O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo? Kill Your Television returns with Shakespeare’s R&J

Posted on January 16, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Luc Tellier and Oscar Derkx (front); Corben Kushneryk and Braydon Dowler-Coltman (back), Kill Your Television Theatre. Photo by Lucas Boutilier.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Meet Daphne.”

A quartet of Edmonton’s hottest young actors, all in their early 20s, did the introductions last week at the end of a rehearsal day at the Roxy. Their director was amused. 

In the course of the tumultuous play-within-a-play that opens Thursday under the Kill Your Television banner, Daphne plays a part in violent brawls and erotically charged love scenes, moments of of self-discovery, of tragic revelation, of danger,  emotional conflagration….   

Daphne is a bolt of red cloth. And this star prop knows how to make an entrance on a bare stage: wrapped around a famous, forbidden text. 

In Shakespeare’s R&J, by the New York actor/playwright/screenwriter Joe Calarco (American Horror Story), four boys at an ultra-strict Catholic boys’ prep school meet after hours to do something verboten: they read Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s great early tragedy of young love thwarted and triumphant. And what starts as an act of rebellion becomes an act of brave commitment as they gradually, tentatively, get swept into re-enacting it, across gender lines. 

With the Kill Your Television production that features four rising stars of Edmonton theatre — Oscar Derkx, Luc Tellier, Braydon Dowler-Coltman and Corben Kushneryk — on one stage, the award-winning indie company, director Kevin Sutley, and producer Nathan Cuckow return to a play they did 16 years ago. Shakespeare’s R&J had started life in a tiny Lower East Side storefront in New York in 1997, then moved to a larger Off-Broadway theatre  — and stayed for more than a year.

(From top) Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Corben Kushneryk, Luc Teller, Oscar Derkx. Photo by Lucas Boutilier.

“It was only the second show we ever did,” says Sutley of the (Sterling Award-winning) production that followed KYT’s gritty debut, Eric Bogosian’s explosive examination of aimless youth, SubUrbia. “It was a great project for us! And we loved it….”

Perspectives on gender equality and sexuality haven’t remained static since 2002, of course. But repression and punitively enforced notions of gender and sexuality haven’t exactly vanished from the world, no matter how much we’d like to think otherwise. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you … Edmonton’s Catholic School Board, and its resistance to gay-straight alliances. 

Does Shakespeare’s R&J still have high stakes? Does it still feel topical and dangerous in 2018? Along with Sutley, the actors, three of whom are also up-and-coming directors, pause after rehearsal to consider those questions, and the whole notion of progress.

“I’m only 24 and I lived it,” shrugs Luc Tellier, who plays Student 2 who plays Juliet, as well as Romeo’s pal Benvolio. “I went to a Catholic high school; I came out while I was there.” A terrible experience? “Yeah. And I had allies and support, mostly through theatre. So I was in the privileged category. But others don’t have those resources.”

“People look at Romeo and Juliet. And they ask ‘who does that?’ Fall in love, and commit suicide?” Tellier, an artistic associate with Blarney Productions (he directed last summer’s production of Legoland), sighs. “Yeah, well, actually they do.”

Derkx, who plays the student who plays Romeo, points out, smiling, that he grew up in “one of the most progressive parts of the world, the little hippie haven of Nelson, B.C.,” And his family is about as liberal and leftie as they come. “I’ve always felt free to love who I wanted to love…. But I still felt the confines of masculinity, I’d say…. And it would have been a scarier, much more difficult path if I’d been attracted to men. I know that.”

“The character I play, who plays Romeo, is the rebel of the group, the one most at odds with the system the students find themselves in,” says Derkx. “He feels he’s missing out on the world. And on himself.”

Luc Tellier and Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Kill Your Television Theatre. Photo by Lucas Boutilier

“Like Oscar I grew up in an environment that wasn’t polarizing or confining,” says Dowler-Coltman, who plays the student who plays the fiery Mercutio as well as Lady Capulet and Friar Laurence. He comes from a blue-blood Edmonton theatre family (his parents and siblings work in theatre and film).

“It wasn’t prescriptive about how to think and feel. But from the outside I did see a lot of people struggling and hurting. … For me, this play is such a powerful acknowledgement of the realization that love is love; you love who you love,” says Dowler-Coltman who created and directed the experimental dance/theatre piece To Be Moved for last summer’s Fringe as well as appearing in Blarney’s A Quiet Place with Tellier. Edmonton audiences saw him most recently in Edmonton Actors Theatre’s Burning Bluebeard. 

“I’ve always joked about playing the Nurse,” grins Corben Kushneryk, whose burgeoning director’s career with the indie theatre Impossible Mongoose has led to such award-winning productions as The Fall of the House of Atreus and Prophecy (both by Jessy Ardern). Now he is. And along with the Nurse he plays as Student 4, he’s also playing Tybalt, the brash, aggressively macho member of the Capulet clan whose death lethally escalates the fatal feud with the Montagues. “The student I play is forced to dig in, and think about a woman’s experience, to unpack that,” says Kushneryk.

When you grow up “as a closeted football captain,” Kushneryk grins, opportunities to talk about love, much less express it, gay or straight, aren’t exactly thick upon the ground.

Interestingly, the students in the play are drawn to a 400-year-old classic love story set in a culture of hostilities — and not the sex and violence of a contemporary piece. “I feel like characters in contemporary writing hold back; there’s more subtext, more secrets,” Derkx muses. “In Shakespeare they’re fully open, fully honest. They’re talking how they’re feeling….”

Kushneryk says, with a smile, “Somehow, mysteriously, I got through high school and five years of conservatory acting training. And I’ve never studied this play! I thought I knew it. But it’s so much richer than I thought….”

The students’ attraction to Romeo and Juliet starts as a game: “there’s so much bawdy innuendo,” says Sutley, “so much testosterone….” And gradually, they’re drawn into the vortex where other discoveries get made. 

“I firmly believe,” says Tellier, “that the entry point is so accessible, so safe, that the lessons about love, the turmoil, sneak up on them and wrap all around them — without giving them time to think about it!” And hey, Daphne is there to support that notion in every way.  

Play-acting turns into something else more compelling. “I don’t feel I’m playing a woman. I feel I’m playing a lover,” Tellier says. “In its bones, this is a story about love, not gender. So much fun. And so satisfying!”

PREVIEW

Shakespeare’s R&J

Roxy Performance Series

Theatre: Kill Your Television

Directed by: Kevin Sutley

Starring: Oscar Derkx, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Corben Kushneryk, Luc Tellier

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

Running: through Jan. 28

Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca

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Did you hear the one about the two salesmen? Collin Doyle’s Slumberland Motel premieres, at Shadow

Posted on January 15, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I always seem to write old guys,” laughs playwright Collin Doyle. Now just into his 40s, Doyle wonders if he’s getting to be one. 

Doyle, whose keynote in conversation is a self-deprecating  blend of wry and rueful, is conjuring his younger self at a turning point  — the moment 11 years ago when, after four years, he’d finished writing Slumberland Motel, the award-winning Doyle comedy that finally gets its premiere Thursday, thanks to Shadow Theatre. 

“Maybe I was reflecting on being 29 and turning 30,” he muses. Doyle had already written The Mighty Carlins, a roistering black comedy of family dysfunction with a profane and vicious old patriarch at the centre. He’d shopped the script around to theatres here and elsewhere, and had the rejection letters to prove it.

They were nervous, he reports, that “the language was too harsh,” too peppered with F-bombs. Years would pass before the play premiered, in a 2008 Workshop West production in which John Wright memorably played the old guy. It was Doyle’s first professional production.

But even before that, he’d collaborated with friend and fellow actor James Hamilton on a play in which aging and the fear thereof thread through the fabric, like a radioactive dye through a vein. In Nighthawk Rules a couple of pals teetering on the brink of 30 are faced with the terrible prospect of growing up, getting dad jobs, and giving up all-night drinking contests and all-day football-watching marathons.

Meanwhile, “I wanted to write a comedy with no swear words,” as an experiment Doyle says simply, and sighs. Slumberland Motel was that play. “I thought I might as well submit it to the Alberta Playwriting Competition,” he says, with a shrug that’s almost audible. It won (just as The Mighty Carlins had two years before, in 2004). Everyone you talked to really liked it. No theatre stepped up. 

You can’t be a playwright in Alberta without resilience, patience and a well-developed sense of absurdity. And Doyle, “an actor who wanted to write” as he describes himself modestly, has all three. Did you hear the one about the playwright who waited 11 years for a theatre to produce his award-winning play?

“I put it away and went to NAIT,” to study TV and film. “I was interested in editing stories and video at the time,” he says. “I didn’t know I’d end up in production.”

For the last seven years when Doyle, a National Theatre School grad, isn’t in theatres, as an actor or a playwright, you could find him at Global Television, working his way up from prompter operator to production assistant; now he’s the control room director in the Global news department, workings shifts on the 6, 10 p.m. or late news broadcasts — a gig he compares to being a theatre stage manager.

Disappointment, says Doyle genially, is at the heart of Slumberland Motel, the first of two Doyle premieres in this half of the season. It’s the “friendly comedy” to the “much darker” Too Late To Stop Now, cheerfully described by the playwright as “a black comedy about alcoholism” that debuts in May in a Dave Horak production at Edmonton Actors Theatre.

The old guys” of Slumberland Motel (Reed McColm and Julien Arnold) are two itinerant vacuum cleaner salesmen, Ed and Edward, who get stuck in a snowstorm and find themselves sharing a shabby motel room on Christmas Eve. It’s 1972, and they are “no longer relevant,” as Doyle puts it.

“Vacuum cleaners used to be an easy sell. Now, not so much,” as Doyle says. “There must have been a time when they were special. Now everyone has one. A common household tool not a dream item any more. Not special.”

IPods, washing machines, dishwaters have all joined the ranks of the “not special,” the “not something you dream about having.” Selling them is a sort of cultural redundancy. They are a given. Poor Ed and Edward.

They’re a contrasting pair, as Doyle describes them. A sense of failure permeates Ed (McColm); Edward (Arnold), says his creator, is different. He “decides on reality and shapes his reality around him…. Which lets the play go in strange places, on positive flights of fancy.”

“The play’s a lot about failure.” Doyle laughs his rueful laugh. “There’s lots of physical comedy in it. There’s a kind of vaudeville about it.”

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

And, ah, there’s a connecting door to the next room. Arnold’s character Edward “is obsessed with it and what’s on the other side.” What, and as it turns out, who. The mysterious woman in the next room is crucial to the way the play unfolds in Act II.

I can’t tell you more, except to say that doors are big with Doyle. They might be locked, but they open. And change is possible. 

PREVIEW

Slumberland Motel 

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Collin Doyle

Starring: Julien Arnold, Reed McColm, Aimée Beaudoin

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Feb. 4

Tickets: 780-434-5564, shadowtheatre.org 

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In an uncertain world, The Humans takes us home for Thanksgiving dinner: a review of the Citadel/ Canadian Stage production

Posted on January 12, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Alana Hawley Purvis, Maralyn Ryan, Ric Reid, Laurie Paton, Sara Farb in The Humans, Citadel/ Canadian Stage. Photo by Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I wish you had more of a view,” says a mother to her irritated younger daughter in The Humans, surveying the alley from the sole window of a run-down duplex in lower Manhattan.

Later in Stephen Karam’s bleakly funny, heartbreakingly melancholy family drama — the 2016 Tony Award-winner getting its Canadian premiere in a tense, well-cast Citadel/Canadian Stage co-production directed by Jackie Maxwell — a father will reveal the recurring nightmare of his own darkening tunnel view.    

As the Blake family gathers for Thanksgiving dinner in the Chinatown digs of Brigid and her boyfriend Richard, every character (except the latter) will reveal a view of dwindling prospects. The last vestiges of the American Dream — the now-legendary one where hard work leads to happiness, progress, solvency — have soured a while ago. In its place? In a word, dread.

In its sneaky, slow-burn, cumulative way Karam’s play paints a group portrait of the stress-filled landscape of fear, anxiety, and disappointment where humans live now, in the post-911 world.

Deirdre (Laurie Paton) and Erik (Ric Reid), a working-class couple increasingly unable to make ends meet in their ‘60s, have driven into NYC for the holiday from Pennsylvania. With them is Eric’s mother Momo (Maralyn Ryan), high-maintenance now that she’s lost in the mapless world of dementia with its irrational outbursts and repetitions.

Richard Lee and Laurie Paton in The Humans, Richard Lee, Laurie Paton in The Humans, Citadel/Canadian Stage. Photo by Epic Photography.

Brigid (Sara Farb) is a budding composer, flailing in the slough of student loans, bartending under the table, unable to find a job in her field. But, hey, she has a new apartment and a great boyfriend (the cook for the occasion), and is up for celebrating both with her family.

Brigid’s older sister (Alana Hawley Purvis), a lawyer, has arrived from Philly and a year that has battered her with losses — her job, her true love, her health.

I wondered a bit about Judith Bowden’s design for this two-storey down-market Chinatown duplex, constantly referred to as dark. It seems almost suburban in its bright, clean, unclaustrophobic whiteness. Michael Walton’s lighting (and chilling lacks thereof) fully enters the narrative, though. And so does Matthew Skopyk’s unnerving sound design.

The Humans, Citadel/ Canadian Stage. Photo by Epic Photography

Where is security — physical and psychological —  to be found in a chilly world of aging, where dreams turn into nightmares and jobs, relationships, professional prospects, inheritances disappear into uncertainty? The Humans is about that. And it’s pretty scary, full of flickering lights, ominous sounds, and false assurances.   

What makes Karam’s play remarkable is the way something recognizable gives way to something more disturbingly mysterious. As the production directed by Maxwell sets forth in its 95-minute real-time span and believably prickly characters, a family dinner reunion drama with its texture of interruptions and overlapping fragments gives way at the seams to an unsettling sense of encroachment.

It’s a tricky shape, highly detailed, and it happens right before our eyes, in a space where everyone is visible simultaneously. And while I imagine that this production will gain ease in its rhythm of sudden family flare-ups and rapprochements — the overlaps occasionally seem laboured and planned — Maxwell’s well-chosen cast deliver characters who do feel related.

Anchoring this genuinely nerve-wracking experience — and upping the ante of course, as parents do — are Reid and Paton. The former, a wonderful actor as Citadel audiences have reason to know, is arrestingly fine as the Erik, increasingly frayed at the edges by his efforts to contain a dark secret and stave off fear (or is it despair?). He is a raw, nervous kinetic figure, in perpetual motion. As the play’s funniest character Deirdre, maddening and lovable, stumping for the idea of faith in a faithless world, Paton is terrific too.

The actors have to be, and are, a convincing ensemble. Under Maxwell’s direction they’re attentive to the intricate but natural surface of interruptions, a cross-hatched shorthand of hostility and warmth, aggravating repetitions, overheard bits and piece from which The Humans is built. Family life is all about recycling — grievances, riffs, obsessions, innuendoes, affectionate teases, mantras. When you’re with your relatives, the walls have ears, and it’s entirely possible that no one ever completes a sentence for the duration. 

Alana Hawley Purvis, Laurie Paton, Sara Farb in The Humans, Citadel/ Canadian Stage. Photo by Epic Photography.

As the two sisters, who live very different lives, Farb is the energetic, brittle one, struggling to land in her chosen field of musical composition, wounded by a grudging letter of reference, Hawley Purvis is the lawyer, teetering but still resourceful; she has a memorable telephone scene that will tear at your heart a little. 

As Richard, Richard Lee isn’t the older, more experienced boyfriend of the New York productions. Here, the character is boyish but game, a young man cushioned somewhat by a well-to-do family and aiming for the conciliatory note when caught between resentful Blake factions. He would seem to be no match for any of them, but rises to the occasion when cornered.

And as the incoherent prophet in this tumultuous world, Ryan is utterly compelling. “You can never go home!” she mumbles. And how right she is.

In the fearful world of diverse uncertainties, is family a comfort? Yes and no, says this disconcerting play, which contains both a kitchen sink and a very non-kitchen sink sense of dark, uncontrollable forces out there. “That’s a terrible key for me,” says Brigid, as the Blakes decide to sing their traditional family song for Thanksgiving and every festive occasion. It may be a terrible key but the singing counts for something.

REVIEW

The Humans

Theatre: Citadel/ Canadian Stage

Written by: Stephen Karam

Directed by: Jackie Maxwell

Starring: Ric Reid, Laurie Paton, Sara Farb, Alana Hawley Purvis, Richard Lee, Maralyn Ryan

Running: through January 27

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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At the Citadel, a new focus for developing new plays

Posted on January 12, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Playwright Belinda Cornish is part of the inaugural edition of The Lab. Photo supplied

The fun of a block party is the unpredictable  mix of people who live in proximity, get included, and show up to play.

Block Party is the nickname, and “community” the theme of the inaugural edition of The Lab, the 2017-2018 incarnation of the newly reworked new-play development program at Edmonton’s largest playhouse. In this Citadel Theatre initiative, four Edmonton playwrights, of widely diverse backgrounds and esthetic and formal persuasions, get seed money to create something new: Marty Chan, Belinda Cornish, Minister Faust, and Kenneth T. Williams.

“The idea,” says Rachel Peake, the Citadel’s new associate artistic director who’s in charge of the Lab, “is to foster the development of pieces specially designed for Citadel stages.” She explains that this focus represents a shift in vision from the Playwrights Forum of the last seven seasons led by Brian Dooley and Colleen Murphy.

“Their focus was on playwright development,” she says. And while many of the 19 new plays that hatched at the Forum went on to premieres elsewhere, few arrived on Citadel stages — largely because they were written “with smaller stages in mind,” as Peake puts it.

The Lab and its Accelerator program is a chance for playwrights “to imagine shows for larger stages. To dream bigger!” It’s the country’s smaller stages, after all, where most new Canadian plays premiere, with casts rarely numbering more than three or four. The Lab aims to change that. “We want to  make sure we see new Canadian plays on Canada’s big stages!”

Peake, who’s newly returned to her home town after 15 years in Vancouver, is renewing her acquaintance with Chan (Mom, Dad, I’m Living With A White Girl, The Forbidden Phoenix), who has written in a variety of forms for page, stage, screen and radio (and every age group). He plans to explore our burgeoning relationship with artificial intelligence.

Playwright (not to mention actor/ improviser, Bright Young Things artistic director) Cornish will apply her deft comic touch — evident in such tonally varied plays as Little Elephants and Category E — to adapting for the stage The Garneau Block by the notable Edmonton novelist Todd Babiak (Come Barbarians, Son of France, Choke Hold, Toby: A Man).

The multi-talented Minister Faust (Coyote Kings, The Alchemist of Kush) has proposed spinning “an immersive, augmented reality drama” from the narrative branches of the Leo Desroches murder mysteries by Edmonton writer Wayne Arthurson.

The award-winning Cree playwright Williams (Café Daughter, Thunderstick) will explore the growth and rejuvenation of language post colonization, in a family-friendly adventure story that uses clown and fantasy.

“We’re interested in, curious about, multi-disciplinary work, digital storytelling. And we’re encouraging our playwrights to tease out the possibilities,” says Peake of the mix of the traditional and the experimental. But we’re very flexible about it….” The Lab will operate under the mantra established by the Citadel’s new artistic director Daryl Cloran: “innovation, inclusive, international.”

“It’ll lead to a week-long exploration at the end of the season,” Peake says of an event that is purposely non-rigid and undefined. “No pressure to have a draft ready…. Call it a show and tell.”

“Our dream is to take (new play development) in a slightly new direction…. We’ll build on what we learn this year!”

 

 

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The terrors of family life: Jackie Maxwell directs The Humans at the Citadel

Posted on January 9, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Alana Hawley Purvis, Maralyn Ryan, Ric Reid, Laurie Paton, Sara Farb in The Humans, Citadel/ Canadian Stage. Photo by Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I thought I’d be settled by my age, but, man, it never ends…. Dontcha think it should cost less to be alive?”

Now there’s an open-ended question for the angsty existentialists among you. It’s put to a younger man by a 60-something father in the funny, heart-breaking, unnerving Tony Award-winner that opens Thursday on the Citadel mainstage. In The Humans, you’ll meet three generations-worth of disappointed people beset by every kind of pressure and secret — financial, marital, medical, romantic, professional. You guessed! They are a family.

And, in Stephen Karam’s acclaimed 2015 play, they are a family gathered (under one dubious roof) at one of the most stressful moments in the yearly calendar: Thanksgiving dinner. Those of you who have just pulled through another Christmas or Hanukkah dinner drama with your relatives, clutching the shredded remains of your secrets, will wince sympathetically at the struggles of the Blakes.

An America which promised much by way of  “getting ahead” has somehow become a darkening world where Erik and Deirdre, working-class and in their sixties, are losing ground. One daughter, the artist of the family, can’t make headway against her student loans; the other, lawyer, has a lost a partner, a job, and her health. Erik’s mother has slid into dementia and her own language. 

Director Jackie Maxwell. Photo supplied.

“A lot of anxiety!” says Jackie Maxwell, the distinguished director in charge of this Canadian premiere, a co-production with Toronto’s Canadian Stage that, amazingly, is the first time the former artistic director of the Shaw Festival has ever worked at the Citadel. “I take supernatural elements as a manifestation of anxiety….”  The “notion of family tradition” is, as Maxwell puts it, “part of the reason we do it; we need a kind of solace. The catch is that it’s with the very people who put you out of your mind.”

As the engaging Maxwell well knows from 14 seasons heading the mighty Shaw, 2002 to 2016,  the multi-course family dinner drama comes with its own built-in complications onstage. Food, for example. And in this department, The Humans might take the cake, so to speak (or, more precisely, the chard).

Like Tracy Letts’ family drama August: Osage County (where the issue of green bean casserole reduces a family dinner to chaos), The Humans happens on two levels, with the characters in full sight.

“It’s beautiful, the level of detail and depth in it,” Maxwell says happily of The Humans. “And technically, it’s been fascinating…. A 90-minute real-time piece of theatre. No blackouts, no escape, no jumping (in time). A two-storey duplex (run-down and in Manhattan’s Chinatown) with four playing areas, two upstairs two down. Every character has to have an absolutely complete narrative…. If there are four people downstairs having a scene, and two people upstairs, they are written to cross-connect.”

The Humans, Citadel/ Canadian Stage. Photo by Epic Photography

“OK, you have to say three of your lines, then you wait while four lines get said downstairs, before you say three more. In order to make it so you’re not just saying three lines and waiting, you have to have something to do, an action or a thought to keep you going till you say your next line…. Oh my god! The actors and I have ended every day going Oooooooh” (Maxwell shorthand for ‘my brain hurts’).

Meanwhile, the boyfriend of one of the play’s two grown-up daughters is preparing an entire turkey dinner. So, more challenges figuring out the stage logistics:  “OK OK OK have you served the sweet potato yet? No. OK, why don’t you hold on the sweet potato while this is happening over here?” Just guessing here, but in a long and eminent theatre career that began in Maxwell’s native Belfast, and crossed the Atlantic in 1978 “for love!” (her ex is star Canadian actor Benedict Campbell), The Humans might be the first time Maxwell has heard an actor talk about sweet potato preparation instead of his motivation.  

“Building Ragtime was easier than this,” sighs Maxwell, who directed that epic multi-generational American musical at Shaw in 2012. “‘Bring those 15 people over here’ is easier than ‘OK, you’ve eaten the appetizers, now’….” But Karam’s script is “incredibly meticulous,” Maxwell says. “He’s really worked it out…. Part of it is like a cooking show: how much has to be done onstage and how much can be pre-done?”

Who knew that chard could be as crucial in theatre as any line reading? “Richard Lee as the boyfriend has to spend the first 15 minutes onstage prepping. So he has to know how much to chop.” Maxwell, amused, permits herself a sigh.

The Maxwell story itself would make good coming-of-age theatre: it involves a feisty, self-educating protagonist who’s a quick study, in a foreign land. The little kid who acted onstage at the Lyric in Belfast (“some terrible play about the Irish famine”) and got a degree in drama in Manchester arrived in Canada age 21 as an actor because Campbell “had just been hired by John Wood at the National Arts Centre…. I talked my way into a job as John’s assistant, as one does (laughter). And it was a fabulous education: I became the resident assistant director, to Wood, John Hirsch, Jean Gascon…. I drank it up.”

“I love actors; I have huge respect for the single-mindedness of what they do. But I didn’t really have that as an actor.” Directing, with its “big-picture focus, and then its zoning in for specificity and detail” was a better fit for the new Canadian artist.

The other “seminal feature of the NAC,” she says, was playwright Sharon Pollock. Maxwell directed the second-ever production of Pollock’s seminal Lizzie Borden play Blood Relations. “She was wonderful. And completely terrifying.” And when Pollock asked Maxwell ‘what happens to new work here at the NAC?” and was confronted by a cupboard full of unread new plays collecting dust, Pollock was an instigator for a new workshop program led by Maxwell.

“Paul Gross, Gordon Pengilly … the writers all seemed to be from the West,” says Maxwell. “I became very interested in new Canadian work.”

Then came 12 years at Toronto’s Factory Theatre, devoted to the expanding the Canadian repertoire (“I stopped because I was burnt out, and I had two little kids”).

A passion for new work and … the Shaw Festival? As Maxwell points out, Christopher Newton’s parting gift as artistic director was to “open up the mandate.” A festival repertoire exclusively devoted to Shaw and his contemporaries would now embrace  contemporary plays about the era too. 

“And that’s what interested me, putting those plays side by side with Canadian plays, current Canadian writers: what would that conversation be?”

When Maxwell directed The Coronation Voyage by the Quebec playwright Michel Marc Bouchard at Shaw the year after she arrived, “on opening night I sat beside the first live writer ever to see their own show onstage at the Shaw Festival!” She’s proud of that.

“I believed in the company, in the intellectual rigour, the production values. But I wanted to introduce new Canadian work, work by women, more women directors: a female voice…. That first season I hired seven female directors; you’d have thought I’d unleashed a nuclear bomb.” 

She even discovered rarely produced female writers of the Victorian and Edwardian periods (Githa Sowerby’s Rutherford and Son for one). And as for adaptations, “the more reading I did, I realized that translations go very stale before the actual play does.” Maxwell was proactive. Morwyn Brebner, for example, made the 1929 Ferenc Molnar farce The President “really hop,” she says. Susan Coyne did a new translation of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters; Neil Munro tackled Ibsen’s fairly intractable Rosmersholm. And under her watch novels got adapted for the stage, too. “I kind of elasticized the mandate,” says Maxwell modestly.

Fourteen Shaw seasons were her exit cue, Maxwell decided. “I have a real belief that since all these jobs are huge, really you should think about how long you’re doing them…. I wanted to leave while I still felt great about it. My Irish mother said ‘always leave before they push ya out Jacqueline’.” Maxwell laughs. “The Shaw was firmly established in the 21st century…. I gave them two years notice.”

And now she’s restored to her true theatrical calling, directing. Is there anything she misses about her artistic director life in Niagara-on-the-Lake? “I miss the walks in the morning, by the Niagara River,” she says. “I miss the company, because I love so many of them. I do miss the creative building of it…. Sometimes I’m reading the New York Times and I think ‘o, that would be such an interesting play to do!’”

“But that’s really it. These jobs are SO huge now. So much fund-raising…. Sometimes you’d find yourself in a meeting about QEW or transport or passports. And you’d think ‘is this why I got into the business?’”

“One thing I do miss about Shaw is the ability to take a look at an interesting young artist and give them a chance, a boost.” We are harbouring a notable example:  the Citadel’s new artistic director Daryl Cloran. In her first season at Shaw, Maxwell had the young up-and-comer direct a lunchtime production of Brian Friel’s Afterlife. “It’s wonderful to be able to take chances on people,” Maxwell says. “People took chances on me.” 

Once Maxwell had left the festival (“it’s like having an enormous computer chip taken out of your head!”), it didn’t take long for the calls to start coming. She directed Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine at the Arena in Washington D.C., a play about America’s failure to recognize fascism that was festering before World War II. “We were there in D.C. at the time of the Inauguration,” she says. “Suddenly, the play was totally topical…. I’ve never been so glad to be Canadian.”

She’ll be back at the Arena next season, and teaching at the National Theatre School in Montreal in the fall. And she’ll be back at Stratford where she directed the lurid Jacobean revenge tragedy The Changeling this past season, a “play I love, in a kind of crazy, terrifying way….” This time it’s a new piece, Erin Shields’ in-progress stage adaptation of Paradise Lost.

Maxwell’s is a life on the road at the moment — “two suitcases and everything else in storage” — that will eventually turn into life in a Toronto apartment “when I have the time to be there.” Meanwhile, Maxwell finds herself, for the first time, working in Edmonton, immersed in a play about the darkening fearful landscape of contemporary America. “The week we started was the week the tax bill got passed in the U.S. What is it like to be lower or middle-class in America?”

“This is a play that really does get how families talk. … The level of familiarity is such that you can say things that sound very hurtful but are part of a (family) conversation that’s been going on for years. It’s fascinating to me. I can understand why it connects to people.”

The Humans

Theatre: Citadel/ Canadian Stage

Written by: Stephen Karam

Directed by: Jackie Maxwell

Starring: Ric Reid, Laurie Paton, Sara Farb, Alana Hawley Purvis, Maralyn Ryan, Richard Lee

Running: Thursday through Jan. 27

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

  

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12thnight goes to Twelfth Night: a review

Posted on January 7, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Twelfth Night, Malachite Theatre. Photo by bb collective photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Wonder and confusion, sadness and joy, thread their way through a comedy that’s always catching you a little off-guard, like the post-Christmas (hangover) season of the year itself. So in a way, the built-in contradictions of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night feel right at home in … a church.

And that’s where you’ll find Benjamin Blyth’s highly enjoyable Malachite Theatre production. It savours the contradictions: stained glass, walls lined with candles and wine bottles, Christmas trees everywhere and in every state of un-decoration including zero, at the altar and in the aisles. You can never quite figure out whether you’re outside or in-, in this version of a Shakespearean comedy that is perhaps the richest in household details of any in the canon. There are a lot of plaid bathrobes in the Twelfth Night conceived by the English company for a 12-member cast of Edmonton and Calgary actors — and they co-exist with toques, gloves, and Hudson’s Bay scarves and blankets 

The production is full of music, of both the festive and mournful persuasion, Old English and Canadian (assembled and arranged by Danielle LaRose). And as the Fool Feste, the excellent Colin Matty is amused, but a little pained, by the folly he sees around him. He rouses himself to anarchic energy, but it subsides then returns — just like the play. 

In a play with a fake priest, played by the Feste as the capper to the household’s revenge on its puritanical purse-lipped steward Malvolio (Brann Munro), there’s a real priest too. He’s played by Holy Trinity Anglican’s genial and hospitable Father Chris Pappas, who shows up with a wink and a wine bottle to do the honours when the Countess Olivia (Danielle LaRose) is getting hitched to the male half of a pair of twins (Andrew Cormier). And he charges down the aisle with full comic swagger after the happy couple. Talk about site-specific theatre! 

Twelfth Night’s cross-currents of mistaken identity, romantic obsession and sexual confusion are set in motion by a shipwreck — and a choice: a young woman’s decision to disguise herself as a boy on the mysterious foreign shore where she lands. Viola (Merran Carr-Wiggin), half a pair of twins, becomes Cesario. And she lands a job as a love broker for a man she falls in love with, and inadvertently succeeds in attracting the romantic passion of the woman she’s courting by proxy.

Twelfth Night pushes the frontier of wonder, folly and comic confusion to the point that a woman reveals her heart to the man she loves, who’s really another woman in disguise, who is herself in love with a man who’s convinced he’s head over heels with the first woman. A web of comic complications ensues, as you will glean if you staggered through that previous sentence.

Carr-Wiggin as the resilient Viola/Cesario, finds her way through this maze with charm, innocent excitement, and a certain air of startled dread that is very funny, a kind of internalized double-take. The moment when she realizes the full measure of romantic chaos she’s unleashed is a little comic gem. “O time! thou must untangle this, not I; it is too hard a knot for me to untie!”

In LaRose’s appealing performance as Olivia, the carapace of grief and aristocratic hauteur is thin already and ready for the melting,  It doesn’t take much: one look at Cesario, and it vanishes entirely, uncovering a heart ready for love and lightness of being. As Orsino, Grindstone Theatre’s Byron Martin delivers an amusing portrait of an unravelling aristocrat wallowing in unrequited love; he never quite gets fully dressed, and flings himself into an armchair (with his Bay blankie) to revel in his tragical state.

Byron Martin as Orsino in Twelfth Night, Malachite Theatre. Photo by bb collective photography

Speaking as we are of revelling, the nocturnal party-hearty members of Olivia’s household — bar one — are all for extending the Christmas festivities indefinitely. “Let us therefore eat and drink!” As the booze-soaked sponge Sir Toby Belch, busy conning a rich ninny into spending his money, William Mitchell is unusually sweet-natured. I really enjoyed Perry Gratton as the dimbulb Sir Andrew Aguecheek, perpetually a beat behind in his comprehension of proceedings. And the “duel” trumped up between Cesario and the equally terrified Sir Andrew, played with hockey sticks in honour of the Canuck connection, is a hoot.

Monica Maddaford and William Mitchell in Twelfth Night, Malachite Theatre. Photo by bb collective photography.

The chief instigator, and arguably the smartest character in the play, is Olivia’s maid/companion Maria. Monica Maddaford plays her with contagious zest, an appetite for amusement, and a lighthouse beacon smile.

Olivia’s stern, self-important retainer Malvolio, the butt of the household plotting, is here played by a female as a female. Munro’s Malvolio is a tiny buzzsaw with a slightly Teutonic accent. The gender switch works fine, though it’s not terribly clear in the production that this particular Malvolio is an authority figure who shuts down revelry, abuses power, and therefore deserves a come-uppance.  So the plot by which Malvolio is brought low seems reduced. 

The scene in which Malvolio discovers a forged letter, and deduces that her employer fancies her is funny, though — not least because the plotters are hiding behind the Holy Trinity pulpit and the church plaque on which the hymn numbers are listed. 

The capper to the complications is the arrival in Illyria of Viola’s twin Sebastian, played with a delightful sense of pinch-me-am-I-dreaming? wonder by Cormier.

In the end the outsiders in Twelfth Night can’t be contained by a mysterious comedy that’s simultaneously hopeful and nostalgic. Malvolio exits, swearing revenge on everyone. And Antonio (Evan Hall, in a lovely performance), the sea captain who’s felt cruelly betrayed by one twin he mistakes for the other, is in handcuffs, forgotten by everyone in the joyful reconciliation.

This Malachite production isn’t particularly attentive to either of these exclusions. It ends instead with a rollicking connection to the audience. It’s like Alberta that way, where “midsummer madness” as Olivia puts it, is a long winter’s dream.

REVIEW

Twelfth Night

Theatre: Malachite Theatre

Directed by: Benjamin Blyth

Starring: Byron Martin, Merran Carr-Wiggin, Andrew Cormier, Evan Hall, Danielle LaRose, Monica Maddaford, William Mitchell, Samantha Jeffery, Perry Gratton, Brann Munro, Colin Matty, Phillip Hackborn, Father Chris Pappas

Where: Holy Trinity Anglican Church, 10037 84 Ave.

Running: through Jan. 20

Tickets: eventbrite.ca or at the door

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From melancholy to mirth: The Malachites are back with Twelfth Night

Posted on January 5, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Byron Martin as Orsino in Twelfth Night, Malachite Theatre. Photo by BB Collective Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“What country, friends, is this?”

This is Canada, lady — as someone in these parts might have informed Viola, the shipwrecked heroine of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night who asks the question near the outset. But The Malachites knew that, already.

They’re the English theatre company, based in the east London district of Shoreditch, who teamed up with Edmonton’s Grindstone Theatre and a cast of Canadian actors last year at this time to explore the moral ambiguities of Shakespeare’s ever-problematic Henry V. In a church sanctuary. In his first directorial outing in Canada, Malachite director Benjamin Blyth chalked up another first: Brynn Linsey was Canada’s first female Henry V.

Once more unto the breach: Twelve months later, the Malachites and Blyth are back. And this time the adventurous arts-friendly Holy Trinity Anglican Church — the Strathcona theatre destination where Henry and co. charged onto the field at Agincourt — has stepped up with a commission. Their choice? Shakespeare’s strangely multi-hued comedy Twelfth Night, with its dizzying identity crises, its crazy cross-gender disguises, its blend of mirth and melancholy, the comical and the tragic. 

Twelfth Night, Malachite Theatre at Holy Trinity Anglican Church. Photo by BB Collective Photography.

   Alberta winter, in all its frozen-hearted rigour and sudden reprieves, has been a major inspiration for the production that opens Friday at Holy Trinity, says Blyth, in a celebratory mood (and not even wearing a coat) for a mid-rehearsal lunch earlier this week.

He’s assembled a cast of 12 Albertan actors (including Grindstone’s Byron Martin as Duke Orsino) for the production that opens Friday at Holy Trinity. “We’ve been about telling the story of Twelfth Night, finding what the location and the actors have to offer, notes that ring true for them” — in a production poised between  “classic and contemporary, heritage and present. Immediate!”

That fusion of old and immediately new and on-location is the specialty of the Malachites. They focus on the early part of Shakespeare’s career in Shoreditch — at the Curtain, the Rose, The Theatre — before the playwright and his company The Lord Chamberlain’s Men moved across the Thames to Bankside, and their new theatre, the Globe. Blyth, who has plans for a Romeo and Juliet on the site of the Curtain and a Taming of the Shrew in a medieval feasting hall at the Lichfield Festival, directed a summer production of Richard III on the excavated site of the Rose.

Written about the same time as Hamlet, Twelfth Night doesn’t fall into the Shoreditch category; it was first performed at London’s legal college the Middle Temple in 1602. But Blyth, whose bi-continental life includes PhD studies in early Shakespeare at the University of Calgary, has been fascinated by the comedy — and the way that initial melancholy and grief give way to joy. It strikes him as “seasonal,” and seasonal, as we know, is something of an Alberta specialty.

Twelfth Night “opens in melancholy gloom,” Blyth says cheerfully. And when Viola in male disguise and the twin brother she’s given up for drowned arrive separately on the shores of the mysterious Illyria, “gloom is gradually shaken off by love.…”

“Love cures people of narcissistic inward-looking self-love,” of the kind that has paralyzed the Illyrian elite. As the play begins, Duke Orsino is in love with being in love; the grief-stricken Countess Olivia obsessively mourns her late bro. 

Colour splashes into a monochromatic world, says Blyth of a production that includes 50 frost-covered Christmas trees. “Illyria is a very cold, mystical space…. As the play warms up, winter is shaken off!”

And the music, live and with choral arrangements by Danielle LaRose, Blyth’s Canadian wife (like Grindstone’s Martin a Grant MacEwan musical theatre alumnus) who plays Olivia, shrugs off its sadder aspects too. LaRose’s score, Blyth says, is “a mixture of traditional English carol music — In The Bleak Midwinter, I Wonder As I Wander — and contemporary Canadian music from Rufus Wainwright, Leonard Cohen, k.d. lang (among others) that speaks to the journey of falling in love.” 

“We’re trying to connect the soundscape to a classic text,”  he says of the Malachite production of a Shakespeare play notable for the quantity of music it contains. After all, the first line of Twelfth Night is Orsino’s celebrated sigh, “if music be the food of love, play on.”

The musicians are the cast. “I pined for a string quartet, but it was not to be,” Blyth laughs. Martin has spent two months improving his keyboard skills, the director reports. And the poet/actor/improviser Colin Mattie, as Feste the Fool, has learned to play the harp he carries with him through the production.

“I cherish the space, the freedom, the infrastructure,” says Blyth of the Holy Trinity commission. “There’s such a lot going for Edmonton as a creative hub.”

“It’s a lonely time of year,” says Blyth of the post-Christmas chill. And Twelfth Night, he thinks, is all about that feeling of lifting your spirits. “It’s such a joy to watch that happen.” 

PREVIEW

Twelfth Night

Theatre: Malachite Theatre

Directed by: Benjamin Blyth

Starring: Merran Carr-Wiggin, Andrew Cormier, Byron Martin, Danielle LaRose, Monica Maddaford, William Mitchell, Brann Munro, Perry Gratton, Evan Hall, Samantha Jeffery, Colin Matty, Phillip Hackborn, Father Chris Pappas

Where: Holy Trinity Anglican Church, 10037 84 Ave.

Running: Friday through Jan. 20 (performances Wednesday through Sunday)

Tickets: eventbrite.ca

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And the theatre season continues: take your seats people, Act II is about to begin

Posted on January 3, 2018 by Liz Nicholls

Onegin, Vancouver Arts Club Theatre. Photo by David Cooper

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE.…

The theatre season isn’t ending; that’s not how the calendar works. There’s still Act II, and it’s about to begin. It’s the moment to cast aside regrets and look forward. What looks too good to miss?

Onegin: There’s a real cross-country buzz about this indie Canadian rock musical from Vancouver’s Arts Club, a reimagining of the Tchaikovsky opera and the Pushkin poem. It’s the original work of Veda Hille and Ariel Gladstone, the team behind the quirky hit Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata. Catalyst Theatre, appreciators (and practitioners) of inventive explorations of the musical form,  brings the much-awarded Onegin to their home stage, the Macab at the Citadel, Jan. 17 to 28 to launch Catalyst Presents, a new series devoted to hosting top draws from the indie theatre scene.

Betroffenheit. Photo by Michael Slobodian.

 

Betroffenheit: the much-awarded creation of the acclaimed Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and playwright Jonathan Young, arrives here as part of an international tour, after scooping up the 2017 Olivier Award. The dance/theatre fusion, by all accounts overwhelmingly powerful, explores the state of shock, grief, perplexity that are the emotional aftermath of trauma. The Kidd Pivot/ Electric company production, which originated in Vancouver, has travelled the world; it arrives onstage at the Citadel March 30 to April 1, a joint presentation of the Citadel and the Brian Webb Dance Company.

Ben Caplan in Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story. Photo supplied.

Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story: this highly unusual musical folk tale from Halifax’s 2b theatre company comes to the Citadel Club (May 9 to 13) from an acclaimed run at the Edinburgh Fringe. And it arrives here from six weeks at the New York Off-Broadway venue 59E59. A music/theatre hybrid, it’s the joint creation of Hannah Moscovitch and Ben Caplan, one of the country’s starriest playwrights and Klezmer sensation respectively. And it tells a love story, which Moscovitch took from her real-life family history, of Romanian Jews arriving in Canada in 1908. The story (which seems to accumulate topical resonances as it goes), the creators, the supple musical form: all are intriguing. 

The Humans, Stephen Karam’s very funny very disturbing Tony Award-winner, opening next week on the Citadel mainstage (and runs through Jan. 27), redefines the family reunion drama in strange, even surreal, ways. Jackie Maxwell, former artistic director of the Shaw Festival, directs the Citadel/Canadian Stage co-production, the first sighting of the play in this country, in a year when it will be everywhere.

Poison, an international hit that’s scooped up major awards on  both sides of the Atlantic, is the work of Dutch playwright Lot Vekemans. A study of grief, loss, and love, the acclaimed play comes to us courtesy of Jim Guedo’s Wild Side Productions, starring Amber Borotsik and Nathan Cuckow. It’s in Theatre Network’s Roxy Performance Series March 15 to 25. 

The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece, which gets the general nod as the greatest English language comedy ever, is taken in hand July 12 to 28 by comedy specialist company Teatro La Quindicina. A replacement for Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple in Teatro’s 2018 season (a problem of securing the rights), it stars Mark Meer and Ron Pederson (who’d have been Felix and Oscar) as Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff.  

If musical theatre does stretches with unusual partners in Onegin, Betroffenheit, and Old Stock, see how limber it can be wrapping itself around these unusual premises:

Michelle Bardach in Children of God, an original musical by Corey Payette. Photo by: Matt Barnes.

•Children of God: Cory Payette’s musical (he’s both writer and director), the first original Canadian Indigenous work on the Citadel mainstage (March 3 to 24), tells a powerful story of two siblings and their residential school experience. 

•Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: the 2010 Broadway musical that The Plain Janes have been trying to do for two seasons, is here. By the Full Monty team of Dave Yazbek and Jeffrey Lane, it careens crazily through ‘80s Madrid, as per the screwed-up relationship story from the Pedro Almodovar film of the same name. Kate Ryan’s production, which has a kick-butt cast (Jocelyn Ahlf, Jason Hardwick, Madelaine Knight, Gianna Read, Andrea House)  is at the Varscona Feb. 15 to 24.

Step out and embrace the new: the second half of the season has a cluster of intriguing premieres. 

Do This In Memory Of Me by Cat Walsh, Northern Light Theatre. Photo supplied.

•Do This In Memory of Me/ En Mémoire De Moi: If you haven’t seen a Cat Walsh play, you’ve been missing an original take on “dark comedy” (she’s even done a solo thriller; how tricky is that?). There’s a new Walsh, in alternating English and French performances at Northern Light Theatre and L’UniThéâtre (March 13 to 25). Do This In Memory Of Me is set in 1963 Montreal, and its protagonist, 12-year-old Geneviève. , is desperately hoping the ban on girls for the prize “altar boy” gig will be lifted. That’s when the star altar boy disappears on his way home from school.   

•There are not one but two new plays by the accomplished Collin Doyle in this half of the season. Slumberland Motel, premiering at Shadow Theatre, won the Alberta Playwriting Competition 11 years ago. So It hasn’t exactly been rushed precipitously into production before its time. Julien Arnold and Reed McColm star as a couple of road-weary vacuum cleaner salesmen in a down-at-heels motel. It comes armed with the intriguing warning “brief comedic nudity.” Hmm.

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

Too Late To Stop Now premieres in May in an Edmonton Actors Theatre production. The third in Doyle’s “Mill Woods trilogy,” it returns us to the inhospitable bosom of the fractious family we met in The Mighty Carlins. Dave Horak’s cast includes John Wright as the impossible patriarch, Maralyn Ryan and Cole Humeny.   

•At the Citadel, a new and non-tentative family swashbuckler comes from the dexterous hand of Concrete Theatre’s Mieko Ouchi. The Silver Arrow: The Untold Story of Robin Hood stars a female as the classic green-clad agent of wealth re-distribution in Sherwood Forest. Daryl Cloran directs a full-bodied steam-punk  swash-buckler, this year’s Citadel/Banff Professional Program show, that includes aerial arts (courtesy of Firefly Theatre) and incidental music by the singer-songwriter cabaret star Hawksley Workman.

•At Workshop West, it’s the very intriguing prospect of Beth Graham’s new Pretty Goblins, a tale of estranged twins inspired by Christina Rossetti’s haunting narrative poem Goblin Market. Brian Dooley’s production, which stars Miranda Allen and Nadien Chu, runs April 18 to 29.

Other shows to look forward to in 2018:

THE PREMISE:

•Trina Davies’ The Romeo Initiative, the third of her plays to be seen on Edmonton stages this season (Waxworks, Shatter), is a rom-com/thriller cross inspired by the chilling Cold War history of a Stasi program to enlist West German secretaries by finding them their perfect Romeo. Nancy McAlear directs the Skirts AFire Festival’s mainstage offering March 1 to 11.

Infinity by Hannah Moscovitch, at Theatre Network. Photo by Ryan Parker

•Infinity, a Dora Award-winner by the Canadian star playwright Hannah Moscovitch. You could say of either the play, or Bradley Moss’s Theatre Network production (April 19 to May 6), that it’s  about time. Its trio of ultra-smart characters are a physicist and a musician, and their mathematician daughter. 

THE COLLABORATION: The enterprising indie Cardiac Theatre (Pompeii L.A., Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes) has taken the unusual initiative of finding producing partners in both Edmonton and Calgary — Azimuth Theatre, Downtown — for Harley Morison’s production of The Listening Room (Feb. 15 to 24). By Calgary up-and-comer Michaela Jeffery, it’s set in a post-apocalyptic landscape where teen dissidents are using outdated technology to probe the mysteries of the past.   

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

THE RETURN: The history of Sheldon Elter’s memorable one-man show/memoire Métis Mutt is a veritable study in Edmonton make-your-own theatre: how it starts small and develops major creative talents as it goes. Métis Mutt is back, in a new production directed by Ron Jenkins at Theatre Network (Feb. 15 to March 4).

THE CAST: Kevin Sutley’s new production of Shakespeare’s R&J for Kill Your Television Theatre is a chance for audiences to catch a quartet of Edmonton’s hottest young actors on one stage in one tumultuous show: Oscar Derkx, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Luc Tellier, Corben Kushneryk. Joe Calarco’s high-stakes transposition of Romeo and Juliet to an ultra-strict Catholic boys’ school, where it’s a forbidden text and reading it is a sin, dates from the late ‘90s. How it fares two decades later, in very different times, is for us to discover in Theatre Network’s Roxy Performance Series Jan. 18 to 28.

 

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Surprise! A holiday theatre quiz

Posted on December 31, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Burning Bluebeard, Edmonton Actors Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Curl up, wear thermal socks, check out our review of 2017 theatre highlights, and try our detoxifying winter theatre quiz. 

  1. What sport is studied, in detailed and scholarly fashion, in the Stewart Lemoine comedy Shocker’s Delight, the grand finale of the 2017 Teatro La Quindicina season?

(a) badminton

(b) polo

(c) fox hunting

(d) golf

2. In what show this year did the god Hermes appear?

(a) The Fall of the House of Atreus

(b) Hadestown

(c) As You Like It

(d) Henry V

3. What was the official nickname of the 2017 Fringe?

(a) Planet of the Lost Fringe

(b) Voyage To The Bottom of the Fringe

(c) A Midsummer Night’s Fringe

(d) See Spot Fringe

4. What year did the Edmonton Fringe start (and thereby change the face of North American alternative theatre)

(a) 1982

(b) 1963

(c) 2000

(d) 1995

5. How many show tickets did the Edmonton Fringe sell during its 2017 edition?

(a) nearly 101,000

(b) nearly 130,000

(c) nearly 1 million

(d) nearly 69,000

6. In Yasmina Reza’s Art, produced by Shadow Theatre this year, three guys sit around discussing … ?

(a) a very large nude painting

(b) a painting with a controversial political subtext

(c) an all-white painting

(d) a sculpture of a man who falls madly in love with a goat

(e) a painting that may or may not be a forgery

7. Which of the following is not an Edmonton festival?

(a) Play The Fool

(b) Serca

(c) Chanticleer Under The Stars

(d) Kaleido

(e) Deep Freeze

8. Terminus — produced by Wild Side Productions this year — is set where?

(a) the east end of London

(b) the mind of the protagonist

(c) a fantasy transportation hub

(d) Western Canada in the 19th century

(e) throughout Dublin

9. In Sharr White’s Annapurna (produced this year at Shadow Theatre), a woman arrives on her ex’s doorstep with …?

(a) an eviction notice

(b) a bag of hash

(c) a lottery win of some $10 million

(d) a pocket full of condoms

(e) multiple suitcases

10. In which of the following productions were we led through a ghostly carnival midway?

(a) Dead Centre of Town X

(b) Hadestown

(c) Ubuntu

(d) The Merry Wives of Windsor

(e) Over Her Dead Body

11. Which of the following are Edmonton indie theatre companies?

(a) Impossible Mongoose

(b) The Tree of Life

(c) Small Matters 

(d) What It Is Productions

(e) Bright Young Things

12. Hadestown was a collaboration between the Citadel Theatre and …?

(a) Octopus Theatricals

(b) Second Stage Theater

(c) Prairie Theatre Exchange

(d) Lincoln Center Theatre

(e) Atlantic Theater Company

13. Jesse Lipscombe, the well-known Edmonton activist who co-founded #MakeItAwkward, made his long-overdue Edmonton theatrical debut in a starring role this year. What character did he play in Workshop West’s John Ware Reimagined?

(a) an astronaut

(b) a physicist

(c) a beekeeper

(d) a cowboy

(e) a stand-up comedian

14. In which Shakespeare play mentioned in the romantic comedy Shakespeare In Love (the 2017-2018 season-opener at the Citadel) does a dog figure prominently?

(a) Romeo and Juliet

(b) Twelfth Night

(c) All’s Well That Ends Well

(d) Much Ado About Nothing

(e) Two Gentlemen of Verona

15. The Salon of the Talking Turk, the 2005 Stewart Lemoine comedy revived at Teatro La Quindicina in 2017, was inspired by which of the following writers?

(a) Molière

(b) George F. Kaufman 

(c) E.T.A. Hoffman

(d) Jules Verne

(e) Goethe

16. In which production, seen on an Edmonton stage in 2017, do the following lines occur? 

(a) “And we build the wall to keep us free….”

(b) “Will I ever again be as happy as I was on the happiest day of my life so far?”

(c) “O for a muse of fire…”

(d) “the jaws that bite the claws that catch…”

(e) “Can a play show us the very truth and nature of love?”

(f) “I didn’t know grown-up people could do that….”

(g) “Are you satisfied with what you know?”

(h) “There’s no telling what you’re gonna do when the chips are down….”

(i) “The villainy you teach me I will execute….”

17. Match the designer and the show:

Designers: Chantel Fortin, Rachel Hauck, Cory Sincennes, T. Erin Gruber, Megan Koshka, Tessa Stamp, Kerem Çetinel

Productions:  Fortune Falls, Irma Voth, Constellations, Our Man In Havana, Hadestown, Crazy For You, The Believers

18. MacEwan University’s new Triffo theatre opened this past November with a production of …

(a) Sister Act

(b) Jesus Christ, Superstar

(c) Nunsense II

(d) Heathers The Musical

(e) I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change

19. Which of the following theatre companies are not part of the new Varscona Theatre Ensemble?

(a) The Plain Janes

(b) Atlas Theatre

(c) Bright Young Things

(d) Shadow Theatre

(e) Tiny Bear Jaws

20. The principal characters in Jabberwocky, the new show from the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, are…

(a) small fish with big mouths

(b) hard-boiled eggs

(c) monsters

(d) rabbits

(e) playing cards

21. Match the director to the show:

Directors: Dave Horak, Kevin McKendrick, Ashley Wright, Kate Ryan, Murray Utas, Ron Pederson

Shows: Our Man In Havana; Shocker’s Delight; Stupid Fucking Bird; The Preacher, The Princess, And A Crow; The Merry Wives of Windsor; John Ware Reimagined

22. Which of the following productions contains characters who are “showbiz people”?

(a) Stupid Fucking Bird

(b) Sister Act

(c) Crazy For You

(d) Constellations

(e) Shakespeare In Love

23. Where is this year’s Die-Nasty live improvised soap opera set?

(a) the suburbs of Cold War Moscow

(b) ancient Sparta

(c) Shakespearean London

(d) ’80s Calgary

(e) a prairie farm during the Depression

24. Name the playwright:

(a) Going, Going, Gone

(b) Constellations

(c) Everyone We Know Will Be There

(d) The Aliens

(e) Shatter

12thnight.ca is a year old today. Happy new year! Here’s to great theatre experiences in 2018!

The answers (no peeking first):

1 (d); 2 (b); 3 (c); 4 (a); 5 (b); 6 (c); 7 (c); 8 (e); 9 (e); 10 (a); 11 (a,c,d,e); 12 (a); 13 (d); 14 (e); 15 (c); 16 (a) Hadestown, (b) The Salon of the Talking Turk, (c) Henry V, (d) Jabberwocky; (e) Shakespeare In Love; (f) Irma Voth; (g) The Exquisite Hour, (h) Hadestown, (i) The Merchant of Venice, 17 Chantel Fortin and Our Man In Havana, Rachel Hauck and Hadestown, Cory Sincennes and Crazy For You, T. Erin Gruber and The Believers, Megan Koshka and Irma Voth, Tessa Stamp and Constellations, Kerem Çetinel and Fortune Falls; 18 (a); 19 (d, e); 20 (d); 21 Dave Horak and Stupid Fucking Bird; Kevin McKendrick and John Ware Reimagined; Ashley Wright and The Merry Wives of Windsor; Kate Ryan and Our Man In Havana; Murray Utas and The Preacher, The Princess, And A Crow; Ron Pederson and Shocker’s Delight. 22 (a, b, c, e); 23 (d); 24 (a) Jana O’Connor (b) Nick Payne (c) Elena Belyea (d) Annie Baker (e) Trina Davies.

24 right? Bravo! You go out, you stay up late, you love the liveness of theatre!

Less than six right? Your clicker should be surgically removed from your hand. You’re missing out on Edmonton’s leading attraction!

 

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Looking back: Edmonton theatre in 2017

Posted on December 22, 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

Shakespeare In Love, the playful, sumptuously romantic opening gambit of Daryl Cloran’s first season as the Citadel’s new artistic  director, took us into the world of 17th century London theatre. Crazy deadlines, fraught rehearsals, fragile egos, stars and promising up-and-comers, scramble for backers, hunger for the new but apprehension of risk, shortage of cash, tensions between producers and artists…. Lo and behold, it looked and felt quite a bit like our own theatre world.

In a year of terrible tone world-wide, when everything felt mean-spirited and dangerously out of control, there’s something reassuring about that kind of continuity.

“Insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster”: that’s how the theatrical impresario Henslowe memorably describes theatre in Shakespeare in Love. “But it always works out in the end….” The mystery of that, which has something to do with desperation and more to do with the connection between real live people, gives theatre its special lustre. On that note, let’s look back and have a (highly selective) look at what happened on Edmonton stages this past year. 

2017 was the year that….

Amber Gray and Reeve Carney in Hadestown, Citadel Theatre. Photo by David Cooper 2017.

•Edmonton’s largest playhouse, the Citadel, collaborated with a contingent of New York producers to tune up a hot Off-Broadway immersive theatre piece, Anaïs Mitchell’s folk opera/musical Hadestown, for the more conventional spatial arrangements of a proscenium stage like the kind on Broadway. The partnership echoed the old days of Citadel founder Joe Shoctor and his Broadway collaborations on such full-bodied musicals as Pieces of Eight and Duddy.

•Edmonton got a spanky new downtown theatre. In its new Allard Hall arts complex, MacEwan University theatre arts launched the 415-seat Triffo Theatre with Sister Act (a musical about a diva hiding out in a convent, you know, the usual story about being part of an ensemble).

•Edmonton got the country’s first female Henry V – Brynn Linsey starred, fiercely, in the collaboration between the English company Malachite and Grindstone Theatre (famous as the perpetrator of The 11 O’Clock Number). Grindstone, incidentally, is opening a new comedy club/bar resto a block off Whyte Avenue this spring.

•The Old Trout Puppet Workshop, a Calgary company of impeccable experimental pedigree, premiered a beautiful new show that memorably addressed the famous hero quest nonsense poem (Lewis Carroll’s enigmatic Jabberwocky) instead of the celebrated fantasy in which it is embedded (Through The Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There).

•If we got to see a New York team of creators at work here, New York meanwhile got a good look at the work of one of our star playwrights, Vern Thiessen. His stage adaptation of Of Human Bondage was part of the acclaimed excursion by Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre into the Off-Broadway theatre stronghold across the border.

•Edmonton acquired two new multi-disciplinary arts festivals, BAM!, devoted to showcasing the work of Edmonton’s black artists, and Sound Off!, a celebration of our deaf artists. Workshop West Playwrights Theatre was the instigator, and host, of both at the annual Chinook Festival.

Bradley Doré in Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes at Cardiac Theatre. Photo by Nico Laroche-Humby

•Edmonton audiences finally got introduced to the work of the young Canadian star playwright Jordan Tannahill — first by way of Harley Morison’s Cardiac Theatre production of Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes, both a thriller and a coming-of-age story in that short real-time span.

•Edmonton theatre lost one of its outstanding theatre administrators; after 14 seasons the Citadel’s executive director Penny Ritco is moving on. And in a double blow, Edmonton theatre loses, as well, Brian Dooley. L’UniThéâtre’s artistic director and director of new play development at the Citadel has announced his departure at the end of the season.

Memorable Productions of the Year: a selection in no particular order): 

Hadestown (Citadel): A richly imaginative, poetic and musical journey to a warm, walled underworld ruled by a factory oligarch. What are you willing to trade for security? That’s the question that resonated in all kinds of political, social and cultural ways through Anais Mitchell’s folk opera/musical and Rachel Chavkin’s stunningly theatrical production.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith stars in Crazy For You, Citadel Theatre. Photo by David Cooper Photography

Crazy For You: the Citadel and Theatre Calgary collaborated on Dayna Tekatch’s glorious, fizzy production of the ‘30s Gershwin musical comedy (written in the 1990s) in which an entire town (and everyone in it) is rescued from oblivion by … theatre. Inspirational really.

Jabberwocky, The Old Trout Puppet Workshop. Photo by: Jason Stang

Jabberwocky: the latest from the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, spun from Lewis Carroll’s jaunty nonsense poem, chronicles a young rabbit’s epic quest, inherited from the older generation,  to confront fear and hold disappointment at bay, face a monster and return in triumph. Exquisite in imagery and unfailingly inventive in puppet characters, it premiered at Theatre Network. The relationship between puppet and puppeteer has never been explored in more fantastical but home-spun ways.   

Shocker’s Delight: a beautifully imagined coming-of-age love/friendship chronicle in a trio of college kids. Teatro La Quindicina star Ron Pederson directed the revival of Stewart Lemoine’s unusual 1993 comedy, wistfully sad and funny, which starred a younger generation of company actors, Ben Stevens, Melanie Piatocha, and Richard Lee Hsi, all excellent in this strange tale of redemption. 

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

Mat Simpson and Melissa Thingelstad in Stupid Fucking Bird, Edmonton Actors Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

   Stupid Fucking Bird: Dave Horak’s Edmonton Actors Theatre production made beautiful work of this irreverent retrofit of Chekhov’s The Seagull, with its questing characters in search of meaning, or even sense, in the crossed wires of their lives. A terrific cast was led by Melissa Thingelstad as the flamboyant grande dame diva, fierce and funny, and Mat Simpson as a struggling playwright, flailing against the sense of his own absurdity. 

Shakespeare In Love: Daryl Cloran’s own MainStage directing debut at the Citadel where he’s the new artistic director was a theatre piece about theatre, zestful, funny, inventively staged and cast.   

Disgraced: Toronto’s Hope and Hell Theatre brought the fascinating challenge of this provocative Ayad Akhtar play to the Citadel — and put paid to any complacent notions we progressive types might be harbouring that we’re tolerantly post-ethnic. A Muslim, a Jew, a WASP, and an Afro-American sit down to dinner — and the subjects everyone’s mom and dad always warned them not to bring up get brought up: religion, politics, terrorism, Islamophobia…. 

Jesus Christ Superstar: At the Mayfield director Kate Ryan brought new life to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s theatrical tale about charisma and the high price of celebrity.

Zachary Read, Jean-Michel Richer in Les Feluettes, Edmonton Opera. Photo by Nanc Price.

  Les Feluettes: Edmonton Opera’s entry into the world of contemporary theatricality was a bold and gutsy production of this Kevin March opera inspired by Michel Marc Bouchard’s zestfully operatic play Lilies.

The Aliens: Director Taylor Chadwick and an excellent What It Is ensemble — Chris W. Cook, Evan Hall, Michael Vetch — made a mesmerizing experience of this virtually event-less Annie Baker tale of stalled 30-something underachievers waiting for their lives to begin.

Memorable Performances of the Year: a selection (“hang on…. I’ve seen you in something” as the Boatman says in Shakespeare in Love)

Andrew MacDonald-Smith in Crazy For You, at the Citadel. Photo by David Cooper

Andrew MacDonald-Smith — the leading man tap shoes have rarely been worn with such transcendental pizzaz as MacDonald-Smith did in Crazy For You. He played Bobbie Child, a stage-struck rich-kid Manhattanite who finds his true calling rescuing the theatre he’s been sent to Nevada to foreclose. A sublime performance.

Robert Markus — a sizzling and furious Judas railroaded by conspiracy into damnation in Jesus Christ, Superstar.

Julien Arnold, Robin Craig, Madison Walsh in Sense and Sensibility adapted by Tom Wood, Citadel Theatre. Photo by David Cooper.

Robin Craig — with Julien Arnold as her companion Sir John, this brilliant comic actor as Mrs. Jennings, marriage broker cum busybody, turns in the funniest performance in Tom Wood’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility for the Citadel/Banff Professional Program.

Farren Timoteo — his dazzling performance as the self-dramatizing pirate king Black Stache, precursor to the great Captain Hook, lit up Peter and the Starcatcher with effortless (and acrobatic) hilarity every time he was onstage. This achievement was matched by his star turn as every character in Made In Italy, Timoteo’s own solo family memoir of growing up in an immigrant family in Jasper.

Farren Timoteo as Black Stache in Peter and the Starcatcher, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Bahareh Yaraghi – this newcomer to Edmonton theatre was terrific as the mysterious, stage-struck noblewoman Viola de Lesseps who impersonates a boy to get her crack at roles — and in the process fascinates a young up-and-comer named Will Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love. The seductive power of words operates on her in a visceral way: you believe it. 

Melissa Thingelstad — She delivered a performance of grand self-awareness and noblesse oblige humour as the star actress in Stupid Fucking Bird, Aaron Posner’s cheeky update of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Ian Leung was very funny, too, as her famous writer lover.

Amber Gray in Hadestown, Citadel Theatre. Photo by David Cooper 2017.

Amber Gray — a sensational Persephone in Hadestown, an electric performance in every way as Hades’ disaffected wife, who brings “a suitcase full of summertime” every time she returns to the above-ground world for her six-month revelries. 

Patrick Page — a compelling performance as Hades, the god of the underworld, whose voice rumbles through the subterranean caverns of Hadestown like the sound of the great beyond. His delivery of Mitchell’s eerily prescient Why We Build The Wall set every ribcage in the joint buzzing.

Ian Leung, Mark Meer, Mathew Hulshof in Our Man In Havana, Bright Young Things, Varscona Theatre Ensemble. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography 2017

Mark Meer — between his precisely differentiated multiple characters in Jana O’Connor’s bright new screwball Going Going Gone at Teatro La Quindicina and in Bright Young Things’ production of Our Man In Havana, Meer played more characters than any actor who appeared on an Edmonton stage this past year. By far. (And that’s without not to mention his convincing turn as a life-sized automaton in Stewart Lemoine’s Salon of the Talking Turk).

Rachel Bowron — as a sassy, spirited screwball heroine with wayward tendencies and a real appetite for incipient chaos in Going Going Gone.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Rachel Bowron in Going, Going, Gone!, Teatro La Quindicina! Photo by Mat Busby.

Braydon Dowler-Coltman – as the aspirational tour guide-turned-CEO of the Mercey Chocolate Inc. in Catalyst Theatre’s new musical Fortune Falls, a dark fantasia about losing one dream, and finding another. A fascinating physically dexterous performance, the  American Dream on legs and in perpetual motion.

Jeff Haslam — a quiet, moving performance as Zachary Teale, “supervisor of merchandise receiving,” whose life is changed on a summer’s afternoon when a stranger asks him “are you satisfied with what you know?” A life reclaimed for sense of possibility in Stewart Lemoine’s beautiful The Exquisite Hour.

Andréa Jorawsky and Kendra Connor – as questing sisters, who escape domestic oppression through art in Theatre Network’s Irma Voth. 

Jesse Lipscombe – a find for Edmonton theatre as the title cowboy of Alberta history in the Cheryl Foggo play devoted to his remarkable story: John Ware Reimagined at Workshop West.     

Raoul Bhaneja — as the conflicted high-powered lawyer who thinks he’s shucked his Muslim heritage, until he realizes he hasn’t, in Disgraced.

Steve Pirot in The Preacher, The Princess, And A Crow, Azimuth Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Steve Pirot — a compellingly scary performance as an ex-street preacher who’s committed an atrocity and locked himself in his apartment, besieged by temptation, in Nicole Moeller’s The Preacher, The Princess, And A Crow. 

Holly Turner — brought a combination of wariness, grief and withering skepticism to the role of Jesus’s mom, resistant to accepting the role history is thrusting on her, in The Testament of Mary. Northern Light Theatre’s Trevor Schmidt directed the stage adaptation of Colm Toíbín’s provocative novella.  

MEMORABLE DESIGN ON EDMONTON STAGES IN 2017:

Stephanie Bahniuk: created a glittering and dangerous Death Strip, coiled barbed wire hung with work boots along the gangway in Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes.

Cory Sincennes: had a year of designing vintage theatres, first for the Citadel’s Crazy For You (the dusty, long-derelict theatre in Deadwood, Nevada that springs back to life as soon as the New York showgirls arrive) and then (a version of the Globe) for the Citadel’s Shakespeare in Love.

Andréa Jorawsky as Irma in Irma Voth, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson/ EPIC Photography

Megan Koshka: an ingenious and witty translucent panel entirely constructed of window frames for Theatre Network’s Irma Voth, a tale of new possibility in blinkered lives. Sometimes they reflected back at you, sometimes they revealed the shadowy figures beyond, sometimes they popped open with an a sort of invitation. 

Tessa Stamp: a beautiful and evocative design for one of the year’s trickiest challenges, Nick Payne’s Constellations at  Shadow Theatre. It conjured a galaxy of alternative possibilities for every moment in the love story of a physicist and a beekeeper. 

Scott Peters: created a haunting and haunted theatre space for Dave Horak’s Edmonton Actors Theatre production of the post-panto panto Burning Bluebeard (running through Saturday), in which characters come to life to finish a show that was cruelly truncated by a theatre fire. The designer even included panels from the old Roxy, Theatre Network’s vintage ex-cinema home.

T. Erin Gruber – her stunning design for the MadFandango production of Bryony Lavery’s The Believers summoned a kind of supernatural apocalyptic vision to this most enigmatic of plays. 

Lorenzo Savoini – the set for Daryl Cloran’s Citadel/Prairie Theatre Exchange co-production of Ubuntu, a cross-cultural cross-continental adventure, was witty and eloquent in itself: a wall of suitcases that contains all the entrances and exits required by the storytelling.

Leslie Frankish — her playful and elegant design for Sense and Sensibility, conjuring the gardens and interiors of Regency England, was the capper to a 18-year series of period collaborations with director Bob Baker at the Citadel.

Chantel Fortin (set) and Matt Currie (lighting)- the conjuring of the old Havana for a company with a shoestring budget was a particular feat of design ingenuity: Bright Young Things’ Our Man In Havana.

Kerem Çetinel – conjured a ghostly, tarnished old Victorian factory for Fortune Falls. 

Trevor Schmidt: his continuing design ingenuity re-inventing the intimate PCL Studio Theatre revealed itself in both Bonnie and Clyde, a two-actor musical, and The Testament of Mary. 

AND IN OTHER HIGHLIGHTS …

Morgan Grau, Sarah Feutl, Graham Mothersill in The Fall of the House of Atreus. Photo supplied.

The artistic compression award for 2017: playwright Jessy Ardern, whose 60-minute Impossible Mongoose comedy The Fall of the House of Atreus covered the entire Trojan War in minutes (with pause for “character development”).

The New Company To Watch award: Impossible Mongoose (see above).

The most perplexing new play of the year (and also it’s most immediately topical): Matthew MacKenzie’s Bust, a sort of macabre black comedy (I think) about the aftermath of the Fort Mac fire. Family solidarity asserted itself in the strangest possible way: the family that covers up a criminal act together stays together.

The ‘what just happened in there?’ award for most enigmatic play of the year: The Believers by the English playwright Bryony Lavery, brought to us by MadFandango.

Prop of the year: the table in Made In Italy. We saw the star (and playwright) Farren Timoteo do handsprings off it, opens bottles on it, dance on it, wrestle himself on it, conjure entire dinner parties single-handedly on it….

Farren Timoteo, Made In Italy. Photo by Murray Mitchell

Bizarre concept of the year: Matthew MacKenzie’s The Bone Wars, the only musical comedy of this (and possibly any other) year) with two warring song-and-dance paleontologists.

Home invasion theatre of the year: Elena Belyea’s Everyone We Know Will Be There, an Andrew Ritchie Tiny Bear Jaws production, wasn’t about a teen party; it was one — in real time in a house in the southwest Edmonton suburbs. Scary.

Choreographic challenges of the year: Amber Borotsik’s choreography had the cast of The Bone Wars collectively  create spike-backed dinosaurs, physically and on the spot. Laura Krewski’s original choreography summoned a ghostly town from the mists of time in Catalyst’s Fortune Falls.

Production number of the year (low-budget ingenuity division): the dance number on swivelling office chairs in Star Killing Machine, a new Clinton Carew musical set in a factory where scientists are working to build a machine that will destroy the sun, and hence all human life on earth (thereby redefining career conflict for all time).

Weird encounters of the theatrical kind: seeing the Last Supper at a dinner theatre. On Good Friday (Jesus Christ, Superstar at the Mayfield).

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