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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

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

Crazy For You. Photo by David Cooper Photography

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

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

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

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

Crazy For You. Photo by David Cooper Photography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREVIEW

Crazy For You: “the new Gershwin musical”

Theatre: Citadel / Theatre Calgary

Directed by: Dayna Tekatch

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

Running: through March 26

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadelheatre.ca

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

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREVIEW

The Mommy Monologues

SkirtsAfire herArts Festival

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

Directed by: Glenda Stirling

Starring: Coralie Cairns, Mary Hulbert, Chantelle Han

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

Running: March 2 to 12

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

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREVIEW

Stupid Fucking Bird

Theatre: Edmonton Actors Theatre

Written by: Aaron Posner

Directed by: Dave Horak

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

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

Running: Thursday through March 12

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