The Unrepentant Necrophile: the punk rock musical that’s a test case for female empowerment

Posted on February 12, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Katie Hartman in The Unrepentant Necrophile, The Coldharts. Photo by Dan Norman.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Brooklyn duo the Coldharts are undeniably into dark and shivery. Take their unnerving Fringe hit Edgar Allan, in which the terrifying young Poe is haunted by a doppelgänger he can’t shake. Or The Legend of White Woman Creek, an eerie one-woman musical performed by a ghost.

If for their third horror musical, the Coldharts were (as Nick Ryan says cheerfully) “looking for subject matter that deeply disturbs us and makes us uncomfortable,” they hit the jackpot the day they “stumbled on” the story of Karen Greenlee.

The Unrepentant Necrophile is (to my, admittedly circumscribed, knowledge) the sole punk rock musical to unspool from this weird source.

Greenlee is the apprentice embalmer in Sacramento, California who turned out to take a love of job in queasy directions, as a career necrophile. In 1978, en route to the Memorial Lawn Mortuary with a corpse in the back of the hearse she was driving, she went AWOL for a few days, to have some quality alone time with the dead body of a 33-year-old man.

In the end, according to California law of the day, she was charged only with stealing a hearse and interfering with a funeral. The bizarre case inspired much research, not least because of male dominance in the necrophilia field.

The Unrepentant Necrophile premiered two years ago at the Twin Cities Horror Festival in Minneapolis. As part of its ##RosesAreDeadLipsAreBlue tour, the show makes its Canadian debut this week — on Valentine’s Day! — thanks to Fringe Theatre Adventures, at the Chinook Series. 

Male necrophilia has been widely documented — albeit not a whole lot in the American musical theatre. And the Coldhart duo did their research. “The details are so provocative and visceral; it shook us at our core.” But, as Hartmen concedes, the idea of male attack on female corpses is “left me feeling so violated that we kept looking….” A notoriously unapologetic interview given by Greenlee at the time caught their eye. 

“There are so many contradictions,” as Hartman points out. “Is it a feminist piece? I don’t think so…. For one thing, it’s set in 1978 when men and women aren’t equal by any means.” As Ryan says, it’s disturbing to “find female empowerment in that world.”

In 2018 The Unrepentant Necrophile is a highly unusual response to a moment in history when consent and sexuality are inflammatory issues in new ways, as he notes. Even in the two years since its creation, the cultural dynamic has changed.

“Horror is usually a reflection of societal anxiety,” says Hartman.  “And the conversation has changed….” As one example, two years ago, “lines that got nervous laughter” when the Coldharts were trying out The Reluctant Necrophile, “were not laughed at last night,” she says of their opening night last week in Minneapolis. “I was curious.”

The star of the show is, after all, a female character “asking for what she wants,” normally a positive development in empowerment circles. Even the most open-minded have to concede that necrophilia is pretty much an ultimate test cast for this. As Hartman says, “the show pushes everyone really far, to really extreme places.”

The world that led up to the U.S. election “has turned a corner,” says Ryan. He plays “the woman’s creepy creepy” mortician co-worker who crosses several lines with her. He used to get a lot of sympathy….” Not any more. Says Hartman, “it’s post-#MeToo now. Society has caught up, in a way.”

The third member of the cast is percussionist Nate Gebhard as the corpse; admirably, he doesn’t let being dead interfere with his drumming, which takes a certain kind of improbable physical invention. Punk rock was always the musical style of choice, loud and anarchic. “It absolutely invites punk!” declares Ryan, who plays bass.

In a conference call last week, they outlined the division of labour in creating a show they called “mixed discipline.” Ryan’s responsibility is  playwriting, Hartman’s and Gebhard’s are music and movement. “Edgar Allan had so much text. This time we challenged ourselves to create a piece where the visuals, the physical movement, and the music are (dominant) … and the dialogue is very spare and awkward.

“Not as cute as Edgar Allan,” laughs Ryan. “And substantially louder!” Think Pogues concert, he says, and adds that they provide earplugs for the delicate.

“We’re fully prepared to alienate everyone!” 

PREVIEW

The Unrepentant Necrophile

Fringe Theatre Adventures, in the Chinook Series 2018

Theatre: The Coldharts

Starring: Katie Hartman, Nick Ryan, Nate Gebhard

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

Running: Wednesday through Sunday

Tickets: 780-409-1910, fringetheatre.ca

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The Ladies Foursome: the short game goes long. A review

Posted on February 11, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Amber Lewis, Karen Wood, Stephanie Wolfe, Belinda Cornish in The Ladies Foursome, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Hitting a tiny ball with a skinny stick? A long long way into the distance into a hole you can’t even see? 

To the non-golfer especially, the whole point of that particularly maddening game — alluded to by many — is that an 18-hole excursion into nature gives you the excuse to hang out with your friends for roughly the length of an average full-length comedy by Norm Foster.

This country’s most-produced playwright by far (with regular incursions into summer theatres across the border), Foster uses golf to frame the 2014 comedy that’s currently onstage at the Mayfield Dinner Theatre. And Jim Guedo’s production of The Ladies Foursome is your excuse to hang out with a quartet of accomplished comic actors. In the course of the evening you’ll see them exercise their considerable chops on Foster’s flat, well-mowed 18-hole course of subjects from the female stance. Among them are life, love, marriage, sex (satisfactions vs. dis-), kids (ideal vs. real) and child-rearing, thwarted dreams and ambitions, shared memories, belief in God (is there one?), the afterlife (is there one?), the cosmos (fate vs. randomness), getting anti-aging “work” done (pros vs. cons), regrets, friendship….

A female companion piece to Foster’s all-male Foursome, The Ladies Foursome gives us four women out on the course in honour of their fallen golf companion. Catherine, incidentally, has just died in a tragic and cautionary lightning strike at the top of a ferris wheel.

Three are old friends, who golfed with the dearly departed every week for 14 years. Oddly, they seem never to addressed any of the subjects listed above till now. The fourth is a mysterious stranger who knew Catherine, too: for two weeks a year the now-deceased visited the remote lakeside hotel that Dory (Amber Lewis) and her husband run.

They are a cross-section, by a playwright whose best work transcends the predictability of the kind of check-list construction that’s in evidence here. Connie (Stephanie Wolfe), the breeziest of the four characters and equipped with the funniest of Foster’s one-liners, is a TV news anchor who’s addicted to men, and sex of the casual persuasion. Tate (Belinda Cornish), alternately chirpy and mopey, is the apparently naive stay-at-home wife of a vascular surgeon, with teenage kids: “mine is a life misspent.” Margot (Karen Wood), who unapologetically cracks a beer despite the early hour (“time, what is time?”), owns a construction company and has a new beau. The actors are all top-notch.

The presence of an outsider gives the comedy its obvious excuse to do the introductions. Dory is a bit like the TV therapist or the TV detective Colombo who asks questions and always avoids answering them. This is the trickiest assignment; the character is most self-evidently a plot device, who plants doubts and reveals semi-secrets. Despite the obvious signs of calculation in the character as written, Lewis, a skilful actor, delivers a performance that negotiates, with some finesse, the, er, sand traps and water hazards.

Revelations ensue (“you feel inadequate, is that it?”). Secrets get aired, incrementally, and up the ante in ways that may well strike you as shameless and/or sentimental. Old jokes get an under-par afterlife. And an A-team production from an A-team director gives a four-square but distinctly B-team Foster comedy a deluxe treatment. Doug Paraschuk’s amusing design, a collection of woodsy painted cut-outs, deserves its own shout-out.

My favourite scene is the last hole, a genuinely funny piece of stagecraft from Guedo and co, with Shakespearean resonances. And that’s not just because it’s the last, in a comedy that might well have stuck to nine holes and repaired to the club house.

REVIEW

The Ladies Foursome

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Written by: Norm Foster

Directed by: Jim Guedo

Starring: Belinda Cornish, Amber Lewis, Stephanie Wolfe, Karen Wood

Running: through April 1

Tickets: 780-483-4051, mayfieldtheatre.ca

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A Latinx dance lesson: Broken Tailbone is moving theatre, in every sense

Posted on February 9, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Carmen Aguirre in Broken Tailbone, Nightswimming Theatre. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Take off that coat! You’ll be too hot otherwise!”

There is nothing usual about Broken Tailbone, the highly original Carmen Aguirre creation that occasions her first-ever visit to Edmonton, courtesy of Workshop West’s Canoe Festival, and the Chinook Series.

It is the only piece of theatre you’re likely ever to see that’s also a Latinx dance lesson. And as this happens, with you up on your feet, moving, it’s interwoven with stories, funny and startling, from Aguirre’s uniquely rich and tumultuous personal history. “It’s also a history of Latin American dance, Latinx dance halls,  geo-political history.…”

Even on the phone, there is something entirely irresistible about the prolific writer/ playwright/ actor who arrived in Vancouver in 1974, age eight, with her parents, as political refugees from the Pinochet coup in Chile. She went back as a teenager with her mother and sister to join the underground resistance opposing the dictator. “Being a political refugee is a huge part of my identity,” says Aguirre, whose two spirited memoirs — Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter and Mexican Hooker #1 And My Other Roles Since The Revolution — are harrowing and tense. 

Her parents opened Canada’s first Latinx (the gender-neutral alternative to Latino/Latina) dance hall in Vancouver in 1974, with monthly dance fund-raisers for political prisoners. “Aguirre grew up dancing the cumbia (from Colombia) or the merengue… “ she says. “Salsa is an umbrella term; people assume wrong about that!”

Aguirre’s play Blue Box, like Broken Tailbone a production from Toronto’s Nightswimming Theatre, had her “literally standing there, talking to the audience,” as she says. Broken Tailbone is a “thrilling and exhilarating” departure: “why don’t we get the audience up and dancing?” 

“I worked on the content for a couple of years,” Vancouver-based Aguirre says of the song list she shares with DJ Pedro Chamale, who interacts with her, and with the audience, in the course of Broken Tailbone. “I curated the song list, from hundreds (of possibilities)…. Each song has a story attached to it.”

Broken Tailbone has played — maybe happened is the better term — at “a couple of Toronto festivals, and most recently, a three-week run in Los Angeles at the L.A. Theatre Centre. As Aguirre points out, “it’s very hard to workshop without an actual audience.”

L.A., where Broken Tailbone was bilingual, was “an experience!” she says of a majority Latinx audience. “So I’m not telling them anything they don’t know….” So the dynamic from the start was strikingly different than Aguirre’s Canadian audiences. And this: “I’m unabashedly left-wing and Cuban-Americans for the most part are not left-wing. There were hecklers, people walking out….”

Aguirre, who’s fierce and funny onstage, isn’t fazed by this, apparently; she’s interested. “The other thing is that in the current climate, it’s refreshing, I think, to see a woman of a certain age talking about her sexuality. Really owning it, and not casting herself as a victim.”

“I don’t identify as a survivor,” she declares, of a personal history that includes a horrifying attack, at 13, by Vancouver’s Paperbag Rapist. “I find that a precious term…. Holocaust survivors, that’s one thing, And I think that’s where the term should stop. And genocides like the Indigenous one. And slavery.”

“Otherwise words become devalued.” Needless to say, in the current sexually polarized environment, Aguirre’s are views that can raise hackles.”I don’t mind!” she says energetically. “I know who my friends are!”

Broken Tailbone runs tonight at 7 and 10:45 p.m. in the Studio Theatre at the ATB Financial Arts Barns. Check out chinookseries.ca for tickets and a full schedule. 

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The sense of connection: Paradise at the Chinook Series

Posted on February 9, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Paradise, Gwaandak Theatre and MT Space. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In 1992, Patti Flather’s father, a family doctor, was murdered outside his North Vancouver home — shot by a former patient with an undiagnosed mental illness.

Reflections on that traumatizing event eventually found their way into Paradise, the 2015 Flather play that opened Azimuth Theatre’s Expanse Festival — and the third annual incarnation of the Chinook Series — Thursday and resumes tonight. “I stopped and started,” says the playwright of this painfully jagged personal channel from life to art. “Writing’s how I deal with things…. I was trying to transcend the personal, expand the scope, tell a wider story that connects with people.” 

Flather is  the artistic director of Whitehorse’s Gwaandak Theatre — the Yukon’s only “Indigenous-centred theatre company,” named for the Gwich’in language word for “storyteller.” And her play explores “human rights, mental illness, addiction, and our own complicity in those issues that surround us daily,” as she says. Originally a journalist before her playwriting career took off, Flather was interested, too, in “Canada’s role in enabling torture overseas, (the question of) who we see as a threat….”

A family doctor and his daughter, a patient who’s an unemployed logger on workers compensation, and a young man under suspicion of terrorism: they intersect in a play that loops together multiple storylines. Says Flather, “In every era, in every size of community, in every system, we need connections; we need our sense of humanity.”

The co-production that arrives at Chinook is a cross-country artistic collaboration in every way. As Flather explains, it was while Gwaandak was touring Cafe Daughter (by the award-winning Cree playwright Kenneth T. Williams) across the country, that the relationship with MT Space began. Based in the Waterloo region of southern Ontario, Majdi Bou-Matar’s multi-cultural company specializes in physical theatre, as Edmonton audiences know from such productions as The Last 15 Seconds and Body 13. 

So the two companies had a kind of complementary contrast. Says Flather, “it was a leap on both our parts, this marriage of text and imagery with the distinct physicality of MT Space.” It’s a co-production that lends itself particularly well to the physical eloquence of ASL interpretation for the deaf. Flather is excited by the prospect.

“The four actors have very different backgrounds,” says Flather of the Paradise cast assembled from across the country. Pam Patel and Nicholas Cumming work often with MT Space; so did Michael Peng, before he moved to Edmonton. Aldrin Bundoc is Toronto-based. Set designer David Skelton is from Whitehorse. Stage manage; technical director Julie Ferguson is technical director.

“It might take a few minutes to figure out what’s happening,” says Flather cheerfully of a play not weighted down by exposition. “But hang in there! It’s a really exciting and intense show to watch.”

In addition to tonight’s performance of Paradise (8:45 p.m. in the Westbury Theatre), Flather reads excerpts from Paradise, as well as her previous plays: West Edmonton Mall (surely a natural for an Edmonton production), Where The River Meets The Sea, and Sixty Below. The reading happens today at noon in the ATB Financial Arts Barns lobby.

The Chinook Series continues through Feb. 18, with many shows, salons, workshops at the ATB Financial Arts Barns. Consult chinookseries.ca for a full schedule.

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Feel the breeze: Chinook blows through with cutting-edge live theatre

Posted on February 8, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Femme Fatales, Expanse Movement Arts Festival at Chinook Series. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Chinook: finally, the moment in the deep midwinter when “cutting edge” doesn’t refer to the wind chill factor. 

Edmonton’s international multidisciplinary performance series blows through the winter theatre season again starting tonight. For this third annual edition, three adventurous Edmonton performing arts companies pool their creative connections in a warming two-week showcase of innovative contemporary boundary-busting work from here, across the country, and beyond.

Chinook breezes into town at the intersection of Workshop West Playwrights Theatre’s Canoe Festival, Azimuth Theatre’s Expanse Movement Arts Festival, and Fringe Theatre Adventures … well, if you don’t know which go-big-or-go-home summer festival belongs to the latter, you must be a career hermit. Sound Off: A Deaf Theatre Festival (the nation’s first and only) and Black Arts Matter (BAM!, devoted to nurturing and showcasing the talents of black artists) are Chinook partners, too, each with a performance roster of their own.

The result of this talent convention is five distinct performance “streams,” each curated by a different company, each with its own line-up of offerings. And they happen under one roof, the Fringe’s TransAlta Arts Barns, “in all our theatres and everything in between,” as the Fringe’s Murray Utas puts it.

When you show up in the Arts Barns lobby any night through Feb. 18, “you’re walking into an animated space,” Utas says. Between shows, “there’s a surprise around every corner..… The idea is to excite, engage the audience. You can never predict what you’ll see, but hang around for the evening, and we’ll talk to you about it!” Naturally, there’s a bar.

Niuboi (Julie Ferguson) in Antiquation. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography 2017

There are 5:30 p.m. lobby “salons,” where you can meet up with  artists talking about their work and the culture. There are workshops and play readings. Before and between shows (Thursday through Saturday, both weekends), you’ll run into Antiquation, an installation created by and starring Niuboi. Or The Lobbyists, a roving group of four emerging theatre/dance artists assembled by Expanse’s outreach co-ordinatorAmber Borotsik.

“What they do is part-performance part-installation,” explains Azimuth’s new co-artistic director Kristi Hansen. “They’ve been working with muralist/ graffiti artist AJA Louden. Some of this dance/art melange is scripted, some improvised. 

In addition to the venue, the infrastructure, and the festival know-how, Fringe Theatre Adventures brings the show that promises to be Chinook’s weirdest (note from Utas: “I’ve always liked weird! It’s me!”).

The Unrepentant Necrophile, The Coldharts. Photo by Dan Norman.

The Unrepentant Necrophile, “a punk rock musical based on true events!” as Utas says, is the work of The Coldharts, the inventive Brooklyn company who brought Fringe audiences such strange and inspired pieces as Edgar Allan and The Legend of White Woman Creek. In their latest, inspired by a bizarre 1970s California court case, a mortician fall in love with a corpse. This time The Coldharts’ Katie Hartman and Nick Ryan are joined by a third performer, drummer Nathan Gebhard.

Workshop West’s Canoe Festival goes Latinx this year at Chinook. There will be no resisting the Spanish flavour: in Broken Tailbone, playwright/ activist/ performer Carmen Aguirre arrives from Vancouver with DJ Don Pedro with a show that’s a salsa dance lesson, interspersed with her pungent, funny, sometimes touching personal stories about the Latin American dance halls in this country. Yes, my friends, you will not be in the usual theatre-watching position, i.e. on your butt. You’ll be up on your feet.

Carmen Aguirre in Broken Tailbone, Nightswimming Theatre. Photo supplied

And on Saturday night, Canoe is throwing a Latinx dance party, Fiesta Y Resistencia, “with Spanish food and a lot of local dance acts,” says Workshop West’s Vern Thiessen. More about Broken Tailbone in another 12thnight.ca posting. 

“I really wanted to appeal to the Spanish-speaking part of the city,” he says. “And besides,” Thiessen laughs, “I was going for Fun and Entertaining, avoiding the super-deep and emotionally harrowing” that’s his more usual theatrical playground. 

The New York theatre artist Jody Christopherson, whom Thiessen had met, off and on, during his six years in the Big Apple, is bringing her solo show AMP. 

Jody Christopherson in AMP. Photo supplied.

Christopherson, who’s never before been to Canada, did a run of the show in December at the Here Arts Center, a hip downtown off-off-Broadway New York venue. “She has a lot of cred…. I loved the idea of the birth of animal magnetism and electro-shock therapy on stage. And doing a show about monsters…. There aren’t enough monsters onstage!” he says of a multi-media show that embraces Frankenstein, Prometheus, the Shelleys.”

Additionally, Workshop West’s Canoe Festival is partnering with Sound Off to bring Maximime: To Clown Or Not To Clown! to the Chinook Series. This solo physical comedy is the creation of Maxim Fomitchev, a deaf Cirque du Soleil performer who arrives from Las Vegas.

Azimuth’s Expanse premieres a new boundary-crossing piece of physical theatre by a star Canadian dancer/choreographer/creator who’s world-renowned for his originality in “fusing traditional Indigenous dance to contemporary forms, including hip hop, Latin, Pow-wow, hoop dancing,” as Hansen explains. He’s Arik Pipestem, a Calgary-based member of the Tsu’Tina First Nation who has the Cirque du Soleil and So You Think You Can Dance Canada on his resumé.

Hole in the Sky. Photo supplied

His new piece Hole in the Sky, produced by Hunter Cardinal and Naheyawin (a communications strategy company), physicalizes a Cree narrative about Star Woman, a creature of light who emerges from the sky into our reality spreading enlightenment.

Expanse also includes Paradise, a collaboration between Whitehorse’s Gwaandak Theatre (the Yukon’s only “Indigenous-centred theatre) and physically inventive MT Space (from Kitchener-Waterloo). It launches the Chinook Series Thursday.

The four-actor play is a marriage of high-contrast styles, the verbal and the physical. It’s by veteran playwright Patti Flather, Gwaandak’s artistic director and co-founder, and directed by Majdi Bou-Matar of the multi-cultural MT Space. And, as billed, it’s a collision between “an unemployed logger, a young man accused of terrorism, a family doctor and his daughter.” More about Paradise in another 12thnight.ca posting.

“Our own entry point has been theatre,” says Hansen, alluding to the fact that she and Sabourin, newly arrived at Azimuth and Expanse, are co-founders of the Edmonton indie company The Maggie Tree. “The entry point of Expanse is the body, the exploration of the body in motion.”

Coast to Coast, curated by Edmonton’s Good Women Dance, showcases a trio of pieces from artists across the country. It includes the premiere of I Can’t Sit Still, an exploration of our fractured-focus lives by Edmonton’s Katherine Semchuk, recipient of the 2017 Good Women Dance New Work Award.

Coast to Coast also includes Femme Fatales, the first full-length piece by award-winning Vancouver choreographer/ dancer Meredith Kalaman, and heart-work, a solo piece by Toronto-based Sahara Morimoto created during a residency in Berlin.

Many of the shows, salon discussions, and workshops have ASL signing. Says Thiessen, “I think now we’re the most inclusive festival in the country for the hard of hearing.”

The festivities are book-ended by Indigenous and black creativity. After invocations by Indigenous Elders, Black Arts Matter (BAM!) is devising the multi-disciplinary opening performance tonight, to the Afro-fusion sounds of MelAfrique. After that, you must explore as the Chinook wind carries you.  

PREVIEW

Chinook Series

Theatres: Fringe Theatre Adventures, Azimuth Theatre, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, Black Arts Matter, Sound Off: A Deaf Theatre Festival

Where: TransAlta Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Feb. 18

Tickets and full schedule: chinookseries.ca, 780-409-1910, tickets.fringetheatre.ca

 

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“Reimagining” the Citadel: Daryl Cloran announces a new season

Posted on February 5, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran. Photo: Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Reimagine” is the rallying cry at Edmonton’s largest playhouse as it turns 53 next season.

Artistic director Daryl Cloran unveiled the upcoming Citadel season, the second he’s fashioned for the company, in the Club cabaret Monday night. It includes two of the theatre world’s hot contemporary musicals and a Pulitzer Prize-winning drama — in addition to innovative partnerships that pair international collaborators with local artists and Canadian indie theatres, a diversity of cultural voices and lenses, and an experiment in live/digital theatrical storytelling.       

Reimagine, that much-frayed term, might fairly be applied to a season with two world premieres that are Canadian,  interconnected, and happen simultaneously on two adjacent Citadel stages — with the same cast: CanCon at its most frenetic. And this: of six mainstage productions five are directed by women.

Hot young Toronto playwright/director Kat Sandler whose resumé includes half a dozen hits (her most recent play Bang Bang premiered last week at Factory Theatre), is the author of The Candidate and The Party, premiering simultaneously on the Maclab stage and in the Club next season, the one a “subscription” show and the other an “add-on.”

“One of the things the Citadel has is spaces,” says Cloran, who will co-direct both shows with the playwright. The idea was his, an inspiration he credits to Alan Ayckbourn’s 1999 House and Garden in which two linked plays happen at the same time in two different theatres, with the cast running back and forth.

The link between the two new Canadian plays has contemporary political traction, says Cloran, who describes Sandler as a “smart, sassy, irreverent intelligent voice.” The Candidate is set on the eve of an election, a scandal erupts, the candidate is forced into damage control mode. The Party happens nine months earlier, at a fund-raising bash: “three nominees are going for the ticket, and the scandal is set in motion,” as Cloran explains. 

“The Maclab play is a bigger, door-slamming farce situation,” says Cloran. In the Club, “it’s an immersive experience; the audience are guests at the party.” 

“They’re stand-alone,” says Cloran of the sibling pieces. “But the big win is when you see both; the fun of it lives in that high-energy situation. It embraces the live quality of live theatre; the ‘we’re all in this together’…. I want to show us taking a leadership role in risk-taking.” Not least in death-defying backstage traffic: Cloran says the term “zany” does not go amiss, as demonstrated at Monday’s season launch by the extremely fit actor Farren Timoteo.

The season’s “big musical” is not without extreme complications, too. And it has a title character who’s a veritable poster-child for re-imagining. “Nobody but me is gonna change my story,” sings Matilda in the multi-award-winning musical of that name spun from the deliciously subversive Roald Dahl novel. Matilda stars a prodigious, much put-upon eight-year-old heroine who rises to resistance against terrible odds. “I cannot get through that show without crying,” beams Cloran. “It’s so funny and just so hopeful; she’s such a hero, just so willing to fight against everything to change her story….”

Cloran’s production is a collaboration between the Citadel, Vancouver’s Arts Club, and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. The cast of 20 includes 11 adults and nine kids; of the latter all except the Matilda will be re-cast locally in all three cities. Choreography is by actor/director Kimberley Rampersad, whose most recent credits are at the Shaw Festival.

Redpatch, created by Raes Calvert and Sean Harris Oliver of Vancouver’s Hardline Theatre, changes the optic on a story we know. “We look at World War I through the eyes of an Indigenous storyteller,” says Cloran. In this hit production, a collaboration between Hardline, the Citadel and the Arts Club timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Great War (the last show is on Remembrance Day), “a cast of six Indigenous actors tell the story in “a really beautiful, heartfelt fusion of text and movement.” Cloran compares it to this season’s Ubuntu in its storytelling mode.

The season launches with a production of Once, the soulful little 2011 musical about the redemptive powers of music that playwright Enda Walsh and its two original stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova adapted from the award-winning 2007 indie film. “Great music and a great contemporary love story,” says Cloran of a musical which (like Hadestown) started small at New York Theatre Workshop. The actors, 12 in number, play their own instruments onstage, a knotty challenge in casting. Winnipeg-based Ann Hodges directs.

Sweat, the 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama by the star American playwright Lynn Nottage (Intimate Apparel), is set in a bar in dying Rust Belt factory town in Pennsylvania — with all the attendant economic, social, racial stress fractures. “But it’s easy to see the parallels here,” says Cloran of its “smart, strong, contemporary storytelling.”

“In a story about people who depend on an an industry; what do you do when it goes down?” Loyalty and friendship are tested; racial struggles ensue. Says Cloran, the success this season of Stephen Karam’s tense and escalating family drama The Humans, which “sold better than we’d hoped for,” indicates “an appetite for great drama here.” 

Directed by Calgary-based Valerie Planche, Sweat is a collaboration with the Vancouver Arts Club, whose new artistic director Ashlie Corcoran is currently at the Citadel rehearsing her production of Mamma Mia!.

Shakespeare, who started this current season with writer’s block (Shakespeare in Love) gets to be part of the 2018-2019 season at the Citadel — in reimagined form. The play is his late romance The Tempest, a strange tale full of magical interventions. And for the Citadel/ Banff Professional Program production, Cloran has enlisted the English director Josette Bushell-Mingo, who runs Tyst Teater, Sweden’s National Deaf Theatre.

Deaf and hearing actors, participants in the Citadel/Banff Professional Program, will mingle in a show that mixes spoken language and ASL sign language. (Prospero’s daughter Miranda will be deaf). Digital media is included, too, courtesy of Mammoth VR,  a Calgary company devoted to virtual and augmented reality experiments. “There’s lots of room for us to play,” says Cloran. “If we’re going to do a classic, I want to turn the classic on its head.”

The new director of the Citadel/Banff Program is Ravi Jain, whose Toronto company Why Not Theatre is exceptionally well connected internationally. And the project is partnering, as well, with Edmonton-based Sound Off, the country’s first national deaf festival founded by Chris Dodd (currently in preparation for this year’s upcoming Chinook Series).

The season contains not one but two seasonal offerings. One is the 19th annual reappearance of Tom Wood’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol, a veritable civic institution by now. Overlapping, as a subscription offering, is Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, a contemporary sequel of sorts to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice by the West Coast American team of Lauren Gunderson (“the most produced playwright in America,” says Cloran) and Margot Melcon.

The Miss Bennet in question is the one you never think of. Bookish, forgotten  Mary finally gets an awkward love story of her own, in a play that, says Cloran, references the period in costumes and setting, but with “a great, fun contemporary sensibility.” Edmonton’s Nancy McAlear directs a cast of eight. “That’s part of our job here, making opportunities for great Edmonton artists,” says Cloran.   

Full programming for the Beyond The Stage presentation series awaits. But Monday’s launch revealed two productions. Nassim, by the Iranian playwright Nassim, of White Rabbit, Red Rabbit fame, will be here in person for a show of uniquely impromptu stripe, “a duet about language and culture,” as Cloran puts it.

The actors, a different one every night, look up at a screen, and performs a script they’ve never seen. The pages are turned by a pair of hands; they belong to the playwright himself, backstage and then on-.

A year from now, Slight of Hand, an original ambulatory theatre piece by the site-specific Edmonton company Theatre Yes (Anxiety, The Elevator Project) takes audiences through the Citadel, “everywhere except the theatres,” says Cloran. “We wanted to get behind an excellent Edmonton company and let them animate our spaces.”

THE SEASON AT A GLANCE

Once the musical, directed by Ann Hodges (Sept. 22 to Oct. 14)

Redpatch (with Vancouver Arts Club and Hardline Theatre), directed by Sean Harris Oliver (Nov. 1 to 11))

Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, directed by Nancy McAlear (Nov. 18 to Dec. 9)

A Christmas Carol, directed by Wayne Paquette (Nov. 30 to Dec. 23)

Sweat (with Vancouver Arts Club Theatre), directed by Valerie Planche (Jan. 12 to Feb. 2, 2019)

Matilda (with Vancouver Arts Club Theatre and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre), directed by Daryl Cloran (Feb. 16 to March 17, 2019)

The Candidate, directed by Daryl Cloran and Kat Sandler (March 30 to April 21, 2019)

The Party, directed by Daryl Cloran and Kat Sandler (March 30 to April 21, 2019)

The Tempest, directed by Josette Bushell-Mingo (April 20 to May 12, 2019)

 

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When you meet a grizzly…. Matthew MacKenzie’s Bears

Posted on February 4, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Christine Sokaymoh Frederick (standing) and Sheldon Elter in Bears. Photo by Alexis McKeown

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If you run into a grizzly, keep the following in mind: They have an aversion to authority. They never back down. And there’s no use playing dead.

“There’s no such thing as neutral in the bear world,” the sassy eight-member chorus of Bears tells us near the outset about their muscular stand-up protagonist Floyd

In the theatre world, Matthew MacKenzie’s spirited, highly imaginative “dark multi-media comedy about the Kinder Morgan pipeline” — now, like Floyd, headed west on a journey to the Pacific — is a veritable bear of a play. You just can’t come up against Bears and play dead.

I saw Bears first in 2015, when the pipeline was the Northern Gateway.  Seeing it this weekend in a new version directed by the playwright (for Punctuate! Theatre and Alberta Aboriginal Performing Arts), I was struck again by its rarity. Bears is as non-neutral a sighting in these parts as a crocus popping out of the snow on Groundhog’s Day in Edmonton, to invoke a simile Floyd might have used (if his standard in similes dropped a few notches). 

MacKenzie’s play, which had a brief run this weekend before the westward tour continues, is about this place now, it’s politically feisty, it’s rhapsodic in its own weird way. And it’s got its own quirky sense of humour too, exercised both in the poetic text and the multi-media resources it brings to bear on setting it forth on the stage. It’s a strange and beguiling combo, especially since Bears is also a chase (exeunt pursued by police and oil industry hit-men). How often do see a multi-media production that is amused by multi-media theatre? Without losing the magic of it?

It starts by running with the Indigenous sense of a sacred harmony with Nature, a vision of man in the natural world. Floyd, a Métis oil patch worker who’s a prime suspect in a “workplace accident,” is in flight through the wilds of Alberta and B.C. As his journey through wilderness proceeds along the route of the Kinder Morgan pipeline through the Rockies, the Fraser Valley and on to the Pacific, hunted by the RCMP and armed company enforcers, he is becoming the natural creature with whom he most identifies: a grizzly.

It’s hard to see how this would work without the charismatic  Sheldon Elter as the fierce but pure-hearted Floyd. Both verbally and physically he’s big and compelling, chronicling his experience in the third person while he’s participating in it. Floyd’s cubhood memory bank is tied to images of his mother. And in the person of Christine Sokaymoh Frederick (artistic director of Alberta Aboriginal Performing Arts), she’s a dream-like onstage witness (and occasional commentator) to every near-fatal collision with the Mounties, or whitewater, or tailings pond, or avalanche.

The shimmering scenic world created by T. Erin Gruber, an expert in video and projection technology, is glow-in-the-dar. It invokes mountains and glaciers, the Northern Lights, dappled alpine meadows, the starry firmament. It’s populated by the chorus of dancers, and the inventive and witty choreography of Monica Dottor. They’re flowers and trees; they’re bees and chickadees, herds of bison, prairie dogs, otters, killer whales, salmon, elk and butterflies: Floyd has friends in high and low places in the wilderness (and a minus quantity in the city).

The players, mostly Indigenous, are as lyrical in movement as they’re sassy in their verbal annotations. A grouse couple change their minds about getting it on: “Nothing kills a mood like a fucking clear-cut,” notes the chorus.

And there’s even an erotic pas de deux  — Dottor’s choreography is enchanting — when Floyd meets his first grizzly friend (Gianna Vacirca).

The play doesn’t sidle up to, or tiptoe around, the environmental argument. It gets mad and steps up boldly, crashing through oil company assumptions and rhetoric like Floyd through a cedar forest. 

The irreplaceable beauty and bounty of the land is what Bears conjures, in sight and sound, movement, music (Noor Dean Musani), and MacKenzie’s funny prose/poetry. Pipelines put Nature at risk. The stakes are high and Bears is about the stakes. 

 

 

 

 

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Remembering dad: Empire of the Son is an artful memoir of a tempestuous father-son relationship. A review

Posted on February 2, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Tetsuro Shigematsu in Empire of the Son. Photo by: Raymond Shum

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“For a long time I did not like my father,” says the puckish, elegantly moustached figure before us in Empire of the Son.

Like? Hmmm.… Who among us hasn’t felt the disconcerting ripple of a thought like that stirring up the grit in the memory pool?

Tetsuro Shigematsu’s funny, heartfelt, and artful solo memoir, arriving in a touring production from Vancouver Canadian Asian Theatre, conjures not one man, but two. They are from two generations separated not just by age but by culture — and the time-rubbed frictions between the old world and the new.

Empire of the Son former CBC public broadcaster Shigematsu has created a double portrait of a father and son who can each easily communicate to the world at large by radio, but resist being in the same frame up close in family life.

It’s set forth onstage in a fascinating jangle of sound and sound clips, ingenious theatrical devices, anecdotes, projected images and family photos, and video. In the process of conjuring his late father from beyond the grave, the son, agile and quick-witted, offers an insight into a culture where gender has a kind of formal stage presence  and age has a kind of authority that’s gotten pretty frayed in this part of the world.

Tetsuro Shigematsu in Empire of the Son. Photo by Raymond Shum.

The younger Shigematsu describes his father Akira (Mr. Shigematsu to you, if you please) as “a mountain, a force of nature, a waterfall.” Later in his show, when Shigematsu interviews his elderly dad, Shigematsu says “my questions were the Rockies” and his father’s answers were “long prairies of silence.”

As a boy growing up in Japan Shigematsu’s father had witnessed the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima. His father’s reaction to his son’s question about that seminal end-of-the-world moment in history is revealing, the son tells us with the endearing wryness that, along with bemused exasperation, is one of the keynotes of the show. He hadn’t been feeling very well, the father had allowed; he attributed it to food poisoning. Now, that’s reserve.

The curious, but telling, parallels in the career paths of father and son are one of the striking signifiers in a show that’s about communicating across great divides of reticence and notions of what’s seemly for males. And there’s something a little breath-taking about actually seeing the real-life object that for a long time was the only link between father and son: a radio microphone.

The father, a die-hard anglophile, had left Japan for England, and a job with the BBC Foreign Service. Later, in Canada, his broadcaster’s job at CBC was the victim of cuts, and he ended his career in the mailroom, troubled by “the lack of silence” and blocking out chatter with a pair of big yellow headphones.

So, a microphone and noise-blocking headphones: they’re the show-and-tell axes of the show. In Richard Wolfe’s production Shigematsu stands at a long table, and uses a sliding camera, and miniatures that are projected on the screen behind him, counterpointed with photos from the family album. I loved the scene where he leans over, and blows on a straw to send an origami boat across water, an image of emigration into the great unknown. In a charmer of another scene, his own fingers stand in for father and son, in a replay of an old argument about skateboarding.

That kind of low-tech theatrical wit, in synch with the lovely Japanese-style screens of Pam Johnson’s design, is the right kind of playground for a performer like Shigematsu.

Tetsuro Shigematsu in Empire of the Son. Photo by Raymond Shum.

A veteran broadcaster who’s used to storytelling using only his voice, he sometimes overplays that skill in moments that seem a little “written and rehearsed.” But the man of radio gets to borrow, and rather effortlessly, the rationale lacking in many solo shows — i.e. why on earth is the person onstage spilling the contents of his memory to a bunch of strangers? Radio performers do that all the time. Empire of the Son scarcely needs the dramatic framework of a man working himself up to cry as a dress rehearsal for his father’s funeral.

What does work, wonderfully well, is the fragmentation of multiple stories between three generations. That texture has an impulsive, free-associative quality that’s very compelling. It’s the way memory works after all. And reflections about life, love, and death have a cumulative composition and impact: the more elliptical path is the surest one.

In the end Shigematsu lets the tears be ours. We laugh our way towards them. 

REVIEW

Empire of the Son

Theatre: Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre

Created and performed by: Tetsuro Shigematsu

Where: Citadel Club

Running: through Feb. 18

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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A wealth of choices on Edmonton stages this weekend (the groundhog needs to get out more)

Posted on February 2, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

HMS Pinafore, Edmonton Opera.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The existentialists were right. Our real problem, ladies and gentlemen, isn’t hypothermia. It’s choice. There’s a wealth of possibilities on Edmonton stages: consider the weekend possibilities. 

•“Now give three cheers and one cheer more for the well-bred captain of the Pinafore….” The class system in all its snobbery gets a razzing in the ineffable Gilbert and Sullivan musical satire HMS Pinafore. The jaunty 1878 operetta gets infiltrated by the Jazz Age in Edmonton Opera’s new production, opening Saturday on the Jube stage.

The idea of setting it on a ‘20s luxury liner (and jazzing up the score to match) belongs to EO general director Tim Yakimec who says “we could have used the Queen Mary, but instead we built our own!”

Glenn Nelson as Sir Joseph Porter in HMS Pinafore, Edmonton Opera.

Rob Herriot’s production pilfers favourite actors from Edmonton theatre. Actor/ director Glenn Nelson plays Sir Joseph Porter, the landlubber Admiral who arrives everywhere trailing a posse of “his sisters and his cousins and his aunts.” Actor/ playwright/ cabaret artist/ TV host  Bridget Ryan plays blowsy, warm-hearted Little Buttercup, possessor of a big voice and a deep dark secret essential to the plot.

You’ll also see Ryan Parker, a charismatic Teatro La Quindicina fave, as the Boatswain. The Plain Janes’ Jason Hardwick, who’s in that company’s upcoming musical Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, choreographs. And the assistant director is Teatro star Farren Timoteo, whose solo show Made In Italy ran in the Citadel Club last season.

HMS Pinafore runs Saturday, plus Feb. 6 and 9. Tickets: tickets.edmontonopera.com. 

Flying Canoë Volant at La Cité francophone. Photo supplied

 •The French Quarter knows how to throw a bash. For six years Flying Canoë Volant has been inviting Edmontonians by the thousands (over 35,000 at last count), to redeem winter, and celebrate our three founding cultures, First Nations, Métis, and French-Canadian.

You can follow the trail of light installations through the Mill Creek Ravine, stop in at the Trapper’s Cabin to hear tales; you can dance and drum at the Indigenous Base Camp. dancing and listening to stories. You can ascend to the hospitality of the elegant French cultural centre, La Cité francophone, listen to bands, explore an art and film installation, listen to music both traditional and contemporary, dance your boots off, visit an ice bar on the patio. You can party indoors and out-, in a mixture of languages, with a mixture of drinks.

It happens Friday and Saturday — 6 to 10 p.m. in the ravine, 6 to midnight at La Cité francophone, 6 to 10 p.m. at Rutherford School across the street. And it’s free.

Love and Information, MacEwan University theatre arts. Photo supplied

•MacEwan University launches its new 150-seat black box Theatre Lab in Allard Hall with a production of Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information, a witty and insightful barrage of some 57 fleeting staccato plays. Dave Horak, of Edmonton Actors Theatre, directs the student production which runs in the new space through Feb. 10. Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca).     

•Hey Ladies! salutes Groundhog’s Day Friday night, in its usual unclassifiable swirl of music, chatter, home entertainment tips, and booze. Your only choice here isn’t whether there’s six more weeks of winter (not possible, surely) or early spring. Co-hosts Davina Stewart, Cathleen Rootsaert and Leona Brausen are joined by  special guests s Dr. Auntie Dote (aka Heather D. Swain), visual artist Dallas LaRose, and The Flashback Band (with 15-year-old Elvis, Jaedyn Pilon). 

•Saturday night, artiste extraordinaire Patricia Zentilli continues her series of themed cabarets,  PattyZee@TheRoxy, with A Joyful Evening Of Sad Songs. She culls from the best: the contemporary musical theatre repertoire, Leonard Cohen, Ben Folds, Dolly Parton, Billy Joel…. In this musical sampling she’s joined by fellow cast members from the upcoming Citadel production of Mamma Mia! (Jenni Burke, Tess Benger, and Melanie Piatocha).

And continuing:

Julien Arnold, Aimée Beaudoin, Reed McColm in Slumberland Motel, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux Photography.

•At Shadow Theatre, Slumberland Motel, Collin Doyle’s funny and touching new comedy of middle-aged disappointment and terror (see 12thnight.ca review)

•At Citadel Theatre, Empire of the Son, a solo memoir of a tempestuous father/son relationship (see 12thnight.ca interview with creator/star Tetsuro Shigematsu).

•At Rubaboo Festival, the Punctuate!/ Alberta Aboriginal Performing Arts production of Matthew MacKenzie’s Bears (see 12thnight.ca interview with playwright MacKenzie) is at the Backstage Theatre (ATB Financial Arts Barns) through Saturday. The same forces present Christine Sokaymoh Frederick’s kids’ play Minosis Gathers Hope at the Backstage Saturday and Sunday. Tickets: 780-409-1910, fringetheatre.ca. 

   

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Her Mark: life on The Rock is harsh, beautiful, and poetic

Posted on February 1, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Matthew Lindholm, Linda Grass, Astrid Sparks, Lora Brovold in Her Mark, Whizgiggling Productions. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Every word I have spoken the wind has taken, as it will take me. As it will take my grandchildren’s children, their heads full of fragments and my face not among those.”

In his poem Her Mark, the celebrated Newfoundland writer Michael Crummey conjured his mysterious great-grandmother who vanished into the shadows of the past leaving nary a trace — save an X on a 1934 deed of property.

It’s that poem (from Crummey’s 1998 volume Hard Light), a moving elegy to what’s lost, that gives its name to the play opening Friday at the Orange Hall in Strathcona.

Her Mark is the work of Whizgiggling Productions, an Edmonton indie theatre devoted to work from or about Newfoundland (Salt Water Moon, The Best Little Newfoundland Christmas Pageant Ever), that atmospherically harsh and beautiful island stronghold in the north Atlantic. And the idea of fashioning a play, with characters and a storyline, from Crummey’s poems is the inspiration of Whizgiggling’s Cheryl Jameson and the playwright/ director/actor/designer Trevor Schmidt, artistic director of Northern Light Theatre.

Together they culled volumes of Crummey’s poems. And together they adapted his poems for the stage, in a play about Ellen Rose Crummey and her three daughters living a hard life on The Rock in the ’20s and ’30s. It was one of the sleeper hits of the 2014 Fringe.

“I liked the stories they told, and the strong character voices,” says Jameson of her attraction to Crummey’s poems as raw material for a piece of theatre with dimensional characters. The St. John’s theatre company Artistic Fraud, as she points out, has done three collaborations with Crummey’s poetry. “I like the way the poems reveal what it was to be a Newfoundlander back then, a living eulogy…. I like the way they’re not just monologues: they lend themselves to beautiful, dramatic storytelling.”

The course of history operates in a different time frame in Newfoundland. “My mother-in law’s family didn’t have electricity till she was 16,” says Jameson, a Westerner who lived in Newfoundland for four years, long enough to miss it when she left. “My father-in-law had to bring a stick of wood (his contribution to the heating) to school when he was a kid…. And these are people who’re just in their seventies.”

Her Mark has been re-imagined by Schmidt and Jameson for the revival in the moody, wood-lined confines of the historic Orange Hall. “I wanted it to feel like an old schoolhouse,” says Jameson.

And what was a chamber piece for four women and a violinist has been expanded. In the 2014 version, in which Jameson played the eldest of the sisters, “we talked about our brother.” This time we actually meet Hollis (Matthew Lindholm), via poems that reveal what Jameson calls “male narrative.” Gradually a Newfoundland family emerges, struggling to retain a precarious way of life.

Thanks to violinist Astrid Sparks, there’s flavourful music, “sometimes just four bars, sometimes whole songs,” as Jameson explains of a score that includes both accompanied and acapella numbers. In all, there are “probably 30 pieces or so, music and poems” in Her Mark, she thinks.

“Everyone gets at least three; sometimes a poem might be three lines (of speech), sometimes a whole page…. The language is so beautiful, they don’t have to be long.”

PREVIEW

Her Mark

Theatre: Whizgiggling Productions

Written by: Michael Crummey

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Linda Grass, Lora Brovold, Jayce McKenzie, Matthew Lindholm, Cheryl Jameson

Where: Orange Hall, 10335 84 Ave.

Running: Friday through Feb. 10

Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca)

 

 

 

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