Teatro turns 35 with a new season of comedies, variously hued

Posted on May 23, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

The Teatro class of 2017: the season ensemble at Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Oh, it’s beyond fun….” 

— Dominica, in The Talking Turk

Now, there’s a mantra for a Teatro season.

In The Salon of the Talking Turk, the vintage Stewart Lemoine comedy that launches Teatro La Quindicina’s  2017 season this week, a Long Island socialite of the ‘20s acquires an exotic, life-sized automaton.

The mechanical fortune teller, dressed “Turk-ishly,” is an instant sensation. People seek him out, ask questions, interpret his pronouncements as wisdom, and make changes and discoveries—small and large — in their lives.

The notion of change, inherently dramatic, is built into the history of a company born at the very first Fringe (a catalyst for civic transformation in itself, to be sure). And on the eve of Teatro’s 35th anniversary summer, their second season at the restored Varsona, it was on the minds of resident playwright Lemoine and artistic director Jeff Haslam last week.

The Salon of the Talking Turk was inspired by Lemoine’s deep-seated attachment to the Offenbach opera The Tales of Hoffman (“a masterpiece! a Shakespeare among operas!”). Its three tales by 19th century fantasist E.T.A. Hoffman, of Nutcracker fame, include the wind-up doll Olympia and a talking Turk. Lemoine, who has decisive views on the opera’s restored and rightful ending, considers his affection for that particular opera a life-changer; as he’s said, it was his first full-bodied, sit-down opera experience as a kid.

When The Salon of the Talking Turk, Lemoine’s first new comedy in three years, premiered in 2005, Teatro was in the midst of discoveries of every size and shape. For one thing, as Haslam recalls, “we were taking Pith! (a signature Teatro hit) back to New York (after a Fringe run there) for a three-week Off-Broadway run.” For another The Exquisite Hour, Lemoine’s poignant turning-point study of the small but momentous changes in an uneventful life — the company’s graceful (temporary) farewell to the Fringe when it premiered in 2002 — was getting productions elsewhere, too.

Both plays, which expand conventional notions of comedy in different ways, have found their way into the five-show 2017 lineup.

The Salon of the Talking Turk cast: Braydon Dowler- Coltman, Louise Lambert, Mark Meer, Shannon Blanchet. Photo by Ryan Parker

After a dozen years, Mark Meer, who first donned the ceremonial fez to originate the role, is back for the revival of The Salon of the Talking Turk. In this advice-dispensing enterprise, he’s joined by Teatro regulars Louise Lambert and Shannon Blanchet and newcomer Braydon Dowler-Coltman (in roles originally written for Teatro stars Leona Brausen, Davina Stewart, and then-newcomer Andrew MacDonald-Smith). It opens Thursday and runs through June 10. 

The Exquisite Hour, Teatro’s Fringe production this summer (Aug. 18 to Sept. 2), remains one of the company’s most popular shows. For the upcoming revival of Lemoine’s first-ever two-hander, Haslam returns to the role, specially written for him, of a mild-mannered department store “supervisor of merchandise receiving.” Zachary Teale finds his regular, predictable existence changed forever on the summer evening in 1965 when a stranger arrives in his backyard with a simple, polite question: “are you satisfied with what you know?” Belinda Cornish, who’s been in several revivals of The Exquisite Hour with Haslam, returns to the questioner’s role originated by Kate Ryan.

Teatro, the city’s leading purveyor of new Canadian comedies, programs a mix of premieres and revivals. And the company makes a point of recruiting newcomers for its ensemble every season to play alongside veterans. Dowler-Coltman, for example, who plays the sassy millionaire orphan kid brother Wally in The Salon of the Talking Turk, caught their eye in Dave Horak’s production of Burning Bluebeard. And his funny, sharp-edged performance in Catalyst’s Fortune Falls cinched the deal for his cast-mate Blanchet. 

There are two premieres in the season. One is a new ‘30s-style screwball comedy by actor/playwright Jana O’Connor, who wrote Going Going Gone on spec and offered it first to “my family,” as she refers to Teatro. Talk about coming to the right place with an idea. “There’s a great company tradition of screwball comedy,” as Haslam notes. “There’s an element of adventure to a screwball,” says Lemoine happily “Jana’s has people going all over the place on the eastern seaboard. Lies are exposed!.”

MacDonald-Smith and Rachel Bowron, fresh from the Calgary run of Crazy For You, star, along with Davina Stewart, Mark Meer, and Celina Dean. MacDonald-Smith plays “a gentleman with more fiancées than is perhaps ideal,” as Lemoine puts it drily in his website notes. Things devolve from there into near-misses with chaos. Dave Horak, of Edmonton Actors Theatre, directs the production that runs June 22 to Canada Day. 

The season’s other premiere (July 13 to 29), is a new six-actor Lemoine murder mystery I Heard About Your Murder. It’s a form that intrigues Lemoine — for its structural rigour (what information to reveal and when, what to withhold) and for the pleasure it gives audiences. “They’re very satisfying when they’re done well. And such fun to work on since the audience is so attentive!”

Lemoine has written murder mysteries before, The Ambassador’s Wives and Evelyn Strange among them. Haslam reports that when Lemoine was writing the latter, the playwright said, memorably that “I thought so hard I felt my brain move.” His cast of six includes two Teatro newcomers, Patricia Cerra and Garett Ross. 

The season finale is a revival of Lemoine’s ’90s comedy Shocker’s Delight (Sept. 28 to Oct. 14), directed by Teatro fave Ron Pederson, who was in a 2004 revival. It’s a funny and moving story of friendship and loyalty amongst three ‘50s college kids (originally written for Julien Arnold, Davina Stewart, and Haslam).

Pederson, a tireless promoter of Lemoine comedies in his adoptive Toronto — he directed a production of The Exquisite Hour there — has long called Shocker’s Delight “my favourite play.” His cast includes Ben Stevens, with Teatro newcomers Richard Lee Hsi and Melanie Piatocha.. 

Tickets: teatroq.com.

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As the crow flies: Nicole Moeller’s new play gets under your skin at Azimuth

Posted on May 19, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Steve Pirot in The Preacher, The Princess, And A Crow, Azimuth Theatre, Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the first moments of The Preacher, The Princess, And A Crow, a man bursts headlong into a tower room above a street. He triple-locks the door behind him.

Jasper is a man under siege. But is he the prisoner or the jailer? Nicole Moeller’s disturbing new solo play imagines a man who is both. And, in Murray Utas’s Azimuth Theatre premiere, Steve Pirot’s scarily intense and kinetic performance imagines the phrase “pursued by demons” made flesh.

Moeller has written about imprisonment before; in her 2011 play An Almost Perfect Thing, a little girl is kidnapped, and grows up a captive in a makeshift dungeon, until she emerges a bona fide media star. That was eerie. This is downright horrifying — not least because you can’t help but be drawn to Jasper’s valiance in struggling against his own predatory, repelling, obsessive devil.

The former street preacher needs to save the princess from this ever-hovering crow, who doesn’t even say “Nevermore” like his famous literary predecessor. And here’s the thing: What do you do if it’s a dangerous world because you exist? Jasper longs for freedom but craves imprisonment, on behalf of society.

The usual religious and social mantras have failed him: faith, hope, humility, perseverance, as he lists. “Why is the man not saved?” he wonders, in the frantic, murky third-person stream of consciousness that’s Moeller’s poetry of damnation.  “Having no soul means the man is neither living nor dead.”   

With Moeller’s plays, empathy isn’t something soft, it’s something hard — and hard-won. Watching Pirot’s Jasper attempt self-exorcism is like watching a man take out his own liver. Without anesthetic. Gruesome and riveting.

Steve Pirot in The Preacher, The Princess, And A Crow, Azimuth Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Utas’s production transforms the Backstage Theatre into something voyeuristic. The theatre opens into the lobby; 45 of us sit at a 45-degree angle to Jasper’s rooming house room, a bleak and blasted urban cell strewn with old paper coffee cups, tattered maps of the big wide world, a bucket of water, and the ugliest couch in the western world. The design is by Tessa Stamp, who locates Jasper’s tiny smeared windows so high up he has to climb a step-stool to see out and down, ready to fly or to jump.

Aaron Macri’s powerful multi-layered soundscape is a sort of sound poem in itself. There’s a kind of ominous hum and thud (a cosmic heartbeat perhaps?) under the muffled sounds of city traffic and sirens. There’s the soundtrack of an evangelical preacher coming from a TV that Jasper seems to be able to turn on and off and with his mind. And from time to time, there’s the frightening sounds of beating wings, claws, beaks; Jasper is a man under avian surveillance. It’s exactly synched with Rae Dunn’s lurid lighting, scabrous and harsh, with flickering evocations of an outside world and sinister shadows of a giant hovering bird.

Occasionally the poetic script, with its tricky internal rhymes (“doctors and healers, witches and dealers…”) turns into analysis rather than spontaneous expression. And the play lurches from its sense of spontaneity at those moments. Mostly, though, it’s for you to follow Jasper’s train (wreck) of thought, as he zigzags through his fatal choices en route to damnation. Pirot, always a dangerous actor, is in perpetual motion throughout, in a tense performance that physicalizes temptation and terror, and feels like thinking aloud.

“Resist the devil and he will flee from you,” he repeats, in period bursts of wishful thinking that are sometimes accompanied by bizarre self-baptisms in water from the bucket. But his “recipes for resistance” won’t stick. And neither will yours. 

“There is no skin left; there is only bone.” And discomforting questions about the people we cast out are under our skin, too.   

REVIEW

The Preacher, The Princess, And A Crow

Theatre: Azimuth, with Fringe Theatre Adventures

Written by: Nicole Moeller

Directed by: Murray Utas

Starring: Steve Pirot

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

Running: through May 27

Tickets: 780-409-1910, fringetheatre.ca

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Exit, pursued by a crow: Nicole Moeller’s new play asks tough questions

Posted on May 16, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Steve Pirot in The Preacher, The Princess, And A Crow, Azimuth Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Jasper has to save the princess.”

When Nicole Moeller follows the thread of her new play back back back to its birthplace, that’s the line she heard in her head.

Intriguing, yes, and not just because you need to know  from whom? from what?. The line gives off a fairy tale pheromone that’s highly unusual even by the standards of a Moeller archive of plays that step up to difficult stories from oblique angles. It comes with question marks, and nary a happily ever after in sight, in The Preacher, The Princess, and a Crow. It premieres Thursday in an Azimuth Theatre production directed by Fringe boss Murray Utas, and starring Steve Pirot.

And there’s this departure from Moeller practice: it’s written in rhyme, laced with alliteration.

“Bizarre! It’s not how I write!” Moeller laughs, glancing at Utas with a question mark of her own last week over a pre-rehearsal sip. “Intriguing, poetic and weird!” declares Utas approvingly, nodding with his usual exuberance. “And some more weird got at it last night at rehearsal!”

Moeller’s new solo play follows a dark and dangerous tangle of motives back to an urban rooming house where a former street preacher has exiled himself, for reasons you’ll discover. “I’m really interested in compulsions, addictions, guilt, shame, the things that haunt us,” says Moeller. “And Jasper is haunted by the devil; his task is to save the princess from the devil, the crow.” And the crow isn’t easy to shake: As Jasper says in the play, “that crow has been following me my whole life….”

Moeller explains that The Preacher… was a response, in a way, to her 2011 play An Almost Perfect Thing. That disconcerting drama was inspired by a horrific 2006 news story about an Austrian girl, kidnapped at 10, who finally fled her captor eight years later. In the ensuing media frenzy, the newly minted celeb controlled her messages, her story, her accessibility. And what was a lurid crime victim story turned, at Moeller’s unexpected angle of insight, into an exploration of the media/ celebrity symbiosis, and the ownership of stories.

“I never really solved the character of the kidnapper,” muses Moeller, typically a relentless critic of her own work. “He always felt inauthentic, not humanized. I didn’t feel connected to him.” That’s why the preacher character in her new play “spoke to me so strongly,” she thinks. “More, I think, than any character I’ve written…. There’s always a crow for all of us. We all hold onto our own traumas, our compulsions.”

What if, as Utas points out, “your compulsion is way past acceptable, where is the empathy for that? There is none.”

“It’s a tough play, very tough,” says Moeller, who collected  degrees in both journalism and musical theatre en route to her playwright’s career. “That’s why I took on the structure of the hero’s journey…. and added a (softening) element of fantasy, fairy tale….”

Director Murray Utas

Provocative questions aren’t exactly a departure for either Moeller or Utas. In Moeller’s The Mothers, which premiered at Skirts AFire in 2015, we meet the mother of a teenage son who’s taken a gun to school, and used it. At Azimuth, Utas, a career advocate for new work, has been part of such radically original Azimuth pieces as Pirot’s Freeman On The Land; Su-Kat, a kind of 3-D comic strip dreamscape; Apocalypse Prairie, an unclassifiable theatre/sound collage designed as a group portrait of Us Albertans.

Theatre is fond (well, over-fond really) of the journey motif. But, with The Preacher… a whole eventful chapter of Edmonton theatre history has intervened since the moment, five years ago, when the Azimuth team, artistic producer Utas and artistic director Pirot, asked Moeller to write a two-hander for them to be in together. “Sure! That’d be wild!” she smiles at the memory. “Little did I know….”

Since that time, a two-hander has become a solo play. Pirot announced he was leaving Azimuth; he’s now the director of iHuman Youth Society. “The Fringe came knocking,” as Utas puts it; he’s now the director of that mighty festival. At one point, the premiere was scheduled for The ARTery, and that venue shut down mere months before opening night.

And Kristi Hansen and Vanessa Sabourin, Azimuth’s new joint artistic directors, wanted it for the capper of their debut season.

As for the play itself, which had a “test drive” (as Utas puts it) at the 2016 Expanse Movement Arts Festival, everything about it has been reworked — except the character and the final image. Which is fine with Moeller, who’s never seen a lead time she didn’t want to lengthen and rewrites she didn’t want a chance to try. “I have a really hard time when I can’t change things any more.”

“I have never experienced anything quite like this collaboration with a playwright,” says Utas happily. “Not just re-writes, sometimes whole new drafts, sometimes whole new plays, would show up along the way…. But the essence of Jasper was always there.” He pauses. “I really respected Nicole taking the time she  needed to get the play she wanted done.”

The production was a moveable proposition, too, Utas reports. “At one point we were going to put everybody in the dark…. At one point it was going to be site-specific and immersive: we thought we’d be moving it into someone’s apartment.” 

In the end, not only did Pirot agree to do the play — a huge relief to Moeller and Utas since Pirot’s kind of bravery is by no means universal — but Jasper’s isolation chamber is now to be found at the Fringe’s Backstage Theatre. Utas has reconfigured it for a sense of claustrophobia, at 50 seats. Which dovetails nicely with his  Fringe plans to occupy more fully, and produce in, the spaces of the ATB Financial Arts Barns.

“An art house having something to say!” declares Utas, whose is his goodbye to Azimuth, where his consultant role  ended April 30 (and left him for the first time in years, with only one job). “To have the courage to tell this story: We’re coming back to that again — at the Fringe! What a wonderful way to say goodbye to that, and hello to this!”

As Utas points out, a controversial play sends the right Fringe signals. “The Fringe was born on the edge. The word itself defines the edge! The Backstage is subversive in nature. You enter from the alley.”

It’s like a speakeasy that way. Tell them Utas sent you.

PREVIEW

The Preacher, The Princess, And A Crow

Theatre: Azimuth at Fringe Theatre Adventures

Written by: Nicole Moeller

Directed by: Murray Utas

Starring: Steve Pirot

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

Running: through May 27

Tickets: 780-409-1910, fringetheatre.ca

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Concrete plans for a big upcoming season

Posted on May 12, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Zak Tardif, Onika Henry in Concrete Theatre’s Bello, which plays Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre next season. Photo by Kim Clegg

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s no coincidence that the most influential and travelled show in Concrete Theatre history has a title with a question mark: Are We There Yet?.

For the 28-year-old Edmonton theatre, devoted to exploring the thorniest social and cultural issues of the day with and for kids, the question is revealing. And, in the spirit of questers, the answer has always been No.

Still, a certain festive air prevails these days at the Playhouse, the Strathcona headquarters Concrete shares with Alberta Opera. As announced this past week, Concrete will return next season to the delicate and difficult subject of teen sexuality addressed by the now-retired Are We There Yet? with a new play. Consent, by Concrete artistic director Mieko Ouchi, challenges its junior and senior high school audiences with questions about sexual encounters, gender equality, individual rights and respect.

Ouchi explains that the production, which takes Consent to 65 Alberta schools and some 22,750 kids next winter and spring, has attracted community partners. The Sexual Assault Centre and Compass Sexual Wellness have offered informational packages and add-on workshops. Financial support comes from the Edmonton Community Foundation and Toronto-based Wuchien Michael Than Foundation supports Ouchi’s playwright commission.

And Alberta’s new Status of Women department will contribute $80,000 to enable Concrete to offer the show to schools for $240, a fraction of the usual $850 fee for Edmonton schools and up to $1480 for out-of-town expeditions.

Ouchi reports that in announcing the grant, minister Stephanie McLean remembered taking Drama 149 from Concrete’s artistic associate Caroline Howarth at Concordia University. And, in a coincidence that’s far from rare given its 16-year touring history, McLean saw Are We There Yet? in Grade 9. “We taught her sex ed!” laughs Ouchi. “And the minister said she was happy to be able to provide a grant in return for others to see a (Concrete) show on the subject.”

In a particular challenge for its three-actor cast, Consent will tour in tandem with a revival, for younger kids, of Jared Matsunaga-Turnbull’s 2013 Paper Song, nominated for both Sterling and Dora Awards in its travels across the country. The play uses origami and shadow puppetry to tell a Japanese folk tale about two enterprising mice up against an oppressive overlord.

The season begins with a fall revival of Ouchi’s The Bully Project, which has been touring to elementary and junior high kids, in two different versions, for three years. It’s an example of Concrete’s “participatory theatre,” a three-actor production that’s “half scripted half improvised, and invites interaction with the audience,” explains Ouchi. “After each scene, the kids check in  with the characters, who analyze their actions and choices with questions. ‘What did you make of that? What else could I have done?.”

In all Concrete surveys to teachers about crucial issues the theatre might usefully address, “bullying was mentioned 100 per cent of the time,” says Ouchi.

Next fall, the Concrete/L’UniThéâtre co-production of Vern Thiessen’s Bello, which premiered this past season, has been picked up by Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre for a two-week mainstage run, with both English and French performances. 

The finale of the 2017-2018 season is a summer arts festival for Syrian refugee kids ages six to 12. Laeib! Play! happens in July 2018 at the Playhouse, under Amena Shehab and Lora Brovold. 

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Dungeons and Dragons, and other theatrical matters

Posted on May 11, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Mark Meer, Rapid Fire Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Nerd Alert: Saturday is Dungeons & Dragons night at Rapid Fire Theatre. Actually, every Saturday in May is Dungeons & Dragons night at Rapid Fire Theatre. Mark Meer, a veritable scholar of nerd-ly arcana, game theory and practice, action hero lore  (and a great improviser) is the dungeon master of Rapid Fire’s come-to-life improv edition, happening at 7:30 p.m. at RFT’s Zeidler Hall headquarters at the Citadel. Puzzles will be solved; realms will be explored; monsters will be defeated. With real people. Tickets: eventbrite.ca

The Hey Ladies! ladies, who have opinions on all manner of subjects, products, people, hair, harvesting of pulses, modern dance, types of cocktails, etc. take over the Roxy on Gateway (8529 Gateway Blvd.( Friday  (8 p.m.) for their Mother’s Day edition. Cathleen Rootsaert, Davina Stewart, and Leona Brausen all have one. Mother that is. So does their male colleague Noel Taylor.

Anyhow, in addition to celebrating mothers, the last Hey Ladies! of the season will have its usual assortment of comedy, prizes, games, chats, musical interventions, etc. It is, after all, a live infotainment variety show that resists more precise categories. Musician/actor Eva Foote is a special guest, along with fermentation specialist Erin Smandych of Culinary Nutrition.  Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca.

News to intrigue: Actor/ street and circus artist Miranda Allen brings her new “trophy wife character escape act” — Whoa, admit it, you’re already visualizing — to the Dirt Buffet Cabaret Thursday at Mile Zero’s Spazio Performativo venue in Little Italy (9 p.m., 10816 95 St.). Each edition of the cabaret curated by Ben Gorodetsky embraces six or eight wildly diverse and experimental 10-minute acts (an entertainment category for which Allen’s act would seem to amply qualify). Tickets are 10 bucks “or best offer.”

Walterdale Theatre, Edmonton’s venerable community troupe doesn’t shy away from grand-scale or classic, to be sure. And, hey, their upcoming summer musical in July is Sondheim’s Follies, for heaven’s sake. But they’ve always been hospitable to new plays by local writers (as playwright Brad Fraser, a beneficiary of this spirit in his youth, has pointed out).

From Cradle to Stage is Walterdale’s annual new play showcase. This year’s edition, next week, features new work by Tessa Simpson and John Richardson.

Simpson’s Portrait of a Family Dinner and Richardson’s Guenevere, directed by Laura Ly and Eric Smith (respectively) play nightly Monday May 15 through Saturday May 20, 8 p.m.  Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca).

The 2017-2018 season at Walterdale locates women — and their struggles to find a satisfying, equitable place in the world — dead centre. 

The community theatre, where the door is always open, launches with a door slam — the one that reverberated through the 19th century. It comes at the end of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, when its heroine does something entirely radical when she leaves her husband and children in search of her own happiness. Alex Hawkins directs the production that runs Oct 11 to 21.

The prospects of the women in Shatter, by Canadian playwright (and former Edmontonian) Trina Davies, in love and life are up against a tragedy, the Halifax Explosion of 1917. Josh Languedoc directs (Dec. 6 to 16).

The Women, Claire Booth Luce’s razor-sharp 1936 comedy, casts its beady eye on Manhattan socialites and the gossip that fuels and poisons their lives. Men are talked about, and never seen. Catherine Wenschlag directs the Walterdale production that runs Feb. 7 to 17, 2018.

Blue Stockings, a 2013 play by the English writer Jessica Swale, stars four women who have to overcome horrifying odds to graduate from Cambridge’s Girton College in 1896. Laura Ly directs (April 4 to 14, 2018).

The 2018 summer musical is Next To Normal, the Brian Yorkey/Tom Kitt groundbreaker that explores, in explosive rock music, the ripple effects of a mother’s bipolar disorder on her family. 

The season also includes the annual From Cradle To Stage (May 14 to 19, 2018).

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The Virgin, The Whore, Something In between: Northern Light announces a new season

Posted on May 10, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Northern Light Theatre 2017-2018 season

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Next season Northern Light Theatre and L’UniThéâtre will share the premiere of a new play by Edmonton’s Cat Walsh, a playwright who specializes in the dark-unto-macabre end of the comedy spectrum.

Trevor Schmidt’s production of Do This In Memory of Me/ Faites Ceci En Mémoire De Moi — which will alternate performances in English and French — continues a collaboration between the two companies that began with Jeffrey Hatcher’s Mercy of a Storm and continued last season with Gratien Gélinas’s The Passion of Narcisse Mondoux.

L’UniThéâtre artistic director Brian Dooley co-stars with Nicole St. Martin in the new Walsh (translated into French by Manon Beaudoin). In the Montreal of 1963, where every sort of liberation seems imminent, the 12-year-old heroine prays to God to change his mind about not letting girls be altar servers. Has her faith been rewarded, her prayers answered, when the star altar boy vanishes on his way home from school?

Do This In Memory Of Me is the centrepiece of the 2017-2018 trio Northern Light has puckishly dubbed its Virgin, Whore, and Something In-between season. The Virgin Mary herself gets to weigh in on the subject in the Colm Tóibín novella-turned-play that opens the season. And she can be pretty scathing.

In The Testament of Mary, we meet the mother of Jesus, post-crucifixion, with her dander up. She has questions, and doubts, about a famous tragic death in her family.

Holly Turner stars in Schmidt’s Canadian premiere production (Oct. 26 to Nov. 4).

The bookend to the season is Slut, a sharp, funny comic take on sexual identity and hypocrisy by the Canadian-born American playwright Brenda McFarlane, whose oeuvre includes such memorable titles as Shut Up, Penis Play, Good in Bed, and Suzi Got Her Lips Tattoed. The character we meet is a woman, pushing 40, who loves sex, spreads the joy around, and gets accused by her neighbours of running a brothel — till she proves she’s a slut. Michelle Todd stars in the Schmidt production that runs April 5 to 14.

Subscriptions: 780-471-1586, northernlighttheatre.com

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The Shadow knows: Collin Doyle’s Slumberland Motel premieres next season

Posted on May 9, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

playwright Collin Doyle

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Stellar news for Edmonton theatre-goers! After 11 years of being an “exciting prospect,” Collin Doyle’s long-awaited Slumberland Motel will actually arrive on stage next season — at Shadow Theatre.

Billed as “a road-weary comedy,” the 2006 Alberta Playwriting Competition winner finds Ed and Edward, two ‘70s era vacuum cleaner salesmen, sucking up the dust of disillusion as they share a cheap roadside motel room. The unexpected arrival of a mystery woman from the next room could change all that.

Doyle is the Edmonton-based playwright whose humour has found its way into edgy and moving landscapes in the roistering black comedy The Mighty Carlins or the heartbreaking comedy Let The Light of Day Through. The  premiere of Slumberland Motel is directed by Shadow Theatre artistic director John Hudson, and stars Julien Arnold and Reed McColmn.

The Shadow season opens with another bright prospect, Constellations by the English playwright Nick Payne. Since its origins at London’s Royal Court in 2012, Constellations has traced a starry path through reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. It transferred to the West End a year later, and had a Broadway production starring Ruth Wilson and Jake Gyllenhaal in 2015.

The two-hander is a sort of metaphysical romance between a physicist who specializes in quantum multiverse theory and a beekeeper. And it explores the infinite possibilities of love, and the parallel universes of choices and consequences.

Amy DeFelice, of Trunk Theatre, directs; Mat Busby and Lianna Shannon co-star.  And, speaking of multiverses, DeFelice’s Shadow production marks the return to theatre of musician/ composer/ actor/ playwright Chris Wynters of Captain Tractor, who designs the sound.

The upcoming Shadow season also includes John Patrick Shanley’s 2014 romantic comedy Outside Mullingar. It charts the fortunes of two antagonist 40-something (and single!) Irish farmers. Hudson directs a cast that includes Coralie Cairns, Glenn Nelson, Jenny McKillop, and Garett Ross.

And the season finale is Fly Me To The Moon, a riotous dark comedy by Belfast playwright Marie Jones (Stones In His Pockets). The gist is that a couple of home-care workers, strapped for cash, decide on a course of action that involves the cashing the pension cheques of their recently deceased client. Hudson directs; his cast has yet to be announced.

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

   

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The two person, six gun, many power ballad musical: Bonnie and Clyde at Northern Light: a review

Posted on May 7, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Amanda Neufeld, Matthew Lindholm in Bonnie and Clyde: the two person six-gun musical, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Northern Light Theatre director/designer Trevor Schmidt is something of a wizard of witty theatrical transformations. With Bonnie & Clyde the two person six-gun musical, the Northern Light season finale, his proven ingenuity has a double challenge.

On the one hand, there’s the space itself, the tiny PCL Studio Theatre — a go-small-or-go-home venue where the epic has to be suggestive rather than exhaustive and (like it or not), the audience is in the show. On the other, there’s the musical itself. It’s a chamber piece in which the American musical-writing trio of Will Pomerantz, Andrew Herron and Doug Ritchie sets about telling the celebrated story of the Depression era power couple as a rom-com with (very) conventional musical theatre “relationship” songs.

As to the first hand, Schmidt’s clever design, assisted materially by the Adam Tsuyoshi Turnbull’s dramatic lighting, reinvents that studio space and the optic of close-up and distance, over and over again in the course of 85 minutes. Against the backdrop of sensationalist 30s headlines, the love story plays out in front of and behind a slatted wooden wall that evokes the rustic hideaways where Bonnie and Clyde, on the run from the law, hole up as their fatal attraction proceeds. 

We, the audience, are sometimes cast as the Barrow Gang; Bonnie, who’s the media slut of the pair, resents the split focus (“And who,” she demands pointing at us, “are they?”). Sometimes we’re the contemporary witnesses torn between conscience and kudos, the wish fulfilment that fuels celebrity.  Sometimes we are ourselves, a modern audience to whom Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, in alternating showbiz spotlights, deliver self-validating songs and explain themselves.

Schmidt’s playful stagecraft conjures getaway cars from headlights, bucolic escapades from picnic blankets, narrow escapes into the blue shadowy glow behind the slats where we see them as silhouettes. They can run but they cannot hide. Tsuyoshi Turnbull’s lighting, which plays in a palette ranging from historical sepia to historical inevitability blue, is a veritable storyteller in itself. 

Amanda Neufeld and Matthew Lindholm, Bonnie and Clyde: the two person six-gun musical, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

The co-stars of the Northern Light production, Amanda Neufeld and Matthew Lindholm, are appealing, powerhouse performers, who know exactly what to do with the power ballads that are Bonnie & Clyde’s version of soliloquies.

What they have to work with in this little musical is, in many ways, less assured than their performances. Neufeld brings a bright, round-eyed, acquisitive magnetism to a character who freely admits her life goal at the outset is revenge for a humiliating series of setbacks, including a failed marriage, after school stardom.

Matthew Lindholm and Amanda Neufeld in Bonnie and Clyde: the two person six-gun musical, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Lindholm as Clyde, fresh out of jail for petty thefts, has a certain rueful, moody worldliness as he explains that he hasn’t “had” several jobs, he’s “done” several jobs. He says feelingly of Bonnie that “she’s the only girl ever made me feel what I do is worth something,” just as if he was a low-paid social worker or barista instead of a small-time thief. 

After a chance encounter in a diner where Bonnie is systematically breaking dishes hoping to get fired, they get a prophetic love duet, of the fatal attraction ilk: … “and you’re sunk!”. They each get songs of empowerment, songs of want (“I want more!”) songs of doubt (“how have I come to this?”), songs of foot-planting resolution (“I’ll think of him, and throw my fears aside…”), songs of self (“this is who I am!”). They get a finale anthem (“we chose our way, and that’s the way we’ll go!”). With some exceptions, like a funny on-the-run car song with a 30s flavour (and punctuated by gunfire), both the placement and the lyrics are more than a little predictable. And, despite the expert ministrations of Nicolas Samoil, at a country bar-type plinky-plunk upright piano, the songs sound a bit like 11 o’clock numbers recycled from somewhere else.

Matthew Lindholm and Amanda Neufeld in Bonnie and Clyde, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

But they’re delivered with compelling intensity by Lindholm and Neufeld. And the creators certainly don’t have to dream up an abrupt ending, thanks to history. 

In between, a story emerges of mutual attraction based on need. The ante is upped when Clyde gives Bonnie a gun; it’s upped again when Bonnie uses it. Serial murder and its attendant celebrity, not to mention Bonnie’s insatiable appetite for newspaper coverage, seal their fate. 

So, can you tell a behind-the-history story, with two actors and a roster of power ballads that all sound pretty much interchangeable? Well, yes you can — if the actors have pipes and charisma and the director is savvy. Be impressed by the pipes, the charisma, the savvy that have gone into this production. 

REVIEW

Bonnie and Clyde: the two person six-gun musical

Theatre: Northern Light

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Amanda Neufeld, Matthew Lindholm

Where: PCL Studio Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 104 St.

Running: through May 21

Tickets: 780-471-1586, northernlighttheatre.com

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Hey, emerging audience! it’s a weekend to go out to the theatre

Posted on May 6, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Andréa Jorawsky as Irma in Irma Voth, premiering at Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson/ EPIC Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s always anticipation in theatre, as there should be, about  “emerging” playwrights, directors, actors. There are whole festivals devoted to them, like the upcoming 2017 edition of Nextfest.

Leave aside for another day the tricky question of when “emerging” stops if you’re a theatre artist: when can you call yourself fully “emerged”? and, for that matter, would you want to be? 

What about emerging audiences?

It is a season of emergence, my winter-weary friends. And this is a great weekend for you to emerge from your homes, and see some live theatre.

The possibilities are unusually large.

Sweeney Todd, ELOPE at the Westbury Theatre.

 “He shaved the faces of gentlemen/ Who never thereafter were heard of again….” You can catch Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 masterwork Sweeney Todd at the Westbury (through May 13), and see what the community players of Edmonton’s venerable ELOPE Musical Theatre company — led by Randy Brososky and Nicole English — make of the tale of the vengeful demon barber of Fleet Street and Mrs. Lovett, his creative companion in culinary innovation. 

You may recall Mrs. Lovett’s sublimely witty song A Little Priest, in which she reviews the grisly secret ingredient that has made her failing pie shop into a bona fide London hit. “The trouble with poet/ Is how do you know it’s /Deceased? Try the priest….” 

Get yourself into the mood for the macabre comic zest of the piece Sondheim called “a dark operetta” with an appetizer. Have a meat pie, courtesy of the Meat Street Pies food truck outside the Westbury Theatre before every evening show.

In this bright grisly idea ELOPE may have been inspired by the English company that set its much-awarded production of Sweeney Todd in Harrington’s Pie And Mash Shop, one of the oldest in London. Since then, the show has moved to New York. The Barrow Street Theatre in Greenwich Village has been transformed into a working facsimile of its original London venue; meat pies created by the Obamas’ former White House pastry chef are served.

Tickets for the ELOPE Musical Theatre production: TIX on the Square: 780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca

Sense and Sensibility adapted by Tom Wood, Citadel Theatre. Photo by David Cooper

Sense and Sensibility, Tom Wood’s new adaptation of the Jane Austen novel, continues on the Citadel MainStage this weekend (through May 14): comedy of the sharp-eyed sharp-eared variety, along with romance — and a deluxe design from Leslie Frankish for Bob Baker’s lavish production. http://bit.ly/2oH5dC4. Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com.

Kendra Connor as Aggie in Irma Voth, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson/ EPIC Photography.

Irma Voth: The title heroine of Chris Craddock’s excitingly theatrical coming-of-age adventure comedy, inspired by the Miriam Toews novel, escapes from her domestic prison by discovering a sense of possibility. The catalyst is the arrival of a film director and company in a strict Mennonite colony in Mexico. Liberation through art: what could be more exhilarating? Bradley Moss’s Theatre Network premiere production is lively, inventive, and playful. Bonus: you’ll be seeing last year’s Alberta Playwriting Competition winner. http://bit.ly/2p4IZJo Tickets: 780-453-2440, theatrenetwork.ca.

Glenn Nelson, John Sproule in Art, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

And speaking of art as a catalyst, there’s Art at the Varscona. The premise of Yasmina Reza’s elegantly written 1994 hit comedy, Shadow Theatre’s season finale, will make you smile: three old friends come to blows over a modern painting. When does that happen? John Hudson’s production stars Glenn Nelson, John Sproule, and Frank Zotter. http://bit.ly/2qqkwwj Tickets: 780-434-5564, TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca)

Farren Timoteo, Made In Italy. Photo by Murray Mitchell

Made In Italy: Farren Timoteo follows up a spectacularly funny comic performance in Peter and the Starcatcher with the one-man play he was inspired to create when he looked more into his family history It’s funny, flavourful, and heartfelt. And since it’s in the Citadel Club you can watch Daryl Cloran’s production whilst  sipping a glass of vino, just like many of the characters onstage. http://bit.ly/2oMza3B. Last show: 2 p.m. Sunday matinee. Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com.

Matthew Lindholm and Amanda Neufeld in Bonnie and Clyde, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Just opened: Bonnie & Clyde the two person six-gun musical. The Depression Era bank robber celebs from another angle, in the two-person musical by the American team of Will Pomerantz (whose stuff has premiered at all the big New York Off-Broadway houses), Andrew Herron and Doug Ritchie. This Canadian premiere, directed by Trevor Schmidt, is finale of Northern Light’s three productions this season. http://bit.ly/2pJkod5. Tickets: 780-471-1586, northernlighttheatre.com   

   

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Two people, 6 guns, a lot of music: meet the young stars of Bonnie and Clyde

Posted on May 3, 2017 by Liz Nicholls

Matthew Lindholm and Amanda Neufeld in Bonnie and Clyde: the two person six-gun musical, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

We know them as historical celebrities, the bank robber stars of a Depression Era crime spree who made a spectacular exit from the world in a bullet-riddled Ford in 1934.

But in the “two person six-gun” bank musical that gets its Canadian premiere Friday at Northern Light Theatre, we’ll see Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow from another angle:  the personal one. Bonnie & Clyde, by the American team of Will Pomerantz, Andrew Herron, and Doug Ritchie, lives behind the sensational headlines.   

“Who were they? How did they get together? Why? The show takes time to focus on the people,” says Amanda Neufeld, who co-stars with Matthew Lindholm in Trevor Schmidt’s production.“This isn’t the archetypal surfaces of the story,” she says of the musical. “This is finding the truth in the gaps between the (documented) historical moments…. That’s fun, creating those in-betweens.”

On a break from rehearsal last week, Neufeld and Lindholm are musing on the dynamic of difference, and attraction, between the two characters history has assigned the single notorious label Bonnie and Clyde. “Clyde’s the career criminal, just out of prison, always in trouble with the law as he grew up,” says Lindholm. “He’s pretty damaged; I feel sorry for him, stuck in this pattern, trying to make it work….”

“Bonnie’s the popular kid in school,” says Neufeld, “the one everyone says ‘you’re gonna go places’….” After that, like so many popular kids going places, her prospects faltered. “She married young, a toxic relationship, and he dumped her….”

“In the Depression Era, options are not endless. She had a desperate desire to be more than who she was. And Clyde brings (with him) the sense of possibility, the possibility of fame and glory…. It’s a perfect storm.”

Matthew Lindholm and Amanda Neufeld in Bonnie and Clyde, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

And speaking as we are of perfect storms, Bonnie & Clyde is something of the sort for two complementary talents: a musical theatre triple-threat and a singer-songwriter who first met seven years ago when Neufeld, a 2008 Grant MacEwan grad of apparently limitless DIY creativity, recruited him for her Rocky Horror Show.

The indie company was Neufeld’s Patient Mango Theatre. And Rocky Horror was Lindholm’s “first musical ever,” he says cheerfully. “A fresh kill for theatre!” laughs the exuberant Neufeld.

Lindholm’s musical theatre debut was in the ‘go big or go home’ mode — a starring role as the guileless, wholesome Brad who finds himself, one dark and stormy night, doing the time warp again with his girlfriend in the stronghold of Dr. Frank N Furter. It was a departure for the affable Lindholm, “more into fine art and drawing than theatre as a kid.”

Since that rocking affair at Dr. Frank N Furter’s place, the Edmonton native has moved to Toronto, where he records, produces and performs original musical under the name Mow Mow. (You can hear songs from his new album Bad Memories on Spotify and ITunes). But Neufeld has lured him back to his home town for such Fringe hits as Hair, BARE, Reefer Madness, and more recently, Bat Boy The Musical.

Last seen by Edmonton audiences in the Schmidt/Darrin Hagen musical Klonkdykes at Theatre Network, Neufeld says she’d “picked up the directing bug” from her high school years at Scona, under Linette Smith’s mentorship. “I had no directing experience except little projects,” she shrugs brightly “But you just can’t wait for people to offer you things! You just have to take a chance!” She savours the word “risk” like someone enjoying a particularly tasty canapé. Which is a sentiment that Bonnie Parker might have appreciated.

“I wasn’t raised in the arts at all!” Until a fateful production of Little Shop of Horrors in Grade 11 proved addictive — “a gateway musical!” she laughs — Neufeld was going to be a psychologist. “And here I am!”

Of her cast-mate she is equally enthusiastic. “He’s got ideas! And he’s going places!” she declares, describing Lindholm’s sound as  “very electronic pop. Alternative. Dance-y. With a synthetic 80s vibe….”

After last summer’s Patient Mango/ Straight Edge Theatre success with Bat Boy The Musical, the pair will be back together again at the upcoming Fringe, with “another alt-camp musical,” as Neufeld describes the horror gore cult extravaganza Evil Dead The Musical. “A beast of a show, with lots of music and lots of blood!”

Meanwhile, there’s a small-scale musical that Neufeld and Lindholm, along with musical director/pianist Nick Samoil, have all to themselves. The music, says Lindholm, “is kind of a pop take on the western, musical theatre-type pop that is…. It hits on a lot of styles, but it lives in pop.”

“Since we don’t play other characters,” says Neufeld, “we’re finding a way to have it still feel like a full world.”

So, were Bonnie and Clyde in love? Neufeld and Lindholm grin, pause to consider, and opt to keep it mysterious. “That would be a spoiler!” 

PREVIEW

Bonnie & Clyde: the two person six-gun musical

Theatre: Northern Light

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Amanda Neufeld, Matthew Lindholm

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

Running: Friday through May 21

Tickets: 780-471-1586, northernlighttheatre.com

  

  

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