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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Bringing Canada to New York: Soulpepper on 42nd Street

Posted on July 16, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Michelle Monteith, Gregory Prest in Of Human Bondage, Soulpepper Theatre. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Last week in New York I had the excitement of seeing what a top-drawer Canadian theatre company, venturing forth, can bring to the stage in a highly demanding world theatre capital.   

Coming from away for the month of July, Toronto’s Soulpepper, is making its U.S. debut ensconced at the Pershing Square Signature Centre on 42nd St. You walk west from Times Square, past blocks of tawdry retail peppered with storied theatre marquees, and, suddenly, just before 10th Avenue, there it is, the end of a glittering series of glass-encased bars and cafes. It was my first time at this stunningly impressive Frank Gehry-designed playground of theatre spaces (three) and studios (two), of varying configurations, sizes, finishes — with a vast, airy shared lobby (complete with bookshop) — where Soulpepper is hosting its summer theatre festival.

It’s four days after Canada Day. And at the top of the stairs from the street entrance is a basket of little Canadian flags.

Among the assortment of award-winning plays and musicals, along with cabarets, readings, forums, audience conversations of Soulpepper’s cross-border foray, is Ins Choi’s highly appealing comedy Kim’s Convenience (which Soulpepper brought to the Citadel in 2014). Spoon River, an original Dora Award-winning Soulpepper musical assembled from the quintessential Americana anthology by Mike Ross and Albert Schultz, is on the playbill too.

Onstage in the Signature Centre’s 294-seat Irene Diamond house, Vern Thiessen’s Of Human Bondage, his adaptation of the sprawling 1915 Somerset Maugham novel, is getting an ingenious, imaginatively theatrical production directed by Soulpepper’s Albert Schultz.

At the dark heart of the story, where Thiessen’s adaptation finds its pulse and its dramatic momentum, is a manic, irrational obsession. The self-destructive fascination of medical student Philip Carey (Gregory Prest) with a ruthlessly manipulative tea shop waitress (Michelle Monteith). Their relationship is the perfect storm of irrational need (his) and ruthless instinct for exploitation (hers).

It’s a chemistry against which Carey’s rational self seems powerless. His friendships, his career prospects, his financial security, his happiness — he places all at risk in scene after scene. And as you see in Prest’s riveting performance, it sends an eminently decent man careening towards despair, mystified by his own assault against his better judgment.

Translating a door-stopper of a novel for the stage means travelling without the baggage of narrative exposition. Carey’s back story as an orphan and art student, the club foot handicap that makes him self-conscious, filter obliquely into an adaptation that feels rich and full. Obsession gets its own vivid image in Schultz’s staging, which locates Carey in a red square centerstage — his own cage, as the director’s note explains — and never lets him leave it.

Obsession resonates in various way in the characters who surround Carey, too,  — all played by the other 11 actors, who disappear into semi-darkness outside the square and play instruments in Mike Ross’s score.

Monteith bravely steps up to the harshness of the terrible Mildred in a vivid performance. Stuart Hughes as a self-destructive artist, Sarah Wilson as a soulful divorcée discarded by Carey in a heartbreaking return to Mildred …. it’s a first-rate ensemble.

Soulpepper Theatre’s Of Human Bondage. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

The scenes flow seamlessly: a brilliant piece of stagecraft from Schultz. And in a full evening, the sense of life as a work of art assembled in dark and light, painful trials and glimmerings of happiness — strands in a complex design as the play says — emerges in a powerful way.

Incidentally, Thiessen, the artistic director of Edmonton’s Workshop West, has a distinctly complex pattern of life himself this summer, too — but all in sunny tones. His new play Pugwash opened the 2017 Ship’s Company season in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. Vimy, undertaken by this year’s ArtsTrek participants in Alberta, opened at Soulpepper’s Toronto headquarters at the end of June.

And now New York, in a festival that’s brought something Canadian to America at a propitious time, as Soulpepper artistic director Schultz referenced, lightly, in his pre-show remarks. 

People everywhere vaguely approve of Canada, generally, if they remember where it is. But for once in life — as enthusiasm for the musical Come From Away has confirmed — the word “Canadian” gets not only a reaction, but a warm one in Trump-hating New York: “You’re from Canada? Take me with you!” said the bartender dispensing little bags of popcorn.   

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I Heard About Your Murder: a new Lemoine comedy reinvents the who-dunnit

Posted on July 14, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Jenny McKillop, Garett Ross, Kendra Connor, Patricia Cerra, Vincent Forcier, Mathew Hulshot, in I Heard About Your Murder, premiering at Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Andrew MacDonald-Smith.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

An early exchange in I Heard About Your Murder, a teasing title with its own built-in line of inquiry, is a tip-off about the mystery concoction to follow. 

Irritated by efforts to smooth out the awkward wrinkles in an unwelcome encounter, one character snaps “we don’t have to make up things.” The pleasant, slightly perplexed, rejoinder is telling: “But I don’t want to tell the truth!” 

Exactly. The plot of Stewart Lemoine’s amusingly curious and original new mystery/comedy divertissement, premiering in the Teatro La Quindicina summer season, is all about that: people who have their reasons, both initial and under spontaneous readjustment, for non- or partial disclosure.

Naturally, some of these people are related; secrets in varying states of repair are, as Canadian theatre wills us to believe, the ultimate family adhesive. I Heard About Your Murder goes to family central: it’s set in a family cabin remote enough to be outside cellular range but close enough to be accessible by car. The bourgeois family getaway is conjured to a T in Chantel Fortin’s two-level design, with lighting to match by Matthew Alan Currie.

And it all begins by referencing a classic farce set-up: a man in a business suit arrives mid-week with a briefcase and a bag of booze, shortly followed by the arrival of a bright young thing in high heels.

The former (Garett Ross) would be Howard Forrester, on an impromptu getaway to the Forrester cabin somewhere between Golden and Radium, B.C. Whoever she actually is, the latter (Kendra Connor) would clearly not be Mrs. Forrester. Mrs. Dodie Forrester (Jenny McKillop) will arrive soon too, on an impulse excursion of her own, accompanied by a younger woman (Patricia Cerra), who gazes around her with a mysteriously alert assessor’s eye.

But lying has to start immediately, mainly because the cabin is not, as Howard has anticipated, empty. The occupant (Mathew Hulshof) is not unknown to Howard, and just as far from delight at the reunion. “What the hell are you doing here?” demands Howard. “Do you have a key?”

Neither question, repeated with variations by assorted characters throughout the evening, is answered; oddly, answers seem not to be expected. Ah yes, there’s so much I could tell you, but you’ll get no further elucidation from me since pretty much everything I could tell you would be a spoiler and you’d be deeply resentful later.

Anyhow, what gives I Heard About Your Murder its appealingly off- centre sense of fun is the way it toys with our own assessments.  Act I gets its meandering quality, as “guests” arrive at a family cabin and scramble for conventional social plausibility, isn’t one big mystery; it’s the accumulation of little, more innocuous mysteries. What we know is that every character, at every moment, wants fewer people in every scene than there demonstrably are, for reasons that aren’t exotic and would seem to sit far from the concept “murder.”   

This escalates to include international intrigue in such a sneaky way you barely notice it’s happening. Lemoine seems to have forged his own link between the farce, the screwball, the murder mystery, and the family sitcom. The line that brings down the Act I curtain, and raises it after intermission, is a corker.

Kendra Connor, Mathew Hulshof, Garett Ross in I Heard About Your Murder, premiering at Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Andrew MacDonald-Smith.

Indispensable to proceedings is a gallery of characters we get to know in Lemoine’s well-cast production. Ross, a veteran actor and Teatro newcomer whose eyebrows have reconfigured themselves into the international road sign for Panic Ahead, is a virtuoso on the keyboard that goes from melancholy to anxiety, with top notes of hysteria. McKillop is endearingly irritating as the dithery, endlessly voluble earth mother Dodie. As the bright, chirpy character from screwball comedies who complicates things mainly for the fun of it, Connor is a hoot.

Vincent Forcier as a passerby in an emergency, and Cerra as a cool, noncommittal professional dislodged from her usual calm into improvising lies she herself finds outlandish, turn in sharp intriguing performances.

The production’s funniest, and most mysterious, performance comes from Hulshof as the unsmiling grouch character, a Forrester relative, who says the least, answers in exasperated monosyllables if at all, and can never be backed into charm or cordiality.

It’s a ticklish business to create suspense while you’re trying to make people laugh. As its title would suggest, I Heard About Your Murder, is a playful experiment in disarming you with scenarios you feel you recognize, then escalating the stakes. What fun, of a summer night, to be tricked.

REVIEW

I Heard About Your Murder

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Jenny McKillop, Garett Ross, Patricia Cerra, Kendra Connor, Mathew Hulshof, Vincent Forcier

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through July 29

Tickets: 780-433-3399, teatroq.com

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Getting away with murder? Stewart Lemoine’s new mystery-comedy I Heard About Your Murder premieres at Teatro

Posted on July 13, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Patricia Cerra, Garett Ross, Jenny McKillop, Kendra Connor, Mathew Hulshof in I Heard About Your Murder by Stewart Lemoine, premiering at Teatro La Quindicina. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In Stewart Lemoine’s new murder mystery thriller comedy — a tricky theatrical category with precious few representatives — you’ll meet a married couple of Canuck urbanites with an idyllic rural retreat.

Little do Howard and Dodie Forrester know it, of course. But their spontaneous, and independent, arrivals at their B.C. cabin between Golden and Radium instigate the complications of I Heard About Your Murder, premiering Thursday in the ongoing Teatro La Quindicina summer season at the Varscona.

A proliferating nexus of unexpected guests, unravelling deceptions and scrambled secrets, orchestrated misapprehensions, and out-and-out lies ensues, says the playwright cheerfully over morning coffee. The man at the next table keeps his head down when he overhears this breezy summation.

It might explain why ‘murder mystery thriller comedies’ are not a dime a dozen in the theatrical repertoire. For starters, they require a certain fierce concentration to plot. Both in the writing and the acting, knowing how much to reveal, and when, … well, it’s intricate, to say the least. “This is not your Agatha Christie or Murder She Wrote,” says Lemoine with his misleadingly benign smile, over pre-rehearsal coffee. “Not that kind of body in the library.”

He is prepared to shed more light on the intricate byways of I Heard About Your Murder — in a mysterious sort of way. Of the drop-ins, “some (the Forresters) know, some they don’t know, some they pretend to know. Everyone there has an agenda; everybody has something to conceal.… Lies range from domestic to international. An unusual turn of events happens that needs to be investigated, but in the context of a fun trip to the cabin.”

Patricia Cerra (centre) with Jenny McKillop, Garett Ross, Kendra Connor, Vincent Forcier, Mathew Hulshof, in I Heard About Your Murder, premiering at Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Andrew MacDonald-Smith.

In 35 seasons of comedies set in exotic locales like Venice and Zurich, Manhattan and L.A., Budapest and Buenos Aires (not to mention up the Amazon), it’s curious, and revealing, how often Lemoine has turned to apparently benign Canadian locales — for screwball escalations, comic mayhem, and even international intrigues. The national parks of Jasper and Waterton have figured prominently, for example (Mrs. Lindeman Proposes, A Rocky Night For His Nibs). So has the cafeteria in the downtown Winnipeg Eaton’s (Fever-Land). Lemoine’s 2013 comedy thriller Cause and Effect had international complications accelerating through a  remarkably unremarkable strip of Edmonton retail real estate, the stunningly undistinguished Gateway Blvd. between 34th and 51st Avenues.

When it comes to “writing something mysterious about people investigating, seeking information and not having it” in a contemporary mystery, “it’s hard to do anywhere there’s wi-fi,” as Lemoine remarks. “You need a remote location.”

Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth, as he points out, is set in an isolated country house; no cell phone reception is involved. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None happens on an island, “with the remake on a mountain you can only get to by cable car.”

Neither is contemporary, of course: “isolation and what it allows dramatically” is a delicate matter in the here and now. When there’s Google, investigation is a mere fingertip distraction. Which is why “the weekend getaway of I Heard About Your Murder isn’t set in downtown New York,” grins Lemoine.

I Heard About Your Murder by Stewart Lemoine, premiering at Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Andrew MacDonald-Smith.

B.C. is the remoteness of choice, mainly because Calgary-based actor Barbara Gates Wilson, a Teatro fave, and her artist husband have a cabin midway between Golden and Radium. Lemoine and Teatro artistic director Jeff Haslam have been guests there. “I always send her a birthday message, and she gets it several days late because there’s no email there,” says Lemoine. “They’re cut off from the normal channels of information.”

Not only is isolation a dramatic practicality, but there’s also “its value to people who want it, beyond (mere) tranquillity. What kind of people that, or will fight to have it?” Hmmm. Could that be people who are, as Lemoine puts it, “concealing, avoiding, lying?”

In writing the new play, the only production in the Teatro season set in contemporary time, Lemoine, who’s written both, has been struck by the parallels in structure between mystery thrillers and farce. In both, the infrastructure of high stakes, ever more teetery, is propped up by improvised lies and concealments.

The production, which he cast before he wrote the play, has a sextet of actors, mixing Teatro stars, like Jenny McKillop, Mathew Hulshof, Vincent Forcier and Kendra Connor with newcomers like Garett Ross and Patricia Cerra,

Kendra Connor, Mathew Hulshof, Garett Ross in I Heard About Your Murder, premiering at Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Andrew MacDonald-Smith.

“In the general landscape of theatre now,” as Lemoine puts it, “six actors is a big cast. In contrast to many of his playwright colleagues, he thinks “it’s easier to write for more people. To have a plot that reflects … life. To (create) something fun involving misunderstanding and misconceptions with three actors is, well exhausting.”

His 2005 farce A Grand Time In The Rapids, with its etiquette columnist character reduced to panic, had only three actors, but four characters since twins were involved.

Teatro’s July slot has always been one of their biggest draws for audiences. Last summer’s revival of Cocktails at Pam’s was the best attended show in Teatro history.

“My philosophy,” laughs Lemoine, “is have something fun for July, the play equivalent of the book you take to the beach. A page turner!” 

PREVIEW

I Heard About Your Murder

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Jenny McKillop, Garett Ross, Mathew Hulshof, Kendra Connor, Vincent Forcier, Patricia Cerra

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through July 29

Tickets: 780-433-3399, teatroq.com

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So…. wanna go out some time? I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, a review

Posted on June 29, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Patricia Zentilli, Robbie Towns, Jocelyn Ahlf, Scott Walters in I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The title sounds like a one-liner, I’ve always thought: a Henny Youngman reboot channelled by Jerry Seinfeld perhaps? Pause to imagine that signature tone of exasperated bemusement at work on I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.

The tag line, “everything you have ever secretly thought about dating, romance, marriage, loves, husbands, wives and in-laws, but were afraid to admit,” cuts to the chase: it’s all about the recognition factor.

That’s how Joe DiPietro’s (very) long-running 1996 Off-Broadway musical comedy, with its clever Jimmy Roberts songs, presents itself onstage: a cabaret of interconnected vignettes on a familiar arc. First, dating rituals in all their panic and assorted humiliations. Then, marriage, with the time-honoured sequels of parenthood, and reassessment. Then a coda that returns us to mating at precisely the time in life when we’re lugging around maximum baggage, a word Roberts rhymes with “saggage” and “draggage” in the opening number.

That ground has been broken many times, of course. And that’s the whole point: familiarity. It can make you wistful and nostalgic. It can make you wince a little. It can make you do one of those nostalgic wince smiles. There are songs and scenes for all of that in I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.

And you’ll see the charm and the fun of the experience in a crack Kate Ryan production at the Mayfield that demonstrates unequivocally — as if you ever doubted it — what a really expert cast of singing actors can do by way of making the recognition factor sizzle. Jocelyn Ahlf, Patricia Zentilli, Robbie Towns and Scott Walters have lustrous, malleable musical theatre voices, comic timing, and attentive relationships — with each other, the 60-odd characters they’re playing, the lyrics.

Ryan ensconces her production in a sort of high-colour bi-level Roy Lichtenstein comic cell, under the watch of two giant pairs of eyes — the male gaze furrowed, the female wide-eyed. Cabaret panels, one for each letter of LOVE, open to expel characters and set pieces onto the stage. And they disappear backwards into mists of LOVE like they were being sucked into an apocalyptic vortex. All very witty, as designed by Ivan Siemens, with lighting by Gail Ksionzyk.

In the funniest reinvention of (and homage to) the familiar, Ahlf and Walters are two busy Manhattanites on a first date. Pressed for time, she suggests they skip the preliminaries and move right along to second-date rituals. He says why not the go directly to third-date mode, and she says, how about skipping the sexual tension and cutting right to the sex. And on it goes, an entire relationship telescoped, from the first glimmer of attraction to the futile regrets, and then a chance meeting a year after break-up. “You look great….”

The fun of the show isn’t in its insights, but in the way it re-imagines, re-walks, re-dances, re-sings, the clichés of the relationship comedy repertoire. And some scenes, and songs, are more successful than others.

First-date hell, in a restaurant, made me laugh out loud, with its counterpoint of matching couples at adjoining tables. At one, the guy drones on about aeronautical engineering, at the other golf. And the smiling women are left to their own secret thoughts, and a duet lamentation to match (Single Man Drought). “Standards,” sings one. “I used to have standards.” “Lesbian,” sings the other. “I should be a lesbian!” Ahlf and Zentilli give this scenario new comic life.

Towns and Zentilli turn the hoary comedy of the awkward first date into something piquant and funny in a scene with its own rueful anthem, A Stud And A Babe, a theme song for romantic underachievers everywhere paralyzed by thoughts of their own inadequacies.

The age of the telephone, and the dating dynamics thereof, have passed into the realm of the historical, to be sure. But Ahlf puts a transforming comic spin on the old scenario of the girl waiting — and waiting — for the guy to call. When he actually, amazingly, does, her transcendental incredulity at this remarkable development is very funny.

Oddly enough, the scene in which the show gets brave and extrapolates into absurdity, is a fizzle, this despite the best efforts of the actors. A singles counsellor in a prison introduces the guest speaker, a murderer serving seven consecutive life sentences because he couldn’t get a date. Waiting, on the other hand, an ancient scenario with simultaneous examples of the chafing frustration of waiting — for a wife shopping in Macy’s, a hubby to finish watching the interminable last 32 seconds of a football game — is amusing. Go figure.

Credit Ryan’s inventive stagecraft, with its affection for vintage (as you’ll know from her Plain Janes productions). Credit, too, the comic fine-tuning of her cast. And every once in a while, there’s a ballad, set forth from the comic fabric of the piece and given room to shine. Zentilli nails I Will Be Loved Tonight, a lovely song of anticipation from a woman who’s been single and made the best of things.

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis

I still find the dating scenes of Act I more entertaining, in the end, than the wedding and harried parent scenes of Act II. I guess some clichés are more clichéd than others. But the Marriage Tango between a husband (Towns) and wife (Ahlf) determined to defeat every obstacle en route to the holy grail, is amusingly fierce in execution, not least because of Cindy Kerr’s ever-clever choreography: “I’m married and I’m gonna have sex….”   

The classic musical theatre score is delivered with gusto and style by Cathy Derkach, at a white grand piano on the upper level, along with violinist Shannon Johnson. And they have a wordless relationship comedy of their own to play after intermission. 

This is a show to remind you of the easy-going enjoyment of laughing the laughter of recognition, and Ryan’s production is a charmer. As the finale title number has it, “I keep coming back to this whirlwind tour/ Of loving, and leaving, and wanting more.”

REVIEW

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre, 16615 109 Ave.

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Jocelyn Ahlf, Robbie Towns, Scott Walters, Patricia Zentilli

Running: through July 30

Tickets: 780-483-4051, mayfieldtheatre.ca

    

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