An ogre and a donkey hit the road: Shrek The Musical at NUOVA. Meet two of the stars.

Posted on February 27, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

They say that you never really know someone till you travel (or, eek, go camping) with them.

A grouchy green ogre and a sassy big-mouth donkey, travelling companions in the Broadway musical that opens Wednesday at the Orange Hub, have a very funny, knowing road song all about about that.

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“Why me? Why me?” sings Shrek, who prizes swamp solitude way too much to jump at a journey with a loud donkey as a travel buddy. Donkey is thrilled by the companionship. “O man, what could be better than this!?” he sings.

No such road trip friction, no “are we there yet?” laments, for the co-stars of the NUOVA Vocal Arts production of Shrek The Musical. Two days into rehearsal last week, Jeremy Carver-James, who plays Donkey, was already saying it felt like he and Michael Watt as Shrek had been working together for ages. And as for Watt, they call his co-star Carver-James “a super-star…. It’s been so inspiring to see him work; it’s like watching a masterclass while I’m in rehearsal for a show…. He inspires me to bring everything I have!”

Michael Watt. Photo supplied

Both actors arrive in Shrek the Musical with huge affection for the story of the ogre who finds self-esteem, friendship, and that elixir of life, love. Actor/playwright/composer Watt, most recently seen as the motor-mouth care-giver Ray in Bea at Shadow Theatre, is “such a fan!” of the 2001 DreamWorks movie animation from which Jeanine Tesori (music) and David Lindsay-Abaire (book and lyrics) fashioned the musical. “It’s pretty much perfect,” Watt thinks. “But the musical just gives us another chance to zoom in on the characters, to delve into how these characters are processing where they’re at and where they want to go…. ”

“Also,” Watt laughs, the musical “is such a platform for a party — so danceable, so much spectacle, so much fun…. It’s a score I really, deeply love! And there’s so much love in it.”

Toronto-based Carver-James, fresh from a production of Waitress, the Sara Bareilles musical, at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, says “when movies are turned into musicals, sometimes you wonder why? With this one, it’s an opportunity to flesh out already rich characters, Donkey, Shrek, Fiona (Jacquelin Walters) , and tell a story that’s resonant for contemporary times.”

Jeremy Carver-James. Photo supplied.

Here’s a coincidence that amuses him: in January on the RMTC mainstage, as Ogie in Waitress, Carver-James was singing “You’re Never Ever Getting Rid Of Me.” A month later, in Shrek the Musical, Donkey’s first song is “Don’t Let Me Go.” Some theatre transitions were meant to be.

Says Watt, “everyone is on a journey of acceptance, self-discovery, even Farquaad (Stephen Allred),” the evil Lord who’s banished a whole gaggle of fairytale creatures. They point to the Act I finale number, “Who I’d Be,” wherein “Donkey asks Shrek who he’d be, in another life. And we get to see him really unpack hopes and dreams he never thought he’d (realize)….”

As he describes, Carver-James, a McGill grad, came to musical theatre via opera (he was in NUOVA productions of The Magic Flute, The Bartered Bride, The Tenderland), and the world of classical music as a boy soprano in Calgary, then at opera school in Montreal. His thinking? “Opera is the hardest kind of music. So if I can do opera I should be able to do any kind of music.”

“Opera isn’t really accessible for everyone.. You do a musical and look out at the audience (he was in Stratford Festival productions of Something Rotten and La Cage Aux Folles), and everyone is SO engaged. It’s just so tangible. People are so happy!”

Donkey, says Carver-James who’s been in several productions of Shrek across the country (with more to come this summer, for Drayton Entertainment in Ontario), “is one of my favourite roles I’ve ever done…. It’s most like myself, I guess.” He’s “so light, so energetic, all the things you aspire to be at the moment in this contemporary world. He’s always thinking forward, always looking for the best…. “ He thinks of Donkey as a kind of mentor, and sounding board, for Shrek, as that ogre sheds layers and embraces love. “I’m so happy to get back into those shoes.”

Carver-James’s upcoming schedule is a testimonial to that affection. While he’s performing Shrek here, he’ll be taking overnight flights to Chicago to be part of workshops for the revamped Scott Joplin opera Tremonisha, slated for production there in May.

As for Watt, who was in NUOVA’s production of White Christmas and Titanic before that, they find Shrek “charming and funny, and not worried about being palatable…. I love the parts of him that are gross, and nasty. Despite feeling insecure, he likes being an ogre. And that’s really fun.”

Both Carver-James and Watt have writing plans post-Shrek. In a very busy musical theatre career, with credits ranging from Come From Away (in Australia) to Hairspray, Rock of Ages to 9 to 5, it’s a moment to ask himself “what are the stories I want to be telling?” says the former. Watt is half — with Walters, who plays Fiona in Shrek — the creative partnership in the indie theatre company Walters & Watt, whose archive includes the original play-with-music Fringe hit Let’s Not Turn On Each Other, and the folk-rock opera What Was Is All at Nextfest.

Expect to see a new Watt play, Reign Check, this summer (and before that, an excerpt at SkirtsAfire). “It’s in our same absurd, silly style, very campy,” says Watt in playwright mode. “About an aging king and why he’s not stepping down, capitalism, politics…. We always say no to music … and then there’s always a song!”

PREVIEW

Shrek The Musical

Theatre: NUOVA Vocal Arts

Written by: Jeanine Tesori (music) and David Lindsay-Abaire (book and lyrics)

Directed by:  Kim Mattice-Wanat

Starring: Michael Watt, Jacquelin Walters, Jeremy Carver-James

Where: Orange Hub, 10045 156 St.

Running: March 5 to 9

Tickets: showpass.com

  

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Dreamin’ and rockin’. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical at the Citadel

Posted on February 21, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical. Luc Tellier (centre) as Puck, Citadel Theatre. Costumes by Deanna Finnman, set by Hanne Loosen, lighting by Jareth Li. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Hanging with Shakespeare at the Citadel….

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Time flies when you’re having fun. It’s lunchtime. And director Daryl Cloran, along with Theseus, Hippolyta, a bunch of rustic artisans, and Titania, Oberon, Puck and that fairyland Midsummer Night’s Dream crowd, have been working on … a Supertramp song.

It’s one of 25 songs, hits from the ‘70s you’ll recognize in a flash, in a new musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s most popular comedy.

“I’ve been playing in this world of musicalizing Shakespeare for a while,” says Cloran, whose creative partner on this new project is Kayvon Khoshkam, artistic director of Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ‘70s Musical, Cloran says, was inspired by the cross-country cross-border success of his 2018 musical adaptation of As You Like It that paired Will and the Beatles. Before that, in 2015 he’d done a jazz musical version of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan verse extravaganza Love’s Labour’s Lost, set in a Prohibition era speakeasy, at Bard on the Beach in Vancouver. And people loved it. During As You Like It “people would constantly say to me ‘what’s your next one going to be?’ With endless bad suggestions … like a Macbeth with all Meat Loaf songs.”

Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran

“I got excited about A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” says Cloran, a notable theatrical free-associator, “because it’s so full of magic and fantasy. And so much of 1970s music has that quality as well…. One of the first images I had was Puck (the fairy sprite) as a sort of David Bowie/ Ziggy Stardust character.”

That got him started. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, after all, a tangle of romantic miscues and entanglements, four plots in intersecting worlds. And the musical possibilities multiply accordingly. “The court. The lovers. The fairies: Oberon (the fairy king) as a Led Zeppelin-esque rocker. Titania (the fairy queen) as r&b, or maybe disco.… And all accompanied by ‘the mechanicals’ (the stage-struck artisans led by Bottom the weaver) as a garage band.”

So the new musical gets a house band “to support the singers all the way through.” And then, in the play’s most perennially hilarious scene, the play-within-a-play the rustics perform for the court, these showbiz hopefuls can do the grand finale “as a big concert musical!”

“With As You Like It, it was all about ‘how do you use all the Beatles songs?’” says Cloran. “Here, it was an opportunity to play with many different genres of music, and how they come up against each other…. It was ‘OK, I see how this genre of music could support this world, and tell the story we need it to tell’.”

He and Khoshkam, a very funny Touchstone in Cloran’s As You Like It,  set about doing their own Shakespearean research. Cloran laughs. “It became about listening to hundreds of songs (and choosing)…. What’s the best fit? What can we get the rights for?”

Luc Tellier plays Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the ’70s musical at the Citadel. Photo supplied

Luc Tellier, who plays the fairy sprite go-fer and agitator Puck, his dream role in Dream, laughs that “the thing I always appreciate being in on a new Daryl experience is that we do not do anything by half-measures at the Citadel!” The show, he says, “is packed to the gills with amazing songs…. It’s like a ‘70s Rock of Ages. But with a donkey and fairies, and a beautiful text we get to roll around in.”

“I actually love jukebox musicals,” says actor/director Tellier, who’s into his fourth season as the Citadel’s director of outreach and education. “The songs usually have some kind of cultural significance, so there’s an immediate response from the audience. Which is part of the fun.”

“Where jukebox musicals fall flat, for me, is in the text,” he says of the mighty labour of getting an audience to connect to a book that doesn’t quite fit the music. No problem here, Tellier jokes. “Daryl hired William Shakespeare to write this book!”

“Amazing rhythms and rhymes and funny characters…. Tell you what, the man’s great! He’s written us a really wonderful play. And I think he should keep at it! He’s got a future in the biz.”

Jameela McNeil and Charlie Gallant in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical, Citadel Theatre. Costumes by Deanna Finnman, set by Hanne Loosen, lighting by Jareth Li. Photo by Nanc Price.

Cloran, who went to high school in the ‘90s, says “most of my music then was alternative. But I do have a love of and connection to the music of the ‘70s. Everyone does! When you start down that rabbit hole, there are so many great songs everyone knows. And these are top hits,” he says. Stayin’ Alive, I Will Survive, Dream Weaver … “you want the joy of that audience recognition.”

For Tellier, the ‘70s are even farther into the past. “I’m doing a period piece,” he says. “I’m not a ‘70s kid, But all these tunes still resonate with me; they’re still recognizable and fun…. This is very very accessible Shakespeare.”

With a song list as fulsome as A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ‘70s Musical, Cloran and Khoshkam took scissors to the play. “And we cut a lot!” says Cloran, “close to a third if not half of the text. You don’t want to double, to have a monologue and then a song about the exact same thing.” Says Tellier, “we had to cull the passages that wander a bit…. The ‘operatic moments’ in the play we do with a rock band and hits by Supertramp.”

Puck, “the merry wanderer of the night,” is Tellier’s dream role in Dream. “I have loved Puck from the moment I first met him.” Which was a Fringe version he saw at age 10, and got enchanted by the fairy world conjured by Shakespeare.

John Ullyatt and Ruth Alexander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical. Costumes by Deanna Finnman, set by Hanne Loosen, lighting by Jareth Li. Photo by Nanc Price.

Tellier has been in the play before, a 2013 Freewill Shakespeare Festival production in which he played Flute the bellows-mender (and Thisbe in the play-within-a-play) opposite John Ullyatt as Bottom the bossy weaver who takes charge of rustics’ rehearsals. Ullyatt returns to that juicy role in the new Citadel production.

For Tellier, last onstage at the Citadel in Almost A Full Moon in 2022, the attractions of Puck include the way he speaks to the audience (“a fun ambiguity with the fourth wall”). “I get to have fun with the audience as they come into the space, and welcome them into the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I sort of ride the wave with the audience a bit, and see it through their eyes.

And I also get to mess about with the lovers, and turn an actor into a donkey, and cast some spells, and belt some tunes. I’m singing and dancing my little fairy butt off…. I’m in heaven.”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical. Costumes by Deanna Finnman, set by Hanne Loosen, lighting by Jareth Li. Photo by Nanc Price.

“And I am rocking a Ziggy Stardust-inspired sparkly bodysuit, tailor-made by the amazing team at the Citadel. So empowering to wear! Along with the ginger mullet I get to sport.”

Fun is a word that touches down lightly, and often, in conversation with Tellier. “I love the fairy sprite, and it’s been fun to explore a beautiful queerness that works in this show,” he says of a production that includes some gender-swapping in the lovers plot lines. “This gender-less but sexual queer sprite is a pleasure-seeker, a party planner…. Puck is always looking for ‘how can we make this more fun? What can I do to help make this party better?”

And speaking of parties, Cloran points to the visuals. Deanna Finnman’s ‘70s costumes, “have Titania and her fairies looking like Solid Gold dancers from the TV show.” And Hanne Loosen’s design “kinda looks like a disco ball exploded.”   

With his new show, “the focus is on music, and on love stories: love in its many forms and music as the language to do it.” Says Cloran, “my interest is how to use the stories and characters in Shakespeare to connect to contemporary audiences.”

“There’s great room for theatrical interpretation and innovation with Shakespeare’s work,” he thinks. “The bones of a great story are always there.”

PREVIEW

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ‘70s Musical

Theatre: Citadel Theatre

Adapted by: Daryl Cloran and Kayvon Khoshkam

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Ruth Alexander, Billy Brown, Alexandra Dawkins, Oscar Derkx, Taylor Fawcett, Charlie Gallant, Kristel Harder, Rochelle Laplante, Jameela McNeil, Chirag Naik, Christina Nguyen, Biboye Onanuga, Bernardo Pacheko, Dean Stockdale, Luc Tellier, John Ullyatt

Running: Feb 22 to March 23

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com. 780 425-1820

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Edmonton theatre this week, and the cure for frostbite

Posted on February 19, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Keith Alessi in Tomatoes Tried To Kill Me But Banjos Saved My Life, at Workshop West. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

This week, in Edmonton theatres, you can have your heart warmed — and in several ways. (Seriously, you can’t be thinking of staying home feeling frosty).

It started Monday night at Theatre Network with a beautiful memorial to the remarkable actor John Wright, the last of a storied Canadian theatre family. A life lived in theatre: great stories from theatre artists across the country mc-ed by John Ullyatt, a wonderful slideshow of photographs curated by director/designer/actor Jim Guedo. A great gift of an evening from his wife, actor/director Marianne Copithorne, to the theatre community.

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•Keith Alessi returns to Edmonton, to re-define the term pay-it-forward at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, in an inspiring way. There are so many ways his hit solo show Tomatoes Tried To Kill Me But Banjos Saved My Life might never have happened. Alessi was a highly successful corporate accountant CEO, with a big, beautiful collection of banjos he didn’t know how to play. A terrible life-threatening cancer diagnosis moved him to drop his high-powered job, and take up banjo-playing and, assisted by Edmonton-based theatre artist Erika Conway, playwriting.

Alessi hadn’t ever performed onstage before. But this true story became a show, with music and uplifting encouragement about embracing your passion. It premiered on the Fringe circuit in 2018, and has been travelling, to theatres and festivals, ever since.

And this is even more heartwarming: Alessi, who’s in his sixties, has donated 100 per cent of the nearly $1 million he’s raised so far to theatre and music charities wherever he goes. As billed, “it’s more than a show, it’s a movement.”

Alessi brings his fund-raising show to Workshop West’s Gateway Theatre for five performances Wednesday through Sunday. Tickets: workshopwest.org.

Kelly Holiff in Disney’s Frozen: The Broadway Musical, Citadel Theatre and Grand Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

•If you want the gelato in your veins melted, Disney’s Frozen: The Broadway Musical at the Citadel could easily get you there. A stage adaptation of one of Disney’s hottest animation properties, it’s actually about the melt, since an ice queen is rescued from her own cryogenic super-powers by the force of sisterly love, and some powerhouse singing. Rachel Peake’s spectacular production, a collaboration between the Citadel and the Grand Theatre, knows a lot about the theatrical pluses of snow and ice and blizzards. Nearly as much as we do. Have a peek at the 12thnight review. It runs through March 2. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

Eli Yaschuk, Nina Vanderham, Aidan Laudersmith in The Noon Witch, Teatro Live! Photo supplied.

•And opening Friday, a tempting comedy about temptation from Teatro Live! The Noon Witch, a revival of Stewart Lemoine’s 1995 comedy, is inspired by an eccentric Hungarian folk tale about a witch who operates under the midday sun, and lures young men to their watery doom by offering them fatty snacks so they sink. The production directed by the playwright introduces four up-and-comers, a new generation of theatre talent, along with the experienced Teatro star Michelle Diaz. Meet Eli Yaschuk, one of the quartet of newcomers, in a 12thnight preview. The show runs Friday through March 9. Tickets: teatrolive.com.

•A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the 70s musical, a new creation by Daryl Cloran and Kayvon Khoskam, starts previews Saturday at the Citadel. More about this show in an upcoming 12thnight post.

  

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Party time in 19th century Russia: Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 at MacEwan

Posted on February 16, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Daniela Masellis (set design), costume design (Skye Grinde), sound design (David Bowden), lighting design (Ken Matthews). Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A black box theatre at MacEwan University (the Tim Ryan Theatre Lab) has been transformed into a red and black Russian cabaret — overhung with velvet  draperies, twinkling lights, a glittering chandelier, imperial insignia of the old regime.

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And we’re sitting in clusters, some of us at cabaret tables, others tucked here and there in between. There is a “stage,” yes, a long scarlet gangway, up a stair or two, and a couple of other stages, too, for an assortment of musicians. But in Jim Guedo’s MacEwan University production of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, the cast of 14 and the orchestra of eight (supplemented by actors who also pick up a violin, an accordian, a clarinet) only ever touch down on it briefly. They’re scattered through the club; they thread their way among us, always on the move, sitting next to us, dancing and singing, mingling.

I’ve seen the musical twice before in New York, once in a tent and once in a full Broadway theatre, sacked for the occasion with interlocking catwalks, to make that audience immersion possible. And this production, like those, feels like a party. I got a chance, unexpectedly, to experience it on the final weekend of a sold-out run.

I say ‘experience’ because we’re included in the storytelling of Dave Malloy’s boldly offbeat through-sung “electropop opera,” with its 19th century love story, and its wildly eclectic score, a mix of electronic rock, opera recitative, Russian folk music flavours.

Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Daniela Masellis (set design), costume design (Skye Grinde), sound design (David Bowden), lighting design (Ken Matthews). Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.

The design (Daniela Masala’s set, Ken Matthews’ glowing lighting, Skye Grinde’s clever costumes, David Bowden’s sound design) embraces the audience in this intricate multi-optic enterprise. And so does Guedo’s theatrical and inventive stagecraft, which propels a story excavated from a 70-page chunk of Tolstoy’s door-stopper War and Peace.

The characters sometimes refer to themselves in the third person, or provide their own stage directions, all in song. And they’re playful about our involvement. In the catchy prologue number, they give us some advice. “You’re gonna have to study up a little bit/ if you wanna keep up with the plot/ cause it’s a complicated Russian novel/ everyone’s got nine different names.” The program has a centrefold family tree, with arrows, and relationships. “Mariya’s old-school, Sonya’s good, Natasha’s young, and Andrey isn’t here.”

Guedo’s cast of student actors (with students working the crew, too, under the mentorship of  theatre pros) are about to graduate and emerge into the big bad world of professional theatre. And they throw themselves into the challenges, musical and dramatic, of this innovative musical at full tilt, with full commitment and then some: a talent scout alert.

At the centre of the complications is a love story that turns out to be the story of innocence lost. While her betrothed (Nathaniel Cherry as the dashing Prince Andrey) is away at war, beautiful young Natasha, unmoored by the heady whirl of Moscow society (as Lisa Kotelniski conveys so convincingly), is tempted into a ruinous affair with the callow married swaggerer Anatole, conjured in Liam Lorrain’s performance.

Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Daniel Masellis (set design), Skye Grinde (costume design), David Bowden (sound design), Ken Matthews (lighting design). Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.

The Pierre of the title, played compellingly by strong-voiced Matthew Gregg in a top-drawer performance, is a depressed nobleman philosopher having a mid-life existential crisis in a sea of booze. Pierre’s scornful, amoral wife Helene (the striking Layne Labbe) is amusing herself with Natasha’s destruction. And there are notable performances by Ashlin Turcotte as Natasha’s friend Sonya (who gets the musical’s only real pop ballad, and nails it), Jaden Leung, Camryn Bauer, Marina Mikhaylichenko.

Some of the voices do seem more suited to the musical theatre idiom than the jagged and demanding operatic intervals into which Malloy’s adventurous score pulls them. But the characters spring, intensely, to life. And they’re surrounded by a zestful ensemble, including such exuberant figures as the troika driver Balaga (Kohen Foley), who flings himself manically through the pulsing number devoted to him.

Like the music and the costumes by Grinde which put jeans, 19th century military jackets and ballgowns together, the choreography by Anna Kumin finds a way to be both “historical” and contemporary. The party energy from characters who are also narrators is non-stop.

There’s something irresistible about this innovative musical, with its soulful ending. In a student production, full of emerging talent, the idea of the comet, that wrests something beautiful, life-changing, and hopeful from the imminence of total destruction seems to speak to our Moment.

Last performance Sunday Feb. 16. It’s officially sold-out. But if you have a chance, you might score a return ticket, in person at the MacEwan box office (1111 104 Ave.), half an hour before the show.   

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Teatro Live introduces a younger generation of stars (and Hungarian street snacks) in The Noon Witch. Meet Eli Yaschuk.

Posted on February 14, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Eli Yaschuk, Nina Vanderham, Aidan Laudersmith in The Noon Witch, Teatro Live! Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Thirty years ago, Teatro La Quindicina audiences caught sight of a highly idiosyncratic witch who preferred sunlight to night time, and lured men to their watery death with caloric fatty snacks so they sink.

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Playwright Stewart Lemoine has said that his inspiration for The Noon Witch was a 20-minute Dvorak tone poem (Op. 108, B196) whose point of origin was an eccentric Hungarian legend. Needless to say, there’s nothing quite like it in Canadian theatre.

Much has changed since The Noon Witch took us to 1920s Budapest in 1995. The ex-firehall Chinook Theatre in Strathcona became the Varscona and then the “new Varscona.” Teatro has become Teatro Live!. What hasn’t changed is that a Stewart Lemoine comedy that introduced a new generation of young actors to Teatro (and Edmonton theatre) stardom — Jeff Haslam, John Kirkpatrick, and the late great Julien Arnold among them — is poised to do the same again.

Davina Stewart and Jeff Haslam in The Noon Witch (1995), Teatro Live!. Photo supplied

A revival of The Noon Witch, directed by the playwright, opens Friday in the Teatro Live! season. And in Lemoine’s cast are four newcomers — Eli Yaschuk, Aidan Laudersmith, Nida Vanderham, Ethan Lang — recent theatre school grads from MacEwan and the U of A, alongside the experienced Teatro sparkler Michelle Diaz.

Yaschuk and Laudersmith are Joszef and Anatol, a couple of Budapest lads-about-town, “park bench philosophers” as billed, who fall under the sweet but possibly lethal spell of Tinka, who has supernatural powers and an alluring way of proffering cream cakes.

If you were lucky and caught Jim Guedo’s MacEwan theatre arts production of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, this past season, you’ve already met Yaschuk, in a fierce, compelling performance in the title role of the driven French painter Georges Seurat immersed in his work, neglecting his lover Dot. Art and making art and mapping out the sky: the Sondheim musical masterpiece has things to say to young artists, fresh from theatre school.

Eii Yaschuk. Photo supplied.

Yaschuk’s entry point onto the stage, if you don’t count a childhood “always in the backyard making shows,” wasn’t Les Miz singalongs. It was Ukrainian dance, 13 years’ worth. A familiarity with being onstage, and an “obsession with musical theatre,” as he says, led him straight to MacEwan University’s theatre arts (and one of MacEwan’s first new BFAs in musical theatre). And like his fellow artists who bravely set forth into the world of theatre in 2020, that fateful year that COVID started shutting down shows, it was a largely Zoomed-in education for the first couple of years, as arranged of necessity by a creative faculty. “Somehow we did two months in person that fall…. And right before Halloween we got sent home, and spent most of the term online…. I’d go down to my basement for my 9 a.m. dance class. On Zoom.”

“And actually,” he says, “it wasn’t horrible. We were new theatre kids. And we hadn’t known anything else.”

At MacEwan, Yaschuk, a bona fide triple-threat, found himself in an assortment of roles, with distinctive theatrical qualities, like Mr. Cellophone in a Kander and Ebb revue. He was Man in Chair, the musical theatre devoté who conjures an entire 20s-style musical in his imagination in The Drowsy Chaperone. By second year, he and class-mate Rain Matkin, who co-starred with him in the Sunday in the Park (Dot to his Georges), “would go to theatre, to see what was out there.” There’s nothing like a Zoomed existence to make artists (and audiences) appreciate the live experience.

The first Teatro show they saw? Fever Land, a sad/funny 1999 Lemoine play that marked the company’s return to live performance in the fall of 2021. Like The Noon Witch it involves supernatural intervention in human affairs. And Yaschuk was drawn to the style, “heightened, bubbly, very articulate characters who think and speak in full sentences.”

Those distinctively Lemoinian features find their way into The Noon Witch, along with the challenge of making unusually literate language sound natural. “For the first few days it felt … new,” says Yaschuk. “I’m running out of breath! Now we’re on our feet it does feel natural!”

Even the characters Yaschuk and Laudersmith play in The Noon Witch, Joszef and Anatol, have a history at Teatro. Five years before The Noon Witch they first appeared in a park discussing opera in Lemoine’s The Unremembered Budapest (the playwright jokes he apparently had “a Hungarian period”). As per the Teatro tradition of real food onstage, Hungarian goulash was served onstage at a climactic moment. This time, it’s “baked goods,” a term far from current in the contemporary lexicon. Ditto “foodstuffs,” which Yaschuk particularly likes. Teatro’s newsletter Aieeeee! even includes a recipe for ‘langos,” a traditional Hungarian street snack.

Joszef, as Yaschuk describes, “is a delightful man. Quirky. A worrier, Full of anxiety about backed goods (he’s concerned about getting plump), tightly wound.. Super-fun to play.” Joszef might actually shudder at the sight of a cream tart. Which makes him highly resistant to the charms of Tinka.  Anatol, on the other hand, says Yaschuk of the character Laudersmith plays, is “very articulate. A bit smarter, to be honest. He thinks a lot more; he always has a plan…. It’s a classical dynamic.”

At the other end of the theatrical spectrum from Lemoine’s fantastical comedy, we’ll be seeing Yaschuk in April, opposite Matkin, in the Northern Light Theatre production of Radiant Vermin in April. Philip Ridley’s darkly funny and knowing satire has a go at the housing market and consumerist greed: a young couple achieves their dream home … at a horrifying price.

Yaschuk and Matkin created a “cabaret play” together (“we spur each other on”), and In My Room was at Grindstone last summer. Look for them at this summer’s Fringe together in Victor and Victoria’s Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things, a macabre 2011 goth thriller cum scary bedtime story by Beth Graham and Nathan Cuckow. Jim Guedo, returning to the Fringe after a long absence, will direct.

Meanwhile, there’s the fun of a Teatro rehearsal — with foodstuffs.

PREVIEW

The Noon Witch

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Eli Yaschuk, Aidan Laudersmith, Nida Vanderham, Ethan Lang, Michelle Diaz

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Feb. 21 through March 9

Tickets: teatrolive.com

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Hey, wanna see a show? Look at your choices on Edmonton stages this week!

Posted on February 11, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Chariz Faulmino and Mark Sinongco in Disney’s Frozen: The Broadway Musical, Citadel Theatre and Grand Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If there ever was a week to expand your horizons at the theatre….  Don’t even think about staying home. Your choices are many: Broadway musicals of every size and personality, improv, a clown show that takes us to the B side of a fairy tale, a play that wonders about theatre as a magic trick, an adventure in straddling two cultures … and first, a new theatre company with a cabaret calling card.

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Trevor Schmidt and Mark Meer co-host the debut PepperMunt Cabaret. Photo supplied

•That would be MUNT, the new performance theatre in town. It’s the brainchild of artistic director Jake Tkaczyk. Among MUNT’s goals in theatrical subversion is a late-night cabaret of the no-holds-barred, unfiltered stripe. The debut edition, hosted by Mark Meer and Trevor Schmidt, both notably quick thinkers on their feet, happens at the Gateway Theatre (8529 Gateway Blvd) Saturday at 10:30 p.m.

MUNT (formally MUNT Performance Association) got its unusual name, as Tkaczyk explains, from Wilhelmina Mints and free-associating with Josh Travnik, his cast-mate in 10 Funerals. EdMUNton, MUNTorship, theme of the MUNT … you get the idea. That christening is as non-linear as the artistic bent of the new theatre company, devoted to prying loose the linear/narrative/plot stronghold on Canadian theatre , in favour of something more experimental, unexpected, more immersive (“for want of a better word,” as Tkaczyk puts it).

That kind of creative experimenting aligns with Tkaczyk’s research for his impending PhD in creative practice from Liverpool John Moores University and the Transart Institute. Such bold experimenters as Punchdrunk and Frantic Assembly in the U.K. and Belgium’s Forced Entertainment (Fight Night) , who experiment with “re-integrating audience and performers,” are right up Tkaczyk’s alley.

A “conservatory-trained actor with a BFA from the University of Alberta, Tkaczyk, who’s also the general manager of Workshop West, is an experimenter in his own play creation. Witness his “live bouffon seminar” Bedeutung Krankenwagen, which was at the Play The Fool Festival. Or his Fringe piece The Big Fat Surprise (with Sarah Ormandy), which “uses the stage as a way to critique populist theatre and (address) the death of experimentation.” He and Ormandy, devising a new piece, are on the Fringe slot waiting list.

Tkaczyk’s current works-in-progress include Ytrap Ruovaf, (Party Favour spelled backwards). And he’s thinking about a show that’s “a dinner party for 16 in a high-rise apartment, site-specific and in real time.”

“How can performance art be part of theatre?” That’s a question that interests the actor/playwright/director. And the MUNT cabarets, slated to happen every two months, are a way, as he describes, to support and encourage artists with off-centre ideas, and provide audiences with “experimental experiences.”

Saturday night’s debut edition of PepperMUNT the cabaret features contributions from Ormandy, from Cody Porter (fresh from a run of Angry Alan at Northern Light Theatre), Sammy Lowe, Shamama, Jason Hardwick, Madi May, drag queen Teen Jesus Barbie, and Tkaczyk himself. And there’s a live jazz band led by Holly Sangster. Dayna Lee Hoffmann of Batrabbit Productions (Rat Academy), an experimenter herself, is doing the projection design.

“Expect the crazy, the fun, the things you didn’t see coming.” Don’t expect to be discussing the narrative through-line.  Tickets (for the +18 crowd only): https://tinyurl.com/ybcuuv5d.

As for the three Broadway musicals, they couldn’t be more different:

Kelly Holiff in Disney’s Frozen: The Broadway Musical, Citadel Theatre and Grand Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

•At the Citadel, Disney’s Frozen: The Broadway Musical is about sisterly love, friendship, and the lovely ways snow and ice can be lighted onstage, adapted from one of Disney’s hottest animations ever. Rachel Peake’s spectacular production runs through March 2. Check out the 12thnight review here. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

Michael Cox (centre) and the cast of The Full Monty, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

•At the Mayfield, The Full Monty, the warm-hearted blue-collared musical by Terrence McNally (book) and David Yazbek (music and lyrics) lets us meet a bummed-out group of unemployed steelworkers in Buffalo, adrift in their new job-less lives, frustrated, anxious, depressed. And gives them catchy songs, as they devise a plan to make some much-needed cash … as a strip act. Talk about showbiz experimenters. Will they have the jam to go through with it, and take it (all) off? Kate Ryan’s production runs through March 30 Have a peek at the 12thnight review. Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca.

•Dave Malloy’s groundbreaking electro-popera Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 takes a 70-page chunk of Tolstoy’s War and Peace for its highly unconventional pairing of music and storytelling. Jim Guedo directs the MacEwan University theatre arts production up close in the Tim Ryan Theatre Lab, Wednesday through Sunday.  Tickets: tickets.macewan.ca.

•At the Aviary, Theatre Yes continues its run (through Wednesday) of Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree, an enigmatic and challenging piece that wonders about transformation, belief,  and the magic that underpins theatre itself, whereby an actor becomes a character right in front of you. Max Rubin, the company’s co-artistic director, appears onstage as a hypnotist, every night opposite a different actor who has never seen the play or the script. The full list of participants is on the Theatre Yes website. 12thnight talked to Rubin and director Ruth Alexander in a preview. And a 12thnight review of the experience is here. Tickets: theatreyes.com.

Ruth Wong-Miller meets Waymun the Lion in King of the Yees, Walterdale Theatre. Photo by Scott Henderson, Henderson Images

•At Walterdale, Barbara Mah directs Lauren Yee’s King of the Yees, a comedy that takes us on adventure through Chinatown, and the bi-cultural experience of a thoroughly North American adult kid of immigrant parents. Have you read 12thnight’s preview interview with director Mah, whose life experience and the playwright’s are uncannily in sync? The show runs through Saturday at the venerable Edmonton community theatre. Tickets: walterdaletheatre.com.

•At the Fringe, Small Matters Production’s The Spinsters, created by Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis, and a whole bunch of brilliant costume designers, returns to the Westbury Theatre, in full ball regalia, Thursday through Saturday. C’mon, haven’t you ever wondered what’s going on with Cinderella’s Ugly Stepsisters? Did they get a bum rap? Check out the 12thnight review from January 2024 here. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

Belinda Cornish and Jana O’Connor in Three Ladies. Photo supplied.

•At Rapid Fire Theatre, two of Edmonton’s favourite actor/improvisers, Belinda Cornish and Jana O’Connor have tea together onstage, with a special guest, to trade gossip and discuss … stuff. And they invite a different actor for every performance at RFT’s Exchange Theatre in Strathcona (10437 83rd Ave.). Three Ladies continues Friday and Saturday, then Feb. 21 and 22 at the Exchange. Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com.

[Blank], U of A Studio theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

•At the U of A’s Studio Theatre, the 75th anniversary season continues with Jan Selman’s production of the challenging [Blank] by the English writer Alice Birch. The script contains 100 scenes and vignettes, which take us into the lives of women impacted by the criminal justice system. And the director selects from among them, mix and match. It’s at the Timms Centre for the Arts (87th Ave. and 112th St.) through Saturday. Tickets: showpass.com.

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Bummed out in Buffalo: will they? won’t they? The struggles of the blue-collar male in The Full Monty at the Mayfield, a review

Posted on February 9, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

The Full Monty, Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The guys we meet in The Full Monty are up against it.

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They’re unemployed steel workers in rustbelt Buffalo. And, as one points out, in the opening musical number “it’s a long night when you’re scrap…. It’s a slow town when you don’t know where to go.”

Edmonton can surprise you. The Full Monty is, remarkably, the second Broadway musical I’ve seen this past week with a big catchy 11 o’clock anthem called ‘Let It Go’. In Disney’s Frozen, at the Citadel, ‘Let It Go’ is a detachable global hit sung by ice royalty, an exiled queen with a terrible secret power. In The Full Monty, the charmer that’s running at the Mayfield in Kate Ryan’s funny and touching production, ‘Let It Go’ is the grand finale of the guys’ plan, born of blue-collar desperation, to make some much-needed cash … by forming a strip act for a one-night-only stand. Will they … let it (all) go?

Culled from an appealingly low-key 1997 Brit film comedy, the 25-year-old Broadway musical is the creation of all-star American playwright Terrence McNally and composer/lyricist David Yazbek (The Band’s Visit, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels). And it re-locates the cluster of jobless steelworkers — along with their anxiety and depression, their battered self-esteem as men, husbands, fathers, breadwinners — from the north of England to America.

A striking design (by Lieke den Bakker and Ivan Siemens) is on that Atlantic crossing. It locates the characters in a derelict factory of brick, dominated by a big tilted window through which Marr Schuurman’s videos give us glimpses of Buffalo ‘hoods and seasons. Gail Ksionzyk’s lighting, as you will discover later, is an important player, with a coup de thêâtre up its sleeve (OK, it doesn’t have sleeves).     

It need hardly be said that the bummed-out fellas we meet, who self-identify as losers, aren’t obvious candidates for the dud-doffing bare-ass razzmatazz of showbiz. And Robin Calvert’s smartly un-slick choreography is all about figuring out how characters who are unemployed steelworkers not dancers dance if they happen to be in a musical.

The Full Monty, Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

There’s life to consider. The cheers of women, the new breadwinners having a girls’ night out at a Chippendales show, are a revelation to their desperate men. McNally’s script and Yabek’s songs, which range from rock to pop ballads to patter songs, sketch in the details, for some characters more fully than others. And Ryan’s cast fleshes out the individual dimensions (gee, I wish I’d worded that differently).

Anyhow, in order for The Full Monty to take hold of you and charm you, you have to fall a little in love with these these tough/fragile dudes. You have to want these underdog shleppers to triumph, as they struggle and resist the upending of their lives and open another beer in the middle of the day. And you really do, in Ryan’s production.

There are stakes. If Jerry (the engaging Michael Cox), the instigator and stage manager of the bright idea, doesn’t come up with some child-support dough soon, he’ll lose joint custody of his son Nathan (Will Brisbin). Their father-son scenes together are a wry and heart-tugging flip of the father-son dynamic: Jerry as the vulnerable supplicant and his kid as the adult. Both performances are excellent. Cox, possessor of supple musical theatre chops, has a wistfully reflective Yazbek ballad, “Breeze Off The River” (“I never feel like somebody somebody calls a father…”) that’s a highlight.

Jerry’s overweight best friend Dave (the winsome Daniel Williston) is paralyzed by body image, certain he’s seeing the end times for his marriage. Here’s an image that lingers: Dave, anxious about his upcoming debut as a stripper, wraps his midriff in Saran Wrap to lose weight fast. And there he is, sitting on the can tucking into a bag of chips. The power ballad ‘You Rule My World’, that gets passed from man to man, with different resonances, is Dave’s address to his own ample belly.

Michael Cox (centre) and the cast of The Full Monty, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The Full Monty, as you will suspect if you saw the sleeper hit movie, is its own oddball thing, an original mixture of raucous and melancholy, dark comedy and heart-felt regret. And Ryan’s production, strongly sung, gives full weight to this high-contrast palette; it’s underpinned by affection, not mockery. And it’s reflected in the performances under her direction. The musical’s funniest song is Jerry and Dave’s helpful duet of buddy support, ‘Big-Ass Rock’, on behalf of the sad-sack Malcolm (Ryan Maschke), who’s s trying to off himself at the time.

Let the recruitment for the new strip act Hot Metal begin. The audition scene is a hoot, hilarious and rueful. Gavin Hope as Noah (nickname: Horse) has a showbiz history, a rocking number “Big Black Man,” and a bad hip. Paul Cowling plays the class-conscious factory manager Harold who’s been concealing his own unemployment from an adoring wife (Christine Bandelow) he can’t afford to either support or lose. Cameron Chapman is the aspirational Ethan, who’s “always wanted to be a dancer (pause) but I can’t dance.” His particular endowment wins him an instant spot in Hot Metal. There’s a very funny cameo of a spectacularly inept stripper hopeful (Evan Dowling) wrestled to the ground by his own T-shirt.

Her deadpan comic performance as the jaded, seen-it-all rehearsal pianist, who cracks wise from the keyboard, marks the welcome return to the stage of Maureen Rooney. Her name-dropping song, “things could be better ‘round here,” is a winner.

Performances from the wives and the -ex’s — frustrated, exasperated by the male intransigence to take greeter jobs at Walmart — include stand-outs by Bandelow as the bourgie wife, Autumn-Joy Dames as Dave’s other half, and Rachel Bowron as Jerry’s ‘ex, the one with the child support ultimatum. And there’s a sort of Greek chorus of Furies,   a a gaggle of scornful women, who criss-cross the stage from time to time as a power-walking gag, to terrify the strippers-to-be.

A first-rate band is an expectation at the Mayfield. And it’s fully met in The Full Monty (musical director Jennifer McMillan). The musical values and the sound quality are exemplary.

Which brings us to the big reveal. Will they chicken out? Will they go ‘the full monty’ as they’ve promised their ticket-holders? Will they totally flame out? This is a playful evening, my ticket-holding friends, and I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the fun you’re going to have.

REVIEW

The Full Monty

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre, 16615 109 Ave.

Created by: David Yazbek (music and lyrics) and Terrence McNally (book)

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Michael Cox, Daniel Williston, Paul Cowling, Will Brisbin, Rachel Bowron, Autumn-Joy Dames, Ryan Maschke, Gavin Hope, Maureen Rooney, Christine Bandelow, Cameron Chapman, Andrew McAllister, Jahlen Barnes, Devin Alexander, Karina Cox, Even Dowling, Sarah Dowling

Running: through March 30

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca, 780-483-4051

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Two sisters and a snowman: Frozen will thaw your cold cold heart, a review

Posted on February 7, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Chariz Faulmino and Mark Sinongco in Disney’s Frozen: The Broadway Musical, Citadel Theatre and Grand Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s a moment in Disney’s Frozen the Broadway Musical, just before intermission, when you just can’t help cheering the liveness of a musical that challenges itself to bring to the stage one of Disney Corp’s hottest animation properties.

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An ice queen, with formidable secret winterizing powers she can’t control — “conceal it, don’t feel it” — has exiled herself for her country’s good. She plants herself in the gorgeous ice palace she’s built with her super-powers, throws off her indoor royal robes (and her indoor voice). Poof! There she is, in a sparkly white showbiz gown. And as Elsa, Kelly Holiff lets ‘er rip in a killer version of the show’s biggest hit “Let It Go.”

It’s sort of a cold-weather Wicked-style anthem. And it will be reprised late in the show by Elsa’s impulsive little sister Anna, played by the firecracker ice-melter Chariz Faulmino, equally strong of voice.

Frozen, which is all about magical transformations, whole kingdoms at a time, is no pushover for live theatre. For one thing the battalions of adorable little girls, heroine-worshippers in sequinned party dresses (and winter boots) in the Citadel audience on opening night, have expectations. They are ready for enchantment, and they are not to be denied.

Kelly Holiff in Disney’s Frozen: The Broadway Musical, Citadel Theatre and Grand Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The story, which takes Han Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen far far away from everything but its Scandinavian origins, doesn’t bear close analysis. Just warm your hands on it, and let it go: it’s about salvation by love, sisterly love that rescues a princess who never gets cold from her own unmanageable power to induce hypothermia in others. The bond between Elsa and Anna is severed by safety-conscious parents, who don’t reveal why, but make Elsa wear gloves. The former grows up afraid of human contact; the latter grows up in unexplained solitude.

It’s a narrative with a wild assortment of characters: spirited heroines, a dashing handsome prince with romance on his mind (but wait …), a pompous misogynist of a duke, a really nice guy with a reindeer best friend and a modest career in ice-selling, a snowman with a gift of the gab, dancing fairy-tale trolls with some medical expertise.…

Rachel Peake’s spectacular Citadel/Grand Theatre production of the musical, adapted and musically enhanced by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez (Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon) from the 2013 Disney animation hit, is theatrically ingenious and fulsome about the visual magic of the story.

Not that Frozen leans into environmental impact, but needless to say we have high standards in blizzards, snowfall and snowpersons in these parts to begin with. Big theatre and its big-budget resources, including a creative team at the top of their game, come into their own in Frozen The Broadway Musical. Since this is live theatre not film, special effects are actually special. Amelia Scott’s projections are dazzling stars of the storytelling, along with Jareth Li’s lighting, that conjure wild storms at sea, the northern lights, spring blizzards, snowy mountain ranges, giant icicles that frame the world, the particular way light filters through gently falling snow….

The projections and lighting have a play-date with Cory Sincennes’ set, a kind of playful pop-up storybook with interlocking set pieces; they slide onstage or arrive from above for form interiors at the Arendelle palace and, in later scenes, ice-bound caverns and wintry peaks.

Nothing much can be done with the hokey operetta-style preamble, the singing, dancing villagers doing the exposition, Ainsley Hillyard’s always inventive choreography notwithstanding. The palace family scenes clunk, too, on the vast Citadel mainstage, despite terrifically charming, confident performances by a couple of young talents with big voices (and careers) ahead: Georgia Kellerman as the young Elsa (who alternates with Elowyn Temme) and Aubrey Malacad (who alternates with Zeia Ayuno) as the young Anna. Their tuneful duet “Do You Want To Build A Snowman,” and lyrics woven with the narrative of the sister separation, is a knock-out.

Frozen the musical is an oddly formed piece, both narratively and musically. Suddenly Elsa and Ayuno (along with Olaf the snowman) will grow up when the score suddenly turns full-fledged pop, an oddball kind of time-travelling. And that’s when Peake’s stagecraft, with its attention to theatrical stylization, to the power of suggestion, to visual coups de théâtre that stick to your retina, comes into its own theatrical coherence.

Warm-hearted Olaf the puppet snowman is an audience favourite, not least because we fully see the puppeteer (Izad Etemadi) who manipulates him and sings a lovely ode to summer. In his warm weather fixation Olaf sets a standard in personal sacrifice that puts Frosty to shame. Sven the winsome pantomime reindeer (Richard Lee Hsi) dances in a spirited way that captivates us, along with his sweet sidekick Kristoff (Mark Sinongco), not least because we know there’s a human actor under those antlers. Theatrical expertise is why, in an elaborate production, an arduous mountain-climbing scene — as Anna desperately looks for her sister, and has a fine duet with Kristoff (“What Do You Know About Love?”) — needs only a rope and cool lighting to establish itself.  This is a production that’s smart about when to say when.   

Frozen has a major asset in Hillyard, one of the most theatrically savvy choreographers around. And the comically bonkers drinking scene in which a whole Scandinavian dance troupe, semi-clothed, emerges from a sauna in a conga line, with branches, shows off her powers of invention. The costumes by designer Sincennes, dozens and dozens of them, fairy tale suits and peasant dresses, velvet frocks, troll pants, sequinned showbiz outfits, are always fun to look at.      

Peake’s production does the Anderson-Lopez and Lopez score (much expanded from the movie) proud, with a cast of strong singers and an excellent band led by music director Steven Greenfield. Holiff, who has a silky lyrical range and a belt voice that could knock out the power in Greenland, is everything you might want in an Elsa, including a brooding sense of inner conflict. And as a hyperactively perky little sister who’s spent way too much time alone, as she says, and is desperate for attention, Faulmino nails Anna, too. The meet-cute scene in which Anna tries too hard with Hans (Aran Wilson-McAnally), the 13th son in line for the throne of the Southern Isles, who tries too hard, too (they share a duet “Love Is An Open Door”) is amusing and charming.

But it’s the sister relationship — two sisters lonely for different reasons, one who takes charge of saving the other from herself — that’s the beating heart of Frozen. And it will thaw yours.

REVIEW

Disney’s Frozen The Broadway Musical

Theatre: Citadel Theatre and Grand Theatre (London, Ont.)

Created by: Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez (music and lyrics) and Jennifer Lee (book)

Directed by: Rachel Peake

Starring: Kelly Holiff, Charliz Faulmino, Mark Sinongco, Aran Wilson-McAnally, Richard Lee Hsi, Andrew Cownden, Izad Etemadi, Georgia Kellerman, Aubrey Malacad, Elowyn Temme, Zeia Ayuno, Vance Avery, Sam Boucher, Andy Cohen, Jennifer Harding, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Julia Pulo, Tahirih Vejdani, Stephanie Wolfe

Running: through March 2

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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Is theatre itself a form of hypnosis? An Oak Tree at Theatre Yes, a review

Posted on February 6, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Max Rubin in An Oak Tree, Theatre Yes. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At the Aviary, a little performance space off the beaten track that’s nobody’s idea of a conventional theatre (except there’s a bar), something weird is happening. It’s magic and you have to be there to experience it.

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An Oak Tree, the latest from Theatre Yes, messes with your mind. You try to wrap your brain around it, good luck with that, and it slips out of those coils and grabs at your heart instead with questions about grief. That it does this right before your very eyes, with no pretence at concealment, says something about theatre itself — the transformation of actors into characters and a script into emotion. It’s a demo of the power of suggestion that goes beyond the temporary suspension of disbelief into questions that take the old arts/life mutual dependency for a spin. I’ve seen An Oak Tree before, on a trip to the Edinburgh Fringe long ago. And I can’t quite shake it.    

An Oak Tree is, in effect, a test case for transformation and belief. The fascinating artifice of the 2004 play by the English theatre experimenter Tim Crouch is named after Michael Craig-Martin’s installation now in the National Gallery of Australia: a glass of water on a glass shelf, entitled “An Oak Tree.”

In the two-hander directed by Ruth Alexander, Max Rubin, who’s usually Theatre Yes’s resident director, is onstage in a sequinned showbiz vest, as a hypnotist. And opposite him is an actor — a different one every night — who has never before seen the play or the script. The showbiz hypnotist Rubin plays, who has an addled huckster vibe about him, has accidentally killed a 12-year-old girl in his car some months before. And the actor, the terrific Belinda Cornish on opening night, plays the bereaved father of the girl, who shows up one night at the hypnotist’s show and volunteers for the act. This requires a dramatic transformation in itself since Andy is a 46-year-old man with (we’re told) muddy shoes and grey hair.

The dynamic is unsettling: is the father looking for … confrontation? closure? confession of guilt? We don’t know yet. And what’s more we don’t know if the hypnotist knows yet.

Over and over, we are reminded, explicitly, that we are watching a play. It’s like taking the splintered shards of the so-called ‘fourth wall’ and juggling them to see what shape they take. Rubin keeps stepping outside his role as the hypnotist to be Rubin the actor in scenes with Cornish, or Rubin the stage manager giving directions, or feeding lines, to Cornish the actor playing Andy the grieving father, hypnotized into playing other characters. Did you follow that? I just re-read that last sentence, and I think I may need professional help or a rest cure in a sensory deprivation tank. “Say yes,” and Cornish does. “Please put the headphones on,” and Cornish does.

Sometimes the two pass the script between them, on a whispered cue or inaudible headphone instruction. Sometimes there’s a narrator: “the house began to fill with grief.” Sometimes the hypnotist is the grieving father’s desperate wife; sometimes Andy is the wife or the little girl. Sometimes the hypnotist and the father are talking to each other; sometimes one is directing the other (sotto voce, perhaps a little too sotto, on opening night); sometimes each is talking to the audience. “These are the last speeches of the play,” says the actor playing the hypnotist, introducing … the last speeches of the play.

The layers of sound, which escalate from whispers to mic’ed hucksterism, velvety hypnotist cues to a blast of Carmina Burana in Alexander’s production, are an invitation into the playbook of theatre, how the magic is created. That An Oak Tree does this while still asking the audience to believe in the magic is audacious, for sure, even brazen. That it’s moving, too, is unexpected.

An Oak Tree is a veritable fun house of mirrors. The strange audacity of it is there right from the start when the hypnotist says “I will never lie to you.” Which is of course a lie. He’s already lied about the “volunteers.” What’s amazing is our escalating emotional investment, amid the constant transformations of the characters, in the question of what on earth you do with a huge, unwieldy, intractable grief. Or guilt of roughly the same size. Is there an exit from the house of mirrors? Can a child be an oak tree?

Theatre says yes, and yes, according to An Oak Tree. Maybe theatre itself is a form of hypnosis. We can look at the tree and see a tree and a child, simultaneously. It’s a puzzle, this theatre magic. As the hypnotist says, in his introduction, “welcome to my hypnotic world. Give me a piece of your mind.”

Do that and you will be intrigued. Your mind will be bent a bit out of shape (for an indeterminate length of time, I’m finding). And, despite everything, your heart will be touched. Weird and wonderful.

REVIEW

An Oak Tree

Theatre: Theatre Yes

Written by: Tim Crouch

Directed by: Ruth Alexander

Starring: Max Rubin, with (in successive performances) Belinda Cornish, Mark Meer, Luc Tellier, Patricia Zentilli, Patricia Darbasie, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Oscar Derkx, Nikki Hulowski

Where: The Aviary, 9314  111 Ave.

Running: through Feb. 12

Tickets: theatreyes.com

 

   

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A big week at the Mayfield: The Full Monty, a new artistic director, a new season

Posted on February 5, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

The Full Monty, Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Poster image supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Kick off your Sunday shoes. It’s a big week at the Mayfield.

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For one thing, the theatre’s 50th anniversary season continues with a Broadway musical hit, blue of collar, warm of heart. The Full Monty, opening Friday with the largest cast (17 actors) of the season, is a classic underdog triumph story: a group of unemployed steelworkers in Buffalo take charge of their failing fortunes and dwindling self-esteem — by creating a strip act. It’s the first show that musical theatre veteran Kate Ryan, whose Mayfield experiences date back 35 years, directs in her new gig as the theatre’s interim artistic director. And it was last staged at the Mayfield 17 years ago by Ryan’s father Tim Ryan.

For another, Ryan announced the lineup of shows she’s picked for the  upcoming 2025-2026 Mayfield season. As befits a theatre company that, as Ryan says, prides itself on “great music and high-quality musical experiences,” — a focus she intends to continue — it includes a much-requested classic Broadway musical with the catchiest of songs, a rockin’ holiday compilation show, a celebration of a seminal musical artist. And the season finale, in the summer of 2026, is a Canadian comedy with a quintessentially Canuck setting, a curling rink.

The whole point of Footloose, the celebratory 1998 Broadway musical based on the 1984 movie, is song and dance, a perennial Mayfield mantra. “High energy, contagious music — the tunes are visceral! — and such a relatable story,” says Ryan, who has taken her cue on all of the above from the production of Grease she directed a season ago, “one of the Mayfield’s highest grossing shows ever.”

Dean Pritchard, of Fame fame is the writer. And Footloose, as Ryan describes, is “smart, funny, with a score that combines top-40 hits (like Holding Out For A Hero) and original music (by Tom Snow, Kenny Loggins and others). “The story of the city kid who moves to a small town and fights for the right to dance  — how timely is that? — is all about how music can bring communities together.” The Mayfield production runs April 14 to June 14.

The season opens in the fall (Sept. 2 to Nov. 2) with Dean Elliott’s much-travelled The Simon & Garfunkel Story, which tells the story of the world’s most successful musical duo with the distinctive sound — formerly ‘Tom and Gerry’ when they were in high school in New York City. “Much more than a tribute show,” as Ryan describes, the production includes video design, old photos, and film footage, not to mention a full live band. And the hit-studded song list — Mrs. Robinson, The Sound of Silence, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Cecilia — is one that, as she puts it, connects you to your memories, “songs that really influenced, and moved, us.” Brit-based Elliott himself, who starred in Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story when it played the Mayfield, comes to direct the show.

The holiday show, the longest-running show of the season and traditionally a Mayfield audience fave, is devoted to the ‘90s  — its music, its aesthetic, its cultural trends. The ‘90s! It’s All Coming Back To Me Now (Nov. 11, 2025 to Jan. 25, 2026) is written and curated by the husband-and-wife team of Kevin Dabbs  and Christine Bandelow, the former an actor/musician himself and the latter an actor/choreographer of note who have extensive Mayfield experience on their resumés.

They mine the decade of the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys, Céline Dion, the Tragically Hip, Sheryl Crow, Bryan Adams, Alanis, Shania…. for this new show. The co-creators have a lot to work with. “Music videos were the new ‘90s trend,” as Ryan says. “What effect did they have? And hit songs in films?”

Following upon the huge response to last season’s One Night With The King, starring Matt Cage as Elvis, Dabbs and Bandelow have have created a new show for the multi-talented tribute artist/actor. One Night With Roy Orbison (Feb. 3 to April 5, 2026), starring Cage, is designed to celebrate the work of the influential musical artist with the unmistakeable voice, and showcase his musical journey from his rock and roll beginnings in the 50s to the 60s hits like Pretty Woman, Blue Bayou, and Only the Lonely, including his participation in the super-star fantasy band The Travelling Wilburys and his celebrated duet Crying with k.d. lang.

Hurry Hard, the season finale, Jun 23 to July 26, 2026, takes us to a curling rink and the long-standing friction between the men’s and the women’s team at the Stayner Curling Club. When a crisis occurs, only burying the hatchet and coming together as one team will secure the trophy at the bonspiel. “Smart fun writing and great characters,” says Ryan, who “laughed aloud” when she read the five-actor comedy by the Ontario-based Canadian actor/playwright Kristen Da Silva. “I enjoyed her skill as a writer, her fast-paced wit and relatable characters. She puts them in high-stress situations and lets them muddle in the mud…. She allows us to laugh at challenging life circumstances.”

Although she’s both directed and acted at the Mayfield since 1991, the artistic directorship of a commercial company in a hotel, in a big theatre with a tricky stage, and dinner!, has been a learning curve, says Ryan, the founding artistic director of the indie musical theatre company Plain Jane. Because the “entertainment experience” at the Mayfield includes dinner, the audience tends to lean back from the show, not into it, she’s found. “And you don’t want to push with a (straight) play.” So for last last summer’s popular Mayfield production of On Golden Pond, experimenting with mic-ing the actors created greater intimacy, and “made for more nuanced moments.”    

Season 50 continues with The Full Monty (through March 30), Jersey Boys, another blue-collar Broadway hit, April 8 to June 8, and a summer show, the perennial solo fave Shirley Valentine June 17 to July 20. Meanwhile, Meanwhile, Ryan is immersed in The Full Monty, music and lyrics by David Yazbek (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Band’s Visit, Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown) and book by the star American playwright Terrence McNally. “The scenes aren’t numbered in the script,” Ryan says. “It’s the wildest thing, so filmic; it flows from one to the next as ‘transitions’…. We’ve created a template, our own little scene breakdowns.”

“I love the characters. They’re lovable jerks and we lean into their flaws,” she says happily.

Tickets and 2025-2026 season subscriptions: 780-483-4051, mayfieldtheatre.ca.

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