Meet a man with a grievance, and the actor who plays him: Cody Porter in Angry Alan at Northern Light

Posted on January 17, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Cody Porter in Angry Alan, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“For the first time in a really long time I feel like someone is speaking to me in a language which I completely understand … something which makes me feel good about myself.” Roger in Angry Alan

In the solo play that opens Friday in the Northern Light Theatre season, we meet a man with a grievance — a lot of grievances.

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The protagonist of Angry Alan, a 2018 Edinburgh Fringe hit by the Brit playwright Penelope Skinner (Fucked, Meek, The Village Bike), is seething with resentment. The third assistant manager of a Safeway, Roger feels under-appreciated, stalled indefinitely in his rise to status. It’s when he discovers an online website, Angry Alan, which feeds on the frustrations of under-achieving white males, he finds a home for his smouldering, then burning, sense of injustice. The new recruit is radicalized — empowered by the mens’ rights movement that lashes back at #MeToo and all that implies.

Roger, a poster boy for the manipulation of toxic masculinity, is a juicy role, to be sure, — but a tricky guy to play. Cody Porter agrees, and laughs. “I was very surprised and delighted when Trevor (Northern Light artistic director Trevor Schmidt) asked me to do the show! And, yes, I was conflicted about it on a first reading, not knowing if I agreed with (anything about) Roger. Which I fully, obviously, don’t.”

The versatile Porter, whose resumé is full of character roles, isn’t a stranger to solo shows either. “The thing about them,” he jokes, “is that the cast parties are just not as fun.”

At the 2023 Fringe audiences saw him in Amor de Cosmos: a delusional musical, a solo musical (by Lindsey Walker and Richard Kemick) — 90 minutes foreshortened for Fringe purposes to a frenetic 60 — about a real-life eccentric. The 19th century loon Amor de Cosmos might have been an ideal candidate for recruitment by a movement like Angry Alan. He became the second premier of B.C., an M.P, and then slid into the crazy right-wing.  In 2014, he starred in the Will Eno solo play thom pain: based on nothing, a complex kind of free-associative existential comedy à  la Beckett. Porter laughs, “I’m all about making things simple and straightforward.”

Rehearsing Angry Alan is downright leisurely in comparison to speed-up Fringe preparations, says the actor, a University of Regina and AMDA (American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York) grad.  He moved to Edmonton in the early 2000s to manage the Princess Theatre in its arthouse heyday.

Lately Porter the actor has been introduced to Porter the improviser (“I try to do workshops outside my discipline if I can”). A quick-witted sort, he did improv workshops at Grindstone Theatre; he’s  joined the Die-Nasty cast in their gold rush season. And the improv skill set, he’s found, certainly doesn’t go amiss in preparing solo shows.

“I’m a bit of preparation hound,” says Porter cheerfully. “I like to feel confident about what I’m doing onstage…. Taking (improv) on has really changed my perspective and my practice. There are no emergencies any more (laughter). If something doesn’t go the way you want, just breathe! Once you get over the idea you have a plan … find where you are, and move on.”

“Actors have some advantages doing improv,” he thinks, since that repertoire of skills included “what direction to face onstage, how to project, how to use your physicality and voice, how to build a character quickly.” Which speaks to the unusually strong link between improv and theatre that’s enhanced the quality of both on Edmonton stages.  “You’re a stronger over-all performer when you get different perspectives on practising the craft.”

Roger’s a handful. “The challenge for a progressively-minded person is is to find the humanity of the character, to not make him the butt of a joke,” says Porter, who was part of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival ensemble in their mobile production of The Tempest this past summer. “I want to think there’s still hope of finding the common humanity we all have…. To understand that however polarized we are a society, the great equalizer is the idea of empathy. And it’s totally absent from some of the movements out there.”

“If Roger were just a pathetic loser,” or an incomprehensible whack-job, “it might be a different play…. What appealed to me (about the play) is that if you take it in the right way it’s not satire,” Porter thinks. “It’s not just crazy people who believe these things; there are real human beings who are disaffected, in a world operating in ways it hasn’t before….”

“The pendulum is swinging … trying to equalize a long-established power dynamic. And if that’s your identity.… Well, we all need to find a place to belong in this world.”

Roger’s “search for something better,” inevitably, takes him through the fateful portal into the internet world. “That’s where the answers are,” Porter sighs. “Scary. And also true…. We seek out things we agree with, things we believe.” He remembers, nostalgically, going to parties where you could disagree with people “and they’re not your enemy.”

Porter laughs, a bit ruefully. “Now that we’re into Part 2 of the administration (you know, that one across the border), Angry Alan isn’t dated at all.”

PREVIEW

Angry Alan

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Penelope Skinner

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Cody Porter

Where: Studio Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330- 84 Ave.

Running: Jan. 24 through Feb. 8

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

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Nevermore, now evermore on film: a week of the macabre in Edmonton theatre

Posted on January 13, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Scott Shpeley and Shannon Blanchet in Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, Catalyst Theatre. Photo by Tim Nguyen.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a big week for the (deliciously) macabre in Edmonton.

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Catalyst Theatre premieres a new film of their signature musical play cum gothic fantasia Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe at the Citadel’s Zeidler Hall Saturday. Broadway Across Canada brings Beetlejuice the Musical to the Jube stage Tuesday through Sunday. And in the Citadel’s Rice Theatre, three goblins, intrigued by the human activity called theatre, have picked the bloodiest play they can find in the Shakespeare canon and they’re staging a production of Macbeth (Goblin: Macbeth).

Nevermore, arguably Alberta’s most successful and travelled theatrical export ever, has crossed the country, the border, and the pond. Catalyst’s original creation (book, music and lyrics by Jonathan Christenson; set, lighting and costumes by Bretta Gerecke) is a true original, macabre and inventive. It imagines, in a playfully theatrical and witty way — in rhyme, music, striking surreal imagery, stylized physicality — the haunted (and haunting) doom-laden life of Edgar Allan Poe as one of his own hallucinatory thrillers.

Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, Catalyst Theatre. Photo by Tim Nguyen.

Co-commissioned by the Luminato Festival in Toronto and the Magnetic North Festival in Ottawa, it premiered in 2009 jointly at the National Arts Centre and the Winter Garden in Toronto after preview runs at Keyano Theatre in Fort McMurray and Catalyst’s black-box Strathcona headquarters at the time (now the Gateway Theatre). Since then the Nevermore archive includes London runs; it’s played LIFT (the London International Festival of Theatre) and BITE (Barbican International Theatre Events). It’s been at the  PuSh Festival in Vancouver and the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, and many other theatres across the country. Nevermore has been in New York twice, at the New Victory Theatre on 42nd St., and Off-Broadway at New World Stages in 2015. It was nominated for three Off-Broadway Lucille Lortel Awards, including best new musical (and lost to an obscure little concoction called Hamilton).

Years in the making, the film, directed like the stage play by Christenson, reassembles the original seven-member cast led by Scott Shpeley as Poe (and including Shannon Blanchet, Sheldon Elter, Beth Graham, Ryan Parker, Garett Ross, Vanessa Sabourin). After Saturday’s premiere, which coincides with Poe’s 216th birthday, Nevermore will be available as a digital rental later this month. Details at catalysttheatre.ca.

Madison Mosley and Justin Collette in Beetlejuice the Musical, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy

•Based on the 1988 Tim Burton movie of the same name, Beetlejuice the Musical (music and lyrics by Eddie Perfect, book by Scott Brown and Anthony King) chronicles the fortunes of a bereaved teenager Lydia, and the haunting of a house by the deceased couple who fell to their deaths through the floorboards. There’s a jaunty song for that, just so you know! Tickets for the touring production: ticketmaster.ca.

Kragva, Moog and Wug in Goblin: Macbeth, Spontaneous Theatre at the Citadel. Photo supplied

•The cast of Goblin: Macbeth, a joint creation by Rebecca Northan and Bruce Horak of Spontaneous Theatre, are goblins curious about humanity, its weird theatrical practices, and its star playwright who includes witches, ghosts, and fairies in his plays. It opens Thursday in the the Citadel’s Highwire Series in the Rice Theatre and runs through Feb. 2. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.  Have you seen the 12thnight.ca PREVIEW with Northan?  

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Fair is foul and foul is fair. Goblin: Macbeth comes to the Citadel Highwire Series

Posted on January 11, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Goblin: Macbeth, Spontaneous Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I’d only ever say this in Edmonton,” declares the amused voice on the phone. “Blame Mark Meer!”

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If that Edmonton actor/improv star with the encyclopedic knowledge of action figures, fantasy lore and wizardly disguises, immersive games (and more) had never shown Rebecca Northan shots of silicon goblin masks created by the specialty company Composite Effects — who did all the background masks for Game of Thrones among other imaginative ventures — we might not be seeing the (very) original version of Macbeth, acted by goblins, that opens Thursday in the Citadel’s Rice Theatre.

The moment she caught sight of the fateful silicon masks Northan was inspired: “Oh, those masks could do Shakespeare!” She showed the pictures to Bruce Horak, her fellow improviser and Spontaneous Theatre creative partner. “Don’t you think they’d do Shakespeare? ” Horak’s instant response: “Well, obviously.”

A play was born in the thought —  a production that that’s about to add an engagement in the Citadel’s Hotwire Series to hot-ticket held-over runs in Vancouver (Bard on the Beach), Toronto (Tarragon), Stratford, and Calgary (Vertigo Theatre).

Three curious goblins, who’ve stumbled on the Complete Works of Shakespeare, decide to try theatre, that weird and wonderful human pursuit, by doing the bloodiest play they can find in the canon of humanity’s star playwright. There’s an experimental artistic hook for Northan and Horak, too. “As soon as you say you’re gonna do Hamlet, Richard III, or Macbeth, everyone asks who’s playing the lead character. They want to pre-judge the performance…. Well, what if you didn’t know who was playing the lead?”

“Maybe you would just listen to the text in a whole new way if the spotlight was taken off the real-life persona of the artist, allowing them total freedom to disappear, and sending people back to the play.  And I think Goblin: Macbeth does that.”

Macbeth isn’t Spontaneous Theatre’s first rendezvous with the Bard. In Undiscovered Shakespeare, slated for a Stratford Festival run until the world’s fateful meet-up with COVID in 2020, Northan and Horak solicited a personal story from an audience member, and improvised the play, all in iambic pentameter, that Will somehow didn’t get around to writing.

Kragva, Moog and Wug in Goblin: Macbeth, Spontaneous Theatre at the Citadel. Photo supplied

Beyond the gore and the dark allure of a Shakespeare play where three witches get memorable stage time, and arguably call the shots, why Macbeth, of all the plays in the canon? “Originally a Goblin: Hamlet was floating in our minds,” says Northan, last in Edmonton with Undercover, an “improvised crime” detective thriller at the Citadel in 2018. But then, fate did one of its showbiz interventions. At the last-minute The Shakespeare Company in Calgary lost a two-hander Macbeth to COVID. And Spontaneous Theatre spontaneously stepped up to this theatrical emergency, “the bonus being that over the years Bruce and I have actually worked on Mackers multiple times.”

Northan remembers the breathless scramble to opening night that followed. The price tag for three Composite Effects masks was $3,000 Canadian; “do we have that? no we don’t, so what do we do?” Enter Spontaneous Theatre’s anonymous super-fan, who bought the masks. By the time these were fashioned by the Louisiana-based company, the time line was crazily foreshortened. In an apotheosis of adrenalized spontaneity, Northan and Horak, with Ellis Lalonde (the musician of the piece), put it together in eight days, Zooming in from Montreal, Calgary and the U.S. “We had not done a full run with those crazy masks on till we had our first audience,” says Northan, still amazed at the memory. “I turned to Bruce just before we stepped onstage and said ‘are we about to humiliate ourselves?’ He said ‘maybe’.”

Goblin: Macbeth, Spontaneous Theatre. Photo supplied.

You could almost call ‘the Scottish Play’ (as theatre superstition prefers calling it) a recurring theme, full of sound and fury (and fun) for them. “The breadcrumbs of our own careers have really led us to this place,” says Northan cheerfully. There have been “truncated versions” with elementary and junior high school kids in assorted school residencies with Calgary’s Quest Theatre. Northan herself, who’s been based in Stratford for the last six years, has twice directed “comedic versions” of Macbeth with Calgary’s improv company Loose Moose, and in Toronto. And because all three members of the cast are improvisers, “we give ourselves permission to surprise each other onstage every night.”

They’re dealing with a playwright who is particularly elastic-sided and open to off-side inspirations. “The plays are so well-written, the structure is so solid, they can really withstand a lot of jumping up and down and kicking, a lot of re-arranging and cutting, because the bones are so solid.” As its name suggests, Spontaneous Theatre is always in cahoots with their audience. “Always!” says Northan emphatically. In Blind Date, for example, which played the Citadel a dozen years ago, Northan as the red-nosed French clown Mimi has been stood up by her date — and finds another a replacement in the audience, for the entire show. In Legend Has It, an audience volunteer becomes the hero of the story.

“In comparison with other Spontaneous shows where we bring one person up onstage to be the star, Goblin: Macbeth is “audience participation lite,’ as Northan puts it. “You can participate, or not, from your seat as a group.” Audiences at Stratford filled up with blue-collar locals, plus “the young and the drunk,” as the buzz grew during the 2023 run at the festival. At Toronto’s Tarragon this past fall, the entire run sold out and got extended before the first performance. And the staff, ensconced in the office above the theatre, reported that the rock concert screaming of the matinee school audiences was so loud they couldn’t work during performances.

In the world of goblins, there’s no fourth wall, which is to say, there’s no self-contained stage world into which we peer. The goblins know we’re there. “Goblins,” says Northan, “are very much cousins of Mump and Smoot,” those bouffon horror clowns from the planet Ummo. “Both Bruce and I trained with Mike and John,’’ Mump and Smoot’s alter-egos Michael Kennard and John Turner, from time to time at the latter’s Clown Farm. “In the world of mask and clown, we all swim around in the same pond. In that world, pretending there’s a fourth wall is a lie. And goblins can’t lie…. We’re all here in a theatre together: we see you, you see us.”

Wearing a face-fitting silicon mask is, says Northan, “a liberation in itself, not dissimilar to a clown nose … something about obscuring your own face that gives you permission to open other doors in your personality.”

“Goblins don’t really understand theatre as a process,” says the actor/director, a mentee of the great improv guru Keith Johnstone of Theatresports fame. “They’re trying it for the first time. And it’s weird. Sometimes they break out of the text to work things out in the moment.” Northan, Horak and their third cast-mate (and the show’s musician) Ellis Lalonde are all improvisers. It’s one of their artistic tenets, she says, that “we have to be so good at speaking the text we earn the right to break out of it and misbehave. And we have to be able to jump back in at any time with total proficiency.” If this sounds crazy difficult, Northan says it is. “It gives your neurological pathways a real challenge.”

So, how on earth did goblins become Shakespeareans anyhow? “We’ve always tried to avoid you humans,” says Northan of her fellow goblins. “Then we discover Shakespeare, and hey, this guy seems to know a lot about our world — witches, goblins, fairies…. So if he knows that much about us maybe we could learn about you by giving it a shot.”

The goblins seem to have developed a taste for the classics. They’ve already unleashed Goblin: Oedipus at last year’s High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, with dates to come in October at Stratford. “We joke we’re building a goblin empire,” says Northan. “Bruce wants to do a goblin Christmas Carol!”

Meanwhile “we’re having a good time!” says Northan. “None of us of us thought that in our 50s we’d be running around with silicon bags on our heads.” And there’s no such thing as a bad hair day. “It’s great! I never want to show my face onstage again!”

PREVIEW

Goblin: Macbeth

Citadel Highwire Series

Theatre: Spontaneous Theatre

Created by: Rebecca Northan and Bruce Horak, with Ellis Lalonde

Starring: Kragva, Moog, Wug

Where: Citadel Rice Theatre

Running: Jan. 11 to Feb. 2

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

 

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‘A wonder of an actor’: with the death of Julien Arnold, we’ve lost one of our best, and most loved, theatre artists

Posted on January 8, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Julien Arnold as Bob Cratchit, 2018. Photo supplied by Citadel Theatre.

Julien Arnold and Geoffrey Simon Brown, in rehearsal for The Woman In Black, Teatro Live! 2024. Photo by Cassie Duval.

In honour of the late Julien Arnold, I’m re-posting my 12thnight tribute of Nov. 25.  Thursday night at the Citadel (7:30 p.m. in the Maclab Theatre) we celebrate the life of this exceptional theatre artist. If you can’t make it in person, the event will be livestreamed: tinyurl.com/ck7nucxe

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Nov. 25, 2024. We — the ‘we’ across the country — woke up this morning to the most heartbreaking and tragic theatre news.

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The untimely passing of Julien Arnold at 58, felled by a heart attack at the Citadel during Sunday night’s preview performance of A Christmas Carol, robs us of one of our finest, and most beloved, actors. In this year’s production of Edmonton’s seasonal hit Arnold had returned to the dual roles of Jacob Marley and the irresistibly ebullient Christmas party host Mr. Fezziwig, as well as joining the ensemble and the band. 

And the theatre community and its audiences are remembering, in an outpouring of sadness and huge affection, a theatre artist who was intensely committed, expert and easeful in his craft onstage, and thoroughly delightful, kind, and funny offstage. When Arnold’s theatre school classmate Ashley Wright was directing a production of Twelfth Night at the U of A, as he told 12thnight.ca, his note to the student actors in the cast was “just watch Julien….”   

There will be many more “Jules” stories to come, of course; this is just the start — the tip of a rich vein of our collective theatre history where this artist will continue to live. Arnold, after all, brought his charisma and skill to theatre companies and indies of every size and shape. He was a co-founder with his U of A classmates of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival in 1989; we got to see him onstage out in the park, in a huge range of parts. He started his own Atlas Theatre Collective when he returned to the U of A for a master’s degree in directing in 2008.

Julien Arnold and Richard Lee Hsi in Mesa, Atlas Theatre Collective. Photo by Mat Busby.

The range of theatrical real estate between, say, Martin McDonagh’s very black comedy A Skull in Connemara and the giddiness of Spamalot, or The Merchant of Venice and Stewart Lemoine’s real-time cocktail party Cocktails at Pam’s, is, to say the least, vast. All easily within Arnold’s compass. You needed a character to play the guitar, the banjo, the violin … Arnold could do that too.

First, and last, was Teatro La Quindicina. His final mainstage performance, as it turns out, was in Andrew Ritchie’s production of the two-hander goth thriller The Woman in Black that opened the Teatro Live! season in October — as an elderly solicitor, who also plays everyone his younger self meets in a journey into a dark, secret past.

Ruth Alexander and Julien Arnold in Two, Edmonton Fringe 2019. Photo by Mat Simpson

The start of Arnold’s professional career was at Teatro, too. The young actor, who emerged with a BFA in acting from U of A theatre school in 1989, immediately caught the eye of the home company of Stewart Lemoine’s original comedies, and was snapped up as a Teatro star, a leading member of the ensemble — which he remained. In 1990, his first year out of school, he starred in Lemoine’s The Glittering Heart, as a husband who’s taken aback when his wife announces she’s up and moving to Venice to become a famous courtesan.

“He was such a good speaker,” says Lemoine remembering the young Arnold’s unusual dexterity with words, a skill particularly to be cherished in literate, witty comedies with smart characters. “And so versatile. He  spoke with such authority, such a grounded presence onstage. In his delivery he was so connected in his words and thoughts.…”

“He was always super-prepared; his scripts were always in tatters,” says Lemoine. He remembers Arnold hauling out his signed Equity contract, all ragged round the edges, and the amazed stage manger would ask ‘what happened to this’?

Julien Arnold in Once, Citadel Theatre

The Teatro archive is full of memorable Arnold performances in nuanced, often wistful comedies, Shocker’s Delight, Happy Toes, The Ambassador’s Wives. They tested the elastic boundaries of comedy, and Arnold naturally found layers and depths in laughter. The last role Lemoine created specially for Arnold was in The Finest of Strangers in 2018.

Lemoine’s favourite Arnold moment? The final image of Shocker’s Delight, a comedy of three-way collegiate friendship, heartbreak, and resilience, leaves Arnold, alone in a rowboat: “I am at peace, and so I float.” That is a thought to hang onto today.

Troy O’Donnell, Nathan Cuckow, Julien Arnold, John Ullyatt, in The Merchant of Venice, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Lucas Boutilier

Arnold and Shakespeare got along brilliantly, from the moment the Free Will Players took to the stage in the park every summer. I remember his Petruchio, the swaggering suitor of the “shrew,” roaring up to the stage on his motorcycle.

James MacDonald, the first Freewill artistic director (now the artistic director of Western Canada Theatre in Kamloops) says of his close friend, who got married to Punctuate! Theatre managing director Sheiny Satanove last summer, that “he was a wonder of an actor, with the agility to break your heart and have you in stitches within a moment. I loved directing him because he always found the depth in his comedic roles, as easily as he found the humour in the dramatic roles. And he made everyone around him better….”

“He found incredible depth and humour as the Fool in Lear, as Feste in Twelfth Night, and as Petruchio twice! Where he was unafraid to be dislikable and charming at the same time. And he stole the show as the Harpo-inspired Pistol in The Merry Wives of Windsor.”

Julien Arnold as Bottom, archival photos of the dress rehearsal for A Midsummer Nights Dream at the Citadel Theatre, 2012 Photo by Ian Jackson, epic photography.

He was in Shakespeare at the Citadel, too, among many other productions at Edmonton’s largest playhouse. I remember his hilariously lovable comic turn as Bottom, the bossy weaver and over-eager amateur thesp, in the Citadel’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2012. Always, there was heart to Arnold’s comedy; he had great comic chops and timing, certainly, but comedy was never a callow affair with him.

With his warmth and cordiality Arnold was a marvellous, quintessential, Bob Cratchit in the Citadel’s production of A Christmas Carol for the two decades of the Tom Wood adaptation. And he and MacDonald shared the stage when the latter played Scrooge for five Christmases. “I have a million memories, but right now what stands out is the final moment between Scrooge and Cratchit, sharing a Merry Christmas greeting (the day after the fateful visitation by the ghosts). He did it for 20 years with as much truth and honesty as on day 1.” He must be the only Cratchit in history to also play, very against type, Scrooge.

Kate Ryan, Arnold’s Mrs. Cratchit, says “life was fragile and beautiful to him. He lived every moment. Being in A Christmas Carol was such a special part of his life and he loved it fully…. (Just now) I saw a child ride a unicycle past my window on the way to school…. The spirit of Julien lives on in the youth’s love of life. He was like the Peter Pan of Edmonton.”

Brian Dooley, Julien Arnold, Chris Schulz in Alias Godot, Theatre Network 2008. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

During COVID I asked Arnold, and other theatre artists, what roles they’d always wanted to play but never had the chance. His answer, typically Arnold, typically unexpected: Dogberry, the bumbling Keystone clown in Much Ado About Nothing;  the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, the grave digger in Hamlet. Ah,,and Salieri, the much-aggrieved lesser light to Mozart in Amadeus.   

The image that that’s grabbed hold of my memory on this sorrowful day is Arnold’s Bob Cratchit, catching sight of Tiny Tim and Mrs. Cratchit outside the bleak offices of Scrooge and Marley. “Hello, my little cock robin!” he cries. His face lights up in wonder; he sheds before our very eyes the drudgery of his life in the warm of human connection.

Arnold knew everything about that kind of magic. “There is so much Happy to remember,” as Lemoine says. This is just the start of that.

A GoFundMe has been created to support Arnold’s family: https://tinyurl.com/bdehccpn. 

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Intermission’s over, take your seats: Act II of the theatre season is about to begin (prospects to intrigue you).

Posted on January 3, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matckin in Radiant Vermin, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Wait…. There’s more. Act II of the theatre season is about to begin. And rehearsals are underway all over town.

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Goblin: Macbeth, a Spontaneous Theatre Creation, starts previews next week in the Citadel’s Highwire Series. How can you not be fascinated by the prospect on offer of goblins getting their mitts on Shakespeare’s swift and bloody tragedy? The Shadow Theatre production of Bea, a challenging theatrical proposition by the Northern Irish playwright Mick Gordon, is rehearsing at the Varscona. At Northern Light Angry Alan, Penelope Skinner’s a funny and furious solo exploration of men-inist conspiracy thinking and male grievances, opens this month too. (Stay tuned for more 12thnight posts on the above.

And, for your nights out at the theatre,  here are 10 other upcoming shows — among many other possibilities — to be intrigued by.

After The Trojan Women, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo from website.

After The Trojan Women. A new epic by Amena Shehab and Joanna Blundell, inspired by the harrowing Euripides classic, one of the repertoire’s greatest explorations of the aftermath and inter-generational trauma of war. A cross-cultural chorus of women — modern Syrians and the ancient women of Troy ‚ find themselves on the shores of the Mediterranean on the Turkish coast, the point of departure then and now for other worlds and other lives. The Common Ground Arts production — a cast of nine (!) directed by Liz Hobbs — runs Jan. 31 to Feb. 8 at the Backstage Theatre. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

playwright Kole Durnford makes his Workshop West debut with Horseplay. Photo supplied.

Horseplay. The theatrical premise of this new play by newcomer Kole Durnford, a Métis actor/playwright from Stony Plain, is one of the season’s most intriguing. We meet a horse and his jockey: Horse and Jacques are as close as brothers, their lives intertwined. The pressurizing news the Horse will be sold unless they win their next race, is a test of their bond of love and friendship in a harsh world. Horseplay premieres at Workshop West, the season finale May 14 to June 1, in a Heather Inglis production. Casting announcement awaits. Tickets: workshopwest.org.

Jupiter. Any new play by two-time Governor General’s Award-winner Colleen Murphy is a bona fide Canadian  theatre event. Commissioned by Theatre Network where Murphy has a distinguished history, Jupiter, “a full-bodied family drama with a beautiful dog” as billed, rolls in three different time periods, 10 years apart. It takes us into the heart (and living room) of a multi-generational working-class family with dark secrets. Bradley Moss’s production, with a cast of seven and a dog, runs at the Roxy, the mainstage 50th anniversary season finale, April 1 to 20. The only actor announced so far is Monk, a handsome golden retriever. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.

An Oak Tree. Theatre Yes takes on this 2004 two-hander by the Brit playwright Tim Crouch, in which only half the cast will ever have seen the script before. There’s theatrical magic in the power of suggestion built into the premise: a stage hypnotist has accidentally killed a girl in his car. And the grief-stricken father, played by an actor who hasn’t seen the show, is the hypnotist’s subject. I saw An Oak Tree at the Edinburgh Fringe, with the playwright as the hypnotist, and it’s fascinating. The Theatre Yes production, directed by Ruth Alexander and starring Max Rubin with a different Edmonton actor every night, runs for eight performances at the Aviary (9314 111 Ave.), Feb. 5 to 12.  (In June Theatre Yes will also be bringing plays to you, at your place, a trio of new ones that you order online, in The Doorstep Plays). Tickets: theatreyes.com.

Alphabet Line. This new play by (and produced by) AJ Hrooshkin, the winner of this year’s Westbury Theatre Award, is prairie through and through. It’s set in Yonker, Sask. in the late 1940s, where a queer farm kid is reaching out from the isolation that all of that implies. It premieres in the Edmonton Fringe Theatre season April 22 to May 3. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

Radiant Vermin. If you ever doubted that renos are hell and real estate acquisition brings out the monster within … actually that’s no one. Anyhow, from Northern Light Theatre comes here’s a boldly dark satire by the controversial Brit playwright Philip Ridley. An heir to the grand tradition of Faustian bargains, it asks the question with reverb: how far would you go to get what you want? The season’s hottest newcomers, Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk, star as a couple with a dream home in sight, along with Edmonton fave Holly Turner as the Mephistophelean real estate agent. Trevor Schmidt’s production runs April 18 to May 3 at the Studio Theatre in the Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave. Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com.

Dance Nation, SkirtsAfire Festival 2025. Website image.

Dance Nation. The SkirtsAfire Festival 2025 mainstage production is a Pulitzer-nominated dance/theatre amalgam by the American writer Claire Barron. It takes us into the fiercely competitive dance world of 13-year-old girls, growing up on the momentous threshold between childhood and adolescence. And, perhaps most intriguingly, it calls on an intergenerational all-ages cast of adult women actors to be pre-teen girls. The cast of nine, directed by SkirtsAfire’s new artistic producer Amanda Goldberg, includes Sydney Williams, Kristin Padayas, Kijo Gatama, Kristi Hansen, Linda Grass, Kristin Johnston,  Veenu Sandhu, Jesse Drweiga, with Troy O’Donnell as dance teacher Pat. It runs March 6 to 16 at the Gateway Theatre (8529 Gateway Blvd). Tickets: skirtsafire.com.

The Noon Witch, Teatro Live! Photo supplied.

The Noon Witch. With this 1995 Stewart Lemoine comedy, set in 1920s Budapest, Teatro Live! revives one of the first plays the company staged at the Varscona. And it’s a gem of eccentricity, inspired by an oddball Hungarian legend. The title character is a supernatural creature who appears at mid-day, and lures men to a watery death by plying them with rich fatty snacks so that they sink. The original production of 30 years ago featured then-newcomers Jeff Haslam and Davina Stewart. The revival, directed by the playwright, features a new generation of theatre artists (Ethan Lang, Aidan Laudersmith, Nida Vanderham, and Eli Yaschuk, with Michelle Diaz). No word yet on the opening night goodies. It runs Feb. 21 to March 9 at the Varscona in a season that also includes the 2001 Lemoine screwball comedy On The Banks of the Nut, set in the Wisconsin hinterland of the 1950s and involving the music of Mahler. Tickets: teatrolive.com.

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

The Full Monty. The heartwarming 2000 Broadway musical, an underdog triumph classic based on the sleeper 1997 hit film, is part of the Mayfield Dinner Theatre’s 50th anniversary season. It re-locates its unemployed steelworker characters up against it from the north of England to rust-belt Buffalo. Inspired by their wives’ girls-night-out at a Chippendale show, they light on a bright (unclothed) antidote to their lost lives. Yup, they form a strip act. The clever catchy score is by David Yazbek (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Band’s Visit); the book is by the star American playwright Terrence McNally. Directed by the Mayfield’s new artistic director Kate Ryan, the production (16 actors plus live band) runs Feb. 4 to March 30 — with, as the theatre puts it, “the most anticipated closing number of the season.” Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the 70s musical. You have to be intrigued by the Citadel’s playful, not to say polyamorous, relationship with Shakespeare this season. Goblin: Macbeth, a Spontaneous Theatre Creation (see above), arrives in the Rice Theatre this month. And inspired in part by the multiple cross-country/ cross-border successes of Daryl Cloran’s As You Like It, a rom-com partnership brokered between Will and the Beatles, the Citadel is premiering an original glam-rock era version of Shakespeare’s most popular comedy. It’s devised and directed by Cloran, with script-adaptation partner Kayvan Khoshkam from Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan. And you may well hallucinate  Puck channelled through Bowie, and Bottom and his stagestruck artisan pals as a struggling rock band. Finally, the BeeGees make their long-delayed Shakespeare debut. It runs Feb. 22 to March 23. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.

Madison Mosley and Justin Collette in Beetlejuice the Musical, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy

•There are big Broadway musicals this season, too (you know you love them). Beetlejuice is at the Jube Jan. 14 to 19, courtesy of Broadway across Canada. And Disney’s mighty The Lion King returns under the same flag in that same venue July 9 to 27. Tickets: ticketmaster.ca. Shrek is at the Orange Hub March 5 to 9, in a NUOVA Vocal Arts production. Tickets: showpass.com. Grindstone’s Byron Martin directs a MacEwan Theatre Arts production of The Prom March 26 to 30 at the Triffo Theatre. Tickets: tickets.macewan.ca.d

•Amongst the offerings at Edmonton’s theatre schools, always worth checking out, are two fascinating and unusual prospects. In the Studio Theatre 75th anniversary season at the U of A, Jan Selman directs the challenging DYI [Blank] by the English writer Alice Birch. Of its 100 scenes and vignettes, which take us into the world of women in the criminal justice system, the director makes a mix-and-match selection. Tickets: showpass.com. At MacEwan University Jim Guedo directs the innovative 2016 indie rock/ electropop/ folk musical Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812, with its story lifted from a 70-page segment of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It runs Feb. 12 to 16 in the Tim Ryan Theatre Lab. Tickets: tickets.macewan.ca.

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2024: remembering the year in Edmonton theatre, part 2

Posted on December 23, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis in The Spinsters, Small Matters Productions. Photo by Ian Walker.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Joel Schaefer in The Play That Goes Wrong, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

2024 (part 2). Here’s a small assortment of highlights — performances, moments, scenes, ideas — in the year of live theatre in Edmonton. But first, the year’s saddest news: as the current 2024-2025 season began, the loss of two much-loved artists, close to the collective heart of Edmonton theatre.

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The death at 87 of Jim DeFelice, actor/ director/ playwright and screenwriter/ theatre founder/ teacher/ community mentor leaves us without a community-builder and -connector with an encyclopedic knowledge of theatre, and the generosity to share it. The death of Julien Arnold, at 58, during a preview performance of this year’s edition of the Citadel’s A Christmas Carol, has taken from us, in a tragic way, not only a superb actor, but an exemplary artist whose expertise and passionate commitment onstage was matched by his open-heartedness and collaborative kindnesses with younger artists.

Belinda Cornish and Josh Meredith in Private Lives, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Performances that linger in the mind:

•Belinda Cornish, pitch-perfect as the tart-tongued Amanda in Teatro Live!’s production of Private Lives, directed by Max Rubin.

•Ruth Alexander. An outstandingly funny and sinister performance as one of a vaudevillian pair of Keystone Cops (the one with literary ambitions of her own) in the Theatre Yes production of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman. She located the piece so playfully and  disturbingly on the axis of horror and comedy.

•Farren Timoteo. No one who saw The Three Musketeers at the Citadel will be able to forget the sight of Timoteo in inflatable brocade bloomers as King Louis (designer: Cory Sincennes, dance steps by Anna Kuman). The production’s single funniest performance.

•Christopher Ryan Grant, compellingly intense and dimensional as Johnny Cash in The Ballad of Johnny and June, a La Jolla Playhouse production of the new Des McAnuff/ Robert Cary musical that arrived at the Citadel for a tune-up en route to New York and London.

Oscar Derkx and Beth Graham in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

•Beth Graham in The Oculist’s Holiday at Teatro Live!, in a nuanced, smart performance as a woman who’s not used to having her clear vision and habitual self-possession be blurred, so to speak, by romantic attraction.

•Ronnie Burkett as all the characters in Wonderful Joe, a stunningly memorable play about life in a multi-cultural city like Toronto or Edmonton.   

Julien Arnold and Geoffrey Simon Brown, in rehearsal for The Woman In Black, Teatro Live! Photo by Cassie Duval.

•Julien Arnold in The Woman in Black at Teatro Live!, as an elderly solicitor with a dark secret, who then unleashes, with great precision and a prodigious store of accents, everyone his younger self meets on a fateful trip to the eerie north of England.

•Lindsey Angell as Blanche, trapped between a world that’s gone forever and a new one that has no place for softness, in the Citadel’s A Streetcar Named Desire.

Glenn Nelson, Reed McColm in The Drawer
Boy, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

•Reed McColm and Glenn Nelson in Shadow Theatre’s The Drawer Boy, one of the signature pieces of the Canadian repertoire, as elderly bachelor farmers and friends forever.

•Andrew MacDonald-Smith, maximum dexterous hilarity in performances in The Play That Goes Wrong at the Citadel, and Pith! at Teatro Live! In the former, as the stage-struck brother of the corpse who won’t stay put; in the latter, as a vagabond seaman populating an exotic adventure for a gloom-laden recluse.

Larissah Lashley, Hayley Moorhouse, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie in Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

All together now (ensemble chemistry):

•Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Mel Bahniuk, and Noori Gill as sisters in Mermaid Legs at SkirtsAfire, whose lives are upended over and over by the erratic behaviour of one of them.

•Hayley Moorhouse, Meegan Sweet, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffman and Dana Wylie as nurses in a World War I convalescent hospital in France. Funny and traumatized, struggling to regain their footing in a shattered world in Stephen Massicotte’s Stars On Her Shoulders at Workshop West.

•In Robot Girls at Shadow Theatre, the girls of the title: Larissah Lashley, Hayley Moorhouse, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie.

Wonderful Joe, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes at Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Moments to savour:

•Smoot picking up a skull, irresistibly drawn to play Hamlet in Mump and Smoot in Exit.

•The magical scene, exquisitely acted by the marionettes, between old Joe and a sulky skeptical teenage girl on a park bench in Ronnie Burkett’s Wonderful Joe. 

•In Robot Girls, the very funny scene where the science club girls discuss the school production of The Crucible. “You mean the witches are the bad guys?” Vanessa (Jayce McKenzie) can’t believe it.

•In The Play That Goes Wrong, Andrew MacDonald-Smith’s lunatic,  remarkably acrobatic tango with a telephone cord, so the show can go on.     

In another memorable year for theatre design, here’s a small sampling of highlights:

•Design concept of the year by Adam Dickson and Ian Walker: the dresses of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters in The Spinsters (a Small Matters production at Edmonton Fringe Theatre), in which they spin, glide across the stage, and twirl like figures in a music box.

The Adventure of Young Turtle, So.Glad Arts at Expanse Festival 2024. Photo supplied.

•The award for cheap-theatre hot-glue ingenuity goes to S.E. Grummett’s ‘queer puppet musical for kids’, The Adventure of Young Turtle from So.Glad Arts at the Expanse Festival. With the exception of Young Turtle, the characters they meet in an undersea adventure are constructed entirely of … garbage: plastic cutlery, throw-away food containers, empty juice bottles, rubber gloves, scrubbies, a derelict umbrella.

•The award for playful big-budget ingenuity goes to Beyata Hackborn. The set for The Play That Goes Wrong at the Citadel is a tangible answer to that comedy’s built-in question “what could possibly go wrong?” A two-level faux-gothic gem of theatre engineering made to be dismantled and reassembled onstage. The star of the show.

•Even Gilchrist’s hanging caged lighting grid for Brick Shithouse.

•Tori Morrison’s unnerving sound, both “recorded” as the characters marvel and live for the thriller The Woman in Black at Teatro Live!, a human whisper, a whoosh of wind, a half-remembered shriek … all at various imaginary distances that made you know, disturbingly, that the room was occupied. T. Erin Gruber’s lighting had the same effect.

Sydney Williams and Julia van Dam in Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Briane Jang, BB Collective Photography

•Larissa Poho’s gorgeously weird, colour-drenched lighting for Monstress at Northern Light.

•Erik Richards’s bone-chilling sound for the interlocking stories of The Pillowman at Theatre Yes.

•Greg Morrison’s superb original score for Mump and Smoot in Exit, at Theatre Network, an evocation, through danse macabre violin riffs and jagged dissonances of the arrival of the pair in the mysterious land beyond the grave.

•Jason Kodie’s soundscore for Trout Stanley at L’UniThéâtre, a captivating mixture of romantic motifs and rock that nailed (without impaling) the kookiness of a play that’s part rom-com, part-murder mystery, part-existential fantasia.

•Brian Bast’s in-the-round design, with Matt Schuurman’s whirling projections, for Dead Letter at Workshop West, an audacious choice for a murder mystery that depends on what’s hidden.

Break out the new:

New artistic directors: (a) the Mayfield Dinner Theatre has a new artistic director: Kate Ryan of the enterprising indie company Plain Jane Theatre, an expert in musical theatre and the directing thereof.  (b) the SkirtsAFire Festival has a new artistic producer, Amanda Goldberg, following the departure of co-founder and artistic director Annette Loiselle after a decade.   

A new festival: the first edition of Ribbon Rouge Foundation’s new Jabulani Festival, named for the Zulu word for “celebrate” and designed to do just that for Edmonton’s African, Caribbean, and Black Albertan culture, happened at Theatre Network. It even came with a new play Ogboingba Tries To Change Her Fate, the work of collaborators from seven cultures. And the joint was packed.

Hannah Wigglesworth and Julia van Dam in The Maids, Putrid Brat. Photo by Kyle Tobiasson and PoppyRose Media

A new indie company: Putrid Brat is named from a line in their debut production, Jean Genet’s 77-year-old play The Maids. Two highly watchable U of A theatre school grads, Hannah Wigglesworth and Julia van Dam, starred in the David Kennedy production.

New venues: the Pendennis Building downtown, a Theatre Yes discovery; the Orange Hub, where Grindstone Theatre has launched a mainstage season of musicals (currently Die Harsh: The Christmas Musical is running there).

New stars. Keep your eye on…

•Garrett C. Smith. His magnetic performance as the title character in Neil Grahn’s The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow at Shadow Theatre, brought to life a remarkable real-life character — a star Indigenous Canadian warrior turned activist when he returned from World War I and found he couldn’t even vote.

Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk in Sunday In The Park With George, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Photo by Lindsey Tran, @understudystudio_. Set design Ross Nichol, costume design Deanna Finnman, lighting design Travis Hatt, video design Matt Schuurman

•Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matkin. As the celebrated pointillist painter Georges Seurat and his model/muse Dot in Sondheim’s extraordinarily challenging musical Sunday In The Park With George, in Jim Guedo’s MacEwan University production.

•Will Brisbin. Charismatic as the disaffected teenager in On Golden Pond at the Mayfield. He held his own with such seasoned pros as Lora Brovold, Glenn Nelson, Maralyn Ryan, Collin Doyle.

•Sydney Williams. We’ve seen her onstage before, in Tiny Beautiful Things and Conni Massing’s Fresh Hell. In Trevor Schmidt’s Goth thriller Monstress at Northern Light, Williams commanded the stage as a female scientist, à la Dr. Frankenstein, whose relationship with the dead girl she’s brought back to life takes on disturbing questions about female drive and ambition.

Bold experiment of the year: Workshop West became only the second professional theatre in the country to make every ticket to every show in their season pay-what-you-will. In this they take the risk that removing any financial barrier to going to the theatre will pay off in audience and sponsorship expansion. Artistic director Heather Inglis reports that many people are paying the “suggested” ticket price, some higher.

Andrew Ritchie in Cycle, Thou Art Here Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson

Wall, what fourth wall? Here are two of the year’s boldest experiments in audience participation. (a) In This Is The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear,  at Workshop West Theatre for a short run last January, playwright David Gagnon Walker Cycle invited us to negotiate the dismaying darkness of the world by telling a story —  the rise and fall of an imaginary civilization — together, out loud. Seven audience volunteers sat at tables, with scripts. The rest of us joined in (or not) as a sort of Greek chorus. (b) In Thou Art Here’s Cycle, creator and star Andrew Ritchie, who evidently has nerves of steel since he rides his bike everywhere in every season, performed atop a bicycle, accompanied by a six-member chorus of cyclists from the audience.

‘Multi-disciplinary’ show of the year: Mermaid Legs at SkirtsAfire, a “surreal theatre dance fantasia’ for three actors and four dancers, was a theatrical exploration of mental illness and its ripple effect on three sisters. A creative collaboration of playwright Beth Graham, director Annette Loiselle, choreographer Ainsley Hillyard, and designers Narda McCarroll (set), Whittyn Jason (lighting), Aaron Macri and Binaifer Kapadia (sound and composition), Rebecca Cypher (costumes).

Runner-up: Anthem of Life, Tololwa Mollel’s stage adaptation of Mazisi Kunene’s 300-page Zulu epic poem: gods, humans, animals, an entire creation mythology and cosmology came to life at Theatre Prospero in dance, chanting, drumming, songs. And that was only part 1 of a trilogy.

Have you checked out 12thnight’s 2024: the year in Edmonton theatre, part 1: highlight productions. It’s here.

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2024: the year in Edmonton theatre, part 1

Posted on December 20, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Joe and Mister in Wonderful Joe, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionette. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In a chaotic, incoherent year in the world, live theatre, which has itself been under every kind of duress in 2024, stepped up to offer us other perspectives, other visions, characters on personal quests for meaning, accountability, forward motion and change — ah, and happiness. Here are 10 highlight productions (in no particular order) in Edmonton theatre that made me appreciate theatre’s great gift of offering the world through other lenses. I hope they’ll jump-start your own memory of highlight experiences in the theatre this year. This is Part 1. Stay tuned for Part 2, a selection of memorable performances, moments, experiences in theatre here this nearly-past year.

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Wonderful Joe. This latest from the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, which premiered at Burkett’s home-away-from-home Theatre Network, was a wonder-filled up-close capture of urban life in this country — in all its diversity and cruelty, its absurdity, humour and heartbreak. It takes us to a ‘hood that the homeless, the outliers, the marginalized, the old and the young, mingle, populated by Burkett’s diminutive, magically expressive cast of actors. And the play is a vision of the multi-cultural Canadian city through the eyes of the old fellow Joe out for a last adventure with his aged dog Mister. He can see the human gold in a tarnished world; he has the gift of belief. A beautiful play: a miniaturized world, yes, but just as large as life. Read the full 12thnight review here, and an interview with the playwright/ actor/ designer/ director/ marionettiste here.

Larissah Lashley, Hayley Moorhouse, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie in Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Robot Girls. Fresh and funny, glinting with insights into the tumultuous lives of junior high girls, Trevor Schmidt’s sharp-eyed comedy, which premiered at Shadow Theatre, unfolded in weekly meeting of girls whose little act of initial defiance is joining a science club to build a robot for a competition. Friendships get built and strain at the seams, under the pressures of the world. Jointly directed by John Hudson and Lana Michelle Hughes, the Shadow production boasted some of the best ensemble chemistry of the season, from Larissa Lashley, Hayley Moorhouse, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie. Have a peek at a 12thnight interview with McKenzie here. The full 12thnight review is here.

Brick Shithouse, fenceless theatre, Found Festival 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang

Brick Shithouse. Ashleigh Hicks’s gut punch of a play, which premiered at the 2024 Found Festival, gave us seven stalled 20-something characters, simmering with the escalating frustration of unusable college degrees, who are working crap jobs and still living with their parents to save rent. They can’t afford the ‘real’ world, so they look to the online universe, live-streaming their fight club for an infinitely expandable, invisible (and, they think, anonymous) audience. Everything in Sarah J. Culkin’s Fenceless Theatre production, at the Tessarae, took a bone-rattling pummelling, including the characters’ moral boundaries, as the ante inevitably got raised. Just writing this makes my ribs hurt. Read the 12thnight review here. And there’s a 12thnight interview with the playwright here.

Dayna Lea Hoffman (aloft) in Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire Festival. Design by Narda McCarroll (set), Whittyn Jason (lighting) and Rebecca Cypher (costumes). Photo by Brianne Jang.

Mermaid Legs. The year’s best title belongs to Beth Graham’s new “surreal theatre dance fantasia,” which premiered at the 2024 SkirtsAfire Festival. It conjures theatrically the strange, unpredictable existential instability — the terrain between the fathomless sea and the risky dry land — that the great mystery of mental illness engenders within a trio of sisters. When Billy (the excellent Dayna Lea Hoffman) disappears, the lives of her sisters (Mel Bahniuk and Noori Gill) are thrown into chaos. Annette Loiselle’s production for three actors and four dancers, her last at the helm of SkirtsAfire, counted as meaningfully multi-disciplinary, a theatrical marriage of words, images, and sounds. To be precise, a collaboration between Graham’s text, Ainsley Hillyard’s choreography, Narda McCarroll’s dramatically expressive set, Whittyn Jason’s lighting, Binaifer Kapadia’s original music score, Aaron Macri’s sound, and Rebecca Cypher’s costumes. Read the full 12thnight review here. And a behind-the-scenes interview with director Loiselle here.

John Turner (Smoot) and Michael Kennard (Mump) are back, in Mump and Smoot in Exit, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Mump and Smoot in Exit. The return of Canada’s celebrated “clowns of horror,” existentialists from the planet Ummo (Michael Kennard and John Turner), after a 10-year absence was a cause for celebration. In their new comedy, which premiered at Theatre Network in a Karen Hines production, Mump and Smoot, resuming their familiar fraught relationship as the imperious one and the resentfully compliant and impulsive one, arrived through the audience into a stage landscape dominated by bones, skulls, skeletons. And it dawned on them, and us, where they were. The big questions — memory and time, good and evil, life and death, religion — are part of this dark/ darker/ darkest comedy. Don’t ask what they’re chowing down on in the dinner scene. O grave, where is thy sting? Check out the 12thnight review, and a preview interview with Mump and Smoot’s non-Ummonion alter-egos and director Karen Hines here.

Meegan Sweet and Gabby Bernard in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Stars on Her Shoulders. Stephen Massicotte’s beautiful, riveting new World War I play, which premiered at Workshop West in a Heather Inglis production, took us to a convalescent hospital in France. The five characters, all women, are nurses, and in 1918 they’re poised on the threshold between the 19th century view of women’s roles and a brave new world of equality between the sexes. Two of them, Canadians, are each in their way, “odd women,” out of step with the view of women as on a husband-finding quest. Both the script and the production, with its terrific ensemble cast — Hayley Moorhouse, Meegan Sweet, Dana Wylie, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffmann — individualize the characters without forcing the issue, en route to thoughts about how to be happy in a completely shattered, and shattering, world. It hit hard, close to home, in a funny and heartbreaking way. The 12thnight review is here, and a preview interview with Massicotte here.

Kristin Johnston, Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Jana O’Connor in Pith!, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Pith! Stewart Lemoine’s 1997 love letter to theatre, and the transforming power of the imagination, got a crack revival at Teatro Live!, directed by the playwright. Three actors, four chairs, a rug and a phonograph are the starting point for an exotic bare-stage adventure, brazenly instigated by a breezy and resourceful vagabond seaman (Andrew MacDonald-Smith) on behalf of a woman imprisoned by grief and faint hope (Kristin Johnston) and her peppy companion (Jana O’Connor). A signature Teatro piece, with a revival cast that knew exactly how to land the playwright’s graceful and intricate wit. See the 12thnight review here, and a preview interview with O’Connor here.

Lora Brovold in Dead Letter, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Dead Letter. Conni Massing’s cunningly contrived mystery/comedy thriller for three actors (an achievement in itself), intriguingly MC’d by the “detective,” so to speak, is a woman looking for reassurance from the cosmos that the losses, however minor — from missing socks to dead letters — aren’t just random and disconnected. They’re clues in a larger, more meaningful life mystery. Heather Inglis’s perpetual motion staging in the round in a Workshop West premiere production is a challenge to the world’s obstinate lack of transparency. The way the central character weaves in and out of narration and simultaneous action, was another reminder that Massing is a witty comic writer, and that Lora Brovold is one of our most skilled and engaging actors. Read the full 12thnight review, and a preview interview with playwright Massing here.

Brandon Mcpherson, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Ruth Alexander in The Pillowman, Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson

The Pillowman. In a venue we didn’t even know about (the eerie Pendennis Building basement downtown), Theatre Yes revived a queasy, disturbingly playful 2003 Martin McDonagh comedy, a queasy-making storytelling puzzle cum screwball, that turned out, in Max Rubin’s production, to be disconcertingly contemporary. In an interrogation chamber in a totalitarian state, a writer (Dayna Lea Hoffman) is being questioned by a pair of Keystone cops about a series of horrifying child murders that have an uncanny resemblance to the murders in her bedtime stories. The play is an intricate construction of layers of gruesome-ness, with questions that always seem a bit out of comfortable reach. Here’s one: are artists responsible for the effect their imaginative work on audiences? An unsettling experience in a plastic-lined room. Read the 12thnight review, and a preview interview with director Rubin.

Stafford Perry, Heidi Damayo, Lindsey Angell in A Streetcar Named Desire, Citadel/Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price

A Streetcar Named Desire. Daryl Cloran’s atmospheric production, lavishly framed with live music and beautifully lighted (by Bonnie Beecher), brought one of the great American plays about illusion and delusion to Citadel audiences. At the centre, as Blanche DuBois, the memorable figure of the outsider, displaced in time and space to a new and jostling world, and on the lam from the harsh light of reality and her own history, was a substantial performance by Lindsey Angell. She made Blanche’s last stand, with its high price tag on fantasy, into something valiant.  And Sheldon Elter made something crucial of the small role of Mitch, the decent neighbour whose heart is available for the breaking in Blanche’s relentless campaign of charm. The production, staged at an unusual distance upstage, unfolded in a series of beautiful, but long-shot, tableaux. The 12thnight review is here; a 12thnight preview interview with Lindsey Angell is here.

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The fun of not one but two redemption stories. Die Harsh: The Christmas Musical at the Orange Hub, a review

Posted on December 20, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Evan Dowling in Die Harsh The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Nothing says Christmas like a villain redemption story, I think we can all agree. Die Harsh: The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre’s very funny contribution to seasonal cheer, has two.

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And, in this original creation by the Grindstone team of Byron Martin and Simon Abbott (Hot Boy Summer), the two narrative strands are wrapped around each other, in a double spiral that’s bonkers, yup, but will make you laugh out loud with the ingenious way it works.  After a list of warnings (loud noises, fog, violence, “several words in German”) it occurs to you that Die Harsh is actually parodying Die Hard and A Christmas Carol together. At the same time.

So, a quintessential action thriller and the quintessential Dickens ghost story: together at last. And in the kind of detail that makes cognoscenti and ultra-nerds, of both types, laugh. Not only that, Die Harsh is a musical — and one that exudes a playfully irreverent knowledge of musical theatre, crammed with allusions to Sweeney Todd, Les Miz, Annie, The Rocky Horror Show … not to mention assorted pop culture styles, including rap. Who would think of doing this?

Die Harsh, which started three Christmases ago in Grindstone’s tiny comedy theatre and played the Varscona last December, has moved to the big house, the 350-seat Orange Hub mainstage. And though tarted up a bit for a big stage that’s reportedly as wide as the Jube’s, it hasn’t lost a certain sassy low-budget ingenuity that’s built into its comic charm.

Evan Dowling, David Findlay, Mhairi Berg in Die Harsh The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

Camille Paris’s multi-level set is dominated by a centerstage elevator. That’s how Christmas ghosts arrive in L.A. skyscrapers (expect the first when the elevator goes ding). The live three-piece band, led by composer Abbott (a formidable pianist) on keyboards, is perched up top. And when the NYPD cop John McWayne (Evan Dowling), seeking out his estranged wife, Holly (Mhairi Berg), hides in Origami Tower during the corporate Christmas party, he appears in a tin vent. Scott Peters’s lighting, a driver of the thriller action, is visual comedy in itself.

When Hans Schmuber (David Findlay), the leader of an international gang of German terrorists  — they take hostages on Christmas Eve; he’s that bad — goes on a tour of his current evil-ness with the rapping Ghost of Christmas Present (Hal Wesley Rogers), it’s in a cardboard limo. The Abbott song Let’s Take A Ride is a highlight.

As for the Dickens, if you don’t know even the gist of the Christmas Carol story — the flinty Ebenezer, the ghostly interventionists, Tiny Tim, etc. — well, I just don’t know what to do with you. Are there no holiday productions? Are there no night schools? If you do — and I know you do — there’s the fun of recognizing the young Schmuber (Rain Matkin), the hardening of his moral arteries, the loss of his one true love, the origins of his hatred of Christmas.

Abbott has devised a score that ripples with references, from the opening number, a perfect James Bond pastiche with a German accent (“he just von’t … die harsh”). There are power ballads at the points in the musical where power ballads always happen in musicals. McWayne and Holly have one, in an amusing near-reconciliation scene. There are jaunty patter songs, like the Cole Porter-esque Another Year Another Heist by Schmuber’s much put-upon henchmen, who definitely don’t get overtime on stats. Schmuber himself leads a big Dr. Frank-N-Furter-esque song-and-dance number, “ich bin ein sexy German terrorist.” I found the sound a bit too cranked and shouty to hear the lyrics (by Martin and Abbott) at times — too bad since they’re pretty funny.

Lanky Findlay, an expert dancer and singer, turns in an ace performance. The rest of Sarah Dowling’s very busy go-for-the-gusto six-member cast change characters, costume pieces, and a serial assortment of kooky wigs (designer: Beverly Destroys) in a non-stop scramble. The pace is lunatic.

Mhairi Berg and Evan Dowling in Die Harsh The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

Along with the rest of the audience, I loved the big ballet number between McWayne and Holly, with the latter en pointe as a dying swan. Dowling, who has unerring deadpan comic timing as McWayne (along with an accent that’s a cross between New Yaaahk and Elmer Fudd), is consistently funny. And Berg, whose command of every sort of musical comedy trope is on the money, brings down the house when she joins Mark Sinongco in an FBI tap number (you know, as per FBI protocol). Tap makes every show more festive (holiday axiom #10).

“It doesn’t weally feel like Kwismuss,” laments McWayne by way of understatement as bodies pile up and the thriller plot advances. And then, by golly, it weally does

REVIEW

Die Harsh: A Christmas Musical

Theatre: Grindstone

Created by: Byron Martin and Simon Abbott

Directed by: Sarah Dowling

Starring: David Findlay, Evan Dowling, Mhairi Berg, Hal Wesley Rogers, Mark Sinongco, Rain Matkin

Where: Orange Hub, 10045 156 St.

Running: through Dec. 29

Tickets: grindstonetheatre.ca 

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A holiday show update! There’s more, if you get your act together

Posted on December 18, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Davina Stewart, Dana Andersen, Andrea House, Paul Morgan Donald in It’s A Wonderful Christmas Carol, at the Varscona. Photo by Ryan Parker.

White Christmas, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Release your inner elf, part two. An update! More holiday shows are opening this week. You’ve got a big choice on Edmonton stages, and your time, like Scrooge’s, is running low.

•It’s A Wonderful Christmas Carol returns for the holiday season Sunday (through the 24th), and for the first time to the stage of the Varscona Theatre, for three performances.  This light-hearted live radio play/panto mash-up — “hilarious, haunting, sometimes superfluously silly” as billed — is a retelling of Dickens’ celebrated take of last-minute ghostly intervention and redemption. And the production stars Edmonton faves Dana Andersen, Andrea House, Paul Morgan Donald, and Davina Stewart. Tickets: varsconatheatre.com.

•At the Capitol Theatre, Fort Edmonton, Dec. 19 to 23 and 27 to 29 is a festive holiday musical, 70 years old — with a great score by Irving Berlin. White Christmas and its celebrated title song come to the vintage stage at the Fort in a NUOVA Vocal Arts production. Tickets: eventbrite.ca.

Little Dickens, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, Theatre Network. Photo supplied.

•The great Canadian theatre artist Ronnie Burkett has brought the magic of his company of marionette actors — and the virtuosity that makes them live and breathe — to Theatre Network. In Little Dickens the cast of the Daisy Theatre, a marionette cabaret with a recurring ensemble of 56 (!) exquisitely crafted characters dressed to the nines, does their own version of A Christmas Carol. It’s a clever, raucous, playfully bawdy affair, semi-improvised by the playwright/ actor/marionettiste/  director/ designer (with assistance from a few game volunteers from the audience). Little Dickens is, quite simply, a riot and a spirit-raiser. And you should on no account miss it. It runs through Sunday. Dec. 22. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.

Have a peek at the 12thnight REVIEW here (and an interview with the perpetrator here).

The cast of a Christmas Carol, 2023, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

•At the Citadel, where the tradition of A Christmas Carol on the mainstage is 25 years strong, Lianna Makuch’s lavish production of the repertoire’s most famous ghost story continues through Dec. 24. The adaptation by playwright David van Belle, set in 1949, finds the frozen-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge (John Ullyatt) as the proprietor of Marley’s department store, implacably rooted to the bottom line. The entire run is dedicated to Julien Arnold, whose unexpected death during a preview performance of the show, while in the role of the joyful Christmas party host Mr. Fezziwig, has shocked and saddened the valiant director and cast of the production. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.

The Blank Who Stole Christmas, Rapid Fire Theatre. Photo supplied.

•Rapid Fire Theatre’s original holiday musical The Blank Who Stole Christmas has returned for a third holly jolly season,. Partly scripted, partly improvised, the production features a different guest villain every performance, who plays a character of their choice, a mystery to the cast of improvisers until they step onstage. By report, the Blanks have included Tiny Tim, which tells you something about the improv expertise of the Rapid Fire cast. There are three versions of the show, calibrated for age, sensibility, and susceptibility to the F-bomb. These details, as well as tickets, are available at rapidfiretheatre.com. Through Dec. 22 at RFT’s Exchange Theatre.

Evan Dowling in Die Harsh The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.

•Returning for a third figgy pudding season is Grindstone Theatre’s festive holiday tradition, Die Harsh the Christmas Musical. This is what happens when the musical-writing team that gave the world Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer and thunderCats — Byron Martin and Simon Abbott — intertwines their favourite Christmas movie Die Hard (really!) to A Christmas Carol. This year it’s at the Orange Hub (10045 156 St.) through Dec. 29. Read all about it in his 12thnight PREVIEW interview with Martin here. Tickets: grindstonetheatre.ca.

Damon Pitcher, Jacob Holloway, Victoria Suen, Amanda Neufeld in Krampus: A New Musical, Straight Edge Theatre at Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

•Ah yes, the festive Yuletide season, a favourite for connoisseurs of family dysfunction. Krampus: A New Musical, by the musical comedy team of Stephen Allred and Seth Gilfillan (Conjoined), cuts through the eggnog. Let’s just say their indie theatre company isn’t called Straight Edge Theatre for nothing. Krampus premiered at the summer Fringe in 2022, which kinda gets at its insurrectionist spirit. The production, enhanced for the mainstage, is part of the Workshop West Playwrights Theatre season at the Gateway Theatre (8529 84 Ave.). It runs through Dec. 22. Tickets: workshopwest.org. Have a peek at the 12thnight REVIEW. And meet the co-creators in this PREVIEW.

Ellie Heath, Caley Suliak, Alyson Dicey in Weekend at Girlies, Girl Brain at Theatre Network. Photo by Brianne Jang, bbcollective photography

•And if sight of falling snow has lost its lustre for you (even more than the sound of Mariah Carey) you can go on holiday, and hang out pool-side at a Mexican all-inclusive, with Girl Brain. Weekend at Girlies is the holiday offering from Edmonton’s favourite female sketch comedy trio, at Theatre Network’s Roxy. No sunscreen required. It runs through Dec. 22. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.  Check out the 12thnight PREVIEW here.

•An intrepid snow-transcendent offering for the festive season, Andrew Ritchie’s Cycle, a Thou Art Here Theatre production, is all about movement, bicycles, the joy of cycling in every season, and what it means to live in a city. It runs through Dec. 22 at Mile Zero Dance, 9931 78 Ave. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca. See the 12thnight REVIEW here.

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A holly jolly “Christmas horror musical” at Workshop West: Krampus, a review

Posted on December 16, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Damon Pitcher, Seth Gilfillan, Victoria Suen in Krampus: A New Musical, Straight Edge Theatre at Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If you’ve cracked your sweet tooth on the hard candied nut of family togetherness, or you’re blinded by the glare from your neighbour’s seasonal light display, there’s gruesome fun waiting for you at Workshop West.

Straight Edge Theatre’s “Christmas horror musical,” that premiered (on purpose) in the middle of the summer at the 2023 Fringe, is back, in the WWPT season. This time Krampus: A New Musical is fancied up, by golly, and expanded into two acts, on a mainstage in the middle of winter.

In Krampus, Straight Edge’s naughty resident musical comedy writers Seth Gilfillan and Stephen Allred, who seem to have an unerring eye for the macabre, don’t have to unwrap the heartwarming Christmas tradition package: sharing, hospitality, family bonding, etc. They see right through it. And they re-gift it, so to speak — but with a twist, and the insight that the heart of the season is the cutthroat spirit of competition.

The wonky angles of C.M. Zuby’s cut-out red-and-green storybook design, an enhancement from the Fringe setup, set the tone. In the opening number of Allred’s grand guignol production, the “perfectly perfect family” assembles in their seasonal finery, an exceptional collection of Christmas sweaters and other festive costume pieces by Trevor Schmidt). They’re an eye-full. And they’re lit melodramatically (the footlight effect) like human puppets by designer Ami Farrow.

Damon Pitcher, Jacob Holloway, Victoria Suen, Amanda Neufeld in Krampus: A New Musical, Straight Edge Theatre at Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

They’re led by their fierce ‘choreographer’, puppet-master, and enforcer Rhonette, aka Mom (“after everything I’ve sacrificed for this family…”). She’s played in stratospherically heightened high style (and high heels) by Amanda Neufeld as the Genghis Khan of the holiday season. You could slice turkey with the edges of her helmet hairdo.

The family one-upmanship is a veritable campaign. There’s more liquor in their ‘nog, they sing. More data on their phones. The Jesus in their Nativity is hotter. Their board games have cash prizes. The lyrics, as with all the songs, are multi-syllabic and clever, and they rhyme unexpectedly, or in cheeky serial fashion: bad, sad, glad.…

Dad is a compliant nerd, captured to a wincing degree by Jacob Holloway, who looks like he’s made of Lego. His parental catechism: “listen to your mother, don’t talk back to your mother.” My favourite line, which made me laugh in the summer of 2023 and made me laugh again last week, is “if your mother says Grandma is a judgmental bitch, Grandma is a judgmental bitch.”

The kids have an amusing sibling jostle to them. Billy (Damon Pitcher) has a fledgling insurrectionist streak; his song Just Lie is an ode to getting out of misdemeanour raps. Tilly (Victoria Suen) is a wide-eyed dimbulb, always a beat or two behind, waiting for a chance to show off her number for the impending Winter Pageant competition. “It’s not my fault I’m so cute.”

She only got second place last year, as Rhonette keeps reminding her. Rehearsal is important if you want to trounce the competition. After all, you don’t want to end up in “bad roles or supporting roles.”

Victoria Suen, Damon Pitcher, Amanda Neufeld, Jacob Holloway and Nicole English in Krampus, Straight Edge Theatre at Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Tilly and Billy’s ex-nanny Nanny Verla (Nicole English), who looks like the hell version of Mary Poppins, arrives unexpectedly, with a spooky mittel-euro accent, and a “dire warning.” There are dark secrets to this perfectly perfect family. Lies! And something sinister is happening on Christmas Eve. That’s not the Amazon Prime guy knocking at the door. And what is that at the window? Will Rhonette have the ultimate Christmas crisis: stains on the carpet?

The expert live musical accompaniment, led and arranged by Michael Clark, is by the three-piece Edmonton Pops Orchestra. This is a show with a French horn joke and an actual French horn. There’s something like opera on acid about the way musical theatre escalates in Krampus. Act II opens with a  recitative of sorts, the kind that’s usually in a foreign language. And I hadn’t remembered the weird, jagged operatic musical escalation late in Act II, Götterdämmerung with ‘nog.

True, there’s a downside to the expansion in length for this new Krampus incarnation. The fun of the inflated acting style in Allred’s production, from its first moments, has a time limit, in truth. And the brevity/impact equation is pushing its luck with macabre clowning in two acts. But it ends just in the nick of time to remain funny. Is this another Christmas redemption story? Ha! Krampus is your personal seasonal antidote to enforced jollity.

REVIEW

Krampus: a new musical

Theatre: Straight Edge Theatre at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Created by: Seth Gilfillan and Stephen Allred (book and music), Michael Clark (orchestrations)

Directed by: Stephen Allred

Starring: Damon Pitcher, Victoria Suen, Amanda Neufeld, Jacob Holloway, Nicole English, Seth Gilfillan

Music by: Edmonton Pops Orchestra

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through Dec. 22

Tickets: workshopwest.org (all tickets pay-what-you-will).

 

 

  

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