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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That masked man is back: a new Phantom of the Opera sings the music of the night

Posted on July 22, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Derrick Davis and Eva Tavares in The Phantom of the Opera, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Some of you may recall the strange affair of the Phantom of the Opera, a mystery never fully explained….”

With this opening gambit, and signature organ arpeggio, a 1911 beauty-and-the-beast potboiler by an obscure Parisian hack/bon vivant named Gaston Leroux turned into one of the monster entertainment success stories of our time.

In the three decades since its 1986 London premiere, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s lushly romantic 1986 pop-Puccini hybrid has phantomized the world, propelled on a jet stream of pure box-office high-test.

Thanks to Lloyd Webber and co, the subterranean vocal coach lifted from a wordy novel no one has actually read is arguably the most famous masked man in history (with the world’s best-known lighting fixture at his disposal). People around the globe flock — as  over and over, as the ranks of phantomaniac repeaters attest — to feel “the power of the music of the night” and see the guy not get the girl. “No use resisting,” as the Phantom himself advises his beautiful chorine protegé. “Abandon thought and let the dream descend.”

And talk about mysteries never fully explained, here’s one. Four years ago, with Hal Prince’s extravagantly staged Phantom of the Opera continuing to sing the music of the knight (that would be Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber to you) to sold-out houses in London and New York, producer Cameron Mackintosh launched a new version for North American touring. 

Starting Wednesday, the world’s second-most lucrative musical of all time (after The Lion King) arrives on the Jube stage in a new production directed by Broadway veteran Laurence Connor. Were Mackintosh et al taking a cue from the Phantom himself, a modernist with acidic things to say about archaic performance styles? It’s not as if fans were clamouring for change, as associate director Seth Sklar-Heyn concedes genially. As he says, that’s the catch 22 of  long-running mega-hits with fanatical followings. “How can you do a revival of something that’s never closed?” 

The Phantom of the Opera, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Alastair Muir.

 “On the page it’s everything people have come to know and love,” Sklar-Heyn says of the new production of The Phantom of the Opera that’s en route across the country, Vancouver to Montreal, before returning to America. It remains spectacular, as re-designed by Paul Brown. And with its cast and orchestra of 52, it’s undeniably huge, one of the largest productions currently on the road.

“Nothing has been reduced!” reassures Sklar-Heyn of a show that needs “the same number of tractor trailers (20) to transport as when it first took to the road” lo these many years. “But it’s updated; it takes advantage of new technology, new developments in (theatrical) engineering, things you couldn’t conceive of in the ‘80s when Phantom premiered….”

“The music itself, of course, is all there, the melodies, the lyrics are maintained, upheld. But it’s with new orchestrations that take into account new technology….”

The updating is “really in the direction,” says Sklar-Heyn, whose archive includes everything from Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia to Finian’s Rainbow and such widely varying tours as Frost/Nixon and Evita. “It’s in the pulse, the way it moves from location to location without black-outs.” He describes that flow as “cinematic, close-ups and wide shots…. We cut from one moment to another, or fade.”

What Sklar-Heyn is describing is an update very different from the re-designed Les Miz, which replaced its famous revolving stagecraft with sophisticated projections. “We’re not about projection or video, except in two or three little moments…. We’re all about full 3-D scenery,” says Sklar-Heyn. “We fill the stage with it! And it’s massive. And very heavy!” 

“It’s not about excess. It’s just about making it grand, operatic,” he says. After all, the story takes us to that extravagant Belle Epoque palace, the Paris Opera. “We need to capture the glamour of the period, incredibly lush, opulent. The physical (environment) of the production has to live at that level…. And it feels justified and balanced with the world of Lloyd Webber’s music. When the orchestra swells, the visuals must be there!”

Does the story have a different feel to it in this new production? Sklar-Heyn considers that it belongs in a new way to Christine, the ingenue the Phantom grooms for stardom. “She’s the focus of the tale. There’s no neon sign on Christine that says Follow Me; it’s just about perspective. Your eye follows her….It’s her story.” Director Connor “tried to come at it in a way that filled in the gaps. What are the moments I’ve always questioned? What does ‘the music of the night’ really mean?”

“We’ve tried to capitalize on the new talent,” Sklar-Heyn says of a cast led by Derrick Davis as the man trapped by his deformities, his genius, his desires, and Canadian Eva Tavares (replacing Katie Travis for the tour, starting in Edmonton) as the chorine he mesmerizes. Traditionally, the age difference between Christine and the Phantom has often meant the latter was a sort of father-replacement. “Here, instead of a man to replace Christine’s father, there’s a man to excite new emotions.”

“It has a different pulse, a narrative momentum,” Sklar-Heyn muses. “The way the world moves feels a little more contemporary; it makes Phantom feel like it belongs in the world of the modern musical theatre..…”

“We really want to give you real people, real threats, in a real working theatre…. We want it to feel tangible: the Phantom as a real man, the man, who’s an engineer, able to create the journey,” the iconic candelight cruise across a subterranean lagoon to the Phantom’s lair.

“We want to meet your expectations. And surpass them.”

PREVIEW

The Phantom of the Opera

Broadway Across Canada

Directed by: Laurence Connor

Starring: Derrick Davis, Eva Tavares

Where: Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium

Running: July 26 to August 6

Tickets: Ticketmaster (1-855-985-5000, ticketmaster.ca)

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Getting your Gasp! back. The Cirque du Soleil’s Kurios: a cabinet of the curiouser and curiouser

Posted on July 21, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Mr. Microcosmos and Mini Lili in Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities. Photo by Martin Girard.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A burnished antique music box opens, and suddenly, set in motion, is a trapeze act with no trapeze. A strong man plants his feet and flings a beautiful woman into the air again and again; she somersaults, ever more elaborately, before he catches her.

The Cirque du Soleil has always been drawn to frame its collection of improbable virtuosos in a theatre of surreal images and whimsical free-association. And you could say that of the 2014 show that’s now ensconced under the Cirque’s signature yellow and blue-striped grand chapiteau at Northlands. But you’d be missing something in your description. In the canon of Cirque shows (of which I have seen more than my share), there is nothing quite like Kurios and its wonder-full 2014 “cabinet of curiosities.” 

By opening the cabinet of the Belle Epoque imagination, Kurios and its mad inventor/scientist/Seeker character (Anton Valen) lead us into the Victorian turning-point milieu of exploration, discovery, invention that joined art to science. The steam that powered the railway (and the original steampunk), the new glow of electric light, clockwork toys, wind-up gramophones, perpetual motion machines, mechanical oddities, the deep-sea bathosphere fantasies of Jules Verne, gravity-defying hot-air balloons — they’re the motifs of a carnival that, in every detail and prop, embraces that new turn-of-the-century sense of wonder at life’s infinite oddities.

Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities. Photo by Martin Girard

It’s directed by Michel Laprise, new to Cirque creation, who has Madonna’s Super Bowl half-time show on his resumé. Stéphane Roy’s stunning design, with its glowing bell jars of strange light, is dominated by a cogged wrought-iron Gustav Eiffel-style arch through which a steam train emerges to disgorge a tumble of passengers, or a giant mechanical hand arrives, crawling with exquisitely contorting deep-sea creatures. And Philippe Guillotel’s fantastical costumes, bona fide works of art, create the Seeker’s inventions who emerge from his cabinet of curiosities and come to life before our very eyes.

Kurios: cabinet of curiosities. Photo by Martin Girard.

Mr. Microcosmos (Karl L’Ecuyer) has a huge bathosphere belly, where a tiny exquisite women Mini Lili (Rima Hadchiti) lives in a perfect little apartment with a perfect little armchair. Nico the Accordion Man stretches and compresses his pleated form into any configuration or size.

The Victorian love of exotica, curios and miniatures is everywhere, and set in motion, in Kurios. There are gramophone/typewriters, holograms, wild percussionists who play furniture and suitcases, a Darwinian gaggle (a school?) of half-men half-fish, a juggler who tosses human hands in the air.

And speaking of hands, in a 46-member cast of circus virtuosos there’s a puppetry whiz (Nico Baxais) who creates whole scenes with just his supple hands (and great lighting). They’re reproduced, in magical fashion, in a giant hot-air balloon floating above.

The towering chair balancing circus act you’ll remember from other Cirque shows is reinvented by happening at a dinner party, duplicated in exact mirror detail and upside down, hanging from the top of the tent. That was the moment, on Thursday’s opening night, when Edmonton provided a dramatic summer tempest outside, with a percussion score of thunder and pelting rain, that actually stopped the show for a time. The Cirque’s sound whizzes (here, Raphaël Beau and Bob & Bill) would never settle for such a crude sound mix.   

It is a measure of the eccentric originality of Kurios that one of its cleverest scenes is an “invisible circus” of traditional acts. You see the trapezes swing, the diving board bounce and the splash of the water in the bucket below. The spotlights move; the tiger roars. What you won’t see are the performers. 

The Cirque is all about marrying circus acts with theatre. Rarely has this aesthetic been so fulsomely and joyously realized as in Kurios. Some of the Cirque’s signatures remain. In every scene, there’s an observer, or a gaggle of them, wonderstruck by the magic around them. And well they might be, by the show’s reinventions.

Kurios: cabinet of curiosities. Photo by Martin Girard.

In one act, a cyclist on an old-fashioned bike pedals her way serenly into the air and accomplishes impossible acrobatic feats from the handlebars and wheels. The classic trampoline act explodes to a new level of thrill on a huge net; an ensemble of extremely athletic sea creatures propel their team-mates to the top of the tent, just by adjusting the angles of their bounces at the edges.

If you’ve found a certain Cirque fatigue setting in of late — making the impossible look easy in show after show flirts with the law of diminishing returns — your sense of wonder will be refreshed by a show that gives you your gasp! back (with exclamation point).

And, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll even fall in love with a clown again: Facundo Gimenez’s seduction scene is a comic gem.

REVIEW

Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities

Theatre: Cirque du Soleil

Directed by: Michel Laprise

Where: Grand Chapiteau, Northlands Park

Running: through Aug. 13

Tickets: 1-877-924-7783, cirquedusoleil.com

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A direct link between theatre and our shared history: Indecent in New York

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

 

Paula Vogel’s Indecent, at the Cort Theatre, New York City. Photo by Alan Kellogg.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“There is a story we want to tell you….”

There is no shortage, in the theatre archive, of plays about plays, the writing of them, the putting on of them, the view of them from backstage. I’ll never forget the one I saw last week in New York.

Paula Vogel’s Indecent, a luminous collaboration with Tony Award-winning director Rebecca Taichman, tells a theatre story, a real one, that connects us directly to the explosive historical and cultural currents of the last century. And to the tragic arc being forged in our own.

A row of actors sit before us in darkness, lit by footlights against a brick back wall that feels like the Kilroy Was Here of history. When they stand, ashes trail from their sleeves. It’s a startling image that will be repeated, in more ominous circumstances, later in the play.

The actor playing the tailor-turned-stage manager Lemml (Richard Topol) introduces the ghostly company of actors who brought Sholem Asch’s landmark 1907 Yiddish play God of Vengeance from the capitals of Europe to America.

The play, in which a rabbi’s daughter falls in love with one of the prostitutes in the brothel downstairs, was warmly received in the Greenwich Village of 1921, the first lesbian kiss on an American stage. But its move uptown to Broadway in 1923 was a disaster. Notwithstanding the fact that the love scene between the two women had been censored pre-emptively out of the script, it was shut down by the vice squad and prosecuted for obscenity. And the embittered playwright turned from theatre to other kinds of writing.

Later, the company would, fatally, return to Europe and perform the play in the Lodz ghetto in Poland. Ashes to ashes: the immigrant experience, homophobia, anti-Semitism, censorship, war…. 

(l-r): Richard Topol, Mimi Lieber, Tom Nelis, Adina Verson, Katrina Lenk, Steven Rattazzi and Max Gordon Moore, the company of Paula Vogel and Rebecca Taichman’s Indecent, at Broadway’s Cort Theatre in New York City. Photo by Carol Rosegg

With its six-actor ensemble in a play-within-a-play, the production moves backwards and forwards, in memorable stage images, klezmer music (played live by the actors), dance, song, and a repeated projection that says “a blink in time.”

And speaking of blinks, the actor Topol playing tailor/stage manager Lemml, whose life (as he tells the playwright Sholem Asch) was changed by his play, steps forward at the final curtain call to explain a highly unusual development. Indecent closed in June. And then, occasioned by passionate letter-writing to the Broadway producer, actually opened again for six weeks. It runs through Aug. 6.    

It’s a magical connection to a time, and the sense of what live theatre can do in linking us to cultural heritage. In her program notes to Indecent, Vogel says “I believe the purpose of theatre is to wound our memory so we can remember.” 

Indecent has a connection to us, in Edmonton, too. Sholem Asch’s son, Moses ‘Moe’ Asch, was the founder, in 1948 Greenwich Village, of Folkways Records, an invaluable repository of American folk and roots music and “world” recordings before that term entered the popular lexicon. Moe’s son Michael Asch, for many years an anthropology prof at the U of A before he and his wife retired to Victoria, secured the entire Folkways archive for the university here.

His grandfather’s groundbreaking play is a living document, a testament of the “cultural diversity” that has turned out to be under attack once more in this century.

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