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Onika Henry, Zak Tardif, Julia Seymour in Vern Thiessen’s Bello. Photo by: Kim Clegg

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

For 16 of its 27 years Concrete Theatre has been inviting people of every ethnic and cultural stripe, every calling, career or colour, to plant a Sprout.

All they need, these playwrights or poets or painters, musicians or  novelists, singers or seamsters or stage managers, is a story to tell. One that could start small and sprout from 15-minutes into a full-length play for kids.

That’s how Bello started in 2011, at Concrete’s annual Sprouts Festival, launched to enhance diversity in a kids’ theatre repertoire that pretty much defined white bread. As Concrete’s Mieko Ouchi puts it, our community is diverse; “we want to reflect that diversity back, in writing, in casting, in stories!”

And now, Bello, a first kids’ play by Vern Thiessen, the accomplished, much-awarded playwright who runs Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, is touring to young audiences everywhere. And it’s playing schools far and wide in both our official languages — thanks to a debut collaboration between Concrete and L’UniThéâtre, Edmonton’s francophone theatre. Ouch’s production arrives at La Citè francophone this weekend. 

When the Concrete invitation to tap his cultural roots came, as Ouchi reports, Thiessen went back to his home town of Winnipeg to consult his Mennonite immigrant parents — and hit them up for a story .

“They each told a story,” says Ouchi. “One was about an old woman everyone thought was a witch. The other was about a little orphan boy who got lost in a snowstorm and was never found.” Which seems very dark but then, hey, consider the grimness of Grimm.

“And kids love it! Some of our favourite characters are orphans,” Ouchi muses. “They have to rely on their own fortitude and self-reliance.”

Originally called Little Bern and Old Nettie, Bello sets forth the former’s situation. “His aunt and uncle, who have 10 children, take him in, and he feels a bit lost in the crowd and misses his parents.” Every day Bern and a cousin walk to school, past a burned-out old barn, and tell scary stories about the outcast who lives there, widely assumed to be a witch.

Zak Tardif, Onika Henry in Bello. Photo by Kim Clegg

In a huge snowstorm one day, they get separated as they walk home. Little Bern is saved by the old woman. Discoveries ensue, led by the realization that she isn’t a witch, but a parent haunted by bereavement.

“Little Bern brings her back to the community,” Ouchi smiles. “A boy without parents and a woman without her child who find each other. And the kid is the moral hero.”

“It’s a really rhythmic, very physical kind of storytelling,” says Ouchi. “And the kids are loving it.” Not least because Patrick Beagan’s set, “which looks and feels homemade,” is an invitation to imagine. The canvas backdrop, for example, “is a cross-stitched tapestry of a town and surrounding fields.”

And the hut, which turns, and the burlap trees, have an old-fashioned homespun storybook flavour. Similarly, with the sound effect, “we see the actors building the sound, with xylophone, orchestral chimes, a ‘thunder cannon’ (a cylinder with a drum bottom and a coil that vibrates),” says Ouchi.

They crinkle water bottles; they create the storm with silk and a turn-of-the-century wind machine. The stage accoutrements? three wooden boxes and three galvanized tin buckets.

“Hey, we’re re-discovering those old-style radio plays onstage,” Ouchi laughs. “We’re pushing the idea of imagination , of hand-made effects that are within reach. We’re telling kids ‘you could do this!’”

Working in French, with three bilingual actors, has let Ouchi return to her now-rusty French immersion student days in the ′80s.  L’UniThéâtre artistic director Brian Dooley has done the translation. “Vern thinks the French version is funnier,” grins Ouchi. “Maybe it’s the animal sounds in French.”

PREVIEW
Bello

Theatre: Concrete and L’UniThéâtre

Written by: Vern Thiessen

Directed by: Mieko Ouchi

Starring: Onika Henry, Julia Seymour, Zak Tardif

Where: La Cité francophone, 8627 91 St.

Running: Friday 7 p.m. (English), Saturday 11 a.m. (English) and 2 p.m. (French).

Tickets: at the door   

Ah! Romance! a new review from Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca 

“All these lovers want is one shining hour/ is that such a terrible lot to ask?/ Look around you, see for yourself! The romantic atmosphere.”

— from She Loves Me

Happy Valentine’s Day from Plain Jane Theatre!

In their new musical revue opening in this week devoted to matters of the heart, you’ll hear a bustling A-type head waiter explain, in song, the raison d’être of the plush cafe in his charge: “romantic atmosphere.” .     

“Romantic atmosphere”: it’s the also raison d’être (and opening number) of Ah! Romance!. It mines the musical theatre repertoire — the classics, the contemporary hits, the neglected gems in which the Janes specialize — for peak romantic moments.

The supply isn’t meagre. How on earth to choose? The Janes’ artistic director Kate Ryan started, she says, “by asking the cast what they thought were some of the most romantic moments in musical theatre. You know, the ones that make you squirm with gleeful embarrassment as two passionate singers manage to embrace and sing those crazy high notes at the same time.”

You’ll hear numbers from musicals as divergent as Hello Dolly! and The King And I to Company and On The Town. You’ll hear He Plays The Violin, sung by Thomas Jefferson’s wife in the little-known Sherman Edwards musical 1776; you’ll hear Follow Your Heart from Urinetown. And the loose thread that joins them all is the starlet/director dynamic of the Cy Coleman musical On The Twentieth Century, in which Janes fave Jocelyn Ahlf partners with fellow Teatro La Quindicina star Ron Pederson in his Jane debut.

“I’m not limited to a decade or a writer…. Oooo, which child is my favourite child?” Ryan says of this crisis of amplitude in her chosen field. “The voices of the songs are so different!”

“I love jumping from one world to the next,” says Ryan. “Opening a door and finding, say, a woman who thinks she knows what she wants — and by the end of the song she’s not so sure. There’s a story there….”

That would be My White Knight from Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, one of two dozen-plus numbers in the show, culled from musicals of wildly different musical and dramatic styles, not to mention perspectives on love, eye-watering heartbreak to hilarity.

There was no shortage of ideas from the musicals-besotted Janes, joined for the first time by Pederson and newcomer Gianna Read. Jason Hardwick, for example, suggested I Am What I Am, the self-empowering declaration from La Cage Aux Folles. Madeleine Knight loved Changing My Major, a witty song of free-associative, spiralling discovery and elation from Fun Home. That beautiful, moving Jeannine Tesori musical is a memoir in which a little girl grows up, goes to college, discovers and discovers her own sexuality when she falls madly in love, and learns too late that her father was gay too.

Ryan, who teaches the fine musical theatre art of delivering dramatic moments in song at MacEwan University when she’s not directing and acting herself, puts the 1963 Jerry Bock/ Sheldon Harnick charmer She Loves Me in her “top five of romantic musicals.” She finds Rodgers and Hammerstein “incredibly romantic.” Ditto Cole Porter. “Romance is so rich, so messy: the chemistry between two people trying to figure each other out!”

In fashioning a romance revue, Ryan says she “I looked at what makes a great musical” and its arc of song placement. She describes the sequence she built into the architecture of Ah! Romance!: “the ‘who am I? I’m gonna tackle the world’ song, the ‘roadblock’ song, the ‘testing with your partner’ song, the ‘call to adventure’, the ‘meeting the mentor, the one who knows all’, the ‘crossing the theshhold, c’mon take a chance’ song, the ‘supreme ordeal, confronting the monster of commitment’ song. Ah yes, and there’s “the lessons learned”song.

“Like a box of rich chocolates each song is about a million calories. But so worth it!” Ryan laughs. “Hilarious! I just now thought of that-probably because there is a box of chocolates right beside me that I’ve been trying to avoid all night!”

 We caught up with the Ah! Romance! cast to discover their thoughts on romance.

Ron Pederson: “The world must be romanticized! I can’t think of something I’ve romanced more over the years than musicals, maybe vodka, but I’ve given that up!  Nothing transcends like music and cuts to the quick more than music and poetry combined, like the songs in our show. 

The titular song from the show from A Light in Piazza, always gets me, the whole score really. I was at the opening night on Broadway, and it was hard to pull myself together emotionally in time for the party.

I love that I get to sing the utterly, rhapsodic and romantic Our Private World from On the Twentieth Century. It’s usually sung by a sonorous baritone, but we’ve raised the key to accommodate a tenor. I’m also thrilled to be singing it with Jocelyn Ahlf. I’ve had the pleasure of being her leading man quite a few times over the years and I’m such a fan of her laser beam voice. Especially at close range, when she’s singing right in my face!

Jocelyn Ahlf:  “I love the romantic songs of Rogers and Hammerstein. The melodies are simple and beautiful and talk about larks and mist and moonlight, something I long for living in the city.  

Madelaine Knight: (in reference to Changing My Major from Fun Home) It’s wonderful to see contemporary writers honouring all expressions and forms of love and romance! Regardless of sexual orientation, love is intersectional and deserves celebration in song.”

Jason Hardwick– Romance and I have not always been on the best of terms in real life, but getting lost in the glory of these songs makes my heart burst.  Listening to all the songs reminds me just how vast the idea of romance can be. There is a song that sits very close to home for me: “I Am What I Am” by Jerry Herman. A song about loving yourself and celebrating who you are in the world regardless of what other people are going to think. Especially in a time where love is so very needed in this world. You’re with yourself until the very end so why not love yourself? Life will mean just that much more…. Besides, you can justify buying yourself chocolate and wine WAY easier this way.

Gianna Read-I love the excitement romance can bring. The anticipation of what’s to come, the mystery of what may happen, and the joy that you feel when you find that person who gives you butterflies. Everyone feels romance so differently, it’s amazing to get to explore it with so many beautiful songs from across the decades!

PREVIEW
Ah! Romance: A Revue of Song, Dance, And Other Passionate Musings

Theatre: Plain Jane

Directed by: Kate Ryan

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

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Feb. 25

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

Kinky Boots, the touring Broadway Across Canada musical. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“You can change the world when you change your mind.”

                                                          — Kinky Boots

“You put a face and a heart on them, and over-riding ideas can change,” says Ciarán McCarthy. The amiable Canadian actor is in the touring cast of Kinky Boots, the warm-hearted Broadway hit musical that high-kicks its way onto the Jube stage Tuesday in vertiginous 8-inch heels.

The 2013 multiple Tony and Olivier Award winner, from the team of pop queen Cyndi Lauper and Broadway stalwart Harvey (Hairspray) Fierstein, tells a sole-ful tale, based on a little-seen 2005 movie and inspired by real life. Charlie Price reluctantly inherits a failing family-run shoe factory in a hard-scrabble northern English town. The business is saved when Charlie finds the unlikeliest of business partners, a flamboyant drag queen, and a niche market in glam high-heeled red boots for the cross-dressing crowd.

Their hard-won rapport, forged over the paternal expectations that have oppressed them, is the heart of it: a message about tolerance, acceptance, overcoming prejudice. And, as McCarthy says, on the phone from Vancouver where Kinky Boots plays till Sunday, that makes it “an interesting show to be touring right now.” 

Dublin-born McCarthy grew up in London, Ont.; his family emigrated when he was eight. And the star soccer player was almost certainly the only member of his acting class at New York’s AMDA (American Musical Dramatic Academy) to arrive with a history degree from a Canadian university (Western).

His “first big gig” was the national tour of The Wedding Singer. And then he got … the boot, so to speak. His first night of Kinky Boots was in Cleveland six months ago. And it didn’t take his history degree for him to appreciate the dramatic significance of the show’s arrival after that in North Carolina, home of repressive legislation about transgender use of bathrooms. “There was an audible gasp from the audience,” says McCarthy of the finale number Just Be, rewritten by Lauper and Fierstein as Just Pee. “Just be who you wanna be” became “just pee where you wanna pee.”

“The liberal-minded went YES; the conservatives (might have) recognized how ridiculous the law is…” says McCarthy hopefully.

An ensemble member who also plays the suave boss of Charlie’s status-conscious fiancée (“in a dashing navy blue suit”), McCarthy has been warmed by reactions from diverse audiences everywhere on tour. “Acceptance, love, tolerance is the message,” he says. “In Arkansas, for example, a place where you might think ….” he trails off tactfully, “the response was overwhelmingly positive”

“I think it’s about exposure,” he says. Prejudice devolves from “what you’ve been told all your life and never known anything else … a habit, bred into you.”

“There’s something safe about having (a challenge) onstage,” McCarthy muses. “True, it’s live, always less comfortable than TV. But these people (onstage) are real; they’re just trying to exist…. No matter who you are, you can see yourself in the characters onstage.”

After all, as he points out, that is the narrative thrust of Kinky Boots: “a group of blue-collar people who aren’t used to seeing glamor drag queens, have them roll into their lives.”

Kinky Boots, the touring Broadway Across Canada production. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

In the fall, the tour went to Japan for five weeks. And McCarthy, calls that “a life-changing experience.”

“Everything was close-captioned in English…. When the songs started, everyone clapped along.” He went on for Charlie twice during that time. And in the middle of Step One, Charlie’s complicated number about reinventing the ailing shoe factory and himself, “the sound went out…. I kept singing a capella, and they kept clapping, till it came back on. It was a pretty stellar moment. And at the end the audience went nuts!”

After seven months on the road, most recently in California then Vancouver — where he hadn’t been in the 15 years since his university soccer team was in the national championship — McCarthy still finds Lauper’s music irresistible.

“I’m still humming it every night when I walk away from the theatre… “Great score! Beautiful arrangements!” It’s taxing to the voice, he says. “This show is written for Olympic athletes, for aliens,” he laughs.

As for the choreography, McCarthy the former athlete doesn’t consider himself a dancer per se. “I move well, and I have musicality. But technique, tensions, flexibility? That has to be groomed…. I took my first ballet lesson at 24.”

Ballet slippers are not the footwear of choice for Kinky Boots anyhow. McCarthy dances in gorgeous size-10 thigh-highs, “custom-made by a little Italian guy in midtown Manhattan for my feet and my feet only: a beautiful luxury. What’s not to love?”

For the purposes of real life offstage, McCarthy does have a couple of pairs of off-the-rack boots, including a “black combat pair from L.A. that make me feel like a rock star.” And he bought high-top sneakers in Japan to which he’s very attached.

He’s looking forward to Edmonton. This is a Canuck who spent a summer working at Tekarra Lodge in Jasper during his university years. “I served breakfast in the morning and cleaned rooms in the afternoon.”

Bonus: “I’m a huge Oilers fans, from the early Messier-Kurri days…. I have to start educating the cast!”

“This isn’t a hard job,” says McCarthy, who loves “the living minimally” that touring demands. And then there’s the show itself. “People jumping and screaming? It’s quite moving. Not only do we get to do what we love, we get to truly affect people!”

Kinky Boots comes wearing “a beautiful message that anyone can understand!”

PREVIEW

Kinky Boots

Broadway Across Canada

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: Tuesday through Feb. 19

Tickets: 1-855-985-5000 or ticketmaster.ca

Andrea House in Chasing Willie Nelson. Photo by Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the romantic evening that comes to Fort Edmonton’s vintage Capitol Theatre this weekend in honour of Valentine’s Day, the mysteriously supple talent of Andrea House wraps itself around a musical icon you might not expect — at first.

Chasing Willie Nelson is the latest of the “storytelling concerts” that have become something of a House specialty, after such hit shows as Forget Me Not, Valentine’s Train, and Song of the Martingale. Says director Davina Stewart, the singer-songwriter (cum actor/ playwright) was a little surprised herself at the start to realize how many of the same songs she and Willie Nelson covered. How could that be?

The logic of it began to form, as titles flashed by and House and Stewart considered the multi-faceted career and repertoire of the legendary Texan songwriter who’s still touring at 83. Nelson sang Texas swing tunes, like San Antonio Rose. He sang country classics like Fred Rose’s Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain. He sang Hoagy Carmichael’s Georgia On My Mind and Stardust, the now-jazz standard that gave his 1978 album its name. He sang Blue Skies by the musical theatre tunesmith Irving Berlin.

Musically, “Willie Nelson crossed boundaries; he can’t be pigeonholed,” as Stewart puts it. And his is a resilient six-decade left-leaning career that has never stopped turning corners. In his ‘40s, for example, fed up with the confines of the music industry, he up and left Nashville and moved to Austin. He’s acted in movies; he’s written memoirs (Roll Me Up And Smoke Me When I Die). He’s embraced activist causes (Farm Aid).

“It’s so inspiring,” says Stewart of the life and works that frame the new House tribute. “And Andrea married it with her own life,” as she often does in her shows. House, after all, is not only a musician and composer, she’s an actor and playwright.

In Chasing Willie Nelson, the man comes to her in a dream, Stewart explains, of a show that wonders how songs get embedded in our minds. The cast includes Dana Andersen as the spirit of Willie Nelson. Mat Busby plays his son. And House leads a five-piece band on the dreamy musical journey.

PREVIEW

Chasing Willie Nelson: A Tribute By Andrea House

Directed by: Davina Stewart

Starring: Andrea House, Dana Andersen, Mat Busby, Andrew Scott, Harley Symington, Bob Blair, Chris Andrew

Where: Capitol Theatre, Fort Edmonton Park

Running: Saturday (7:30 p.m.), Sunday (2 p.m.), Tuesday (7:30 p.m.).

Tickets: eventbrite.ca or at the door. Dinner and a night at the Selkirk Hotel are possible add-ons.

Footloose at MacEwan University, directed by Dave Horak. Photo by Steven Stefaniuk.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Two of the country’s most inventive directors, award-winners both, take on classics of their kind with student casts this week, at MacEwan University and the University of Alberta’s Studio Theatre.

At MacEwan University, Dave Horak of Edmonton Actors Theatre (Burning Bluebeard) directs a production of an irresistibly dance-y and celebratory 1998 stage musical that advises us to “cut loose, footloose, kick off your Sunday shoes.” Which, you have to admit, sounds like advice for these parlous, regressive times.

It’s Footloose (as if you didn’t know) based on the ‘80s movie. And it runs (well, dances and generally rocks) through Feb. 18 at the John L. Haar Theatre, Centre for the Arts and Communications (10045 156 St.). Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca).

The Government Inspector directed by Ron Jenkins at the U of A’s Studio Theatre. Photo by Ed Ellis.

At the U of A, Ron Jenkins returns to Studio Theatre — Mary Mooney Distinguished Visting Artist — to direct Nikolai Gogol’s wicked blue-chip 1836 political satire The Government Inspector. What happens when an underling civil servant is mistaken for a high-ranking government inspector? An outbreak of farcical panic and terror amongst the corrupt and venal officials of a small provincial Russian town.

Hmm, perennial applications seem even more acute at the moment, for this evergreen comedy. Jenkins’ production runs on the Timm’s Centre for the Arts stage (87th Ave and 112th St.) through Feb. 18. Tickets: 780-492-2495 or ualberta.ca/artshows.

Moon at Midnight, photo by Marc J. Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Expanse has amply lived up to its name.

In the 12 years since Amber Borotsik and Murray Utas first imagined a movement arts festival, something that “started small and local,” as Azimuth Theatre’s Kristi Hansen puts it, has expanded. Exponentially. “Across the country and beyond.” With partnerships to match.

“Small and local”? Expanse was designed for a space that pretty much defined intimate, Azimuth Theatre’s late lamented Living Room Playhouse, where elbows regularly met. The festivities moved to C103 and the Roxy before finding a home at the ATB Financial Arts Barns’s various spaces as part of the Chinook Series.

So, welcome to the newer, wider Expanse, opening Thursday. This year’s four-program incarnation of Azimuth’s annual movement arts festival has a star performer from Italy, Dasa Grgic, for example. In the program Body Parts, she’s partnered her show BodyunTitled with  Re:Pairing by Montreal’s Parts and Labour Danse.

POLKA(dots) by Rosanna Terracciano. Photo by Reynard Li.

Coast to Coast, another of Expanse’s four programs, curated by Edmonton’s Good Women Dance, assembles creations from three provinces. From Calgary comes Rosanna Terracciano’s POLKA(dots), intriguingly billed as flamenco-meets-polka. From Toronto, There she was, created and performed by Jane Alison McKinney. From Vancouver, Submission to Entropy pairs contemporary dancer Karissa Barry with Elya Grant.

The Alberta Grown program has two pieces, including the premiere of vulnerable and soft and strange and stomping by Edmonton choreographer/dancer Aimee Rushton, who received Good Women Dance’ 2016 New Work Award, with its cash, mentorship and rehearsal space, to develop the piece during the past year.

Ainsley Hillyard, Good Women Dance’s muse extraordinaire, has been hugely influential in Expanse, says Hansen. The choreographer/ dancer/ movement designer moves freely between the worlds of dance and theatre, smudging the frontiers whenever she can. And Expanse has followed suit. “Chinook gives us access to the (much larger) theatre audience,” says Hansen.

The largest scale work at Expanse, running Feb. 17 and 18, is the much-awaited Moon At Midnight, a dance/theatre/sound installation with a monster movie inspiration, co-created by Amber Borotsik and Jesse Gervais. The eight performers encompass a range of skill sets, ages, experience, body types. And sound designer Aaron Macri mixes sound live onstage. 

“It’s dance it’s music it’s theatre,” says Hansen of the piece, which has been touring since the fall. “Fun and touching!”

And there are even performances between performances: The Lobbyists are a coterie of Edmonton’s emerging interdisciplinary artists who haunt the spaces between the spaces.

 PREVIEW

Expanse Movement Arts Festival

Theatre: Azimuth

Where: ATB Financial Arts Barns, various spaces

Running: Thursday through Feb. 19

Tickets: chinookseries.ca or at the door (pay-what-you-will tickets available two hours in advance of performance, first come first served.