In love with Shakespeare: the Citadel’s season-opener is a sumptuous love letter to theatre

Posted on September 22, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the entertainment world there’s no shortage of movies transformed into stage extravaganzas (thank Disney for a slew of them). It happens all the time, with motives no one would call pure. So it’s a special occasion, a homecoming, when a story born onscreen seems to find its true and natural footing in the theatre.   

That’s exactly what happens in Shakespeare in Love. The stage version of a delightful 1998 Marc Norman/ Tom Stoppard movie is an irresistible opening for the new Citadel mainstage in this lavish 20-actor production by the company’s new artistic director Daryl Cloran.

Shakespeare in Love is about the theatre, after all. It lives there. In witty, affectionate fashion it celebrates the maddening and magical world of pretend and its frantic disciples who somehow, mysteriously, get at the heart of what’s real. By the end of the evening, it might even cross your mind to wonder why anyone ever thought Shakespeare in Love should have been a movie in the first place.

This, my friends, is a funny, sexy, touching evening. Welcome to the dynamic, competitive world of Elizabethan theatre in the 1590s — with its fractious playhouses, its hunger for new hits and backers, its shortage of cash and scramble for credit, its big egos and rising newcomers.

Designer Cory Sincennes, who’s risen to the occasion in every way, creates an world that references multi-layered wood-lined Elizabethan playhouses like the Globe and the Rose, with movable pillars, panels and screens that take us to Whitehall or an actors’ tavern in a blink. And Scott Henderson’s burnished lighting comes from a imaginative range of lanterns and golden flickers. And the only word for Sincennes’ velvet and brocade costumes, extravagantly individualized, is sumptuous.   

“I think he has potential,” says the ever-beleaguered theatre manager Henslowe (Garett Ross) of a young upstart named Shakespeare (Andrew Chown), who’s promised him “a comedy with a love story and a bit for a dog.” Working title: Romeo and Ethel The Pirate’s Daughter.

Ah yes, the dog; there has to be a dog. Shakespeare in Love is amusingly sly on the ways theatre has of accommodating art to “The Money,” as Fennyman (Ashley Wright) introduces himself bursting into a rehearsal, and to the sponsors and the stars. There’s sport to be had in revealing that showbiz hasn’t changed a whole helluva lot in five centuries. “The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster,” as Henslowe sums up his chosen line of work.     

The anachronisms are playful. “Thank you, and now for your modern piece,” says Will, glumly auditioning completely unsuitable actors for his as-yet-unwritten Romeo in a very funny scene of ill-fated cameos. When anyone asks where Shakespeare’s new play is set, the reaction is the same: “Verona, again?” A boatman ferrying Will and his lead actor — “hmm, haven’t I seen you in something?” — produces a weighty script of his own for perusal. “Strangely enough, I’m a bit of a writer myself….” The rehearsal scenes are a riot, as usual a battleground for the nervous and the high-powered.  

And the play is larky, too, in salting the script with Shakespeare allusions and quotes in ways that are sneaky or as shameless as “Spot! Spot!  Out, damn Spot!” when the only four-legged cast member flattens one of his two-legged cast-mates backstage. Spot incidentally will have a more edifying moment later in the story.

In fact, Shakespeare in Love IS actually a comedy, with love, and a bit with a dog. And the love story is, cleverly, double. At the start we meet the playwright who will be the biggest big shot in theatre history oppressed by deadlines, in the throes of writer’s block, bailed out word by word by his helpful rival Kit Marlowe (Gabe Grey).

When he meets stage-smitten upper-crust Viola de Lesseps (Bahareh Yaraghi), who’s disguised as a boy to get around the age’s proscription against females onstage, he falls in love. Suddenly he has a muse. And as his own real-life forbidden love story gets star-cross’d, the immortal heart-stopping tragedy we know emerges, pirate-free.

The intertwining of the stories gets faster and faster, and the stakes mount, until the scene, cleverly staged by Cloran, in which Romeo and Juliet revolves before us and we see it from the perspectives of both the backstage comic chaos and onstage lyrical heartbreak. If there ever was a physical metaphor for the co-existence of laughter and tears onstage this is it.

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

Chown and Yaraghi make for combustible chemistry together.  As the young Shakespeare, the former, impetuous, passionate, and more than a little exasperated with the constraints of his theatre world, charts an incremental fits-and-starts growth of confidence with real thoughtfulness and physical eloquence. And Yaraghi, who has an interestingly angled voice, is luminous: she conjures in a visceral way the seductive reverb that words can set off in body and soul.

There’s an array of zestful comic acting in Cloran’s production. Ross for one is very droll as Henslowe, the theatre manager who’s a master of the stop-gap excuse, perpetually on the brink of financial ruin, wheedling away to defer the conflicting demands of his artists and his creditors. I love Wright as the hard-bitten money man who proves an instant convert to theatre once he’s given a small part in the play. In every flounce and grimace, John Ullyatt, who has a bristling array of precise accents at his command, nails the purse-lipped censor and sycophant Lord Chamberlain who hurls disapproval like a man spitting out rancid sunflower husks.  

You’ll get a kick out of Tom Keenan’s performance in a tiny but crucial role as the bloodthirsty scrapper who turns out to be the future Jacobean revenge playwright John Webster. Sarah Constable is a tart-tongued Queen Elizabeth. And as rival actor/directors, the bombastic Ned Alleyn and the authoritative Richard Burbage, in whom the collaborative spirit of theatre can’t help but prevail when the chips are down, Kayvon Khoshkam and Paul Essiembre are both excellent.

Shakespeare in Love. Photo by David Cooper.

Like the plays they contain, including this one, theatre is one impediment after another, as Henslowe concedes. “But it always works out in the end.” How?, someone is always bound to ask. “I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

Exactly. That’s the beguiling attraction of it. 

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Seasonal returns: High Tea and the Theatre 6-Pack

Posted on September 21, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

High Tea, Firefly Theatre & Circus. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Let no one argue that Firefly Theatre & Circus doesn’t take the high road.

With the return of their annual High Tea Sunday, Firefly takes vertical integration literally, and tea-time to dizzy new heights. You can never really get jaded about receiving a nice cuppa or a glass of bubbly from above. Like manna from heaven.

Anyhow, in addition to treats (from Duchess Bake Shop) and special tea (Acquired Tastes Tea Co), there’s a sneak preview of Kolabo, Firefly’s upcoming theatrical collaboration with Kita No Taiko, the Japanese drumming troupe (slated for a February opening). Ponder, for a moment, the aerial possibilities in that partnership.

Meanwhile your servers will be flying in. And you’ll see a variety of aerialists at work if you look up. Bonus: Stephanie Wolfe of the Spirit Sisters of the Flying Séance will read your tea leaves.

High Tea, hosted by Firefly artistic director Annie Dugan, is at the ATB Financial Arts Barns (10330 84 Ave.) Sunday, 2 to 4 p.m. Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca), fireflytheatre.com, 780-758-9999.

•Edmonton theatre is a repository of bright ideas (think Fringe). One of the brightest of them all, and a bargain to boot at $125, is the Theatre 6-Pack, a sampler cross-section of the season: six productions from six different theatres.

The first of them — the Teatro La Quindicina revival of Stewart Lemoine’s Shocker’s Delight — opens next week — so time is running out.

What’s in this year’s six-pack?

Shocker’s Delight: Ron Pederson, who was in this elegant 1993 comedy in a 2004 revival, makes his Teatro La Quindicina directing debut in the production that runs September 18 to Oct. 14 at the Varscona Theatre. His cast includes Ben Stevens, Melanie Piatocha and Richard Lee Hsi.

John Ware Reimagined: The play by Calgary-based Cheryl Foggo chronicles the improbable true story of the man who went from American slave to Canadian icon. Workshop West’s production, Nov. 8 to 18, is directed by Kevin Hendricks. 

Shatter: Trina Davies’ play is set against the backdrop of the Halifax explosion of 1917, and probes the impact of the tragedy on the hopes and dreams of its characters. The Walterdale Theatre production runs Dec. 6 to 16.

Julien Arnold, Reed McColm in Slumberland Motel. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux photography 2017

Slumberland Motel: Shadow Theatre premieres this Collin Doyle play about the changing fortunes of two down-at-heels vacuum cleaner salesmen on the road. Their lives are transformed by the arrival of a mystery woman. John Hudson’s production runs at the Varscona Jan. 17 to Feb. 4.

Do This In Memory of Me/ En Mémoire De Moi is a Northern Light Theatre/ L’UniThéâtre co-production of a new Cat Walsh play, set in the Montreal of 1963, when altar boys were never girls. Twelve-year-old Geneviève is hoping for a re-consideration by the Almighty. Trevor Schmidt’s production runs at La Cité francophone March 13 to 25, in alternating English and French performances.

The School for Scandal: Richard Sheridan’s witty Restoration comedy of manners is directed at the U of A’s Studio Theatre by Jennifer Tarver. It runs at the Timms Centre for the Arts March 29 to April 7.

Theatre 6-Packs are available at TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca).

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The sounds of music: a strong cast of singers climbs every mountain

Posted on September 20, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Jill-Christine Wiley as Maria with the Von Trapps, The Sound of Music. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the world catalogue of “favourite things” The Sound of Music gets its own gold star. 

Just mention brown paper packages tied up in string, or goatherds, and something magical happens. The 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical — the last collaboration from the most successful musical theatre partnership in history — is conjured before your very eyes and ears. Its tunes, its images, its mantras about mountain climbing and stream fording …The Sound of Music isn’t just memorable; it’s actually embedded in the collective psyche.

So in the great scheme of things, revivals of the musical don’t have to exert themselves much by way of character or  dramatic storytelling. You can get by on mere allusions to the plucky wayward postulant, the stern naval hero widower, the cute family kids, the Alps, the inspirational nuns, the Nazis. Really, just say Julie Andrews, close your eyes, and the hills are alive. 

This by way of introducing the surprisingly deluxe touring Sound of Music that’s arrived at the Jube this week, under the Broadway Across Canada flag.

Its original direction was by Jack O’Brien, with his frequent design collaborators Douglas W. Schmidt (set) and Natasha Katz (lighting), Broadway heavy-hitters all. In this touring production, directed by Matt Lenz, we see a world fashioned from gliding set pieces, translucent lace walls, perspective projections. The action slides effortlessly from Nonnberg Abbey where the nuns are wondering what you do with a problem like Maria to the posh old-school Von Trapp mansion, where the stern patriarch has forbidden music (yeah, right, in a musical!), and back. The lighting captures the way dusk comes in the mountains and storms gather in exquisite effects.

Lenz’s production’s main attraction, though, is a cast of exceptional singers who deliver the musical’s chief asset, its songs, with real mastery — in every role, not just Maria (Jill-Christine Wiley) and Captain Von Trapp (Mike McLean). In embracing the musical theatre and folkloric tunefulness of Rodgers’ score, the cast somehow avoids the easier temptations of pop slides or operetta quavering. And they do sound of the period, the 1938 Anschluss as the Third Reich arrives in Austria.     

You can’t possibly not know the story, based on Maria Von Trapp’s autobiography. It follows the fortunes of the free-spirited Maria, a peppy postulant who gets the boot from the abbey to be the governess to the seven children of the wealthy autocratic Georg Von Trapp. He’s a martinet (and staunch Austrian nationalist) who’s estranged from both his kids and music at the outset.

Music is the great liberator, in both the story and the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical it rescues from saccharine overdose. Maria teaches the children songs like Do Re Mi and The Lonely Goatherd. Music pries Georg from his carapace of grief — and his engagement to a wealthy oligarch — into family-friendly mode. And, as Maria wins him over to both music and fatherhood and they fall in love, music saves the Von Trapps, now a successful chamber choir with an fairly oddball family act. They take Climb Every Mountain to heart, and vamoose over the Alps to Switzerland in the nick of time.

The heart of the piece is Maria. And in a very spirited performance, Wiley brings an unerringly lovely crystalline voice to bear on My Favourite Things (here transplanted from its usual placement o be a bonding moment with an unexpectedly frisky Mother Abbess (Lauren Kidwell), The Lonely Goatherd, and the rest of the score.

Jill-Christine Wiley as Maria, The Sound of Music. Photo by Matthew Murphy,

This Maria is nothing if not a lively governess. The performance is highly watchable, but from the moment Maria arrives chez Von Trapp, in a high state of showbiz bustle, it seems possible that the nun-to-be has spent a lot of time as an adrenalized kindergarten music teacher. And something, perhaps, of Maria’s sense of discovery of her own strengths doesn’t find traction. It’s already well established. Salzburg Festival here we come. 

But then, that seems to be the heightened acting style for everyone (something in the water at the abbey, perhaps?). Vivacity rules. But then, who’s going to deny Austrians an extra quotient of double-takes in 1938.

As the world knows from Christopher Plummer’s appearance in the 1965 movie, Von Trapp doesn’t have to be a great singer,  McLean is excellent, though. And while all personal transformations, including his, seem a little quick — half a musical phrase and the Captain is a new man (OK, musicals don’t have all night) — you do feel the chemistry heat up between him and Maria.

Melissa McKamie has a glittery charm as the wealthy fiancée Elsa, unusually animated here. And in tandem with Jake Mills as semi-shyster music impresario Max, How Can Love Survive? (a witty ode to romance up against it when lovers are rich instead of poor) is genuinely fun.

Keslie Ward as LIesl and Chad P. Campbell as Rolf. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

The children are individualized amusingly here, even if they don’t seem to require much coaching to be terrific singers. There’s nothing tentative here. The first-love scene between the eldest, Liesl (Keslie Ward), and Rolf (Chad P. Campbell), with its liltingly melodic song Sixteen Going On Seventeen, is reinvented in a charming way.

It’s a luxury to have such vocal excellence, through and through — especially in a musical without a chorus or big production numbers. Even when the story is only sketched in, the songs are delivered in a way to be cherished, as the rush to a standing ovation on opening night attested.

And Kidwell delivers Climb Every Mountain with such a thrilling , house-filling command that you feel sure the vibrations can be felt across Europe. You’ll take them home in your ribcage.

And the next day, as I can attest, they’re still there.

 

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From Romeo to Shakespeare: meet Andrew Chown, the actor who plays the mystery man

Posted on September 20, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Andrew Chown as Will and Bahareh Yaraghi as Viola de Lesseps in Shakespeare in Love. Photo by David Cooper.

By Liz Nicholls 12thnight.ca

So who is William Shakespeare anyhow?

The world has always wondered. And in the romantic comedy that opens the season Thursday on the Citadel mainstage, we meet the mystery man himself — as a young working up-and-comer actor/playwright, struggling to make his way in the volatile theatre world of London in the 1590s.

“A guy who likes to write and can’t. Who meets an amazing woman and starts to write again”: that, in a nutshell, is how Andrew Chown describes Will in Shakespeare In Love, the stage adaptation of the 1998 Oscar-winning movie created by Marc Norman and the great playwright and theatre wit Tom Stoppard.

Chown, quick-witted himself, is the young Toronto-based actor who plays Will in Daryl Cloran’s debut production as Citadel artistic director. And a rueful laugh from him en route to rehearsal acknowledges that getting cast as the starriest playwright in the history of the world is the plummiest and also, in a way, the most daunting of assignments.

“How can you play a genius if you aren’t one?” Questions like that are a leading cause of thespian anxiety. “So much research, and theorizing about who he was and wasn’t,” sighs Chown. “You could get lost going down that rabbit hole.”

On the other hand, look on the bright side, there’s remarkably little known — besides an enigmatic will, a selection of signatures spelled a little differently, a couple of business invoices — about the glover’s son from Stratford who moved to London and changed the world. And that’s got to be liberating. “It’s all theory,” says Chown cheerfully. “None of us were there…. And he doesn’t reveal himself in his plays; (with his characters) you can never really tell whose side he was on.”

Andrew Chown as Will Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love, Citadel Theatre. Photo by David Cooper.

Shakespeare In Love captures the great man as he struggles with writer’s block and forbidden love in his own life to create Romeo and Juliet. That aligns itself rather uncannily with the fortunes of Chown, a Vancouver-born National Theatre School grad who caught the eye of director Cloran when he was playing Romeo at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach a summer ago.

The way Cloran tells it, for the Citadel’s Toronto auditions Chown’s name was submitted for Kit Marlowe and a couple of the other characters in the play. “Andrew auditioned just before the lunch break, and did a good job…. I went down the street to grab some lunch. And when I got back he was still there, sitting outside the theatre. And he said ‘you have to see me for Will!’.” So Cloran did.

“Fair enough,” laughs Cloran. “His tenacity impressed me. And then, well, he was great!”

Shakespeare has always been part of Chown’s theatre life. “My introduction was Hamlet in Grade 7,” he laughs. The drama teacher was a sports guy who would have none of the usual jock stereotypes that divert boys from theatre. “There’s going to be sword-fighting. And you’re gonna get to die!”

Chown, who grew up in Oakville, Ont. — “I always say I was born in B.C. because I think it makes me sound more interesting” — was hooked. By high school he was at Shakespeare camps at Stratford nearby. “I’d be happy to do more Shakespeare; the breadth of experience it touches on is so beautiful!”

A playwright himself (his solo show Canine was at the Toronto Festival of Clowns), Chown comes to Edmonton from the Soulpepper production of Vern Thiessen’s Vimy.

“It’s a love story first and foremost,” says Chown of Shakespeare in Love. “And it’s an ode to theatre and to the misfits trying to put on theatre…. Even in the most dramatic moments, there’s always comedy. It’s a lot of fun. And there’s heart.”

In the course of the play “Will matures as a person, and accepts that some loves don’t last. And he matures as a writer. Later, when he’s heartbroken, it’s pouring out of him; he’s able to translate his experience….”

“It’s a coming-of-age tale,” says Chown. “He’s Romeo at the beginning. He’s Shakespeare at the end.”

PREVIEW

Shakespeare in Love

Theatre: Citadel, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Andrew Chown, Bahareh Yaraghi

Running: through Oct. 8

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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“We’re all in this together” forsooth: the spirit of inclusion in the Citadel season opener

Posted on September 20, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Andrew Chown as Will Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love, Citadel Theatre. Photo by David Cooper.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Shall I compare thee to a … sum … a sum … a something, something… Damn it.”

In the opening scene of the play that launches the new Citadel  season Thursday, we meet an up-and-coming playwright up against it. You know, the usual: debt, ridiculous deadlines, conflicting promises to two different theatre companies, demanding backers with both beady eyes on the box office — and a bad case of writer’s block.

The young man is William Shakespeare. And in an image of theatrical collaboration, he’s surrounded by his fellow actors, and a helpful playwriting rival named Kit Marlowe (Gabe Grey). Will (Andrew Chown) will get his groove back, with a little help from his friends, when he falls in love across the class divide with a stage-struck noblewoman. And suddenly Romeo and Ethel The Pirate’s Daughter, a comedy promised in desperation, will turn into something else, an outpouring into a luscious romantic tragedy we know. 

A new era in Citadel history begins with Shakespeare in Love, the celebration of theatre adapted for the stage by Lee Hall from the Oscar magnet 1998 movie by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. And its signal of theatrical inclusiveness is at the heart of Daryl Cloran’s choice of his debut production as the company’s artistic director, he says.

“It plays to the strengths of this company!” Cloran declares of Shakespeare in Love one morning last week before rehearsal. “It’s a sumptuous, gorgeous show” with lavish period costumes by Cory Sincennes. “And a large cast, 20 actors!, that only the Citadel can do…. “ 

Shakespeare In Love, Citadel Theatre. Photo by David Cooper.

“But more than any of that, for me, is that the whole season, all the programming is based on the idea of inclusiveness.” Cloran uses the term ubuntu, an African word meaning “I am because you are” or “a person is a person through other persons.” Ubuntu is the name of the signature (and much travelled) Cloran piece, a collaboration with South African artists he developed with his Toronto indie company Theatrefront (it arrives at the Citadel in October).

“All of our shows are about that. Shakespeare in Love is a romance, and a comedy. But ultimately it’s about a group of actors, outcasts coming together to challenge that status quo about who gets to have a voice. Who gets to participate…. Whose stories are we allowed to tell, and who gets to tell them.” 

In an era when women weren’t allowed on the stage, Viola de Lessep, Will’s muse, is the first (played by the Persian-Canadian actor Bahareh Yaraghi). And this radical departure doesn’t come without risk in the play; the Lord Chamberlain (played by John Ullyatt among multiple other assignments) can shut a theatre down for such a gross infraction of prescribed practice. 

And speaking of Ullyatt, “this show has taught me about the bench strength of Edmonton actors,” says Cloran, who notes that nine of the 20 actors are from Edmonton (seven from Winnipeg, home of the Citadel’s co-producer the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, four from around the country). “John and Andrew MacDonald-Smith, our leads from Crazy For You, along with Farren Timoteo (a star of Peter and the Starcatcher) are now in supporting roles. Macdonald-Smith “keeps showing up in a different beard,” laughs the director. “He’s probably 25 different characters.”

The “ensemble nature” of both the plot, and the storytelling — “artists coming together to do something” — “is how the show is envisioned,” says Cloran of an adaptation that slides quite easily from the screen onto the stage since it’s about theatre.

“Everyone participates…. Throughout, actors are there onstage witnessing scenes they’re not in. You’re always reminded that we’re telling the story together.”

Paddy Cunneen’s music, with its period instrumentation, is recorded (and comes with the script). But all the singing on top, from a quartet of actors, is live.

Cloran explains that every night a different actor in the cast will step forward at the outset to introduce themselves, and welcome the audience. “They’ll say to the other actors ‘are you ready?’. Then they’ll look to the audience and say ‘are you ready?’ And hopefully everyone says Yes!” he grins. “We just trying to acknowledge that we’re all in this together, creating an ephemeral moment together with these bodies in space…. I’m hoping that connects the audience to the storytellers.”

The fun of Shakespeare in Love is the knowing, timeless way it’s steeped in theatre. The tension between appealing to the widest possible audience and the urge to create something challenging and unique is, amusingly, part of the dynamic. And it certainly hasn’t vanished from the theatre, to put it mildly.

Cloran, who has just moved to an exponentially larger theatre than his indie roots or his most recent artistic directorship in Kamloops (Western Canada Theatre), nods sympathetically. “You try to find a balance,” he says, “of how to encourage people into this building with shows they’re familiar with and excited about, and at the same time push our own mandate of challenging, important things….” He’s encouraged by the way that subscription and ticket sales are on target so far. 

Bahareh Yaraghi and Patricia Darbasie in Shakespeare in Love, Citadel Theatre. Photo by David Cooper.

That “we’re all in it together” embrace of Shakespeare In Love even extends to its impresario and money men characters, who are all about bums in seats, not art. As someone says, “Comedy. That’s what they want. Love and a bit with a dog.”

Ah yes, there has to be a dog — as every producer and company manager in the play, and even the theatre’s royal patron, the Queen herself, keep reminding Will. And so it is at the Citadel.

Canines come with their own casting difficulties. “The dog is going to be the death of me,” says Cloran, permitting himself a sigh.

“Ah well, the people are gonna love the dog.”

PREVIEW

Shakespeare In Love

Theatre: Citadel, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Andrew Chown, Bahareh Yaraghi, Gabe Grey, Paul Essiembre, Garett Ross, Ashley Wright, Kayvon Khoshkam, Sarah Constible

Running: through Oct. 8

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com 

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The new theatre season begins: hey, Edmonton has play dates!

Posted on September 19, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Amber Gray in Hadestown,
New York Theatre Workshop. Photo by Joan Marcus.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“And the wall keeps out the enemy/ And we build the wall to keep us free….”

—Hadestown

In Hadestown, the Broadway-bound musical whose out-of-town opening happens at Edmonton’s largest playhouse the Citadel (Nov. 11 to Dec. 3), desperate people in desperate times wrap their hopes around desperate solutions. Ring a bell?

And, in Rachel Chavkin’s much-awarded re-imagining of the Orpheus myth — spun from a 2010 concept album by singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell — Eurydice is torn between her summer love for a dreamy poet-musician and the pragmatic winter seductions of a subterranean industrial magnate who runs a walled, soulless underworld of employment and, well, warmth. She chooses.

There’s a creative tension that speaks to theatre artists everywhere (and in every time, as you’ll see from a certain up-start playwright’s struggles in Shakespeare in Love, opening Thursday at the Citadel). And it’s a theme that ripples through the season about to happen on Edmonton stages of every size, shape, provenance, aesthetic and personality after another record-busting Fringe.

Let’s sneak a look — a highly selective one — at the spectrum of intriguing possibilities for your upcoming nights out in Edmonton theatres this season.

#MAKESOMETHINGWOMAN (black comedy division)

Michelle Todd in Slut, Northern Light Theatre.

The heroine of Brenda McFarlane’s Slut, at Northern Light Theatre April 5 to 14, is a middle-aged woman whose zest for sex, and her democratic zeal for playing well with others, get her in trouble with the neighbours. She’s accused of running a brothel — until she proves she’s a slut. Michelle Todd stars in Trevor Schmidt’s production. 

FOLLOW A PLAYWRIGHT (whose time has come)

Collin Doyle, the highly accomplished Edmonton-based playwright who’s the reigning monarch of the long lead time, has not one but two plays opening this season.

Julien Arnold, Reed McColm in Slumberland Motel. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux photography 2017

At Shadow (Jan. 17 to Feb. 4), Doyle’s Slumberland Motel, which won the Alberta Playwriting Competition fully 11 years ago, gives us two chronic underachievers Ed and Edward (Julien Arnold, Reed McColm), a couple of disappointed vacuum cleaner salesmen on the road sharing a shabby motel room. The arrival of a mystery woman from the next room (Aimee Beaudoin) might transform their world.

At Edmonton Actors Theatre (May 10 to 20), Sterling Award-winning Dave Horak directs Doyle’s latest, Too Late To Stop Now, the finale of a trilogy that includes The Mighty Carlins and Routes. John Wright returns to the role of the prickly booze-soaked Father Knows Worst, in a production that includes Maralyn Ryan and Cole Humeny. “I’ve been a huge fan of Collin’s for a long time,” says Horak. “Vern (Vern Thiessen) at Workshop West brought us together to workshop the piece earlier this year and it sort of haunted me.”

REDEFINING THE ROMANTIC COMEDY

Trina Davies’ The Romeo Initiative, opening on the 2018 SkirtsaFire Festival mainstage (March 1 to 11), crosses the rom-com with the spy thriller, to probe the undercurrent of paranoia in gender relations. The play spools from Cold War history, and a Stasi program to target single West German secretaries by finding their perfect Romeo. Nancy McAlear’s production stars Heather Cant, Sarah Feutl, and Aaron Hursh.

THE HOTTEST SCRIPTS (starry playwrights from the big wide world)

(a) The Humans by the American playwright Stephen Karam, reinvents the family reunion drama genre in a sad/funny/scary strangely surreal way. The Citadel production (Jan. 6 to 28) is directed by Jackie Maxwell, the former artistic director of the Shaw Festival.

(b) The Aliens, by the young American star Annie Baker (The Flick, John, Circle Mirror Transformation), lets us eavesdrop on the conversations between a couple of disaffected slackers, and the high-school kid they decide to teach about life. It comes to Theatre Network’s Roxy Performance Series in a Taylor Chadwick production (Oct. 10 to 22). And there’s music! 

Mat Busby and Lianna Shannon in Constellations, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography 2017

(c) Constellations by the Brit playwright Nick Payne charts a love story that happens in alternate arcs and outcomes, in parallel universes, when a string theory physicist meets a beekeeper. The Shadow production directed by Amy DeFelice (Oct. 25 to Nov. 12) stars Mat Busby and Lianna Shannon, with music by playwright/actor/composer Captain Tractor muse Chris Wynters.

SEE A BI-CITY INDIE COLLABORATION

The LIstening Room. Photo from Cardiac Theatre.

The Listening Room is our introduction to the Calgary-based up-and-comer Michaela Jefferey. Her play, which premieres in a production by the innovative indie Cardiac Theatre (Pompeii L.A., Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes) is set in a post-apocalyptic future, where teenage dissidents use antiquated technology to search for their connection to the past. Co-presented by Azimuth Theatre and Calgary’s Downstage as part of their Emerging Company Showcase, the play runs in Edmonton Feb. 15 to 24.

ART: WHERE FRIENDS MEET (and get their hearts broken)

Stewart Lemoine’s 1993 Shocker’s Delight, among the most heartbreaking of his funny comedies, is the upcoming season finale at Teatro La Quindicina (Sept. 28 to Oct. 14). Ron Pederson, who appeared in a 2004 revival, directs this, his favourite Lemoine, about three college friends struggling to find some harmony between what they know and what they feel.

SEE WHAT’S NEW

Jabberwocky, The Old Trout Puppet Workshop at Theatre Network. Photo by Jason Stang Photography.

(a) Jabberwocky, premiering in the Theatre Network season (Nov. 9 to 26), is so new the title has already changed (from Underland) since the season announcement. It’s the work of one of the country’s most innovative ensembles, Calgary’s Old Trout Puppet Workshop who seem to gravitate to the hospitality at Network (Famous Puppet Death Scenes, The Erotic Anguish of Don Juan). The upside-down logic of Lewis Carroll logic and a poem about an elusive monster seem perfect bait for the macabre, surreal Trout appetites.

(b) Playwright/filmmaker/director Mieko Ouchi’s new swashbuckler, The Silver Arrow: The Untold Story of Robin Hood, the Citadel season finale. stars a female action hero. Steam-punk in flavour, it’s a size X-large extravaganza with all the trimmings:  swordplay, aerial arts, a narrator who sings, music (courtesy of singer/songwriter/cabaret artist Hawksley Workman).

Do This In Memory Of Me by Cat Walsh

(c) Cat Walsh’s muse tends to take her into the dark labyrinths of black comedy (the last time I was at Walsh play reading it was in a funeral parlour, no kidding). Her new play Do This In Memory Of Me/ En Mémoire De Moi — premiering in a Northern Light/L’UniThéâtre partnership, alternating English and French performances — takes us to 1963 Montreal, where liberation hasn’t extended to the church. Geneviève, 12, is praying that God will life the gender ban on girl altar servers. That’s when the star altar boy vanishes on his way home from school.

(d) With its estranged twin sisters, Beth Graham’s new play Pretty Goblins, premiering at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, is inspired, says the playwright, by the 1859 Christina Rossetti poem Goblin Market, in all its weird, fantastical eroticism. 

STRETCH YOUR MUSICAL MUSCLES (they’re more elastic than you think)

A spectrum that ranges this season from the close harmonies of Forever Plaid (Mayfield Dinner Theatre) and Jersey Boys (Broadway Across Canada) to Cy Coleman’s City of Angels (MacEwan University) is multi-hued. Still, leave it to the Plain Janes, specialists in the off-centre gems of the musical theatre repertoire, to explore way outside the musicals mainstream, juke or otherwise. Originally planned by the Janes for last season, Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, a 2010 Broadway flop by the Full Monty team of Dave Yazbek and Jeffrey Lane, is created from the crazy-relationship film of that name by Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar.

“Love passion and deception!” in 1980s Madrid, as director Kate Ryan puts it. “It makes the Real Housewives of America seem so petty.! Ryan’s production runs Feb. 15 to 25. 

ART MEETS SCIENCE

Infinity by Hannah Moscovitch, at Theatre Network.

If theatre that enlists string theory on behalf of romance sounds intriguingly smart (Constellations at Shadow, see above), consider Infinity, by the star Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch, of East of Berlin, This Is War, Little One fame. It’s all about time, with a trio of characters — a physicist, a musician and their mathematician daughter — whose lives are entwined domestically and philosophically. A violinist plays live. Bradley Moss directs.

REDEFINING THE DOMESTIC DRAMA

Cleave by Elena Belyea, a Tiny Bear Jaws production.

Upping the ante on teen angst: Cleave, by Tiny Bear Jaws’ muse Elena Belyea  (Everyone We Know Will Be There), has fashioned an award-winning six-actor play whose questing characters include a couple of parents, a gender therapist and a 17-year-old intersexed kid starting fresh in new school. It runs March 27 to April 7 in the Fringe Theatre season at the Backstage Theatre.

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

And there’s more, much more. Betroffenheit, the award-winning Crystal Pite/Jonathon Young hit arrives under the joint Citadel/Brian Webb Dance flag, a major event for theatre and dance. Sheldon Elter’s hit solo show cum memoire Métis Mutt, fiercely honest and funny, is back in a newly reworked production directed by Ron Jenkins at Theatre Network. The first original Canadian Indigenous work on the Citadel mainstage, Corey Payette’s musical Children of God, probes the residential school experience. Small Matters Theatre’s Over Her Dead Body takes its wordless physical comedy to a funeral, at Fringe Theatre Adventures. Tubby and Nottubby, vagrant Shakespearean vagrant clowns, arrive at L’UniThéâtre in Tempus Extraordinarius (French with English surtitles)….

It’s time to play.

 

 

 

 

  

    

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The 25th anniversary edition of the Die-Nasty Soap-A-Thon is sudsing up

Posted on September 15, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Welcome to Dystopia!

The 25th annual edition of Edmonton’s venerable improv comedy tradition, the Die-Nasty Soap-A-Thon, is at hand. Starting this very evening, 7 p.m. at the Varscona Theatre, the forces of the improv elite — the bold, adrenalized, strangely fearless horde who make it all up as they go along — are sudsing up for a weekend expedition, 50 straight hours long, into a dark improvised future: Soapocalypse 2025.

In this anniversary venture, which cites such imaginative projections as Mad Max, Fallout, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Hunger Games as inspirations, the cast of Die-Nasty, Edmonton’s live weekly improvised soap opera, are joined by fellow improv stars from across the country and around the world.

The Rapid Fire Theatre improv aristocracy will be on hand, along with Karen Johnson-Diamond, founder of the Calgary suds improv Dirty Laundry. The cast’s international contingent includes Alan Cox of London’s impressive School of Night, which thinks nothing of improvising perfect Shakespearean sonnets on demand, and Becky Webb from Liverpool’s Impropriety.

The Canadian contingent includes Kayla Lorette of Toronto’s The Sufferettes and Caitlin Howden of Vancouver’s Sunday Service. Both troupes have regaled audiences at Rapid Fire’s international festival Improvaganza.

Impulse and spontaneity are the Soap-A-Thon currency. As of Friday morning, Die-Nasty star Belinda Cornish, for example, hadn’t finalized a character to play, but was considering the option of “someone from the wealthy faction” à la The Capitol in The Hunger Games. She has acquired a pink tutu and “some very furry legwarmers, “so I might just end up looking something out of Fame.”

PREVIEW

Soapocalypse 2025

Theatre: Die-Nasty

Directed by: various improvisers, starting with Die-Nasty‘s Jeff Haslam for the first six hours

Starring: the cast of Die-Nasty and an international contingent of improvisers

Where: Varscona Theatre (10329 83 Ave.)

Running: Friday 7 p.m. to Sunday 9 p.m.

Tickets: Weekend passes, available online at yeglive.ca, are $60. Single entries at the door (cash only) are $20. Stay as long as you like but if you leave, you need to buy another single entry to return.    

  

 

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A Midsummer Night’s Fringe is a record-buster!

Posted on August 27, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

“I have had a most rare dream….”

— Bottom the weaver, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Rare? It’s been a record-breaking Fringe! By 6 p.m. Sunday, with an evening of fringing to go, the 36th annual edition of Edmonton’s giant 11-day-and-night summer theatre bash, had sold 129,522 tickets to its 220 shows. A Midsummer Night’s Fringe ticket sales nearly hit 130,000 — 129,809 to be precise — by the time the revels ended, and the curtain(s) came down on the festivities Sunday night.

This is a dramatic surge from last year’s 121,900 tickets. And festival director Murray Utas, a theatre artist himself, was understandably in a celebratory mood Sunday night. “We’re putting ‘theatre’ back in the name Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival!” And artists will take home a record-breaking $1.15 million from this year’s edition of the festivities.

“It’s all about people taking a risk!” declares Utas in delight. “Friday night, 44 shows were sold out! Saturday, 59! Crazy! More than 400 sold-out shows altogether” And, as he points out,  it wasn’t as if volatile unpredictable weather did the Fringe any favours: sun, squalls, winds that could blow a busker clean off his ladder, thunder and lighting storms, deluges. “People could have chased themselves away. But they didn’t! They stayed!” declared Utas Sunday night, heading for a backstage dance party. “This means 10,000 more people got themselves out of the beer tent and into the theatres!

With crowds that regularly approach three-quarters of a million — and this year, surged to 810,000, another record — the Edmonton Fringe, the continent’s first and largest, has long struggled with the imbalance between the gigantic outdoor carnival and the ticket sales to shows. This year theatre got a big boost. As Shakespeare and Gordon’s Big Bald Head show have it, “the play’s the thing.”

And with that thought, something crucial about the Fringe’s raison d’être and spirit has been restored. Congratulations to the artists and audiences who bravely experimented together.

 

 

 

 

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Reprieved: more Fringe holdovers next week

Posted on August 26, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Linda Grass in Ciara, Trunk Theatre. Photo by db photographics.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

And the Fringe lives on! In addition to the holdovers already announced, you’ve had reprieves on more hot Fringe shows next week.

At Holy Trinity Anglican Church:

Julien Arnold, Kristi Hansen, and (front) Davina Stewart in The Receptionist. Photo supplied.

The Receptionist:  A tight tense little black comedy, with a long slow burn of a setup and a stinger that will take your hide off. Davina Stewart turns in an absolutely deluxe performance as the title character, who trills away answering the phone like a soprano warming up at the Met. “Good morning! North East office!”  Friday, Sept. 1, 7 p.m.

Barrymore by William Luce: A one-man show about the star American actor John Barrymore, starring Patrick Treadway, with Reed McColm. Sept 1, 9 p.m.

At The Playhouse (1033 80 Ave.): All four Fringe shows at this venue get holdover performances next week.

April Banigan and Kristi Hansen in The Superhero Who Loved Me. Photo by Mat Simpson.

 

The Superhero Who Loved Me: Blarney Productions’ Paquette directs this premiere of a new Chris Craddock, his first new Fringe play in six years. What happens to a relationship when one party is a divorcée and the other is a superhero? April Banigan and Kristi Hansen star.  Thursday Sept. 31, 7 p.m.; Friday Sept. 1, 9:30 p.m.

Bash’d! A Gay Rap Opera: A revival of the Chris Craddock/Nathan Cuckow tale, in rap, of two young men who fall in love in a small town. Thursday Sept. 31, 9:30 p.m.; Saturday Sept. 2, 7 p.m.

Ciara: Trunk Theatre’s production an intricate monologue by the dexterous Scottish playwright David Harrower. The title character (Linda Grass), an art gallery owner and the daughter of a Glasgow crime boss, finds her father’s criminal world seeping into her fortified life of culture. Friday Sept. 1, 7 p.m.

Kristian Stec and Zoe Glassman in To Be Moved. Photo by Mat Simpson.

To Be Moved: An experimental dance/theatre/music collaboration that tells a love story.  It’s the initiative of the enterprising up-and-comer actor/director/theatre artist Braydon Dowler-Coltman, composer Matt Skopyk, choreographer Laura Krewski, and two actors Zoe Glassman and Kristian Stec. Saturday Sept. 2, 9 p.m.

 

Chasing Willie Nelson – A Tribute: Andrea House’s hit storytelling concert gets an extra pop-up performance Sunday Aug. 27, 3 p.m. at CKUA downtown.

The Spark: A Hero Takes Charge: This just in! The Accidental Humour Company, specialists in original live multi-media theatre (the McCrackin’ Trilogy), are holding over their superhero adventure Friday at 9:30 p.m. at the Garneau Theatre. Tickets: accidentalhumour.com or at the door.

 

 

 

There’s a holdover performance of The Accidental Humour Company’s superhero extravaganza at the Garneau Theatre Friday at 9:30. They’re specialists at the Garneau Theatre, is ,

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Dream on! A Midsummer Night’s Fringe has holdovers!

Posted on August 25, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Thea Fitz-James in Drunk Girl. Photo by Tashi Hall

 

It’s not time to wake up yet. Some of the hottest shows at A Midsummer Night’s Fringe, the 36th annual edition of our summer theatre bash, are being held over.

FRINGE THEATRE ADVENTURES: At Fringe headquarters, the ATB Financial Arts Barns, starting next week, you can catch the following:

Prophecy: Jessy Ardern’s witty new solo gut-puncher for Impossible Mongoose is set in the endless destructiveness of the Trojan world, but it resonates powerfully in our time. And it extrapolates from Cassandra’s terrible god-given gift: she can foresee the future but she will never be believed. A powerful performance from startling  newcomer Carmen Nieuwenhuis.

Drunk Girl: Thea Fitz-James is the charismatic creator and star of this disarming and high-spirited memoir that explores in a serious way the high price tag, and sexist double standard, on finding liberation in booze.

Legoland: This entertaining oddball of a comedy by Jacob Richmond (Ride The Cyclone) is a home-made theatrical presentation by two home-schooled siblings — an odyssey through America and its pop culture clichés. Luc Tellier’s production features  comic performances from two of our best: Jenny McKillop as the eager-beaver older sister, and Rachel Bowron who’s very funny as her intense nihilist younger brother.

My Love Lies Buried in the Ice, Dead Rabbits Theatre. Photo supplied.

Love Lies Frozen in the Ice: I haven’t yet seen this new show from the London company Dead Rabbits Theatre yet. But I loved The Dragon last year. And my ever-insightful fellow 12thnight.ca reviewer Todd Babiak called it “strange and wonderful.” He was enchanted by this inventively theatrical tale of three 19th century explorers who head for the North Pole in a balloon.

Tickets and times (starting Aug. 30): 780-409-1910, fringetheatre.ca

AT THE VARSCONA:

Belinda Cornish and Jeff Haslam in The Exquisite Hour (2013), Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Andrew MacDonald-Smith.

The Exquisite Hour: Stewart Lemoine’s beautiful comedy for two, The Exquisite Hour, a shimmering exploration of the way a sealed-off solitary, “ordinary” life can suddenly open up to possibility, continues its run next week as part of the Teatro La Quindicina summer season. I’m excited to see the revival of one of my favourite Lemoines tonight. Todd Babiak, who counts the play as one of his favourites too, saw it last weekend, and loved it again: “moving, mysterious, masterful.”  Tuesday Sept. 29 through Friday Sept. 1 at 7 p.m. Saturday Sept. 2 at 2 and 7 p.m.

Belinda Cornish, Ron Pederson, Louise Lambert in No Exit. Photo by Ryan Parker.

No Exit: Jean-Paul Sartre makes his Edmonton Fringe debut in this crack Bright Young Things production of his very witty, tough-minded, and — who knew? — sharply funny No Exit. In Kevin Sutley’s production Ron Pederson, Belinda Cornish, and Louise Lambert find themselves in hell — and hell, as the Sartre insight has it, is other people. No, this is not some French existentialist manifesto in favour of one-man Fringe shows. This is a terrific four-actor cast! Friday, Sept. 1, 9 p.m.

Tickets:varsconatheatre.com or the door.

HOLY TRINITY ANGLICAN CHUIRCH

Urinetown: Grindstone Theatre’s production, rockin’ by all reports, of this raucous satire of capitalist greed has been packing ’em in at Holy Trinity. The musical,  which rocketed from Off-Broadway to On-, scooping up awards as it went, has attracted a deluxe cast of 14 (and a four-piece band) to Byron Martin’s production.  Martin is holding the show over Tuesday to Thursday (Aug. 29 to 31) at Holy Trinity. Tickets: Grindstonetheatre.ca

Chasing Willie Nelson – A Tribute: Andrea House’s “storytelling concert” has been selling out all week. There’s an extra pop-up performance Sunday at Stage 39, CKUA, 9804 Jasper Ave.

 

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