#starcrossedlovevic: a classic musical and a classic play in rep at Vic

Posted on March 15, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

#starcrossedlovevic at Victoria School of the Arts

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Greg Dowler-Coltman sent me a Leonard Bernstein quote this week. “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”

“How did he know?” jokes Victoria School’s theatre department maestro. He’s alluding to the epic and combustible plan that — to borrow a lyric from Something’s Coming, the opening number of West Side Story — is “cannonballing down through the sky, gleam in its eye, bright as a rose…”

When Tony, the boy who falls in love across a lethal ethnic divide in West Side Story, sings “something’s coming…” he’s not kidding. The something is #starcrossedlovevic. Starting  Thursday, the arts high school is poised to produce, simultaneously, West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet: the groundbreaking 1957 Broadway musical and the Shakespeare tragedy that provided it with the tale of star-crossed lovers doomed by gang violence and racial/ethnic hatred.

Vic has staged both shows in the course of its 30-year history as an arts school. As Dowler-Coltman points out, West Side Story was “the first full-scale musical we ever produced.” The Montague and Capulet kids made their Vic debut in 1999.

But both full productions, together? “A year ago we asked ourselves, wouldn’t it be great for the kids to see the resonances between the two?” Dowler-Coltman laughs. “We thought it would be fun! An adventure. We’re always looking for ways for kids to see that risk-taking is part of an artist’s life. It’s a fundamental tenet of who we are as a school.”

In this risky, crazily complicated enterprise, a rarity for audiences too, he and co-director Natalie Witte were egged on by designer Marissa Kochanski, who suggested recycling her set for the 2015 Freewill Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet.

Last October, the horizon-expanding adventure began. Dowler-Coltman enlisted professional mentors with widely different specialties to amplify the double experience for the student company. In the end school logistics meant that only 12 kids were in both shows, but all 80 actors in the two productions were exposed to a Jerome Robbins dance workshop, for example, and Doug Merz’s dialect mentorship. They all studied “Shakespeare off the text” with Amber Lewis; they all learned stage combat with Patrick Howarth.

And they spent a weekend in a master-class with one of the most innovative physical theatre companies in the world. London’s Frantic Assembly did the original creative work translating The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time. Dowler-Coltman contacted the company, and it turned out one of their number, Jess Williams, was in New York preparing the touring production of that hit for the road. In a curious incident of synchronicity in the night time, incidentally, the star of that tour several performances a week is Vic grad Ben Wheelwright.

In the course of rehearsing, Dowler-Coltman, Witte, musical director Bruce Cable, and choreographer Maureen Tigner-Morison pooled their creative ideas. “If risk-taking is part of our bedrock, so is collaboration,” says Dowler-Coltman. “If kids don’t see it in action, it’s just an abstract idea….” 

What emerged, in an intriguing reversal, was that the Verona of Shakespeare’s tragedy is the contemporary setting: hand-to-hand violence, knives instead of swords. And West Side Story is the period piece, set 60 years ago when it was originally created, in the mean streets of ‘50s New York.

As the young actors have discovered, the parallels and intersections between the two shows have cumulated in a powerful way. “I watched the West Side Story dress rehearsal Saturday,” says Jordan Melnyk, the Grade 12 student who plays Juliet. “And Maria and Tony singing Tonight! I thought, this is the balcony scene!”

Modern dress makes it “easier for the audience to connect,” she figures. As Juliet Melnyk wears her own ripped skinny jeans in the show, at Dowler-Coltman’s prompting. “You look like you!”

In the musical Melnyk’s assignment is to dance in the dream dance pas de deux, Somewhere, with Tony and Maria looking down. It isn’t much of a stretch to imagine them looking down through the centuries, in effect, at their 16th century counterparts. 

“Two kids in West Side Story are stage-managing Romeo and Juliet,” reports Dowler-Coltman. Lady Capulet and the Nurse are calling (cues for) West Side Story.” Dowler-Coltman watched the musical’s Tony, Sage Jepson, watching the actor playing Romeo. 

“I started to see the parallels between Tony and Romeo,” says Jepson. One gets songs; the other gets gorgeous monologues in verse. The hardest thing about doing two shows, says Jepson, who’s in the gaggle of Romeo’s friends, is “focus…. You have to be always there, 100 per cent, listening, back to the heart of the story.”

PREVIEW

#starcrossedlovevic: West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet in rep

Theatre: Victoria School of the Arts

Directed by: Greg Dowler-Coltman and Natalie Witte

Where: Eva O. Howard Theatre, 101St. St. and Kingsway

Running: Thursday through March 22

Tickets: 780-392-3534

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Shocker: the outstanding Penny Ritco is leaving the Citadel

Posted on March 15, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Penny Ritco, executive director of the Citadel Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The dramatic theatre news of the day comes from the Citadel: executive director Penny Ritco has announced she’s leaving the company after 13 years.

One of the country’s most accomplished, astute, and respected theatre leaders, Ritco will stay on at the Citadel through a transition period, through summer and into fall, as the search begins for a replacement in the demanding ED job at the helm of a 51-year-old company with a $12 million a year budget.

The Citadel’s new artistic director Daryl Cloran, who’s been working with Ritco now for nearly a year, paid tribute to her “visionary leadership. “She believes so fully in this company, this city, and the transformative power of art, and she has worked tirelessly to ensure the Citadel is a place where art can thrive. ” Board president Sheila Witwicky says “Penny has played a critical role in ensuring the Citadel’s ongoing success and vitality in our community.”

And it hasn’t been easy. At Edmonton’s largest playhouse, the challenges and artistic accomplishments of the last 13 years — 12 of them in tandem with former artistic director Bob Baker — have been immense. The recessionary downturn with all its implications for sponsorships, ticket sales, frozen or diminishing grants, a large and aging facility to run and renovate notwithstanding, the indefatigable Ritco has demonstrated huge energy and commitment to making the shows happen.

The innovative Citadel/Banff Professional Theatre Program, the Citadel’s restructured Academy and Young Company, the re-imagining of the Rice Theatre as a cabaret venue, the partnerships with Catalyst and Rapid Fire Theatre — they all happened under Ritco’s executive directorship. And in the annals of Canadian theatre, notoriously fractious in the tensions between the artistic and administrative sides of theatre, the Baker-Ritco partnership proved unusually durable and harmonious.

“Thirteen years of being ON seven days a week, a building to run, people, it’s a huge responsibility,” says Ritco. “Theatre is changing. And I’d like to be part of creating and producing its new forms. Theatre is more and more artist-led..And they need someone to teach them how to be viable.”

” If there’s a place for me (in that), in a role that isn’t quite as all-consuming….” says Ritco, a graduate of the National Theatre School whose entry point into theatre was as a stage manager, producer and tour manager before she went into TV and film at the National Film Board, Great North Productions, and Alliance Atlantis. The Citadel job, which reunited Ritco with Baker — they met when he was acting and she was stage managing at Stratford — brought Ritco back to her first love. “Live theatre,” she declares firmly, “is where my heart is.”

The sheer size of the Citadel operation is exhausting. “Keeping the facility open means millions that never get put into the art,” Ritco sighs. “Artists have to find money and audience in order to create…. Today our payroll was for more than 200 people; I know towns that aren’t that big! The amount of money we have to generate on a daily basis in phenomenal! It’s a big job.”

“I don’t know if I’m a creator. But I’ve always been an enabler,” Ritco says, and laughs. “I need to enable some other things than bricks and mortar.”

Typically, Ritco has figured out the optimum theatre logistics for her exit, which won’t happen before October at least. “Even if the new executive director starts in the summer it will be a learning curve for them. And then, in September when Daryl is in rehearsal for Shakespeare in Love, and we move into (the complications) of Hadestown (a pre-Broadway collaboration with an American team of creators), I’ll be there to help the new executive director, and start preparations for the 2018-2019 season….”

Ritco isn’t looking for another version of her job at a different company. “I haven’t been made to feel unwelcome by anyone; I get on like a house on fire with Daryl…. I just need to step off for a minute to see what I want to do next. If anything.” (Laughter). It will be something. I just don’t know what.”

“I think this is right. Because I feel good. And that is how I would like to leave, not tired or grumpier. Or losing my ability to work for 16 hours day!”

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Here’s a Chekhovian regret for you: Stupid Fucking Bird is gone

Posted on March 13, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Cast of Stupid Fucking Bird, Edmonton Actors Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Haven’t you ever watched yourself and got the vague feeling you’re a spectator in your own life instead of a participant? Or maybe a fictional character in something kind of meandering and plotless instead of something that gets you happier? 

Chekhov is there for you, my friend. And Stupid Fucking Bird, Aaron Posner’s contemporary re-imagining of (and homage to) Chekhov’s The Seagull really has your back. I saw the last performance Sunday of Dave Horak’s terrific Edmonton Actors Theatre production (which will sound like I’m just rubbing it in here if you missed it). But I can’t stop thinking about its uncanny insights into our frantic quest for mutual love, human connection, sustainable happiness — in all its absurdities. And the way we never stop feeling like we’re outside looking in, thwarted at every turn.

In fact, Con, Posner’s version of The Seagull’s Constantin — an aspiring playwright burning with frustration at the conventional in theatre — says“thwarted” over and over, in every possible permutation and combination, till the word loses all sense and becomes a goofy sound effect.

Stupid Fucking Bird, in a cheeky retrofit of the Chekhov, is the world seen through Con’s eyes;  he’s a thwarted character in this, his own play. And he stands outside to chat with us directly, asking for pointers on how to win the love of the elusive Nina (Zoe Glassman), an up-and-coming actor in love with the idea of her own fame. In fact, the play starts with Con telling us it isn’t going to start till someone says “start the fucking play.” And he waits till one of us does just that. Mat Simpson is absolutely compelling, start to finish.

In Stupid Fucking Bird, a title that strikes exactly the right note of sass and exasperation, is all about the absurdity of criss-crossed arrows of desire. Why don’t the right people love you back when you love them so intensely? Mash, played with amusingly pitch-perfect acid-tinged ennui by Paula Humby — her whole body can do one of those skeptical eye-rolls — is so smitten by Con she barely has time for the eager, friendly Dev (Ben Stevens) who’s besotted by her. At moments of extreme frustration, she takes to the ukulele and sings hilariously bleak ditties of her own device: “you’re hot, you rot, and then you’re done/ And where’s the part of this that’s fun….”  That sort of thing.

Dev’s unfailing attempts at hopefulness are consistently funny and touching, as Steven delivers them. He tries so hard; he’s thwarted so regularly.  He’s the one who tries to let Con down gently, but is too forthright not to tell him the truth. Will Nina ever love Con? Well, no.

Melissa Thingelstad is tremendously funny as Emma, the play’s Arkadina, famous grande dame actress, queen of the flamboyant ego, aware of her audience at every second. Thingelstad’s creation knows that noblesse oblige is merely a theatrical ruse. She sees through herself but carries on in spirited fashion anyway, just because it tickles her to be an Artist. And her relationship with her equally famous writer lover, played with worldly authority by Ian Leung in another of the play’s fine comic performances, has every kind of nuance of power and vulnerability.   

In this crowd of theatre people and writers, the only character who isn’t an artist is a doctor (Robert Benz). And he’s been foiled, not by love or God but by time. Pushing 60 and bemused by the frantic disappointments around him, he mixes himself a cocktail and muses that he wants to be 27 again. “I think I’m ready to do my late 20s really well now….”

I loved the mixture of ruthless upward mobility and fragility in Glassman’s Nina, who comes onto Trigorin relentlessly, gets her man and chance at stardom, and gets discarded by both in turn. Horak gets sharp, very funny and rueful, naturally detailed performances from all his actors.

Stephanie Bahniuk, who should be getting snapped up by theatre companies across town, designs a frankly fake bucolic space with astroturf, the classic Chekhov birch trees as playing areas, and an abstract wall of domestic cubbyholes.

It was a great show. I hope you saw it. And if you didn’t, now’s your moment to sample a Chekhovian regret for missed opportunity.

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The temptation of danger without the risk: Soliciting Temptation, a review

Posted on March 12, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Patricia Cerra and Mattie Overall in Soliciting Temptation. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Soliciting Temptation hands us a snapshot of a situation earmarked for our disapproval.

Fretful middle-aged white guy in a grubby hotel room in a Third World city: He’s pacing, drinking whiskey, getting sweaty, fiddling with the air conditioner, phoning the front desk to complain it doesn’t work.

Clearly Man (as he’s identified in the program) is not waiting for Godot or room service. And the arrival at his door of Woman, beautiful, exotic, young — “how old did you say you were?” —  confirms it. 

The odd 2014 two-hander by Erin Shields (If We Were Birds), a collaboration between Shadow Theatre and Calgary’s Sage Theatre, sets out to talk about, if not explore, child-sex tourism. It’s a dark, serious subject. But it’s not exactly a provocative one since it would be awfully hard to dredge up much resistance in a theatre audience to the idea that child prostitution and child-sex tourists are bad.  

So Soliciting Temptation has its work cut out for it making viable drama where there’s no real argument or moral uncertainty. Instead, the play diverts itself into a series of revelations about the characters we meet. And it’s tricky to tell you very much about the way Soliciting Temptation unfolds, since there are surprise reversals in the dynamic between the two characters.

Since Woman is shy and silent at the outset, Man does all the talking, a monologue in halting, nervous fits, starts and tangents that Mattie Overall negotiates expertly, even when he has to say things like “you can see I’m a man to be admired”.

When Woman abruptly starts to undress he is disconcerted. When she finally speaks, amazingly it’s perfect English, delivered fiercely by Patricia Cerra. He gets an angry earful — about his moral failure, the evils of prostitution, the hypocrisy of those who use the economic argument. “You’re a disgusting old perv,” she says. “And I have the power to effect change.” Who talks like this? I hear you ask. The challenge of the play is to create enough successive reveals that you stick with the possible answers.

Anyhow, what follows is an “argument” in which the woman chastises the man in no uncertain terms and he weakly tries to justify himself. “I’ve never done this before,” he stammers. “Yet here we are,” she says with a sardonic sneer that is a keynote of the character.

What started out as a paid sexual encounter has turned into a sting. She threatens exposure to his wife, his daughter, his business; he pleads pathetically, and she calls him on it. 

Anyhow, there are more reveals, doled out carefully if not persuasively. But what we have is a two-hander classic: two people in a room “arguing” — about white liberal guilt, first world privilege, economic disparity, choice, parental responsibility, euphemistic language — and changing who has the upper hand. This they do in terms that don’t exactly smack of real life. Soliciting Temptation hasn’t succumbed to the theatrical temptation of convincing dialogue.

Which means that much is demanded of the actors in Jason Mehmel’s production. Both are excellent, though not entirely successful at camouflaging the impression that Soliciting Temptation belongs to the playwright, not to the characters.  Overall manages the texture of the businessman’s confusion and guilt, advances and retreats, with real dexterity. Cerra, a resourceful young actor, has the challenge of sustaining the sardonic attack mode, while hinting of secret sorrows beneath.

Patricia Cerra and Mattie Overall in Soliciting Temptation, at Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

Nothing much can be done about the ending, though, in which the play changes tack yet again, this time floating the idea of sex as gender politics. Soliciting Temptation flashes its provocations, but doesn’t really deliver on them. 

REVIEW

Soliciting Temptation

Theatre: Shadow and Sage

Written by: Erin Shields

Directed by: Jason Mehmel

Starring: Mattie Overall, Patricia Cerra

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through March 26

Tickets: 780-434-5564, TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca)

    

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Crazy For You: sweet and embraceable at the Citadel

Posted on March 11, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“They kept me late at the bank but I’ve got my tap shoes on!” cries Bobby Child, a young man with a distinct career malfunction, at the start of Crazy For You.

Words to live by, it turns out — nay, a veritable existential position — in the twinkling firmament of the 30s-style musical comedy now lifting spirits, yours included, to joyous heights at the Citadel. As one of the musical’s dazzling string of Gershwin hits (Shall We Dance?) sagely advises, “put on your dancing shoes, and watch your spirits climb.” Isn’t that a lot wiser than any counsel you’ve gotten lately from a banker? 

The evening of Crazy-ness is powered by the irresistible Gershwin songbook and the unfailing exuberance of director/choreographer Dayna Tekatch and her cast of 22 in rising to it. And it’s devoted to the kind of dreams that are a specialty of the American musical theatre. In the course of it, starry-eyed Bobby (the wonderful Andrew MacDonald-Smith, coming full into his own as a star) will release his inner leading man from the chains of the bank ledger. And this he will do the classic Broadway way: he will fall in love, and he will save the very theatre he was sent from New York City to dusty Deadrock, Nevada to foreclose — by putting on a show.

Not only that, these transformations will prove contagious. A  gaggle of cowboy layabouts who have occupied themselves Biding Their Time will reinvent themselves as song-and-dance men. They’ll find themselves in striped tights rehearsing for a show. They’ll form improv bands armed with washboards and brooms. They will fall in love with New York showgirls who fling a leg up up and away towards a shoulder on the least provocation. Snooty New York socialites will shed their fur stoles and kick up their (high) heels. And a tough-cookie tomboy cowboy-town post office proprietor (Ayrin Mackie) who secretly dreams of Someone To Watch Over Me will find one, unexpectedly — in a Manhattan rich kid with tap shoes in his luggage.

The cowboys of Deadrock, in Crazy For You, at the Citadel. Photo by David Cooper.

In short a town, and everyone in it, will be reborn when a derelict theatre starts hoppin’: civic branding strategy at its finest, ladies and gentlemen.

But I digress. As the eminent New York producer Bela Zangler (riotously played by John Ullyatt) puts it, “we have a show to put on here!”

Highly compatible time-honoured showbiz motifs of transformation — the joint redemptive lure of falling in love and of the theatre itself — do their magic in the book by playwright Ken Ludwig, of Lend Me A Tenor fame. When your biggest problem as a librettist is how to enfold such marvels as Embraceable You, I Got Rhythm and Someone To Watch Over Me into the fabric of your play, some would say ‘cry me a river Ken’. But Ludwig reclaims old-school comedy alongside great songs co-opted long ago as jazz standards with such imagination and savvy you never notice the fault lines.

A 1992 musical comedy that looks and feels like the 1930 one (Girl Crazy) that spawned five of its eighteen Gershwin numbers, Crazy For You is an homage, playful and affectionate, to the old Broadway. The moss-covered jokes are on loan from vaudeville. “He will go to Deadrock over my dead body!” snaps Bobby’s rich and imperious fiancee Irene (Rachel Bowron), in perpetual battle with Bobby’s rich and imperious mama (Susan Gilmour). “That sounds like an excellent route!” declares the latter grandly. “The guest list is up to 900!” says Irene by way of inserting the concept or wedding into the conversation with her reluctant fiancé. “Great!” says Bobby, forever agile in avoidance, “you won’t miss me!”

But there are more contemporary theatre jokes too, including a scene I won’t spoil for you, involving unexpectedly learned contributions from a cowboy who apparently wouldn’t know stage right from a stage coach.

Every kind of dance, from Busby Berkeley rotating chorus lines to Charlestons, jazzy riffs to Fred and Ginger waltzes, to pratfall acrobatics and near-misses to soft-shoe and escalating tap routines are referenced in Tekatch’s choreography. I Got Rhythm, the Act I closer, is a wild melee of every kind of dance. Naughty Baby is a hilarious sado-machoism tango, performed with gusto by Bowron’s re-born socialite fiancée Irene and her uncouth new beau Lank (the very funny Jesse Gervais). Gervais, who gets more than a few of Ludwig’s cheeky one-liners, lands them unerringly, in full dander-up exasperation mode. “In 2,000 years, there’s only been resurrection, and it wasn’t a theatre.” 

Jesse Gervais and Rachel Bowron in Crazy For You, at the Citadel. Photo by David Cooper.

Lank was dead wrong on that count. But then he wasn’t counting on designer Cory Sincennes. His inventions pay tribute to the old with the wit of the new, creates a marvellous world, with old-fashioned set pieces that turn, footlights, the front of the Zangler Follies in New York, an entire cobwebbed western vaudeville theatre with a period proscenium — and costumes with sequins and feathered headdresses for days. Sincennes’ work is consistently fun to watch, full of sight gags of its own both shameless and subtle.

Combined with Ludwig’s own stagecraft — Crazy For You is constructed as a series of unexpected entrances and exits, which all count as Moments — the design has got rhythm too. 

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect Bobby than MacDonald-Smith, who’s as captivating a triple-threat virtuoso as they come, whether singing, dancing, or clocking off a comic aside, a rueful double-take, or a near-miss with a saloon floorboard. This is someone who knows exactly what to do with a showbiz sport as sublimely giddy as tap: it must never look worked at.

Breezy and easeful as his performance is, the winsome MacDonald-Smith never lets you forget the wonderment of the transformations in Crazy For You. As Polly Baker, the hard-to-win girl of Bobby’s dreams, Ayrin Mackie’s big-voiced authority seems to come at us from the period. And she combines fierceness with reluctant vulnerability in a way that’s always likeable. 

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

The comic roles are zestfully, and inventively, occupied by Gervais, Ullyatt, Bowron, and Gilmour. But, hey, there’s a particularly sparkly chorus, too, of showgirls with an amusing assortment of dweebs and drunks as the burghers of Deadrock. And Don Horsburgh’s orchestra, unusually large for these enterprises at 14 pieces, is deluxe in every way.  

We’re in a gloomy period in history, full of dark portents. So the thought that your life might turn around on a dime, or a pirouette, or a feather, seems as appealing as it must have in 1930, when Girl Crazy sprang, with giddy showbiz defiance, to its feet. “Things are looking up,” sings everyone who falls instantly in love in Crazy For You. “It’s a great little world we live in.”

Behave accordingly. Get yourself out of Dodge and into Deadrock, and fall in love. The Citadel deserves a hit with this one.

REVIEW

Crazy For You: the new Gershwin musical

Theatre: Citadel/ Theatre Calgary

Directed by: Dayna Tekatch

Starring: Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Ayrin Mackie, John Ullyatt, Jesse Gervais, Rachel Bowron, Susan Gilmour

Running: through March 26

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.ca 

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Who could ask for anything more? Crazy for You at the Citadel

Posted on March 8, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Andrew MacDonald-Smith stars in Crazy For You opening Thursday at the Citadel. Photo by David Cooper Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Nice work if you can get it/ And you can get it if you try….”

In Crazy For You, the deluxe ‘30s musical comedy that was actually, amazingly, written in the 1990s, a stagestruck Manhattan rich kid will somehow find himself in a dozy Nevada mining town, putting on a show with a gaggle of New York showgirls, saving a bankrupt theatre. Ah, and getting the girl. And losing and re-getting the girl.

As you will glean, this classic musical comedy to-do list alone would make the starry-eyed character, as per above, a busy man onstage. But then there are the Gershwin songs, some of the most lustrous in the history of the musical theatre. And then since the songs aren’t just sung, there’s the dancing, of every stripe including ecstatic outbursts of tap.     

Crazy For You. Photo by David Cooper Photography

Bobby Child: “It’s the dream role I didn’t know existed!” sighs Andrew MacDonald-Smith, the lanky multi-talented star of Crazy For You, opening Thursday on the Citadel MainStage in a 22-actor 15-musician Dayna Tekatch production. He has a certain vintage style about him, even when he’s sporting runners not tap shoes and a T-shirt from his favourite ramen shop in NYC instead of a tux. “Holy smoke! I didn’t know it was a dream role till I got it!”

“I fall down! I get to do the physical comedy stuff I love to do! I get to be really challenged with difficult choreography!” says MacDonald-Smith, arriving foot-weary from rehearsal last week along with his cast-mate and real-life partner Rachel Bowron.“Bobby disguises himself at one point, very funny, so I get to be someone else for a while as well as the leading man! AND I get to fall in love onstage.”

All of which makes the role of Bobby Child nice work if you can get it, as MacDonald-Smith cheerfully acknowledges. “The really fun character part and the love interest don’t tend to go hand in hand,” he grins. “You just don’t get both. Not normally.”

Normally? There is nothing normal about the 1992 musical concocted by the master farceur Ken Ludwig (Lend Me A Tenor). Crazy For You reclaims the glorious bounty of 18 Gershwin hits — only five of which came from the 1930 Gershwin hit Girl Crazy that is, very fractionally, its source — into its tale of showbiz, cowboys, Follies girls, joyous romance. “I guess you could look at it as a jukebox musical, but it sure doesn’t seem that way,” says MacDonald-Smith. “It seems perfectly like it was written in the ‘30s, with an updated contemporary sense of humour.” 

Crazy For You. Photo by David Cooper Photography

This suits MacDonald-Smith just fine. For one thing, “my voice seems to live most comfortably in that era,” he says of Gershwin and that crowd. He culled largely from that gleaming repertoire last month for his cabaret in the Citadel Club, You’re Never Fully Dressed Without A Band (with Don Berner’s Big Band, and guest appearances by Bowron and Crazy For You assistant director Farren Timoteo). From Crazy For You, he borrowed Slap That Bass, along with songs by Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, and others.

“Anything where I get to wear pleated pants,” jokes the leading man. “Hey! In Pleated Pants is a good name for another cabaret, a follow-up!” laughs Bowron, who plays Bobby’s high-maintenance New York socialite fiancée Irene Roth in an impossible succession of hats, gloves, and fur coats, all hilariously out of place in Deadrock, Nevada.

“It’s a troubled relationship,” grins Bowron who, like MacDonald-Smith, is a Teatro La Quindicina star. “Irene is quite a difficult fiancée….” The pair, who haven’t been onstage together since they clutched puppets in Avenue Q at the Citadel, laugh. “Yeah, she’s under the impression we’ve been engaged for five years. And I’m not!” grins MacDonald-Smith.

In Ludwig’s book, the moment Bobby arrives in Deadrock, he falls for Polly Baker (Ayrin Mackie), the local postmistress whose dad is the mortgage holder on the Gaiety Theatre Bobby’s mother has sent him to close. Complications accelerate. 

“Such a brilliant book!” says director/choreographer Tekatch. “A great story about love at first sight. There are possibilities around every corner; everybody has a transformation. Each person has that possibility. Romance, after all, is all about accepting risk, taking a chance.”

MacDonald-Smith echoes the thought. “Every character is hilarious. The cowboys and showgirls in the ensemble have fully formed characters. They’re not generic; they’re specific characters…. It’s a real ensemble of people; there isn’t that conventional distinction between ‘characters’ and chorus.

If you saw MacDonald-Smith either in his irresistible award-winning turn as chimney sweep Bert in Mary Poppins, or as an ancient and rickety waiter nearly falling down stairs again and again, in One Man Two Guvnors, you’ll already know something about his rarefied dance skills. With its choreographic responsiveness to I’ve Got Rhythm, Embraceable You, and the rest of its memorable Gershwin song list, is a veritable dance extravaganza.

“Dancing may “make my troubles all seem tiny,” to borrow a line from I Can’t Be Bothered Now. But if it involves tap shoes, your joints take a helluva pounding. The tall lithe MacDonald, who has a tap number with six women amongst his manifold assignments, looks ruefully down at his sneakers. “I’m burning it off, boy oh boy. These puppies are tired.”

“Vaudeville, tap, ballroom, jazz …” says Bowron, who’s petite and vivacious. “I get lifted a lot in Naughty Baby (Irene’s big number). Which is thrilling to me!”  Her partner, and target, is played by Jesse Gervais who is, she says, “a dancer, and an incredible athlete, so graceful and strong. He can just throw himself into it!”

“It’s more of a character duet than an actual dance….” That, says Bowron, is one of Tekatch’s great gifts, “how to tell the story through character movement…. There’s a bit of flamenco in it; there are body rolls. That’s who Irene is….”

“The music is first,” says Tekatch of her choreographic impulses to interpret the orchestrations. She cites reports that “Gershwin played as if he had six hands.”

“There are so many feels to the music. It may feel like a tango in the middle of a foxtrot, a waltz in the middle of something different…. And there’s no separation of character and story, there’s a continuity.

Tekatch, who storyboards all the numbers she choreographs, explains that the average big dance number in a musical might be three or four minutes long. I Got Rhythm, that Act II showstopper, is eight, “the longest number I’ve choreographed in my life!”

In the course of eight minutes there are kicklines, and Charlie Chaplin riffs, there’s a cowboy trio. And of course there’s tap, a skill that’s by no means universal amongst triple-threats these days. Tekatch loves tap; she’s put it in other numbers, too, like Stiff Upper Lip.

“This,” sighs MacDonald-Smith happily, “is a show with big number after big number, eight of them in the show tied together with a book that doesn’t make it look like eight big hits tied together.…”

“The show is joy, hope, fun, a wonderful escape from the world,” says Bowron. In a period when the world seems to be plummeting depressingly into chaos, “it’s perfectly timed. The show is joy, hope, fun, a wonderful escape from the world,” says Bowron. “That’s why the musicals of the ′30s are so indelible. When times are tough, give us a mistaken identity musical farce, please!”

MacDonald-Smith and Bowron may have disagreed at the outset about their golden-age-of-musicals idols. MacDonald-Smith declares, firmly, for Fred Astaire. Bowron confesses “a huge crush on Gene Kelly.” This is a classic musical theatre nerd argument. But they came together over Donald O’Connor. “That’s why we’re together,” grins MacDonald-Smith.

He and Bowron will be onstage together again this summer, in Teatro La Quindicina’s premiere production of a new Jana O’Connor screwball Going Going Gone. Meanwhile, they go home to their Strathcona loft every night with glorious Gershwin ringing in their heads. And when you have an entire orchestra and choreography in your head, “you just have to stand up and do it!” says MacDonald-Smith.

Dancing in a loft to the music of Gershwin sounds like the ne plus ultra of romance. Gershwin fandom isn’t universal, though. “Our cats don’t love our dancing,” laughs Bowron. “They end up in the chair….”

PREVIEW

Crazy For You: “the new Gershwin musical”

Theatre: Citadel / Theatre Calgary

Directed by: Dayna Tekatch

Starring: Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Ayrin Mackie, John Ullyatt, Jesse Gervais, Larry Herbert, Rachel Bowron, Susan Gilmour

Running: through March 26

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadelheatre.ca

Crazy For You opens Thursday at the Citadel. Photo by David Cooper Photography

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Mum’s the word at SkirtsAfire, the “herArts Festival”

Posted on February 28, 2017 by Liz Nicholls
Coralie Cairns, Mary Hulbert, Chantelle Han in The Mommy Monologues. Photo by BB Collective Photography.

Coralie Cairns, Mary Hulbert, Chantelle Han in The Mommy Monologues. Photo by BB Collective Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Everybody you know has one, alive or pushing up daisies, possibly on the phone asking why you don’t call or wear yellow more often. I refer of course to moms. 

And the sheer cosmic strangeness of that, individually and collectively, can’t help but find its way into The Mommy Monologues. The production gets its world premiere at the upcoming fifth annual SkirtsAfire, the “herArts festival” devoted to showcasing and inspiring the work of women in every art form.

When SkirtsAfire artistic director Annette Loiselle acquired the play-shaping services of dramaturg Tracy Carroll and director Glenda Stirling last spring, to work with 10 women theatre artists on their 15-minute submissions about motherhood, Carroll predicted the monologues would shake down into two basic categories:  “Mother is SO wonderful, or motherhood is SO hard day to day.”

“It didn’t turn out that way. At all,” laughs Carroll. She was amazed by the range. “There was every kind of perspective! So many voices! Characters who want children and can’t have them, characters who didn’t want kids….” There was comedy; there was tragedy; there was everything in between: regret, lack of regret, trying to make decisions, revisiting decisions. The age of the characters range from 20s to 60s. 

Chantelle Han in The Mommy Monologues. Photo by: BB Collective Photography.

Chantelle Han in The Mommy Monologues. Photo by: BB Collective Photography.

In one monologue a woman is talking to her dead mother. There was regret, lack of regret. In one of the monologues a woman is talking to her dead mother. Singer-songwriter Andrea House’s contribution was a song, I’m Just Your Mom. “It’s made us cry,” says Carroll, who says that Stirling has experimented with where in the show to place the song. 

Stirling herself has written a piece, at Loiselle’s request. At first she wasn’t sure why the invitation came since “I don’t have kids, or want them. And I have no tragic regrets about not having them…. But I figured I could write about my mother.” In the end, the character Stirling explores is “a step-mom. When she gets asked to leave the house, she makes a video for her step-daughter….. ‘Here’s my house. Here’s your room in it’….”

As poets know, brevity ups the challenge. Stirling talks about “a portrait in miniature,” a phrase she acquired from the late great dramaturg Iris Turcotte. “You have to be so judicious, a snap-shot of people at a pivotal moment.”

Her piece turned out to be a video. “The way we use the space for each monologue is radically different,” Stirling says of the work of weaving 10 pieces about motherhood into a single production with a cast of three “Sometimes we’re in a family home, sometimes a hospital room, sometimes who knows where….”

And here’s a question with widely varying answers: who is the character talking to? Sometimes the other actors are listening or watching silently. Sometimes not. “We’re working on the transitions,” says Stirling.

The funniest of the pieces, Stirling and Carroll figure, is probably Conni Massing’s Pants on Fire. Carroll, who directed Massing’s rom-com-cum screwball The Invention of Romance at Workshop West in 2014, describes the arc of Pants on Fire as “a woman starting with a little lie that snowballs.”

Like much of Massing’s work, Carroll says, “humour overlaps with deeper layers. You get laughter, and you dig down into something more personal.”

“The experience of The Mommy Monologues will be different for everyone who sees the show,” Carroll says. “At least one or two of them will speak directly to you!” 

PREVIEW

The Mommy Monologues

SkirtsAfire herArts Festival

Written by: Beth Graham, Andrea House, Katherine Koller, Annette Loiselle, Conni Massing, Nicole Moeller, Mieko Ouchi, Dana Rayment, Glenda Stirling, Michele Vance Hehir, Cat Walsh

Directed by: Glenda Stirling

Starring: Coralie Cairns, Mary Hulbert, Chantelle Han

Where: Cabaret Theatre, Alberta Avenue Community League, 9210 118 Ave.

Running: March 2 to 12

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

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Stupid Fucking Bird: Does it give Chekhov wings or the raspberry? Let’s ask Dave Horak

Posted on February 26, 2017 by Liz Nicholls
Cast of Stupid Fucking Bird, Edmonton Actors Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

Cast of Stupid Fucking Bird, Edmonton Actors Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The people of The Seagull, Anton Chekhov’s first great masterpiece, are chafing with confusion, disappointment, unrequited desire, time, ego.

The people of Stupid Fucking Bird, an irreverent modern remix by American playwright Aaron Posner, are like that too. 

It’s a veritable soul-searcher’s convention at a country house where an artsy assortment of actresses, a playwright, a writer, a doctor are scrambling to make some sense of love and art in all their absurdities.

That sassy title will make Stupid Fucking Bird sound like a Chekhov parody. It isn’t though, says Dave Horak, the theatrical provocation specialist who’s directing the seven-actor Edmonton Actors Theatre production that opens Thursday at the Backstage Theatre. “It’s smarter than a parody….  Actually, it’s the truest version of The Seagull I’ve ever read: the needs, the wants, the missed opportunities, the levels of love, desire, relationships.”

Horak’s indie company has provided Edmonton audiences with such boldly off-centre theatrical adventures as Fat Boy with its rampaging maniac title character, and Burning Bluebeard, the Christmas panto that opens with the singed cast emerging from body bags. With Stupid Fucking Bird, the company is taking on the master of nuance himself, often parodied as vague and mopey, or else caffeinated into more strident forms of absurdity.

Posner, thinks Horak, “is trying to deal into something Chekhov was working on, that feeling of waiting, longing, not getting what you want….” In short, he says, “it feels like life!”

“Do you feel you’re never really in your life, you’re putting on a performance? We talk about this all time,” says Horak of his all-star cast of theatre pros.” The feeling that being onstage is more real than real life…. And these conversations are in the play; these characters are aware they’re characters in a play.” They know they have an audience.

Ian Leung and Melissa Thingelstad, Stupid Fucking Bird, Edmonton Actors Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

Ian Leung and Melissa Thingelstad, Stupid Fucking Bird, Edmonton Actors Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

Horak has been doing a full-body Chekhov immersion, since he’s also directing his first-year MacEwan University theatre students into Chekhov scenes, too. “It took them a bit of time to get into it. But, in a weird way, they understand it so well. Young people understand half-sentences, not quite being able to communicate. They really understand mis-communication issues!”

So why Chekhov, often parodied for the mopey discontented passivity of his characters? “Life doesn’t feel net and tidy, one thing leading to another,” he muses. “In Chekhov, people are bumping into each other. Random things come into their lives. The most important bits of information are mumbled. Or put off to the side.”

Horak looks for an example. At the end of Chekhov’s Three Sisters there’s a duel. “Someone gets shot. And someone brings that information onstage, and whispers it in your ear….”

Paula Humby and Ben Stevens in Stupid Fucking Bird, Edmonton Actors Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

Paula Humby and Ben Stevens in Stupid Fucking Bird, Edmonton Actors Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

Spare and imaginative theatricality interests Horak, as you’ll know if you saw Burning Bluebeard or Fat Boy. Stupid Fucking Bird, he says, “doesn’t need a fancy set…. We’re staging it in an alley (configuration). The audience needs to feel so close for this show….”

Like Chekhov’s original cast in the 1890s, Horak’s actors are all connected in relationships offstage, he says. Ben Stevens and Paula Humby are engaged. Melissa Thingelstad and Ian Leung (who were in Fat Boy together) are long-time partners. Mat Simpson and Zoe Glassman have been friends forever, says Horak. all have relationships offstage. “It really works for this show, real relationships…. It’s a big advantage that people really know each other. Weirdly, it really shows up onstage this time!”

PREVIEW

Stupid Fucking Bird

Theatre: Edmonton Actors Theatre

Written by: Aaron Posner

Directed by: Dave Horak

Starring: Robert Benz, Zoe Glassman, Paula Humby, Mat Simpson, Ben Stevens, Ian Leung, Melissa Thingelstad

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

Running: Thursday through March 12

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The consolations of the Big Apple

Posted on February 19, 2017 by Liz Nicholls
Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. Photo by Alan Kellogg

Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. Photo by Alan Kellogg

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The impending arrival of Rachel Chavkin and her creative team at the Citadel next season, to prepare a Broadway version of the original musical Hadestown is exciting news.

Judging by her dazzling production of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 currently dancing and singing its way through the Imperial Theatre in New York, there is nothing conventional in the storytelling proposed by this boldly inventive young director.

So this is what I saw last month. For the Dave Malloy musical excavated from a chunk of War and Peace, Chavkin has sacked a Broadway theatre, and turned it into something very like a Russian cabaret, all red velvet and overhung with twinkling lights. The production finds new and creative ways of being intimate with the audience. We sit in small groups separated by cabaret tables. The “stage” extends with graceful catwalks up into the mezzanine, and encircles clusters of musicians, as the cast, always on the move through the theatre, infiltrate the audience.

Josh Groban and the cast of Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. Photo by Chad Batka

Josh Groban and the cast of Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. Photo by Chad Batka

I’d seen the show on a winter’s night a couple of years ago in a spiegel tent on 45th Street; we were all handed glasses of vodka and plates of blinis. Somehow, amazingly, magically, this ongoing Broadway incarnation I saw last month captures the same feeling of inclusion in the story. 

Dave Malloy’s offbeat score, with its strange and wonderful blend of contemporary and soulful Russian folk music flavours, is something to savour. The book has much the same blend; the characters often refer to themselves in the third person.

Josh Groban and Denée Benton in Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. Photo by Chad Batka

Josh Groban and Denée Benton in Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. Photo by Chad Batka

The Natasha, Denée Benton, is new. And who knew pop star Josh Groban as the melancholy Pierre would be so affecting? Most of the idiosyncratic the cast from the Off-Broadway incarnation are back. And so is that magical feeling of occupying a galaxy where comets are a sign.

The print media are teetering on the brink of the Great Beyond. Slutty media sensationalism is getting everyone down. So what could be more therapeutic than watching a screwball/ black-hearted satire sink its teeth into the newspaper industry?

John Goodman with Christopher McDonald and Dylan Baker in The Front Page. Photo supplied by DKC/O&M

John Goodman with Christopher McDonald and Dylan Baker in The Front Page. Photo supplied by DKC/O&M

The Front Page does it, with venomous comic zest. And here’s the kicker: Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s riotously blood-thirsty comedy is from 1928.

I sought it out — not least because the great Nathan Lane was burning up the stage, in what the New York Times called a 72-point headline of a comic performance. And he was leading an extraordinary ensemble of  heavy-hitters that included John Slattery, John Goodman, Jefferson Mays, Sherie Rene Scott, Robert Morse….

We’re in the vintage press room of the Chicago Courts, where the competitively adrenalized ink-stained wretches are getting snarly on an over-nighter. They’re having to wait for an early morning hanging: an anarchist has killed a policeman. And their high-speed cynicism as they sniff out stories and jockey for angles, is matched by the corruption on the part of the sheriff and the mayor, who are making political hay being commie-baiters.

The Front Page captures the way the sensationalist squalor is fuelled by an addiction to the thrills of the deadline chase. Mad Men star Slattery plays a top-drawer reporter who, pushed by his fiancée, has promised to leave the biz and take up a respectable life in advertising (which got a major laugh from the audience).

Amazingly, Lane’s Walter Burns, the managing editor, doesn’t even appear onstage till late in the second of the three acts — a build-up of character mythology via everyone’s commentary and bellowing phone calls that would have felled a lesser performance. How could any actor live up to the hype? Walter Burns is an irresistible maniac, a monster of awfulness, topping one explosion with another. You can’t take your eyes off him.

Aisling O'Sullivan, Marie Mullen, Marty Rea in Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Photo by Richard Termine

Aisling O’Sullivan, Marie Mullen, Marty Rea in Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane.
Photo by Richard Termine

And speaking as we are of monsters, the mother who redefines maternal feeling for all time — mainly by its absence — was back in New York. In honour of the 20th anniversary of Martin McDonagh’s break-out black comedy The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the storied Druid Theatre of Galway brought its revival to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theatre, a clever re-invention of a blasted once-grand vaudeville house.

Marie Mullen, who had played the daughter two decades ago, was back this time as the infinitely vicious mother, a duplicitous spreader of misery and chaos, with Aisling O’Sullivan as the daughter, on the slow-simmer of resentment.

It’s impossible to imagine a tenser, more appallingly funny production than this one from Garry Hynes. The feeling of dread you acquire near the outset never abates; you laugh, and cringe at yourself for laughing. The production, poised to tour the world this year, reeks of absolute authenticity.

Funny thing about authenticity. You just feel it in your bones; you never quite recover from the lack of it. A Bronx Tale, a mediocre Chazz Palminteri/Alan Menken musical with a leaden morality tale and generic pop songs, is a poster child for that absence.  Honourable exception to Nick Cordero as a Bronx thug who mentors the young protagonist as he comes of age. 

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The song and dance of love: The Plain Janes’ Ah, Romance! reviewed

Posted on February 17, 2017 by Liz Nicholls
The Plain Janes' musical revue Ah, Romance!. Photo by Janna Hove.

The Plain Janes’ musical revue Ah, Romance!. Photo by Janna Hove.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“It’s a grand night for singing/ The stars are bright above. / The earth is a-glow/ And to add to the show, I think I am falling in love!

— Rodgers and Hammerstein, State Fair

Barring starlight, the moon, or a candle, Plain Jane’s idea of natural lighting is the chandelier. Six (designed by Matt Currie) overhang the stage for Ah, Romance! .

It’s a theatre company that lives exclusively in a world where characters think their thoughts and consider their options in song, and burst into it when they dream. The deluxe Janes revue currently running on the Varscona stage explores the musical theatre repertoire, their home turf, to shed light on strange and transformational phenomenon of romance.

And, as they’ll demonstrate in this delightful revue, romance isn’t some fixed heart condition. People — and hence the people of musical theatre — don’t all fall headlong into it. Some climb into it arduously, hand over hand; some slide into it from the side. Some get there by accident, amazed because they were actually going somewhere else but were holding the map upside down. Some arrive ambivalent, some wary, toe first and tending to their burns.

And some arrive kicking and screaming, like the starlet in the Cy Coleman musical On The Twentieth Century who pretends to ponder the question “when will I be available?”  She concludes “Never!” at top volume in a number memorably delivered by Jocelyn Ahlf in the show. Ah, Lily, never say never; it’s an unspoken rule in musical theatre.

But I digress. OK, so maybe romance is a journey; enter choreographer Cindy Kerr, who knows exactly what moves that can take. In Ah, Romance! there’s a number for every stop or pause or backward glance — from the wistful librarian Marian with her modest dreams of romance in My White Knight from The Music Man to the imperious seductress we meet in Whatever Lola Wants from Damn Yankees. And from there to the witty insight that marriages are built on the cumulation of the small stuff, no matter how aggravating (It’s The Little Things You do Together, from Sondheim’s Company).

And it’s for Kate Ryan’s cast of five lustrous-voiced actor-singers, led by Ahlf and Ron Pederson (in his Janes debut), to create the particular dramatic world the character inhabits in each of them. It’s one thing to become a character in the context of a whole musical; it’s another to do this in single song — even if you’re assisted by a pianist as responsive and elegant as David Fraser, a master of style.

And the songs Ryan has chosen are a lesson in musical theatre complexity. Madelaine Knight conjures with charm the exhilarating sexual self-discovery of the heroine of Fun Home in Changing My Major. She’s the modern, sexual parallel to the excited apprentice in Hello, Dolly!, in Jason Hardwick’s appealing delivery of It Only Takes A Moment. In the comical Buddy’s Blues from Sondheim’s Follies, he plays both parties in a droll high-speed internal assessment of romantic ambivalence. 

In Unusual Way, from Nine, Gianna Read conveys the confusion of a woman who loves a man, but not in the way he loves here.

Pederson, an outstanding addition to the Janes coterie, attacks Romantic Atmosphere with huge comic zest at the top of the show. And all his contributions feel dimensional and expressive; I loved the excitable character he creates in the title song of She Loves Me.

Ahlf’s apparently inexhaustible vocal range extends from operatic to musical theatre belt. And this: He Plays The Violin, a deceptively simple song I’ve never heard from a musical I don’t know at all (1776), has Thomas Jefferson’s wife finding the romantic side of her intellectual distant husband in his music.

There are duets, ensemble numbers for the five performers, even a dance riff to the Gershwins’ S’Wonderful (Hardwick and Read, armed and legged with Kerr’s graceful choreography).

What is this I’m saying? What is this I’m feeling?” wonders a man (Pederson) in Love Can’t Happen from Maury Yeston’s Grand Hotel. This is the show to pose those questions from every angle.

It’s a grand night for singing, and acaptivating evening of possibilities.

REVIEW

Ah, Romance! A revue of song, dance, and other passionate musings

Theatre: Plain Jane

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Jocelyn Ahlf, Jason Hardwick, Ron Pederson, Gianna Read, Madelaine Knight

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Feb. 25

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

RELATED LINK
Preview: The Plain Janes are falling in love with love: Ah! Romance!

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