, his mom, and his little brother constantly on the lam from a dad with a predilection for violent abuse. And its story gathers looped memories and for this new version refracts them, says Elter, he says, for the vision of the “the man I am today…. I’m just not the same person.”

“I’m a better artist this time around,” Elter muses over lunch last week, “more familiar with the techniques of theatre….” The queasy stereotype jokes, eliciting nervous laughter as an indictment of systemic racism, “feel less like audience entrapment and more like a clear device. It’s showing you that Sheldon the actor doesn’t find those jokes funny any more. Now in the play you get to find out why I was telling those jokes. What I was doing wasn’t quite right, and I was worried about it.…”

Edmonton audiences know something of the startling breadth of the creative talent that was hatched up north in a string of communities (and women’s shelters) starting in Peace River. We’ve seen him in Shakespeare: as the star-cross’d Romeo and the racial outsider Othello (with an eagle and medicine wheel tatted to his chest). His musical theatre chops are expandable — from classic Broadway, like Crazy For You at the Citadel, to the daffier repertoire  favoured by The Plain Janes (It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! It’s Superman! (he was a funny, earnest Superman) to innovative musical experiments like Catalyst’s Nevermore.

He’s at home in comedy (Teatro La Quindicina’s Marvellous Pilgrims), in farce (One Man Two Guvnors), in avant-gardiste dance/theatre (Hroses: An Affront To Reason) or Canadian grit (Kill Your Television’s The Crackwalker). He plays in the ukelele cover band The Be Arthurs

Now, fresh from a starring role in Matthew MacKenzie’s Bears that played to packed houses in Toronto and last week here, Elter is revisiting the traumatic, and traumatizing, events of his own life, in rehearsal for Métis Mutt.

Elter says, “I’m just not the same person” who created a seven-minute comedy sketch in 2001 or the Nextfest play or the Theatre Network revival of 2003 — much less the teen stand-up who “might have been perpetuating negative stereotypes and not understanding why I was saying those things. And who was rewarded with laughter, which was a bit confusing….”

As Elter describes, that teenage Elter of yore was at Grand Prairie College, with a goal: “teaching Grade 1.” And when the teacher’s friend who ran a bar/pool hall called Breakers needed a host, Elter found himself onstage, “an amateur hosting an amateur night,” he rolls his eyes. “It usually ended up with one of my friends winning, which was a bar tab.” An actual weekend job at an actual Grand Prairie comedy club, Dave’s Comedy Saloon, ensued. A stand-up was born, one who knew the world of hard-ass venues and unforgiving crowds who’d rather be watching football on TV.

By the time Elter got disenchanted with teaching (student teaching can do that to a person), theatre was invading his dreams. In the summer of 1998, Elter was down in Edmonton, doing a Fringe show with Aaron Talbot. Elter remembers it as “a Romeo and Juliet-type story about an anglophone and a francophone, and then Quebec separates…. A terrible tragedy. And the reviews (it was awarded a “bomb scare”) were fairly tragic, too.“I worked all summer and got $34.67.”  He smiles genially. 

It was Talbot who gave him the idea of Grant MacEwan College’s musical theatre program as a good fit. Elter sighs. “I was such a lazy young man. I did no research whatsoever….” And post-audition, he and his pals had “a debauched drug-filled experience at Woodstock ’99…. On our way back, across the States in a van, we had to get rid of the drugs we had before the border. It was, I think, North Dakota. We took them all….”

He toured with hypnotist Marc Savard, who recruited him after seeing a stand-up set at the WEM Yuk Yuks. It was on the day off after a New Year’s Eve gig in Manning, Alberta, that Elter expected a visit from his unpredictable father, a member of the Michel First Nation. “We’d tracked him down and I was going to introduce him to this girl I was thinking of marrying. And he didn’t show. I was furious!”

When they arrived at his girfriend’s parents’ house, the news came: Elter’s dad had died in a car accident. “I had cursed him and his name, and I didn’t comprehend the guilt I was feeling. A week later I was back on the road….” 

When Elter arrived at Grant MacEwan for what he now calls his “first first year,” it was a foreign world, full of kids who knew all the lyrics to Sweeney Todd since infancy. And he was falling apart.“I didn’t even know what I was going to till I got there. What? Am I on the set of Fame or something? I didn’t know what I thought musical theatre was…. ” He’s said wryly that he was the only one in his class who knew more about Chet Atkins and Hank Williams than either Rodgers or Hammerstein.”

“In the first four months I dropped 50 pounds. My teachers and fellow students were concerned: ‘do you have food?’ ‘Yeah, I do; I just don’t have an appetite’…. To save face, because I was probably going to fail and get kicked out, I asked (program head) Tim Ryan if I could leave, get myself together, and come back….” Ryan agreed.

It was a rough time, Elter says. He took “crazy amounts” of ecstacy, “seven times a night, three or four time a week, and get depressed from it… I thought about suicide, “and made an attempt.” He was rescued from this race with destruction by by Savard. “All he said was ‘go get something to eat, drink water…. I’m not saying don’t kill yourself, I’m just asking this: I’m coming into town in three days. Can you wait till I get there?’”

Savard’s simple wisdom proved profound for Elter. “See, all you have have to do is make a choice. And you’ll be doing that every day for the rest of your life.” And this, from Savard’s hypnotism technique: “What’s expected tends to be realized.” Says Elter, “that statement changed me.” 

Savard took Elter out on tour, with the proviso that “I had to quit everything clean: no coffee, no cigarettes, no anti-depressants….” It saved his life.

“I was such a wreck. Trying to figure out who I was, spiritually. I didn’t know. And I was scared to say I didn’t know,” says Elter. “I knew I had to change up my material…. I think I knew darn well that what I was doing wasn’t quite right, a lot of it felt inappropriate and racist. But I was too young and cocky to admit it.”

And suddenly he knew he had to go back to theatre school “and finish what I’d started.” That was when he found himself, at 20, in Kenneth Brown’s vocal masque class, scrambling to come up with “some kind of theme that defines us as a person, broad strokes…. I’d procrastinated and I had nothing. So when it came to my turn I blurted the first thing that came into my head, which was Métis Mutt. Everyone laughed.”

“Then I had to figure out what the heck that meant. So I figured maybe I’d just start with the some of the jokes I used to do stand-up. That’s how it all started….”

It was Brown who offered to help him turn that sketch into a one-man play. “Largely the actor I am today is because of Ken Brown,” Elter declares.

Sheldon Elter in Métis Mutt, Nextfest 2002. Photo supplied.

As a full-fledged solo show, Métis Mutt and its creator/star  startled audiences at Nextfest in 2002, and then in a remount at Theatre Network the following year. The history of the show is a veritable microcosm for the way theatre happens in this theatre town, with its make-your-own spirit and  artists. 

Since then Elter has found himself doing Métis Mutt in community halls on reserves (“like a motivational speaker,” he grins), hip urban studio theatres, mainstages, major national festivals like Magnetic North. He remembers playing one Alberta reserve, and hearing that “the entire community is going to come! Great! But the only problem is that there’s no babysitters. So there’ll be a lot of little kids.”

Elter remembers tentatively objecting that the content was awfully, er, adult, for that kind of mixed crowd, and hearing “we think our kids can handle it! There’ll be an activity for the little kids, and the bigger kids can sit and watch.”

“We get to the hall, and the lights are pot lamps on faders, a lot of them burned out. So, OK. And I brought my own sound gear. So, OK. And there’s gonna be a big fest after, and would you and your stage manager like to stay? Sure!”

In the event, “they cooked the meal at the back of the hall the entire time, banging pots and pans, with the smell of deer stew and fry bread. And the activity for the little kids at the back of the gym? Floor hockey. And in the in the middle of show, the kids in the front row, Grade 6 or so, get up, very politely, sorry sorry, and leave holding cigarettes, opening the door so more light is pouring in. And then they come back, very polite again, and the same thing happens….”

“A cellphone? A crinkly candy wrapper? NOTHING!” grins Elter, nothing if not a seasoned trooper. “It reminded me, if I just stuck to the story, just told it, did my job, they were with me!”

Last year Ryan Cunningham (a co-founder of Alberta Aboriginal Arts) called Elter with a proposal to do Métis Mutt in Toronto for the first time, at Native Earth Theatre. “If I’m going to do it, it has to change,” Elter thought. “I wanted it to be a more theatrical piece. I want to embrace design, lights….” And he wanted it to be more of a story and less a kind of life collage. 

“I have to be careful that I’m not re-traumatizing myself,” Elter says. “It’s hard. I spend a lot of the day on the edge of tears, or actually crying…. My team is very good at recognizing that and telling me to take a break.”

“Sheldon the man has to work through, in order to tell the story properly. When they come away, people will understand that through my own unique Indigenous experience, despite all the things in my life, the history and oppression, the family violence, at some point I have to take responsibility for myself…. I’m going to have to dig deep. And do it myself. Hopefully, by doing that I can create positive change for myself, one day at a time.”

And he’s “constantly reminded,” he says, that “though the story is mainly about my relationship with my father, without my mother I wouldn’t be the man I am today…. When I feel the pressure of trying to inspire my Indigenous community — look at you, breaking a cycle of family violence! — it wasn’t me it was her! So brave!”

In the joke department it’d take a lot to surprise Elter. “Even as a young man I knew when I got up onstage, people felt like they had permission to tell me racist jokes, all of them terrible…. I coulda written a book. I’ve heard them ALL. ‘Hey, maybe you could use this in your act….’”

Elter sighs. “In what other jobs does this happen? Can you imagine going up to a doctor and saying I gave my sister a cup of soup and it worked. So maybe you could use this in your practice.”

“I’m proud of where I’ve come to,” says Elter of a career that’s included award-winning writing for the TV series Caution: May Contain Nuts. “I have to remind myself that in 1998 I walked out onstage with a lopsided braided wig, playing a garbage pail.” He winces at the memory. 

“People would ask me questions and expect that I’d be speaking for all Indigenous people. As a young man, I’d take on that stress and let it overwhelm me…. I thought I had to have all the answers.” Now he has questions. And a show.

PREVIEW

Métis Mutt

Theatre: One Little Indian, at Theatre Network

Written by and starring: Sheldon Elter

Running: Feb. 15 to March 4

Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca

 

 

   

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