Review: SwordPlay: A Play of Swords

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Katilin Morrow, Conor Bradbury in Swordplay: A Play of Swords, Sex T-Rex. Photo supplied.

SwordPlay: A Play of Swords (Stage 37, Suzanne Thibadeau Auditorium, La Cité francophone)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

With SwordPlay: A Play of Swords, the Toronto comedy troupe Sex T-Rex delivers live theatre with something everyone secretly wants: a video game on legs, with references they can’t fail to get.

That they do this, with pizzaz, on a bare stage using only five people with the gift of the gab, feathered hats, tights, rubber rapiers wielded with ruthless brio … well, that’s the kind of low-budget ingenuity that fuels improv comedy and fringe festivals world-wide. 

Inventive physicality, shameless pop-culture pilfering from sources like The Three Musketeers or Game of Thrones or The Princess Bride … that’s the engine of this zestful high-speed swashbuckler. The secrets of the plot, in all its daft convolutions, are safe with me: I couldn’t explain it even if I weren’t being held captive by a fire-breathing dragon.

Suffice it to say that classic scenarios of the thrust-and-parry genre are invoked, and stitched up with lavish outbreaks of swordplay. A kidnapped princess, abducted by someone nefarious related to someone royal, is in need of rescue. De-frocked swordsmen, in need of redemption after that whole sorry Roland fiasco (don’t ask), set forth on a heroic rescue mission — of the princess and their reputation — on the all-for-one one-for-all plan. They defy the auguries, crazy odds, unexpected obstacles, cheap-theatre limitations, mistaken identity crises, the new political realities, self-esteem issues. Did I mention the fire-breathing dragon?

As someone says, “you could have married a similar-looking girl with darker hair and no back story.” But no, my friends, if life were that simple, there would be no need for fancy fight choreography or warnings about “cartoonish violence and adult language.” 

The cast — Jon Blair, Conor Bradbury, Julian Frid, Kaitlin Morrow, Seann Murray — attack with gusto. The proper term for their kind of loopy, winking attachment to something flimsy is zany. And zany is fun, in a pure fringe-y 60-minute-max sort of way.

As seen at the Winnipeg Fringe. 

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Fringe review: Drunk Girl

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Thea Fitz-James in Drunk Girl. Photo by Dahlia Katz.

Drunk Girl (Stage 13, Old Strathcona Public Library)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Carpe diem!” beams the high-spirited woman before us, presiding over a selection of bottles. 

In the well-stocked repertoire of cautionary tales with sadder-but-wiser chasers, Thea Fitz-James’ solo show isn’t just one for the road. Drunk Girl, it turns out, is a smart, challenging show that doesn’t just sip the risky high-test stuff (and spit it out when no one’s looking), but declares bottom’s up.

The Fringe is full of solo shows that allude to complexity and cultural contradictions. Drunk Girl actually takes them on — in surprising ways that don’t include resolving them. It’s brave and kind of feisty that way.

“Let’s take a gander, shall we?” grins Fitz-James, charismatic and cordial, as she flips open her yearbook. She’s funny. And we’re with her on that classic threshold of maximum possibility: For a small-town Quebec girl and her classmates, “probable destination” is  mostly “anywhere but here.”  

In the course of Drunk Girl, amusement — she calls it “nostalgic whimsy” — turns to disappointment, underscored by a rage that masquerades as high spirits but is more like profound sadness.

It’s charted in a steady escalation of onstage drinks, and ever more expansive annotations, as our college-girl protagonist and her party-girl alter-ego come up, time and time again, from different angles, against something confounding  and irreducible. The fun that empowers you, as a young woman out to participate on equal footing in the world, also penalizes you.

“I am the queen of Ladies’ Night!” declares the party girl who drinks with her friends because she can (and why shouldn’t she since boys can and do and will?). “Alcohol is my fuckin’ revolution!” The professional grad who doesn’t drink at conferences — except white wine, which doesn’t really count, right? — invokes Kafka, and “conceptual” drinking games.

The alter-egos come together in a terrible moment, where only the feeling of violation is unequivocal. “No is an extraordinarily complicated word when you’re drunk,” she says.

Fitz-James has such an easy, amiable instant rapport with the audience that you almost don’t realize the high-risk zones into which Drunk Girl sallies forth. One is an audience-participation chug-a-lug that seems to startle even the performer. The other — and this is only partly successful I think — is the summing up by the playwright.

Certainly she’s earned it. She’s done the research, and presented chunks of it, too. But the show is perhaps vivid and strong enough on its own to just leave us with its provocative, combative ideas and the poetry that surrounds them.

“Sometimes I feel like the Titanic — big, beautiful, too big to fail….” She is. 

As seen at the Winnipeg Fringe. 

  

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Fringe review: Prophecy

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Carmen Nieuwenhuis in Prophecy, Impossible Mongoose. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Prophecy  (Stage 31, Strathcona Baptist Church)

“Ignorance can be bliss, but knowledge is not power,” Prophecy tells us in this vivid meditation on a violent male world seen through the eyes of women. They see destruction coming and know its consequences.

Last time out, Impossible Mongoose, an adventurous Edmonton indie tore into a zany, breathlessly high-speed five-generation chronicle of terrible behaviour in a dysfunctional family. In Jessy Ardern’s The Fall of the House of Atreus, the years of the Trojan War flew by in madcap minutes.

With Ardern’s witty and powerful new play, Impossible Mongoose returns to that war. In a powerhouse performance from newcomer Carmen Nieuwenhuis, we meet a succession of women whose tragedy is to see ahead in time and know too much. The poster child for this long-distance vision is Cassandra, the clever Trojan princess whose god-given gift of prophecy comes with a stinger: she will never be believed. 

In Corben Kushneryk’s production, Cassandra is reduced by the backlash from her peculiar talent — “was/ is/ will be… death”  — to re-purposing assorted stuff from a janitor’s closet to re-tell the story of destruction of her country and her family in an unending war. The rationale for this storytelling concept isn’t quite clear; a minor tweak could fix that, I think.

“This will be my father,” she says picking up the bucket that stands in for Priam. Her brother Hector gets to be a mop.

We meet Cassandra’s tart-tongued mother Hecuba, with her worldly edge of cynicism — again nailed by the resourceful Nieuwenhuis. She describes her son Paris — whose mad-pash for Menelaus’s glamorous but slutty wife Helen will ignite the Trojan War — a hat with feathers on it, “the human fascinator, beautiful but useless.”

We meet Andromache, the beleaguered foreign-born widow of Hecuba’s son Hector, “a queen with no king.” And we meet another woman with a tumultuous history of exploitation by the military men around her. “I practise getting smaller; eventually I will disappear,” says the concubine Briseis who, in Nieuwenhuis’s performance, does seem to be shrinking before our very eyes. .

The atmospheric lighting, from flashlights and footlights, has a kind of homespun ghostliness about it; it casts distorted large-scale shadows of a turbulent historical epic on the wall behind the women.   

“Your job is to tell the truth when no one is listening…. That’s what keeps you human.” The ending, which flings Prophecy into the immediate present, is a punch to the solar plexus. 

As seen at the Winnipeg Fringe.

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And on my summer holidays … I went to the Winnipeg Fringe

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

This is just a little note to tell you that I’m about to start posting 12thnight.ca reviews of shows I saw on my excursion last month to the country’s second-largest Fringe festival, in Winnipeg. They’re 16 of the shows you could be seeing come Thursday, when the 36th annual Edmonton Fringe starts its 11 day (and night) bash in 42 venues.

I know you’re all studying the 220-show Fringe roster, and getting excited. At 12thnight.ca we’re here to egg you on (and to pique your own curiosity for theatre exploration)!

 

 

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No stars for the star rating system of Fringe reviews

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

To star or not to star.

There’s a question that’s been debated in beer tents, box offices, and press rooms since Hamlet gave director’s notes to the travelling players.

There are arguments to be made on both sides, and I’ve made them. And I’m still of two minds. But as a theatre reviewer who’s covered the Edmonton Fringe and its astonishing growth spurt since 1983 (please, don’t do the math!) I’m thinking that the star rating system, the shortest possible shorthand review, has outlived any real meaning for artists and audiences it might once have had. So, for my short Fringe reviews on my theatre website, 12thnight.ca, I’ve decided not to go that way. 

In a star-studded Fringe universe peppered indiscriminately by a proliferation of four-and-five star ratings from an ever-widening spectrum of writers — just look at the program — artists and Fringe-goers alike tell me (loudly and convincingly) that 3 1/2 stars is a pall, and three is a pasting, worse at the box office than no review at all. Two? Don’t even bother writing a review. To pursue that thought to its reducto ad absurdum, why even bother writing a review anyhow, and provide evidence for your critical reaction, if a star chart with its top-heavy four and five-star clusters, is all that counts?

I get that the 220-show lineup in this latest edition of our summer theatre bash is dauntingly full of choices for ticket-buying audiences. But if critical reaction is reduced to four- and five-star assignments, we’re in a sorry era of a pass-fail system for Fringe shows. Only four? Sorry, you flunk.

And, my Fringe-going compatriots, isn’t that a slam at the whole idea of having a Fringe, a theatre festival with alternative cred, with a mixture of bright ideas, experiments, works-in-progress, polished touring shows?

Star ratings were never a nuanced, stand-alone system, I think. What journalist wants their work not to be read? Not me, that’s for sure. What’s happened to the critical imperative to explain your reactions?

To pick the most problematic of the ratings, what does a three-star rating slapped on a review mean? Potentially, very different things. A theatrical experiment with aspects of brilliance and notable flaws, perhaps, worthy of seeing and discussing? Or perhaps a piece that strikes you as competent but only mildly interesting? How many stars should a fascinating failure get? How do you weigh ambition against execution?

These reactions cry out for a review, no matter how short. And it shortchanges everyone concerned, onstage and off-, artist and audience, to off-load that responsibility onto a star chart.

Which is why I’m venturing outside the star rating system for my Fringe reviews on 12thnight.ca. I’ve thought and thought about this, since the Fringe is SO big. And artists need, and deserve, some cross-country box office traction from their experience at the continent’s biggest and oldest Fringe, some way of recording the response to their work.

I’ll be trying hard to be more quotable; it’s only fair. Stay tuned.

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All in the family: Ryan history is onstage at the Fringe

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Sadie Bowling, Kate Ryan, Emma Wilmott in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds. Photo by db photographics.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Something big and important, something you could call life-changing, happened to Kate Ryan 31 years ago. And it sheds light, both the theatrical and the personal kind, on why her theatre company, The Plain Janes, is doing a straight play at the Fringe, along with the sort of off-centre musical that is its more usual fare.   

Back to 1986. It was a family affair. Kate and her sister Bridget appeared with their actor mother Maralyn in a production directed by their father Tim, Ryans all. The play was The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds, a wrenching 1971 Pulitzer Prize-winner by American playwright Paul Zindel. His breakthrough into the big time, culled from his own experience, was an exploration of family dysfunction: an embittered and controlling widowed mother, and her two teenaged daughters.

“It was a thrilling time,” says Ryan recalling her teen self in the production. “A huge turning point!”

Not that the theatre life was a discovery. She and her sister had grown up in rehearsal halls, when the Ryans lived (and started theatre companies) in Cleveland. They’d been in musicals; Maralyn had founded the St. Albert Children’s Theatre, and regularly directed kids in big Broadway musicals and plays.

“But it was our first time working with mom as an actor, our first time working with Tim as a director.And it was terrifying!” she laughs. “He demanded a lot from us…. No concessions! He was all about respecting the work, what the world of the play needed. And I realized if you choose to be an artist, this is what you commit to….”

Kate Ryan, Maralyn Ryan, Bridget Ryan in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds, 1986. Photo supplied.

“I remember mom saying ‘it’s not going to be easy’. She remembers going backstage, and thinking how hard it is to be this woman, to live her….”

Ryan is finding this out first-hand. This time she plays Beatrice the monster mom in Amy DeFelice’s Plain Janes Fringe production of Marigolds. And Ryan’s teenaged daughter Emma Wilmott, newly graduated from Vic (the performing arts high school) and fresh from a summer theatre intensive at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) in London, is playing the role she once had: Ruth, the daughter most damaged by her mother’s hatred of the world. Sadie Bowling plays Tillie, the shy daughter who rises above the toxic environment by blooming.

“Tim didn’t rehearse us together; he kept us apart,” recalls Ryan. “Same thing with (director) Amy and I this summer…. (The play) is written that way. The mother isolates herself from her daughters; her connections are full of conflict..”

Ryan was a theatre kid; how could you be a Ryan and not be immersed? I remember Maralyn once telling me the relief of working with other Ryans on a production was that at least everybody in the house had anxiety about the same show. But, says Kate, “I didn’t know what it really meant to be an actor, a theatre artist…. After Marigolds I knew I wanted to be an actor, to go to Juilliard.”

So her father, who started the theatre arts program at MacEwan, took her, at 17, to New York to audition. “The nerve of it!” she laughs. “And the disappointment when it didn’t work out! But I did it! I picked myself up after that…. This business is so cruel, so hard on the soul. I see that in Emma, the stress, the disappointment, the dreams of success.”   

Beatrice, an isolationist steeped in rancour, has the configuration of a monster. But, like Amanda in Tennessee Williams’ A Glass Menagerie, she has a past full of struggles and disappointments, says Ryan. “In the dark days of parenting, I’ve felt that myself: why is the world so much happier than I am? The woman goes to the darkest places.”

“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” Ryan laughs. “That, and learning Sondheim.”

Which explains, in a roundabout way, why Ryan spent a morning at home last week, waiting for the arrival of a cat skeleton for the show. You can get anything at Amazon. 

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds runs at Walterdale Theatre (Stage 3) Aug. 18 to 27.

Tim Ryan and Maralyn Ryan in The Apple Tree, Cleveland 1973. Photo supplied.

Madelaine Knight in The Apple Tree, The Plain Janes at the Fringe. Photo by db photographics.

A CODA: Meanwhile, there’s a Ryan history attached to the Janes’ other Fringe show, too, a witty little 1966 musical by the storied Fiddler on the Roof/ She Loves Me team of Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock. Ryan’s father and mother starred in a 1973 production of The Apple Tree in Cleveland, before they arrived here, and started making theatres, and theatre companies. 

Dave Horak of Edmonton Actors Theatre, Ryan’s brother-in-law, is directing The Apple Tree, in a production starring Graham Mothersill and Madelaine Knight as the world’s first couple Adam and Eve, and Jocelyn Ahlf as the Snake. It runs at the Varscona (stage 12) starting Thursday. 

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Edmonton Fringe 2017: a selection of hit return engagements

Posted on August 13, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

True, the unpredictability factor is built into the 220-show edition of the Edmonton Fringe that opens Thursday. But hits do have a way of showing up again. Will they be back in buffed-up, revised, re-muscled, enhanced form? Maybe, maybe not.

In the lineup, I noticed a smattering of shows I’ve seen and enjoyed before, in past summers. Here’s a selection… 

The Exquisite Hour. A gem One of my favourites of all the Stewart Lemoine canon returns to the Fringe as part of Teatro La Quindicina’s 2017 summer season. When the playwright’s only two-hander premiered, in 2002, it was Teatro’s temporary farewell to the Fringe, a momentous threshold in itself. And everything about this beautiful and insightful little real-time piece seemed to open new vistas — for the playwright, the actors, the characters. When a mysterious woman arrives in the backyard of an unassuming “supervisor of merchandise receiving” one summer evening and asks him politely “will you let me have this hour?”, nothing can be the same.

Jeff Haslam is back in the role of the “ordinary” man who discovers the possibility of the extraordinary. He originated Mr. Zachary Teale in the 2002 premiere (with Kate Ryan) and resumed in the 2013 revival, with Belinda Cornish, who returns, too, as Mrs. Darimont.

Weaksauce. If you’ve never seen a show by Sam Mullins, one of the country’s best monologuists, you’re now in a position to fix that. Give yourself a treat. There’s something compellingly natural about the way he mines his own experiences, and turns them into something fresh. Weaksauce takes us into the strange new topsy-turvy world of his 16-year-old self, who falls in love for the first time. The coming-of-age turf is familiar; it’s exploration by Mullins feels fresh and newly discovered.

Johnnie Walker in Redheaded Stepchild. Photo supplied.

Redheaded Stepchild: Johnnie Walker was a delight as a much-persecuted 11-year-old carrot-top in this hilarious and poignant coming-of-age 2012 solo show from Toronto’s Nobody’s Business Theatre. You’ll never see an adult play a kid — a danger-fraught enterprise — with more unforced charm.

Nayana Fielkov and Matthew McCorkie in Falling Awake, Ragmop. Photo by Kai Hou.

Falling Awake. Last summer I was enchanted by a strangely surreal little physical comedy from the Vancouver duo Ragmop, beckons you into a dreamworld where memory and fantasy get to play by their own elastic rules. It’s back to play along the frontier between waking and sleeping. Funniest sex scene at the Fringe (until proven otherwise). Bonus: you get to use the word “surreal” with impunity.

Stéphanie Morin-Robert in Blindside. Photo by Tristan Brand.

Blindside. I loved this charmer when I saw it last year in Winnipeg.  In one way Stéphanie Morin-Robert’s memoir is an ode to childhood resilience — she gave up her left eye to cancer at age two — but it stands apart from that repertoire for its wry sense of humour, its unexpected bounce, its playful end-run around sentimentality. She’s very apt to pop out her glass eye and enjoy it when we flinch. Apparently, the creator/performer (who’s also in the highly original two-hander The Merkin Sisters) has re-written and re-worked for this return engagement at our Fringe. 

Jem Rolls in The Inventor Of All Things. Photo supplied.

The Inventor of All Things. The virtuoso performance poet Jem Rolls directs his fierce verbal dexterity at a subject as compellingly eccentric as his own performance style. Leo Szilard was the Hungarian physicist who devised the science of the atomic bomb, and then, in an act of little-known heroism, figured out how to keep that knowledge from Hitler. But that’s not all he was. Rolls’ show is an homage to unstoppable, multi-faceted creativity, and its unexpected byways.

The Pre-History of Moses P. For years the South African storyteller Erik de Waal has delivered Fringe audiences vivid glimpses into a richly variegated culture and its traditions. And he’s done it in a sonorous, incantatory style like no other. His kids’ stories feature animals. His adult shows, like The Pre-History of Moses P (here half a dozen Fringes ago), explore the high cost of a human culture arranged and separated strictly by colour. I remember this show for its weave of two storylines that come together with tragic force.

  

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Edmonton Fringe 2017: what to see at our big summer theatre bash

Posted on August 13, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

So… what looks good?

Yes, my friends, the Fringe, Edmonton’s favourite summer festival, is back Thursday, in the town where the continent’s fringe phenom began. A Midsummer Night’s Fringe, the 11 day-and- night 36th annual edition of North America’s first and still biggest fringe, has more choices than ever. 

The 144-page Fringe program is a fat and weighty tome, to be sure. But don’t be daunted by the prospect of launching yourself into an unpredictable 220-show universe. Be curious and get excited instead. Scatter the classic four-word Fringe question “so, what looks good?” freely, wherever you go. I went to the Winnipeg Fringe last month to check out some of the 42 shows that are arriving here after playing there, so 12thnight.ca will be posting reviews of those, soon. Some of the Fringe’s biggest hits, shows I’ve enjoyed before at Edmonton Fringes past, are returning: check out the 12thnight.ca companion post on those. Meanwhile, have a look at some intriguing prospects below. I haven’t seen them yet; we can explore together. 

Some caught my eye because of the play itself. Sometimes the draw is the adventurous artists involved; sometimes an experimental premise that seems to come at us direct from left field. At Fringe time, the question “whaaaaat? who would do that?” is an attraction, not the reverse.

So, 12thnight.ca has 12, no 13, possibilities for you to consider….

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

The Superhero Who Loved Me. How could you not want to see Chris Craddock’s first new Fringe play in six years? The award-winning author of Irma Voth returns to the festivities with The Superhero Who Loved Me, which would seem to invite the Craddockian love of theatricality, black comedy, and cartoons.  Wayne Paquette of Blarney Productions directs April Banigan and Kristi Hansen.

Gruesome Playground Injuries. Star Canadian director Ron Jenkins is back at the Fringe after an absence of 10 years, for a production of this two-hander by Pulitzer Prize nominee Rajiv Joseph. Merran Carr-Wiggin and Evan Hall, who are evidently injury magnets, return to the roles they first occupied in 2012 as 23-year-olds in Sandra M. Nicholls’ production.

Merran Carr-Wiggin and Evan Hall in Gruesome Playground Injuries. Photo supplied.

Now 28, the real-life couple play Gayleen and Doug, whose friendship over 30 years can be charted in blood and bruises, cuts and breaks, a whole anatomical gallery of damages. Carr-Wiggin and Hall plan to keep returning to the play at the same intervals the characters meet, till they’re 38, as in the play’s finale. That’s a lot of blood. 

Louise Casemore and Vern Thiessen in Gemini. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography

Gemini. There was a time when Fringe BYOVs were repositories of site-specific theatre. It’s rare these days, but Louise Casemore’s artist brain still ticks that way. She “loves the intimacy, the obliteration of the divide between performers and audience.” Her OCD was a nerve-wracking expedition into that territory. Her latest is specially designed for a bar, the lower level at El Cortez Mexican Kitchen and Tequila Bar, “as close to an ambient bar environment as I can get.” 

Her first two-hander explores bar culture, the relationships it forges, its dependencies. And there’s this: Casemore co-stars opposite the award-winning playwright (and Workshop West artistic director) Vern Thiessen, in a rare stage appearance. 

 Kill Shakespeare. Based on the hit comic books by Conor McCreary and Anthony Del Col, this live radio play (with blow-up projections from the graphic series) imagines Shakespeare’s star heroes and villains outside their plays, and gives them an action adventure/thriller to be in. Will the expeditionary force led by Richard III, Iago and Lady M find the mysterious recluse William Shakespeare and assassinate him? Will the rebel movement led by plucky Juliet and Falstaff save him? Andrew Ritchie of Thou Art Here, the quick-witted “site-sympathetic” Shakespeare company, directs us and them towards the answer. No dithering from Hamlet, please.

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

No Exit. “Nothing says summer like Sartre!” declares the puckish Ron Pederson.

OK, who does Sartre at the Fringe? Who has ever done Sartre at the Fringe? Bright Young Things’ production of No Exit, a 1944 play by the French existentialist bigshot assembles three strangers … in hell. “They know that’s where they are: an ugly room, badly furnished,” says Pederson, originally the director and now in the cast (along with Belinda Cornish and Louise Lambert; Kevin Sutley directs). “They’re unsure of what the nature of hell is, and what the torture will be….”

“Who knew that the author of Being and Nothingness would be so great at unpacking a story?” says Pederson. “It’s a real puzzle for actors,” says Cornish, artistic director of Bright Young Things, dedicated to reviving the neglected mid-century repertoire. “There’s meat to it, a bit of wrestling, and some really funny moments of comedy.”

Pompeii, L.A. Edmonton’s introduction to the young Australian playwright Declan Greene comes courtesy of Cardiac Theatre (Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes). Director Harley Morison describes it as a “collage,” a tumble into the “magical, weird, toxic” Wonderland of L.A. and Hollywood, celebrity, and “the machine that eats up child stars and spits them out.

“”It’s like flipping through channels on TV,” he says. Or “a sound stage, where you open one door, and there’s Judy Garland, another and it’s Johnny Carson, a whole B-list of stars.…” Of Morison’s six actors, five have two or three roles. 

My Love Lies Frozen in the Ice. “A tale of love, loss and madness” from the English company, Dead Rabbits Theatre, who brought us The Dragon last summer. I loved the ingenious theatricality of their storytelling, and its playfulness in that fable. This new show sounds magical and inventive, too: A balloon expedition to the North Pole in 1897, three men and the woman they left behind. Sign me up.

Madelaine Knight in With Glowing Hearts: A Canadian Burlesque Review. Photo supplied.

With Glowing Hearts. Haven’t we waited long enough for a burlesque revue of Canadian history? Send in the Girls, those adventurous history buffs, who have un-corseted Shakespeare heroines, the multiple wives of Henry VIII, and the Bronte siblings, get down and reveal the, er, underpinnings of Canuck history and leading ladies like Laura Secord, Klondike Kate,and Nellie McClung. The mind reels, and jigs.

Legoland. The play is from the same brain, Jacob Richmond, responsible for the macabre and alluring Ride The Cyclone, a bona fide Canadian alternative theatre hit on both sides of the border. Like the dead teenagers of that play, the precocious home-schooled brother and sister of Legoland come from Uranium City, Saskatchewan. (Note to self: see all plays with characters from there;  you can write the name and it has a weird kind of Shangri-La magic about it). And they have an enforced public service presentation for us, on why assaulting pop icons is wrong. Luc Tellier directs; Jenny McKillop and Rachel Bowron play the siblings.

Rachel Bowron and Jenny McKillop in Legoland. Photo by Ryan Parker.

Rivercity the Musical. Photo by BB Photography

Rivercity The Musical. The last time Rebecca Merkley said “wouldn’t it be so funny if…?” she came up with a comedy about synchronized swimmers. Last summer’s sleeper hit The Unsyncables was her first play. Then Merkley  said it again. This time the result is a new musical — she was a singer-songwriter before she became a playwright — spun from the Archie comics.

The heroine is Betty: “she’s my favourite,” declares Merkley feelingly. “She’s cool, sweet, kind, nice, she fixes Archie’s car, she makes five-course meals. She’s awesome. Her only weakness is … Archie.” And that cad is in love with Veronica. Doesn’t that sound like something to sing about?

Brian Dooley, Nadien Chu in The Small Things. Photo by Ryan Parker.

The Small Things. It’s by the scarily clever Irish playwright Enda Walsh (Disco Pigs), so I’m already getting tense, in advance. It imagines a world violently reduced to tongue-tied; the two characters are the last to spew out words, in the face of a catastrophe of silence. Wayne Paquette’s production stars two elite actors, Nadine Chu and Brian Dooley.

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

(Note to self: What is it about the Celts?) The only other prospect in the line-up with similar tense-making potential is Ciara, by the well-named Scottish playwright David Harrower (A Slow Air, Good With People, Blackbird). Linda Grass stars in Amy DeFelice’s Trunk Theatre production of the intricate dramatic monologue that takes us onto the mean streets of Glasgow, and the career arc of a gangster whose daughter runs an art gallery. 

Slack Tide. There’s buzz about this new play from up-and-comer Bevin Dooley, about two siblings and the dark secret that has estranged them. In addition to “violence, sexual content, religious content, and adult language,” the warnings include “disturbing imagery.” The strong parts&labour cast includes Merran Carr-Wiggin, Chris Cook and Julia Guy.

Multiple Organism, by Mind of a Snail Puppet Co. Photo supplied.

OK, even with bagels, a dozen includes 13. So, have a peek at Multiple Organism. I’m intrigued. Where else are you going to see a large-scale shadow puppet adventure with original music, with live projections on the nude body of an actor? It’s from the adventurous Vancouver duo Mind of a Snail, who’ve brought us the magical Curious Contagious and Caws and Effect.

Suddenly this intriguing possibilities list seems to be bursting at the seams. What about The Apple Tree? One of the hottest directors in town, Dave Horak, directs a strong Plain Janes cast in the three-hander musical by the same forces brought the world Fiddler on the Roof.  Or MAA and PAA’s new history cabaret Vern’s Diary, the writing of a Canadian prisoner of war, with original music? And hey, there’s a Morris Panych….

Stop, Liz. It’s time to explore.  

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Wakey Wakey! Fringe tickets go on sale today at noon!

Posted on August 9, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I have had a most rare dream….”

–Bottom the stagestruck weaver, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Tickets go on sale at noon today for A Midsummer Night’s Fringe, the 36th annual edition of our summer theatre bash, North America’s first and still biggest fringe festival.

There’s more than one route into the 220-show  universe of this year’s Fringe. You can order tickets online at fringetheatre.ca. You can phone the Fringe box office (780-409-1910). Or you can show up in person at the central box office in the ATB Financial Arts Barns (10330 84 AVe.) or TIX on the Square in Churchill Square downtown.

The holy grail for the Fringe binger is a Frequent Fringer Pass or Double Fringer Pass, $115 and $230 respectively for 10 or 20 tickets. There are 600 for sale, and they get snapped up in a twinkling.

Once the festivities start, other possibilities, more spontaneous and creative, appear in the Fringe mist. You can make your ticket transactions (and pick up your online purchases) at satellite box offices scattered throughout the site, and at the French Quarter’s La Cité francophone headquarters. An hour before showtime, you can try your luck at the door of a BYOV, one of the 31 indie venues acquired and outfitted by the artists themselves, and containing fully half the Fringe’s 220-show roster. 

Artists set the ticket price, to a $13 maximum, with a $3 topper going towards running the box office system. So the most you’ll be shelling out is 16 bucks. Most artists — broke and going for broke — have opted for the max, as you’ll see if you do a quick tour of the 44-page glossy $10 program. But there are some exceptions (Prom Night of the Living Dead: A Zombie High school Musical!, for example, at $10, Stranger Things Have Happened at $8, Blown Away at $11, Cream of Improv Soup at $10).

Many shows offer discounts for seniors and students. And they can also send tickets to the half-price “daily discount” booth on the day of the performance. And if you’re nice to an artist, who might happen to be wandering through the site promoting a show, who knows? You might end up with a complementary ticket (groups can hold back a quarter of their tickets for any show, for their own impulsive connections with their potential audience).

Now, the question is this: What To See? 12thnight.ca is here to help you with that. Check out this site for suggestions, features, Fringe show reviews, by me and special guest reviewers. 

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Theatre Network’s 43rd season opens with a Trout premiere

Posted on July 29, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Sheldon Elter in Métis Mutt. Photo by Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!/  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun/  The frumious Bandersnatch!”

— Through The Looking Glass And What Alice Found

Theatre Network ventures through the looking glass to launch their 43rd season this fall. 

For one thing, plans for a new theatre that will rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the old, are emerging tangibly from the smoke of the 2015 fire that destroyed their vintage 124th St. ex-cinema home. And there’s this: the TN MainStage season of three productions opens November 7 to 26 at the Roxy on Gateway, the company’s temporary home, with the world premiere of a new show from the zestfully experimental Calgary-based Old Trout Puppet Workshop.

Two years in the making, Underland, as it’s currently titled, is spun from the adventures of Alice in a world where logic is upside down, or inside out. Lewis Carroll is a natural fit with Trout World, with its appetite for the absurd, the grotesque, the strange and wonderful.

Which is something you might instantly suspect if you have followed the Trouts’ long and productive relationship with Theatre Network. It’s included the macabre faux-archive Famous Puppet Death Scenes (which ran twice at Theatre Network, 2008 and 2015); Ignorance, a kind of Trout doc/history of happiness; The Erotic Anguish of Don Juan, which found a whole arsenal of eccentric surreal imagery for the old reprobate’s career.

Underland, says Theatre Network artistic director Bradley Moss, was conceived as “Alice in Wonderland backstage, a messed-up puppet behind-the-scenes version….” But that was before the Trout trio of Judd Palmer, Peter Balkwill, and Pityu Menderes were struck, more particularly, with the Lewis Carroll poem Jabberwocky and “its wild absurdity,” as Moss puts it.

“We’ve already changed the blurb several times,” Moss laughs. “Hey, even the title might change.” 

An adventure of a very different sort runs in the TN season after that. “It’s exciting we can bring it home,” says Moss of Métis Mutt: Sheldon Elter’s hit solo play, was born at Theatre Network’s Nextfest in 2001, as a 10-minute stand-up routine.

Buzz surrounded Métis Mutt from the start, both for the harrowing and hilarious personal story of abuse and domestic chaos it told in an audacious blend of tragedy and comedy, and for the stunningly multi-talented young actor/musician/writer it introduced to the scene.

Métis Mutt has been amplified several times since then. After a Dora Award-nominated run at Toronto’s Native Earth Theatre this past season, Ron Jenkins’ production comes home Feb. 13 to March 4, and Moss is delighted. “Sheldon is so charismatic, so willing to go to the hard places….”

Moss himself directs Infinity (April 17 to May 6). The challenging 2015 play by the Canadian star Hannah Moscovitch (East of Berlin, This Is War, Little One) knots the domestic and the philosophical in the relationship between a physicist, a musician, and their mathematician daughter. “The characters are all brilliant, all screwed up,” says Moss, whose production of Moscovitch’s psycho-thriller Little One won the outstanding production Sterling Award in 2014.  In Infinity, the physicist’s theory of time will prove crucial. “Infinity starts with the word ‘love’ and ends with the word ‘love’,” says Moss. “It’s smart, it’s funny. And there’s music,” played live by an onstage violinist. 

Network’s annual Roxy Performance Series, which hosts productions from indie companies, opens (Sept. 21 to 24) with Mind Games by and starring the mentalist Jeff Newman.

Taylor Chadwick directs a What It Is production of The Aliens (Oct. 10 to 22), the 2010 breakout play by the American writer Annie Baker, whose distinctive voice has found its way into such award-winners as Circle Mirror Transformation, The Flick and John. Two underachiever slackers, hanging out yakking behind a nondescript Vermont coffee shop, are joined by a nerdy high school kid: that’s the unflashy setup that expands to embrace big things. “I know these guys!” laughs Moss, who grew up in Quebec not far from the Vermont border.

Dave Horak’s award-winning Edmonton Actors Theatre production of Burning Bluebeard — “our anti-Christmas Christmas show” as Moss puts it — returns for a third Yule season December 3 to 23. The macabre but poignant Jay Torrence play seems eerily tailored for Theatre Network: the singed cast of a Christmas panto returns from the ashes of a burnt-out theatre to finish their show.

“There are pieces of our 124th St. mural in the backdrop,” says Moss. “Our burnt theatre is up there onstage.”

Kill Your Television returns to their 2002 hit Shakespeare’s R & J, with a new production of the Joe Calarco play in which four students from a strict Catholic private boys’ school meet secretly to read something banned: Romeo and Juliet. They become immersed, in a powerful and unexpected way. The cast of Kevin Sutley’s production has yet to be announced.

Jim Guedo’s Wild Side Productions (10 Out Of 12, The Realistic Joneses) returns — with a hot contemporary six-actor play that awaits only the finalization of rights.

Hey Ladies!, the kooky infotainment variety show invented by Cathleen Rootsaert, Leona Brausen, and Davina Stewart has five dates, Sept. 29, Oct. 27, Dec. 1, Feb. 2, May 11. New to the line-up is PattyZ’s@The Roxy Cabaret Series. Actor/cabaret artist Patricia Zentilli creates themed cabarets, with guests, for Saturday night series, dates to be announced.

Meanwhile, TN steps up a capital fund-raising campaign for a $10 to $12 million new Roxy, on the footprint of the old. The reborn Roxy will include a 200-seat mainstage theatre (the Nancy Power), an 80 to 100-seat black box alternative stage (the Lorne Cardinal Theatre), and a Bradley Moss rehearsal hall.

Subscription passes for season #43 are available at Theatre Network (780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca). 

        

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