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Ross Travis as Ponce de Ponce de Panache, in Firefly Theatre’s Panache. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There never would have been a sequel if the unthinkable hadn’t happened.

When last we met Ponce de Ponce de Panache, 12 months ago,  it was at a pep rally for the self-glorifying blusterer and king of hyperbolic claims, preposterous entitlement, and alternative facts. As Firefly Theatre and Circus Arts artistic director Annie Dugan put it at the time, the high-flying Ponce was a cross between a certain presidential candidate and Louis XIV. And the Firefly satire and circus fusion, Panache, was a cross-hatching of “Versailles, The Hunger Games, and the current political climate in the U.S.”

Then came November.

“Who could have guessed he would win!” declares Dugan. “We never thought we’d be doing a Part Deux; it was never part of the plan…. We’d already started planning a show around a Christmas Carol skeleton,” she says of early brainstorming meetings with collaborators John Ullyatt and Belinda Cornish.

“But after one week in office, what Trump was doing was too horrible!” In that thought was born the sequel, Panache Part Deux, opening Friday at — which is to say on and above the stage at — La Cité francophone.

Satire is tricky, and outrage is barely sustainable in an age when reality trumps it every time, as Alex Baldwin has admitted on the subject of his sensationally grotesque Saturday Night Live alter-ego. “It’s too awful to parody what Trump is doing, so we’re doing how,” says Dugan.

The Ponce has triumphed. He’s now Supreme Leader of La Cité. Last year, at the pep rally edition of Panache, “the audience was complicit,” as she says of our applause, cued by signs held up by a trio of “minions.”

This year, our complicity continues, since we’re cast as Congress. “This is a day in the life,” Dugan explains. “We’ve turned the how-to of governing into a game show.”  All the circus performers are the Ponce’s cabinet ministers, “his smoke screen, his diversionary tactics,” she says. “A politician surrounds himself with his friends. The ‘former Miss South Africa’, for example, is the Secretary of Mining and Resources…. All the women are ‘former Miss Somethings’.”

Ross Travis as the Ponce, in Firefly Theatre’s Panache. Photo supplied.

Since Part Deux is a game show, the lavish world of circus is juxtaposed to the contestants, “three normal people with normal needs, petitioners in the Ponce’s court: a gentleman who needs a hip replacement for his grandmother, a women looking for a bus pass, a guy who’s been arrested for jaywalking and wants a get-out-of-jail pass.”

Director Dugan has enlisted a trio of Edmonton heavy-hitter actors: Dave Horak, Shannon Blanchet, and Mat Busby to be the supplicants. Cornish is the dramaturge on the project.  

For the rest, the core group of Panache performers is returning for the sequel, led by San Francisco’s Ross Travis, an acrobat/actor who specializes in the most punishing of aerial arts, the Chinese pole. Dugan has one word for it: “painful!” This year the pole isn’t planted on the stage; it flies, which sounds impossible.

Lyne Gosselin (trapeze with silks) and Mackenzie Baert (rhythmic contortion) are back. So is the ever-inventive musician Jason Kodie, who plays keyboards live. And the magician/illusionist Billy Kidd (Gia Felicitas) returns from her home base in the U.K. Last year, she concocted an act especially for Panache. And it was a showstopper. As a  set-up for Marie Antoinette’s famous line “let ‘em eat cake” she actually baked a cake in someone’s hat.

The finale of Firefly Theatre’s Panache. Photo supplied.

Calgary’s Patrick Chan (aerial straps) is the Ponce’s Secretary of Defence. And the cast includes Lisa Feehan (aerial cargo), Caitlin Mader (corde lisse), and the acrobatic Quebec City duo Les Vitaminés. 

The latter’s act “involves a plastic bubble,” laughs Dugan. “Plastic bubbles for all are how Ponce plans to combat climate change he doesn’t believe in.” 

“I don’t usually do political satire,” says Dugan. “ I like stupid comedy. I’m happy to do things with chickens. And peanut butter.”

“This year the whole show is a little bit darker. And it needs to be.”

PREVIEW

Panache Pt. Deux: The Triumph of the Ponce

Theatre: Firefly

Directed by: Annie Dugan

Starring: Ross Travis, Billy Kidd, Jason Kodie, Lyne Gosselin, Mackenzie Baert, Lisa Feehan, Caitlin Mader, Dave Horak, Shannon Blanchet, Mat Busby

Where: La Cité francophone, 8627 91 St.

Running: Friday through Sunday

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

Waiting for Godot by One World Theatre. Photo by Truman Buffet.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

For poetic impulses and vivid characters, and a certain raucous soulfulness and way with words, you can’t beat the Irish. And Serca (the Gaelic word for “love story) is the festival that celebrates that multi-faceted contribution.

For this year’s edition of the eight-year-old festival — it’s spent the last three on The Ave, 118th that is — artistic director Liz Hobbs has assembled a series of Canadian-Irish plays, in staged readings, to encircle the headline production this weekend. All three are by women and, as Hobbs points out, “try and find an Irish play in the mainstream Irish repertoire by a female playwright with a female cast! It’s hard!”

Bevin Dooley’s Slack Tide happened Thursday. Saturday’s offering (4:45 p.m.) is Beating Heart Cadaver by the Governor-General’s Award-winning Colleen Murphy. Amy DeFelice directs a cast of five top Edmonton actors in the 1998 play — “beautiful and heartbreaking” as Hobbs describes it — in which “a couple who have lost their eight-year-old daughter in a car accident try to find their way back to each other.” Sunday at 6 p.m., it’s Cat Walsh’s Fetch, named for the Gaelic word for doppelganger, in which two versions of the same girl proceed through two different scenarios, by way of different choices. 

ELSEWHERE AT SERCA

• St. Patrick’s Day Irish Ceilidh on the Ave (starting at 5 p.m.): a celebration featuring an Irish stew dinner with Knock Irish dancers, followed by a variety cabaret and, at 8 p.m. live music by the Edmonton Ceilidh Band featuring Jeremiah McDade.
• Saturday (1 to 4 p.m.), a Family Irish Ceilidh, including Maralyn Ryan’s puppet version of The Ugly Duckling, dancing, cookie decorating and crafts, refreshments. After the 4:45 p.m. staged reading of Beating Heart Cadaver, a 7 p.m. performance of Waiting For Godot, followed (9:30 p.m.) an Irish cabaret for adults.
• Sunday’s 2 p.m. Waiting For Godot matinee is followed by Fetch (6 p.m.) and then an 8 p.m. performance of Godot.

K. Brian Neel and Jeff Page in Waiting For Godot, One World Theatre’s production at the Serca Festival. Photo by Truman Buffet.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

One of the most delicious true-life stories ever to come out of the Edmonton Fringe, a great natural repository of theatrical absurdities, can be traced, in a direct line of descent, to the One World Theatre production of Waiting For Godot that opens tonight, to launch this year’s edition of the Serca Festival of Irish Theatre.

Jeff Page is on the phone from Seattle to revisit. It’s 1993. And  the production, by then three years old and with a lot of sold-out western Fringe performances (and one state penitentiary) in its archive, had arrived from Seattle to test its mettle at the biggest festival of them all.

It’s a matinee, after intermission (ah, intermission, a now-mythical concept at the Fringe). “So, it’s the top of Act 2,” says Page, .  “Suddenly, a woman stands up in the audience; suddenly she has a bag of carrots. She starts hurling carrots at the stage, shouting ‘You’re absurd! I’m not absurd! You’re absurd!’.” Then she storms out of the old Bus Barns theatre.   

A moment of stunned silence in the theatre. Page, who was playing Vladimir, one of Samuel Beckett’s pair of existentialist vaudevillian tramps — a role he resumes at Serca — remembers his partner Estragon (K. Brian Neel) went into improv brilliance mode. “Was that him?” he asked the audience.

“Perfectly Fringe, perfectly Beckett,” as Page puts it. In the single most influential and resonant play of the 20th century, the tramps are, after all, onstage waiting for HIM, this mysterious and mystifying authority figure Godot, to shed some light, to give some meaning to the absurdities of their existence.

The choice of veg is so weird but so uncannily apt — carrots are in the play — that for more than two decades, Page has been wondering about the identity of the woman. “For 20 years Mark Meer has been promising to introduce me to her,” sighs Page, who suspects a ruse from that master improviser.

That show incidentally was a turning point in Page’s life. He moved to Edmonton, where he’s been based ever since.

It’s been 27 years since Page and his One World Theatre cohorts got the bright idea of taking Beckett’s masterwork to the rural parks of eastern Washington state. He’d just moved to Seattle from his home town of Albuquerque, New Mexico with his “experimental improv theatre” buddies in King’s Elephant Theatre.

The early performances were something less than a smash. “We’d sit on a park hill at intermission and and watch people gradually fold up their lawn chairs and leave.” 

They re-evaluated. The consensus? “Let’s not be as precious to the Beckett as to the funny. And we went to our campsite and re-rehearsed the whole thing.”

“After that, the people stayed. And by the time we got to the last show, in Oroville, Wash., we were really rolling,” says Page. Their excursion to the Vancouver Fringe was the first time they’d played the show indoors. “And it’s still one of the best acting experiences I’ve ever had.” 

He still remembers the performance at the Walla Walla State Penitentiary — “there’s a history of playing Beckett in prisons,” he says. In the gymnasium for maximum security convicts “they were busy lifting weights, and little by little they came over and sat down. That’s the power of the play!”

One World moved on from Godot after that. They did Fringe tours of Aristophanes comedies; they went to Russia and collaborated with mad genius Slavic auteurs. They collaborated far and wide.

And then came Edmonton, with Beckett in tow. Page remembers being at a late-night Fringe bar and getting asked by a media type “how does it feel to have a Fringe hit?” He grinned and said “I wouldn’t know.” Next morning he did, though. “It was a big splash. A hit. Great reviews. Line-ups.”

In 1990, the Seattle Weekly had praised the actors as always believable, even though they were 20 years too young. Twenty-seven years later, with Page and Neel back in their roles as the time-killing vagabonds, time has solved that little chronology glitch for the company.

Waiting for Godot by One World Theatre. Photo by Truman Buffet.

Waiting For Godot “has a different resonance for me, now” thinks Page, who was in a One World revival of the show four years ago in Seattle. “It feels all about the past, being with someone. The idea that life is unbearable but better with someone to share it with. Something about that act of living…. I’m not fabricating anything. This is experience.”

Time means something different when you’re 20 than when you’re 50, muses Page. “There are memories that are gems….. Everything else is blurry,”  he laughs.

“And I’m a better actor now. I’ve done a lot of acting in those 27 years!”

PREVIEW

Waiting For Godot

Theatre: One World Theatre at the Serca Festival

Directed by: Shawn Belyea

Starring: Jeff Page, K. Brian Neel, Tim Moore, Mark Fullerton

Where: Alberta Avenue Community Centre, 9210 118 Ave. (Serca headquarters)

Running: Thursday through Sunday

Tickets: sercafest.com

#starcrossedlovevic at Victoria School of the Arts

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREVIEW

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

Theatre: Victoria School of the Arts

Directed by: Greg Dowler-Coltman and Natalie Witte

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

Running: Thursday through March 22

Tickets: 780-392-3534