Hello! The Book of Mormon rings our doorbell again, at the Jube. A review

Posted on November 20, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Sam McLellan and Diego Enrico in The Book of Mormon, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Hello! They’re back.

There was a time — 14 years ago when The Book of Mormon instantly became the hottest ticket on Broadway — that assorted cultural prophets predicted fearlessly that the puckish lampoon of religion, American exceptionalism, and musical theatre would never play the hinterland.

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Too insubordinate. Too foul-mouthed. Too much fun at the expense of  (omg)… a church. When I first saw it in New York in 2011, the New Yorker sitting next to me laughed so hard she actually fell right out of her seat (which made all of us up there in the balcony laugh even more).

Well, the hit run of the Tony magnet musical comedy continues to this day on Broadway and in the West End. And its eager-beaver Mormon missionary platoon, selling “the secret of eternal life” door to door, is still on the road. Which is, after all, where missionaries go to spread the word.

Sam McLellan and the company of The Book of Mormon, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Julieta Cervantes

And here we are, with the touring production that rang our doorbell again Tuesday night at the Jube. And I’m here to report that even if you can’t get a laugh just from saying the title after all this time, the sight of a cotillion (regiment?) of beaming whitebread missionaries in short-sleeved white shirts with ties and name tags, in formation, is still pretty funny. And when this showbiz brigade breaks into a full-scale musical theatre production number, Turn It Off, a jaunty Broadway ode to staying repressed, and smothering all reasonable doubts and sexual ambiguities — “turn it off, like a light switch, just go click, it’s a cool little Mormon trick “ — it’s downright hilarious.

That’s one of the most appealingly subversive attractions of The Book of Mormon, one that carries the musical into 2024. It launches its shivs in the cheekiest possible way, via the high-spirited conventions of the American musical theatre. Aspirational anthems (“you and me, but mostly me, are going to change the world together!” sings Elder Price), self-empowerment numbers (Man Up), inspirational odes (I Believe), romantic ballads (Baptize Me), the moments when intensity inevitably turns into song-and-dance … all the trappings are there.

The Book of Mormon, as you already know, is the work of the South Park guys Trey Parker and Matt Stone, with their equally irreverent collaborator Robert Lopez of Avenue Q fame. They’re putting a well-placed boot up the butt of white American cultural ignorance and arrogance, Mormonism, and religious literalism by framing all of the above as a classic American musical. Ah, and one crammed with playful allusions — to The Sound of Music, The King and I, The Lion King, and even the telephone scene of Bye Bye Birdie.

Even in this era of growing awareness of colonialism in all its subtle byways (and its overt ones, post-American election), it’s hard to imagine a funnier, more telling, target than the whitest of white missionary choruses claiming “We are Africa!” in a highlight production number. “With the strength of the cheetah, my native voice will ring.”

And what of the Broadway Across Canada production, the first since 2016, that’s arrived on our doorstep? You’ll come to appreciate how well cast it is, in the course of the evening. But the sound mix  on opening night veered distractingly from brassy, forward metallic sheen to the kind of murk where voices fade in and out. Which meant missing some of the fun of the lyrics, which is a shame. The outstandingly inventive, allusive choreography, though (originally by Casey Nicholaw (The Drowsy Chaperone), executed by a nimble ensemble who dig with gusto into the Broadway tradition, never stops being riotous.       

Sam McLellan in The Book of Mormon, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Julieta Cervantes

At the outset, after an amusingly stagey pageant of the 19th century origins of Mormonism, we meet a mismatched pair of Mormon missionaries on assignment in a world they know absolutely nothing about. Elder Price, played with comic earnestness by Sam McLellan, is the uptight, self-important class over-achiever. He is more than a little dismayed to find himself paired, in a two-year mission to Uganda, with the friendless class loser and pop-culture nerd Elder Cunningham. Played in broad comic strokes by Diego Enrico, Elder Cunningham, whose reference bank is Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, has never even heard of Uganda.

They arrive in a village where the population has more pressing matters to attend to — poverty, AIDS, a war lord with an unprintable name and a particular focus on female circumcision — than the seminal biography of Joseph Smith, “the all-American prophet.” And while Elder Price, the born leader, is grappling with his shock (The Lion King “took a lot of poetic licence,” he feels), the needy Elder Cunningham, the born follower, is bonding with the villagers. Ah, and especially the village maiden Nabulungi (sweetly, breathlessly, played by Keke Nesbitt), by means of his predilection for pop-culture narratives.

Diego Enrico in The Book of Mormon, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

It’s a strong cast (even if their singing was undercut by the vagaries of sound on opening night). Craig Franke is very funny as the nearly-closeted Elder McKinley, leader of the local district missionaries. And so is the fierce General with the unprintable name (Dewight Braxton Jr.), enraged and perplexed equally by the American soul-savers.

It’s possible that Elder Price’s “spooky Mormon hell dream” goes on a  little long (though the dancing Starbucks Ventes remain a nice touch). But the villagers’ own original version of the life of Joseph Smith is to be prized.

In response to concerns of Black cast members about the depiction of Africans, the show’s creators tweaked the narrative in 2021, so the satire targeting white Mormonism became sharper, and gave the villagers, especially Nabulungi, a bigger, more knowing and sophisticated, role to play in gaining the upper hand. This boost in agency, with its vindication of storytelling and its zest for the comically outrageous, couldn’t be more timely. It’s a moment in our collective history when cultural complacency and the sense of superiority look more dubious, and ridiculous, than ever. There’s fun to be had in seeing them dismantled.

REVIEW

The Book of Mormon

Broadway Across Canada

Created by: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Robert Lopez

Directed by: Casey Nicholaw and Trey Parker (originally); Jennifer Werner (touring)

Starring: Sam McLellan, Diego Enrico, Keke Nesbitt, Craig Franke, Lamont J. Whitaker, Trevor Dorner, Dewight Braxton Jr.

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca

 

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Big, fun, the craziest show in town: the Mayfield celebrates the big 5-0 with Flashback Fever, a review

Posted on November 18, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Flashback Fever, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s the craziest show in town.

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Flashback Fever: the Mayfield Dinner Theatre is throwing a time-travelling bash onstage in honour of the theatre’s 50th anniversary. It’s big and it’s fun.

Think about the improbability of it all, the Mayfield arriving at the big five-oh, in commercial theatre, in Edmonton. Half a century of shows, distinct entertainment phases, TV celebs in their golden years, the rise of local triple-threats, musical revues containing Elvis or Patsy or Roy or Buddy alongside rom-coms, spoofs, bona fide musicals both Broadway and Off-…. All served up after a buffet dinner (and theme cocktails).

Western Canada’s first dinner theatre hasn’t always been called the Mayfield, to be sure. The owners have changed. So did the name (in 1993); remember Stage West? The theatre caught fire one night in 1987 during a sold-out run of the female Odd Couple (starring Stella Stevens and Sandy Dennis), burned to the ground, got rebuilt. Renos and re-thinks have happened, to the theatre and the programming.

Seth Johnson and Christine Desjardins in Flashback Fever, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Here’s a show to match the story. Flashback Fever, the 25th annual edition of the Mayfield’s perennially popular Christmas show, is a high-speed topsy-turvy segue-free barrage of scenes and moments, songs from Adele or KISS, Madonna or The Proclaimers, comedy riffs, song and-dance production numbers — from productions gone by. Hey, isn’t that Tina Turner (Celeste Catena) singing Proud Mary? Elvis has apparently never really left the building; Matt Cage makes sport with that thought in his version of Suspicious Minds. “We’re caught in a trap,” he sings over and over, shoulder-acting madly, and hunting for a way to end the song.

And Leona Brausen’s costumes, a Mayfield celebration in themselves,  just keep coming.

The operating principle of the show, by mystery team of Will Marks and L.N. Magill, sure isn’t chronology, or theme. Think of it not as a history but a sort of flashback collage. Or psychedelic free-association. Or maybe an explosion in a wig factory  — there are at least 60 along wIth 300-plus outfits in the glorious profusion of Brausen’s design for the eight-person ensemble of singer-dancers of director Van Wilmott’s cast.

Brad Wiebe, Celeste Catena, Jahlen Barnes, Seth Johnson, Matt Cage in Flashback Fever, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The spiralling projections of Matt Shuurman’s clever, consistently amusing video design take us careening topsy-turvy through the half-century at the Mayfield. My companion for the evening kept seeing flashes of vinyl record albums he’d once owned spinning end over end through the space/time continuum.  And Doc Brown (Seth Johnson) and Marty McFly (Christine Desjardins) of Back To The Future fame touch down in the DeLorean here, there, and everywhere, Great Scott!, in the epoch since “the harmonious partnership of theatre and dinner began.”

This homage to the Mayfield at 50 is, thanks to John Dinning’s design, a glowing set of proscenium cubes, stained glass,a and lights (lighting design by Gail Ksionzyk), like Vegas the church of the material world, so to speak,

If there’s a recurring showbiz riff in this kooky show it’s a wink at the “classic” dinner theatre door-slammer farce, with the obligatory pert French maid (Pamela Gordon) with the obligatory bad French accent, and doors that slam for absolutely no reason. And, as someone says, “if in doubt, cue the band.” Which makes total sense at a theatre where the musical values and sound have always had consistently high quality.

If you have a history with Mayfield shows, you’ll get a kick out of spoofy scenes like Family Feud. They remind you of the period when the theatre found its stars again and again in TV alumnae from cancelled small-screen shows: Team M*A*S*H vs Team Three’s  Company and The Jeffersons. In 1987 (a year that will live in infamy since Gretzky got traded), Father Mulcahy prays that Peter Pocklington “chokes on one of his own over-priced hot dogs.” And as for Jamie Farr as Klinger … I’ll leave you to the fun of that.

The Act I closer is “The Time Warp.” The Mayfield production of The Rocky Horror Show ran in the Dancing Shoes Club next door to the theatre in 1987 (post-fire), and then went to the Fringe. In Act II, musicals enter the Mayfield repertoire in a big way: scenes from Cabaret, Chicago (“he had it comin’”), Rock of Ages, Grease. Incidentally, artistic director Wilmott has told 12thnight.ca in the past that the first time he ever entered the Mayfield Theatre, in 1993, Grease was playing, with (Maralyn and Kate Ryan were in the cast).

Brad Wiebe and Matt Cage in Flashback Fever, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The six-member band rise to any style Flashback Fever throws at them (and the show has a short attention span and changes its mind constantly). Buddy Holly emerges from the band late in the show (in the person of Tyler Check), where he’s been playing guitar all along, to rave on. Van Wilmott’s cast is as versatile as the band.  And they throw themselves into Christine Bandelow’s inventively demanding and sexy choreography. As one example, Seth Johnson, the Doc Brown, also does a John Travolta-esque dance number, and plays Nicely Nicely in Sit Down You’re Rockin’ The Boat from Guys and Dolls.

What just happened there? I hear you asking yourself. In a pretentious word, well two, it’s performance art. In one word, it’s a celebration, both of the expandable possibilities of ‘dinner theatre’ and of the actor/singer/dancer/musicians who perform there. And it’s fuelled by the thought that, as one character says late in the show, music might just be the best time travel machine there is.

This is a theatre, unique in this theatre town, that has travelled distances, with considerable ingenuity, on its small stage. From the olden days of finding its star power in fading TV celebs (“not quite shiny enough for Hollywood,” as Wilmott puts it) in flimsy door-slammers, onward and upward. To original revues that showcase theatre artists who have chosen to live and work in Edmonton. And to an anniversary season with, as a birthday bonus, not one but two big Broadway musicals back to back starting in February: The Full Monty (last seen on the Mayfield stage, directed by the late great Tim Ryan 17 years ago) and Jersey Boys.

Meanwhile, there’s a party, with a terrific band.

REVIEW

Flashback Fever

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Written by: Will Marks and L.N. Magill

Directed and Music Directed by: Van Wilmott

Choreographed by: Christine Bandelow

Starring: Jahlen Barnes, Matt Cage, Celeste Catena, Christine Desjardins, Pamela Gordon, Seth Johnson, Devra Straker, Brad Wiebe

Running: through January 26

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca, 780-483-4051

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‘Staying together is the happy ending’: The Ballad of Johnny and June at the Citadel, a review

Posted on November 15, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Christopher Ryan Grant and Patti Murin in The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What happens to a happy ending “when it comes in the middle”?

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The’s what John Carter Cash, the only son of Johnny Cash and June Carter, wonders as he speculates onstage about his lineage and his parents’ famously challenging, tumultuous love story in The Ballad of Johnny and June. The new musical, written by Robert Cary and Des McAnuff (who directs), arrives on the Citadel mainstage from a premiere summer run at the La Jolla Playhouse. And it was greeted with a bona fide standing ovation by the cheering opening night Citadel crowd Thursday.

The story comes with built-in epic dimensions, to be sure, in the historical joining of two great musical stars whose convergence has  something to reveal about how country got to be country. The much-abused term “iconic” doesn’t go amiss here, and the musical comes with an expansive song list, and a famous anecdotal performance history, to match. June of the Carters, a family celebrated for their retrieval of an early folk tradition as much as for their own contributions, meets Johnny, who bursts the gospel buttons of his  harsh evangelical upbringing and erupts into the big bad world of rock and pop … and country.

Patti Murin and Christopher Ryan Grant in The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse at Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography.

As I say, epic. But the impact of The Ballad of Johnny and June, dramatically, as conceived by McAnuff and Cary, is on a human scale: an irresistible attraction, a lot of collateral damage, a dangerous drift toward chaos and tragedy (via booze and pills). And this kind of love story, with its happy ending in the middle and before-and-after struggles on either side, is smartly framed by musician/narrator/only son John Carter Cash.

The keynote of Van Hughes’ perfectly judged, and indispensable, performance, captures a wry, worldly, amusing skepticism that filter through The Ballad of Johnny and June, with a title song created by the co-writers and Ron Melrose. And it gives a story plucked from musical history and riddled with gruesome stories of bad behaviour, addiction-fuelled and with a point of view vis-à-vis “family addiction,” a certain (welcome) lightness of touch.

Christopher Ryan Grant in The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse. Photo supplied.

The imposing figure of Johnny Cash is well-trod jukebox musicals turf, to say the least: the entertainment repertoire, in clubs and dinner theatres alike, is crammed with clones and anecdotes and the hit song list. And, needless to say, you can’t put Johnny Cash onstage without an actor who can convincingly deliver the four most famous words in country music. “Hello. I’m Johnny Cash” is the “God bless us every one” of the jukebox musical. In McAnuff’s production, with its more dramatic compass, Christopher Ryan Grant goes far beyond that. He provides signature allusions to the celebrated man in black persona, yes. But his grave, intense performance exceeds mere impersonation — and arrives at a dimensional character, in the musical’s most compelling performance.

June Carter is less well defined in the collective consciousness as an individual personality with a known repertoire of physical and musical gestures. With the character created in Patti Murin’s performance, we meet a generically jolly, good-humoured personality (“keep on the sunny side of life!”), broadly comedic in performance, up against an elemental force and paying a price. As John Carter Cash acknowledges, in an origin story he proposes from several points of view, June’s romantic chemistry with Johnny is improbable, and with a considerable cost attached.

Patti Murin and Christopher Ryan Grant in The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse production at the Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

As our genial narrator notes, if there are two sides to every marriage, two marriages add up to four sides. It’s a complicated geometry. And in McAnuff’s expert stagecraft and the assortment of musical collaborators, relatives, and ex’s undertaken by an able nine-member cast, Gabriella Joy stands out as Johnny’s cherished, neglected, then abandoned, first wife Vivian. Drew Wildman Foster and Correy West as June’s ex-husbands Carl Smith and Rip Nix are limited to quick, vivid cameos. The kids from these early marriages are mostly reference points; the only offspring Johnny and June had together is the grown-up guy stage left, sitting on a stool, playing on the guitar, and commenting on contrasting versions of his pre-birth past.

Maddie Shea Baldwin and Gabriella Joy ih The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse production at Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

June’s sister and confidante Anita Carter (Maddie Shea Baldwin) returns to the scene from time to time to remind June, and us, of the hazards of hooking up with a problematic artist who measures the distance to the next city as “two-and-a-half pills.” Anita’s lyrical version of June’s Ring of Fire (written with Merle Kilgore), is the one that started that boisterous hit-to-be on its meteoric way (mariachis to come, thanks to Johnny Cash et al).

Correy West, Christopher Ryan Grant, Drew Wildman Foster in The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse at the Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

With its versatile ensemble and a crack six-member band of mostly local musicians led by musical director Lyndon Pugeda, the musical values of McAnuff’s production are first-rate (kudos to guitarist Joe Payne in particular). The sound and the sound mix (Peter Fitzgerald) throughout are impeccable. So the pleasures of a song list that includes I Walk The Line, Get Rhythm, Folsom Prison Blues, A Boy Named Sue, along with famous covers and lesser known songs from the Carter Family archive, are yours to savour. Periodic returns of Jackson make of its memorable lyric “we got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout,” a sort of recurring chorus.

Maddie Shea Baldwin, Patti Murin, Gabriella Joy in The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse at the Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography.

We hear the band before we see them. Our first glimpse comes at the outset through the lighted wooden slats of Robert Brill’s lovely boxcar set. The glints of light, and the play of golden and sepia light in tableaux that speak to an indeterminate past, are all part of Amanda Zieve’s striking lighting design, with its vintage onstage lighting instruments.

It turns out our narrator has an axe to grind, part of his multi-sided family inheritance. The musical gene, check. The predisposition to addiction, check. A certain wariness about marriage, check. “If you want to see God laugh, make plans,” he says. “If you want to see Him do a spit-take, get married.”

The show’s disclaimer on behalf of theatre, though, belongs to the narrator’s dad: never let the truth stand in the way of a good story. And this is a good one, dressed in sin and redemption colours, and with good pipes. Speaking as we are of circles unbroken, the second happy ending, the one that’s actually at the end, is the hardest one: “staying together is the happy ending.” It’s a thought that gives the show its celebratory finale.

Meet director Des McAnuff in this 12thnight preview.

REVIEW

The Ballad of Johnny and June

Theatre: La Jolla Playhouse presented by the Citadel Theatre

Created by: Robert Cary and Des McAnuff (book), music and lyrics by Johnny Cash, June Carter, and others

Directed by: Des McAnuff

Starring: Christopher Ryan Grant, Patti Murin, Van Hughes, Gabriella Joy, Drew Wildman Foster, Bart Shatto, Correy West, Paula Leggett Chase, Maddie Shea Baldwin

Running: through Dec. 8

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

 

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What’s new? The weekend on Edmonton stages, that’s what: three new Canadian plays and a musical

Posted on November 14, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Dana Wylie, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffmann in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Hey Edmonton! It’s a weekend to be surprised and excited by something new on the stages of this theatre town. As the country has found out, E-town has longtime cred as a generator and showcase of new plays. And this the weekend to explore a surge of possibilities, including two high-contrast plays set during World War I, a thorny and surging love story with music we know, an eerie goth thriller.

Patti Murin and Christopher Ryan Grant in The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse at Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography.

•Opening tonight at the Citadel, a new musical about the challenges and intertwined lives of country music’s most celebrated couple, Johnny Cash and June Carter, a love story (with the famous musica) seen through the eyes of their only son. The Ballad of Johnny and June, which premiered at the La Jolla Playhouse last summer has been in further development here at the Citadel en route to the big bad world. Meet the director/co-writer of the musical Des McAnuff (Jersey Boys. The Who’s Tommy, Big River) in this 12thnight preview. It runs at the Citadel through Dec. 8. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

Garrett C. Smith in The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

•At Shadow Theatre, The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, by Neil Grahn, retrieves from Canadian history the remarkable story of the Indigenous warrior and Ojibwa Chief, who turned activist on behalf of his people when he returned from World War I to find he couldn’t even vote. Read the 12thnight preview interview with the playwright, and the 12thnight review here. The premiere production directed jointly by John Hudson and Christine Sokaymoh Frederick runs through Nov. 24 at the Varscona Theatre. Check out the 12thnight preview interview with Neil Grahn here, and the review here. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

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

•Stephen Massicotte’s Stars On Her Shoulders, premiering at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, has a World War I setting too. This latest play (from the author of the Canadian classic Mary’s Wedding), beautiful, funny and heartbreaking, takes us overseas to that terrible conflict, to a convalescent hospital in France. We meet five women, in a deft exploration of love and friendship, the position of women on the precarious threshold of a new world of equality. Highly recommended. Heather Inglis’s production, which runs through Sunday, is also the debut of Workshop West’s bold experiment at the box office: all tickets, for the entire season, are pay-what-you-will. Read the 12thnight interview with playwright Massicotte here, and the review here. Tickets: workshopwest.org.

Julia van Dam in Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

At Northern Light Theatre, Monstress, a new gothic two-hander thriller from Trevor Schmidt (who directs, and designs set and costumes), spins a dark (and visually stunning) web from the Frankenstein story, and the thorny issue of the relationship between creator and creation. The two-hander (Sydney Williams and Julia van Dam) does its exploring from the female perspective: An ambitious doctor, thwarted in her career, brings back to life the daughter of a wealthy father. Is she God? And the play wonders “who is the monstress?” in the end. It runs through Nov. 23 at the Studio Theatre in the Fringe Arts Barns (10330 84 Ave.). 12thnight talked to playwright/director Trevor Schmidt in this preview. The 12thnight review is here. Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com.   

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A love story with complications, in a new musical: Des McAnuff brings The Ballad of Johnny and June to the Citadel

Posted on November 12, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Patti Murin and Christopher Ryan Grant in The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse production. Photo supplied

Christopher Ryan Grant and Patti Murin in The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Ballad of Johnny and June, the musical that opens Thursday at the Citadel is a love story, with complications. And its director and co-creator Des McAnuff, pre-rehearsal last week, is hunting for the big-impact historical equivalent.

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“Johnny Cash and June Carter coming together was the equivalent of a medieval wedding,” he declares, in a first for contemporary analogy-making. “It’s Henry II marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine.”

“By the late 50s Johnny Cash was the reigning prince of country music. And June Carter was the darling of the Carter family,” giants in the history of country music as not only performers but hunters and gatherers of songs that even date back to the 19th century…. When Johnny Cash marries June Carter (in 1968), the earth shakes.”

Des McAnuff, director and co-writer of The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse production at the Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied.

McAnuff, a delightful conversationalist as you will glean, arrives in town with the La Jolla Playhouse production of The Ballad of Johnny and June, en route to further engagements elsewhere (New York? London?). And at his disposal in conversation — a welcome antidote to the morning-after gloom of U.S. election night — is a distinguished cross-border theatre career that’s startling in its embrace. It ranges freely from La Jolla to Broadway (and hits like Big River, Jersey Boys, The Who’s Tommy, Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations), to a five-year artistic directorship of the Stratford Festival, and back. And it all starts in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, with an American-born Canadian kid who played in rock bands and at folk clubs, and wrote music (and musicals).

McAnuff’s latest, which he co-wrote with playwright Robert Cary (“a very very smart cookie … a Yale wit, with a vast general knowledge”), premiered this past summer at the La Jolla Playhouse — a regional theatre brought back to life by his artistic directorship, and one of the country’s most significant Broadway try-out houses. The Ballad of Johnny and June arrives at Edmonton’s largest playhouse, with its La Jolla cast of actor/musicians (mostly New York-based), largely through McAnuff’s connection with Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran. In this travel itinerary, it follows the trajectory of Hadestown and Six, which had developmental stops at the Citadel en route to Broadway.

Cloran was McAnuff’s assistant director on a couple of Stratford productions, Caesar and Cleopatra (starring Christopher Plummer), and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. “Daryl came to visit me in La Jolla,” recalls McAnuff. “To learn more about the mechanics of doing original work and how to get work out to other places,” a subject on which McAnuff is demonstrably a top-drawer expert. Witness the full third of La Jolla productions in his two regimes there that have been produced elsewhere, including 14 that have found their way to Broadway (with two best director Tonys for McAnuff). The international travels of Cloran’s Beatles-infused As You Like It, most recently to the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington D.C., please him enormously.

Christopher Ryan Grant in The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse. Photo supplied.

The immediate inspiration for The Ballad of Johnny and June, McAnuff explains, was that “the rights to the Johnny Cash catalogue and story became available.” And John Carter Cash, the starry parents’ only son together, and a musician and biography-writer himself, “wanted a story that was authentic…. We were given no instruction about what take to have on the story. But he was very interested in us not trying to romanticize the story of his parents.”

There have been other Johnny Cash musicals, Ring of Fire on Broadway and Walk The Line on film. But they promulgated “a kind of fairy tale,” wherein June rescues Johnny from a life of dissolution. Their son “was open to having the real story told.” It’s much more complicated than the mythology, since it includes June’s denial of her own substance abuse problems.

“He was very generous about sharing stories and information with us,” says McAnuff of the son who’s captured onstage as the musician narrator (played by Van Hughes), the “balladeer” of The Ballad of Johnny and June. “One of the wonderful things was John told me that my first Broadway musical, Big River (1985), was his dad’s favourite.”

“We went to Hendersonville (Tenn.) where he still lives, we listened to all the music, we did a lot of research, and spent an incredible amount of time together to figure out what the architecture of this musical would be … all before a word was written. We’d tell the story back and forth to each other, with the song structure, and it went through several incarnations.” Readings happened, and so, two years ago, did a rather fulsome workshop in New York.

The Ballad of Johnny and June, La Jolla Playhouse production. Photo supplied.

“You go in with curiosity and hopefully a sense of wonder about what you’re going to discover,” as McAnuff puts it. What he and Cary did discover was “a story that concerns family addiction.” DNA? nature vs nurture? In any case “it’s a disease that can be passed on.” And amidst our current opioid epidemic, when street drugs are scarily more available, and cheaper, than they were in the ‘50s, there’s no arguing its topicality.

“It’s a love story with challenges,” he says of The Ballad of Johnny and June, “terrible, debilitating, and potentially fatal problems…. Which makes it an important story.” But “not a downer,” McAnuff hastens to add. “I think it’s very moving to see people who love each other getting over their deep personal problems and addictions. Ultimately, it’s uplifting. Not a drag! The irony is that the music they’re playing is so exuberant.”

“There’s something between them, something that buoys them up!”

The sheer size and range of the McAnuff career archive as playwright, director, and actor, backs him up on the declaration that that “The joyous thing about theatre is you don’t always have to play the same role. You switch hats and nobody’s terribly shocked.… I want to do it all; I’m a glutton.” He laughs. “The kind way to put it is ‘eclectic’. If you used that word in the Russian theatre it would be a curse”

He’s an artist who wears his vast cross-border experience lightly in conversation. “I never decided to become a playwright or a director. I just woke up one day, and that’s what I was doing. No life goal; it was anarchy!” By the time he’d left Toronto for New York in 1976, age 23, to research on location in Soho a piece on Phil Oakes, “I’d run a lot of laps,” as he puts it.

There are Alberta roots in the McAnuff story (his mother was born in Drumheller, a grandfather in Bowden). And there’s no shortage of Canadian theatre cred. In high school in Scarborough he’d written a musical, Urbania, “and they had the moxy to produce the thing!” instead of Mame, as planned. He’s still a bit wonderstruck by this. “It was even controversial, a gay character, armed resistance in a city of the future … a little bit Brave New World.”

Leave It To Beaver Is Dead, by the 21-year-old McAnuff, had premiered at Hart House Theatre. For Toronto Free Theatre, he’d written a score for Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, a non-linear adaptation of the poetry collection, and it got done at the Folger Theatre in Washington D.C. His friends were the movers and shakers of the happening alternative Toronto theatre scene of the ‘70s, Martin Kinch, Paul Thompson among them. He lived in the same house (different floor) as playwright Carol Bolt “who took me under her wing.”

One of his most influential mentors, as McAnuff enthusiastically describes, was Michael Langham, the English-born actor/ director/ Stratford artistic director (and sometime head of New York’s Juilliard School). “A brilliant man, and and I owe him so much!”.

New York and McAnuff took to each other, and “I’ve kept a place there ever since.” He arrived with his girlfriend of the time (actor Wendel Meldrum, from Edmonton), co-founded the Dodger Theater Company, and directed their inaugural show Gimme Shelter. “I arrived in May, had my 24th birthday in June, and got my first serious job in July.” He directed The Crazy Locomotive at the Chelsea Theatre Centre, and his own play Leave It To Beaver Is Dead at the Public Theatre (with a high-powered cast that included Mandy Patinkin, Dianne Wiest, Saul Rubinek, and Maury Chaykin).   

McAnuff remembers his years leading the Stratford Festival — he left his La Jolla artistic directorship in 2008 for that prime Canadian gig — with particular fondness for the possibilities of a rep company. “I had a fantastic time,” he says. “I believe playwrights flourish when they’re produced side by side with classical plays.”

Musicals (“I love all kinds of music”) thread their way through McAnuff’s career, alongside Shakespeare, Shaw, Chekhov….  He thinks of Jersey Boys, Ain’t Too Proud, and now The Ballad of Johnny and June  as “history plays,” like the Wars of the Roses cycle of Shakespeare. And in these post-royalist times, “musicians are our kings and queens.”

“I wouldn’t be interested in creating a fictional story to go with a body of songs” à la Mamma Mia, he says. “I’m only really interested in the biography…. The jukebox thing is meaningless to me.” He grins. “If Johnny Cash and June Carter were master chefs, there would be no songs in the show. There might be chateaubriand though….

PREVIEW

The Ballad of Johnny and June

Theatre: La Jolla Playhouse presented by the Citadel Theatre

Created by: Robert Cary and Des McAnuff (book), music and lyrics by Johnny Cash, June Carter, and others

Directed by: Des McAnuff

Starring: Christopher Ryan Grant, Patti Murin, Van Hughes, Gabriella Joy, Drew Wildman Foster, Bart Shatto, Correy West, Paula Leggett Chase, Maddie Shea Baldwin

Running: Thursday through Dec. 8

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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“I have become God”: Trevor Schmidt’s thriller Monstress premieres at Northern Light, a review

Posted on November 9, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You enter the Studio Theatre through fog, and discover you’re in a mysterious chamber, glowing with jewelled colours and overhung with dozens of scissors, blades pointing down at us.

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The centrepiece, a slab that might be a kind of altar, seems to float on rosy light from below, possibly from hellish sources. And you can just make out, if you squint, a back wall dominated by a Vitruvian Woman, splayed in the famous Leonardo square and circle.

There’s eerie magic in this improbable transformation of a small black box space, something of a specialty of Northern Light’s playwright/director/ designer Trevor Schmidt — a necromancy here assisted materially by the gorgeously atmospheric and dramatic lighting devised by Larissa Poho. And as you’ll quickly find out in Schmidt’s new Goth thriller Monstress, opening the NLT season, this reinvention speaks theatrically to the Frankenstein-ian experiment that’s at the centre of the play. Ah, the story is a tangible demo of the operating theatre as … theatre.

We’re in a doctor’s subterranean lab. “Am I the monstress?” wonders the “good doctor” (Sydney Williams) at the outset, speaking to us from the vaguely Victorian, even more vaguely English, past. “What have I become?”

Sydney Williams in Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

This ambitious scientist, the first female doctor accepted to the Upper Harrington Academy of Anatomical Dissection and School of Medicine and Surgery, has been expelled. But she’s carried on. And now, she’s speaking to us from the precipice of a breakthrough “on the boundaries of life,” as she puts it. “Hubris has brought me here…. I have become God.”

Julia van Dam in Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

Her experiments in “necromancy and re-animation” have come to the attention of a rich Colonel. He’s hired her to bring back from beyond the grave his dead daughter Lydia Chartreuse (Julia van Dam), her neck fatally broken when she was thrown from a horse. For the doctor it’s an invitation to pull back the curtain on the Great Secret of life and death, to cross the mysterious frontier between the two. Like Mary Shelley’s Viktor Frankenstein before her, the challenge to defy human limitations, operate outside boundaries of conventional morality, and exercise god-like power, is irresistible. In the male-dominated world of science the script and its witty title give this doctor’s single-minded quest a particularly feminist motivation, too.

Which is when you realize that the doctor is revisiting, and reassessing, her “triumph,” in a play that’s bookended by that opening question, “am I the monstress?” It’s really a question for the us, the audience.

As her experiment begins, relocated to the Colonel’s spooky country house, Dave Clarke’s clever sound design doesn’t just conjure the past in an unnerving, echo-y way — the fateful sound of horses’ hooves, for example, and voices that sound unlocked from a misty vault. The punctuation, so to speak, of Schmidt’s production is the recurring, and always horrifying sound of a neck cracking, in reverb. It will make you flinch, along with the doctor, every time.

There is much I shouldn’t tell you, for your own good, about what happens in Monstress. This you should know: both actors in Schmidt’s cast are excellent. The doctor’s re-creation of a person, and the education she instigates in how to be human, are strange, and queasy. In van Dam’s performance, which dispenses with any hint of English accent in favour of sounding neutral, Lydia Chartreuse has a chilling fixity, an outsized doll-like blankness (“a strangely clean slate”). The doctor as teacher introduces words, and words trigger memories that begin to add up.

And Williams is terrific as the instigator, increasingly flummoxed by the chain of direct life-and-death questions put to her by her “creation” — and by her own mounting doubts about her responsibility for the creature she’s returned to the land of the living.

Julia van Dam in Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

“Are you my mother?” asks Lydia, who attaches herself more and more to her ‘benefactor’. “I brought you back to life,” answers the doctor cautiously. “How do you know I wanted that?” Lydia wonders.  “Am I good? Are you good?” And here’s one: “how does a father love a daughter?” The questions are wide-ranging, and kind of float through the play, attaching themselves here and there, on the thorns of the past.

The script, and the story, belong to the doctor’s first-hand account, and, in Williams’ thoughtful performance to her dawning realization about Lydia’s life and the ruthlessness of her own thwarted ambition. The doctor, the self-created god who rallies under the science flag, describes events as they happen. Times being what they are, in an age permeated by political skepticism about science, Monstress is unafraid to wonder about the ego of the scientist, and that’s unsettling in itself.

But what gives this highly theatrical piece its particular tension and suspense is the visual and aural imagery attached to a story about female drive and unrelenting ambition. The sight of Lydia like a beautiful, dangerous, outsized fairy, learning humanness from scratch from a self-appointed god, is something you’ll take with you. The big questions are the unanswerable ones.

REVIEW

Monstress

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Trevor Schmidt

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Julia van Dam and Sydney Williams

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

Running: through Nov.23

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

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In a staccato barrage of scenes, a star is born: The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow at Shadow Theatre, a review

Posted on November 8, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Garrett C. Smith in The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the opening moments of Neil Grahn’s The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, to the strains of Rule Britannia, a top soldier is getting a military medal from the Prince of Wales.

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Seconds later, as Francis Pegahmagabow is annotating, wryly, that the ceremony was “the best it ever got” in his relationship with Brit royalty, his limelight disappears, and he waves to the theatre technician behind us to restore it. “Reconciliation in action,” he quips, with a ghost of a smile. It’s funny, and it’s telling.

The new play, by a Métis writer with major comedy cred, has a fascinating true story to tell, inspired by Grahn’s research in the dark vaults of Canadian history where public consciousness rarely ventures. It’s about a remarkable Canadian, an Indigenous warrior whose deadly expertise as a sniper and scout in the bloody Front Line trenches of World War I made him prized abroad — in a way that never translated to basic respect, much less equality, at home. He could risk his life in nightly forays across the enemy line. But back in Canada he couldn’t even vote, or hire a lawyer, or secure a loan. It turned a war hero and Ojibwa Chief into an activist, a warrior on behalf of his people against the Canadian government and its lackeys.

In Shadow Theatre’s season-launching premiere production, directed jointly by John Hudson and Christine Sokaymoh Frederick, we meet the man in a star-power performance by Garret C. Smith. He impressively carries the play through its scattering of staccato scenes that are brief snapshots of moments ranging non-chronologically through time and space — from an orphan’s childhood, growing up hunting with an arsenal of traditional skills and connections to the Great Spirit, through World War I and its disillusioning aftermath, in what seems like no particular order. There are a lot of entrances and exits in this production.

Ben Kuchera and Garret C. Smith in The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Like the second of Pegahmagabow’s “two battles” itself — the one in the trenches of Canadian bureaucracy, racism, and intransigence — all of them capture a moment, then end abruptly and inconclusively. The exit line is almost always a look from “Peggy”:  a telling deadpan, an ever-so-slight stoic’s grimace, the briefest of knowing glances at the audience that speak to the absurdity of the world, an almost-shrug. They never end in anything as overt as out-and-out exasperation, even the ones that demonstrate the character’s remembered capacity for anger.

Smith’s performance memorably conjures a character who is unusually self-possessed, a powerhouse of calm, gravity, grace and dignity under fire of all kinds. And his four cast-mates play everyone else — grandparents, in-laws, wartime officers, nurses, fellow Indigenous leaders, buddies — in an exaggerated style under Hudson and Frederick’s joint direction. It’s Peggy who commands the stage for the evening.  And the charismatic Smith is a real find for Edmonton theatre.   

The playwright fashions The Two Battles as a memory play, a scattergun assortment of very brief scenes hosted by Pegahmagabow. He annotates from time to time, including a reflection on his “terrible gift” for “hunting men.” In a story about heroism, Grahn’s comedy muse occasionally kicks in to undercut, in a puckish way, the solemnity of a moment by acknowledging its theatrical circumstances. “I’m sharing my inner thoughts here,” he says to another character, shooing him off the stage:. “This is not your story. I was already here.…”

Monica Gates, Julie Golosky, Garett C. Smith in The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, Shadow theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The “here” is a striking curvilinear design by c.m. zuby, a kind of amphitheatre of screens, low-rise scaffolding and in the centre a tilted and slatted round wooden “stage” like a drum, sitting on a red target. It can be lighted (or un-lighted, in Patrick Beagan’s clever design) to conjure a campfire, or a gas attack, or evoke the sense of all-surround danger in trench warfare. Aaron Macri’s subtle soundscape finds a narrative continuity between the thunder of Indigenous drumming and the thunder of cannon fire. Pegahmagabow’s uncanny success and fortitude as a scout and sniper are directly related to his traditional Indigenous skills.

Interestingly (and oddly), Macri’s boldly painted projection-scape, which includes shadow puppet-play (animator: Lynette Maurice), emphasizes a certain storybook quality: memory scrolls horizontally, in a rustic, stylized, not to say historical, technique that dates back centuries. The full moon comes up like a painting; clouds of poison gas wafting through the trenches take on ghostly shapes.

Monica Gates and Garett C. Smith, The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The acting style of the ensemble leans into comic exaggeration, in broad, quick, cartoon strokes that occasionally press their luck. Trevor Duplessis’s gift for comedy is on display in a variety of roles. The most touching, and droll, scenes, perhaps because of their stillness or quietness, are encounters between Pegahmagabow and his taciturn, amusingly undemonstrative wife Eva (Monica Gate), or with his white wartime buddy Glen (Ben Kuchera).   

The life and career of Francis Pegahmagabow is a great story, no question, and an important one to tell in this historically-challenged country. But the downside of storytelling in brief, abrupt scenes, constantly dislocated in time (which is, to be fair, the way memory and influences work in real life) is that the two-battle momentum of the story keeps getting deliberately interrupted and, I think, a bit dissipated in the process.

Garett C. Smith in The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

It’s the pointillist approach to biography — sketches on speed? — presumably with the thought that a lifetime isn’t one thing after another, it’s a simultaneous totality, with memorable glints here and there, back and forth. Something of the impact and double-weight of Pegahmagabow’s two wars, one that ended and one that continues to this day, is dispersed in this fractured landscape.

Ah yes, continuity: The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow is an open-ended play that way, and an eloquent reminder to us Canadians of a past, still present, that has made outsiders of some of us.

REVIEW

The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow

Theatre: Shadow Theatre

Written by: Neil Grahn

Directed by John Hudson and Christine Sokaymoh Frederick

Starring: Garett C. Smith, Trevor Duplessis, Ben Kuchera, Julie Golosky, Monica Gate

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Nov. 24

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org 

  

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Who’s the real monster? Monstress, a new Trevor Schmidt thriller, launches the Northern Light season

Posted on November 6, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Trevor Schmidt calls his latest play, launching the Northern Light Theatre season Friday, “my Lady Frankenstein show.”

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Playwright Schmidt, NLT’s long-time artistic director, has long been fascinated by the female perspective, female windows on the world, the female voice and vision. Ah, and much to the delight of female actors, roles for women. And Monstress, as its title wittily conveys, re-imagines Mary Shelley’s celebrated Gothic novel of 1818 — the complicated relationship between a doctor and his creation — in female terms.

“There have been lots of different versions of the Frankenstein story,” says Schmidt of the Shelley novel in which Dr. Viktor Frankenstein creates a living being from interred body parts. Some versions, he says, even have a female Dr. Frankenstein. But this question intrigued him: “what would be the difference if the two (Doctor and Creation) were both women?…. Might it be maternal in some way? What if the doctor doesn’t necessarily feel maternal? I wanted to explore the relationship,” he says, along with “a lot of ideas that were present in the original Frankenstein — hubris, doctors thinking they’re God, creation and what responsibility (the creator) has.”

The seed of it was planted in the Schmidt brain as a one-person show, then with a cast of two or three. “It shifted a lot” before Schmidt settled on the show as a two-hander.

Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

In Monstress, a doctor, a woman in the male-centric Victorian world who’s been expelled from medical school for experiments outside the curriculum (or possibly just for being a woman), “brings a dead woman back to life,” at the request of the dead woman’s rich father. The deceased has apparently been thrown off a horse and broken her neck.

It sounds, on the surface, as if there are similarities with the Emma Stone movie Poor Things that came out after Schmidt’s idea had become a script. And the playwright was much relieved to find that they, and their stories, are very different.

“I was a bit nervous about this,” says Schmidt of his dark new play. “People don’t realize how nerve-wracking it is to write a play, hand it to people, and hope they like it….” The excited  response he got back from designers Larissa Soho (lighting) and Dave Clarke (sound) turned things around for him. “It’ll be something!” he felt. Maybe not something for everyone, but “something!”

The design pair found the script “so creepy, so dark,” says Schmidt. “Weird?” He hadn’t quite realized it. “Well, OK,” he thought. “I had to think that maybe my taste level is skewed after years of weird work!” He leaned into it, “and now it’s quite unusual…. I think it’ll be quite unsettling for people.”

A designer himself (he does set and costumes for Monstress), Schmidt thinks the NLT production will be beautiful to look at. “Both Larissa (lighting designer Poho) and I really like intense saturated colours … the colours of the show are green and purple.”

Schmidt offered the role of her choice to Julia van Dam, who’d starred in his production of A Phoenix Too Frequent a season ago (she’s just finished a run of Putrid Brat’s production of The Maids). She chose to play The Body. Another hot up-and-comer, Sydney Williams, plays the doctor.

Gradually, a blurring of identities seems to happen between the doctor and her creation. When he was announcing this season’s NLT lineup, Schmidt wondered “which one is the real monster?”

“I’m always interested in plays with protagonists who are conflicted — what is best for themselves vs what is best for others — society, relationships, love.” In this case “notoriety, success, fame” are the lure. Hubris and ego have roles to play. “Does the doctor’s personal advancement take precedent over the human aspect of the woman she’s brought back (to life)? Where does the doctor’s responsibility lie? If she brought her back, does she have to care for her?”

“I could shape her any way that I want to,” thinks the doctor, as Schmidt describes the play. “Nature vs nurture … someone with the wrong motives gets their hands on an innocent lump of clay…. Ah, but conversely, is that person an innocent lump of clay once they’ve died and come back to life. How have they been changed?”

Monstress is a capper to a year and a half’s “creative surge as a writer,” as Schmidt puts it: no fewer than seven new plays, including two (Robot Girls and Candy & The Beast) last season and three (The Black Widow Gun Club, Microwave Coven, Mass Debating) at this past summer’s Fringe. With more to come.

“We’ll see if some of it is too much for audiences,” he says of Monstress, the opener to a season christened Making A Monster. “There’s disturbing stuff in it…. It’s not like anything that’s happening in town right now.”

PREVIEW

Monstress

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Trevor Schmidt

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Julia van Dam and Sydney Williams

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

Running: Friday through Nov.23

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

 

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The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, a new World War I play by Neil Grahn, premieres at Shadow Theatre

Posted on November 5, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Garrett Smith in The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

He was “arguably the greatest soldier this country has ever produced,” as playwright Neil Grahn puts it. “And nobody knows his name….”

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Grahn’s new play The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, premiering Thursday to open the Shadow Theatre season, chronicles the extraordinary life and career of one of Canada’s most decorated heroes in the horrific war that was supposed to end all wars. And when the star sniper and scout, an Ojibwa from Wasauksing First Nation near Lake Huron, returned home from fighting for his country in World War I, it was to a world where he didn’t even have a vote.

So, for the warrior/ Chief/ activist, the “second battle,” this time in the Canadian trenches, began, a battle that in so many ways has never been won in a war that has never ended.

It was when Grahn was researching the Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry Division for his World War I play The Comedy Company, which premiered at Shadow in 2018, that he kept coming across a name he’d never heard. Francis Pegahmagabow’s achievements were startlingly impressive. He’d signed up early, and he stayed on for the duration, fighting through injuries. And to his Military Medal in 1916 was added two bars for bravery and excellence as a scout and sniper in some of the bloodiest, most dangerous, battles of the most destructive war in human history: Ypres, Passchendaele, Amiens, the second Battle of Arras among them.

“Who is this guy?” Grahn wondered. “Why do I not know who this guy is? I felt embarrassed, just by myself, not knowing….”

An indefatigably curious researcher, Grahn, a Métis writer/director/sometime actor who works in theatre, film, TV, and improv comedy, set about finding out. And in the process he uncovered an amazing, and expansive, story. “So many of the early political movements for First Nations were inspired by returning Indigenous veterans…. They went over to World War I and they were peers, one of the soldiers,” in short equals. “But when they came back they were … Indians.”

“The army was quite a good place for being treated for who you were not what you were,” says Grahn. Indigenous soldiers “had been given autonomy and respect, and so when they came back and it was taken away, that inspired them to take action. Many veterans were the leaders” in the Indigenous activist movements that followed.

Ben Kuchera and Garrett Smith in The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The injustice of Pegahmagabow’s situation was striking, to say the least. “He comes back a war hero and can’t even vote,” as Grahn says. He’s the Chief of his band, and his loan application — “he’d wanted to get some horses to improve his land and raise his station” — is turned down at least three times. “The Indian Agent felt he “‘wasn’t responsible enough’.” And an activist was born.

Grahn recounted the story to his friend Shadow artistic director John Hudson, with the annotation “this has got to be a movie!”. Hudson pushed him to make a play of it, “and I’m really glad he did,” Grahn says. The stylization built into theatre means that “cast of hundreds if not thousands” is conjured by the five actors of the Shadow cast led by Garrett Smith as Francis. “It’s very egalitarian,” says Grahn of the show we’ll see; “everybody plays everybody, women are soldiers; everybody is pitching in.” The only actor with a single role is Smith; he is, to say the least, busy. “It’s Francis’s story and he’s telling it…. I don’t think Garrett leaves the stage; he’s in everything! An exhausting adventure!”

“I am absolutely delighted with Garrett!” declares Grahn happily of the actor, a member of the Piikani and Kainai Nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy of southern Alberta “He’s the deal! He has a real physicality to him, and a way about him. I sit beside him, and I think ‘I wouldn’t want to fight this guy’…. He reminds me — similar energy and body type — of my buddy Shaun Johnston,” the actor who was a Shadow co-founder with Hudson.

The production is co-directed by Hudson and Christine Sokaymoh Frederick. It crossed Grahn’s mind to direct it himself, but he’s right in the midst of creating and directing season 2 of the APTN documentary series Horse Warriors (season 1 is airing right now). As Grahn describes, “it follows the ‘Indigenous relay circuit: Crazy! So dangerous! They race horses in relay fashion; they get on a horse — a highly strung super-fast thoroughbred — and do one lap, jump off and jump on other horse, and do another lap, and then again. And they do it bareback. This is insane!” he says appreciatively. “If it’s happening live anywhere near, go see it! It’ll blow your doors off.”

“It’s kinda like stock car racing if the car could just randomly turn and run you over.” The circuit follows the old plains tribes, Grahn explains. “Where the buffalo roam. Used to room,” he amends. “We’re about as far north  as they go.…”

A documentarian he is, but comedy, improv and sketch, are part of Grahn’s showbiz DNA too. In the late ‘80s he became the fourth member of the storied sketch troupe Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, famously nutty in a highly literate sort of way, and pioneers in fashioning full-length plays from sketches. For seven years he was the head writer for The Irrelevant Show, CBC Radio’s hit sketch show. And he’s created and written seven TV series.

Steven Greenfield, Sheldon Elter, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Jesse Gervais in The Comedy Company. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography 2018

“I don’t think I’m capable of doing anything without finding some joy or laughter,” he figures. The true story, unlikely and unknown, that Grahn culled from the mists of Canadian history, the inspiration for The Comedy Company, is a test case. In the darkest days of the First World War, members of Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry Division were summoned by their commander to devise light musical comedy shows to divert and amuse their fellow soldiers — laughter in the face of death.

Grahn says his Indigenous connections have continued to inspire him. “The First Nations comedy sensibility is really dry,” he’s found, to his perpetual amusement. “As soon as I come in and they start to make fun of me, I know I’m in, I’m good. If they’re really polite I’m like ‘O No! What did I do wrong? I’ve pissed someone off’.” This continues to amuse him.

Francis Pegahmagabow, the Indigenous soldier whose life inspired the Neil Grahn play that launches the Shadow Theatre season. Photo supplied.

In the case of The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow, “so much of my documentary background has really helped me with the script,” he says. “I’m a Métis guy writing an Ojibwa story,” so he consulted Ojibwa elders to see what they thought of that. “They all said ‘the story should be told, tell the story’.”

Theatre and TV have meant that time has proven in short supply in Grahn’s life. “I’d love to get back to weekly improv,” he says. “It’s so refreshing! When you’re improvising, if you’re doing it right, you’re nowhere else but there…. That, and pickleball (laughter). That’s where I’m at.”

And the research for the play was “brutal,” as he puts it cheerfully. Diving into the National Archives and newspaper sites was tricky, mainly because “not a lot of early First Nations political movements were covered much. You really have to dig.” He’s discovered that in 1927 the government effectively put a stop to First Nations activism by making it illegal for Indigenous people to hire and pay a lawyer.  “Whaaaat!?”

What was he like, Francis Pegahmagabow the man? “He could be fiery,” says Grahn. “And his beliefs were mixed. He was very very Catholic, and also very attached to the Great Spirit and traditional teachings as well…. There was a lot of magical thinking to him.”

PREVIEW

The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow

Theatre: Shadow Theatre

Written by: Neil Grahn

Directed by John Hudson and Christine Sokaymoh Frederick

Starring: Garrett Smith, Trevor Duplessis, Ben Kuchera, Julie Golosky, Monica Gate

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Nov. 24

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org 

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Heartbreaking and funny, Stars On Her Shoulders premieres at Workshop West. A review.

Posted on November 2, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Hayley Moorhouse and Dayna Lea Hoffman in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Every once in a while you find yourself in the theatre fully absorbed in a world that’s both distant and utterly close at hand. And you laugh through tears. It happened for me at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre Friday night.

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There is a moment, both heartbreaking and funny, in Stephen Massicotte’s beautiful new World War I play Stars On Her Shoulders, when one of the five nurse characters in a convalescence hospital in France undertakes to teach another the how-to’s of happiness — in a shattered world.

In Heather Inglis’s premiere production, Helen (Hayley Moorhouse), grim-visaged in the fortress of her own gallows humour, admits “I’ve lost the knack of it.” A feeling of hopelessness has trampled everything else.

How does happiness work? Can it be learned? Or, once lost, re-learned? Georgie (Dayna Lea Hoffmann), a new arrival on the ward, coaxes Helen into the fragmentary world of her own memory — and a moment at home in Canada before the war, a buried image of sunlight through a summer storm. It’s Helen’s first smile in the play, and it will touch you in a profound way.

Stars On Her Shoulders is like that. There is a love story embedded deep in the fibre of the play — it’s for you to discover so I won’t spoil it. But it wears its World War I setting in a much different way from Massicotte’s Mary’s Wedding, a dream of first love the conjures the terrible war overseas through the imaginary participation of a Canadian girl back home. For one thing Stars On Her Shoulders is poised on the precarious threshold between centuries, the prescriptive Victorian sense of a woman’s lesser place in the scheme of things and the elusive possibilities of a brave new world of equality between the sexes.

Dana Wylie, Meegan Sweet, Hayley Moorhouse in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

As if to conjure it visually, Inglis stages her production (beautifully designed by Brian Bast and lighted dramatically by Alison Yanota) on a gangway, a pathway between worlds that has us seated on either side. And Darrin Hagen’s original sound and composition design, with its whiffs of Edwardian music hall and its floating allusions to the “modern” world is in sync, too.

At the centre are Helen and Emma (Meegan Sweet), inspired by historical figures, who have braved grave danger to rescue the survivors in a German bombing of a Canadian hospital in Doullens, France in 1918. And these female heroes, who would not be happy with the designation ‘heroine’, are recuperating fretfully, anxious to get back to work. Both, in different ways, have a sharp-edged articulate wit about them that cuts through the traditionally sentimental male-owned landscape of heroism like a hot knife through butter, in the bright comic banter that Massicotte’s dialogue provides them. The play wears its narrative complications lightly, and carries its burden of exposition with expert ease.

Emma’s wounds are obvious: her head is swathed; her hands are bandage mittens. Helen’s are less obvious but less fixable, as we learn in the course of the play. Shell-shock and a shattering sense of “hopelessness” have overtaken her; “I’m lacking a variety of feeling,” she concedes in a rare unguarded moment without the mordant sardonic tone and entrenched irritability that Moorhouse captures so vividly in their performance. “The charm of doing nothing” has vanished, as she snaps. “Was I doing ‘nothing’ wrong?”

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

Sweet is terrific as Emma, a Canadian senator’s daughter of the activist Suffragist stripe, droll, bright, and crisply exasperated by a status quo that has kindly allowed women to participate, as nurses, in the lethal war abroad, but denied them the right to vote. Bandaged hands notwithstanding, she even smokes with a certain insouciance. And the character rises to every setback as a provocation to redoubled efforts. “Our voice was heard; the work continues!” she says of a failed protest launched on behalf of women’s gymnastics. “The answer is invariably No…. It’s persistence that pays.”

Helen and Emma are both, in their way, “odd women,” which is to say women who are out of step with the usual “husband project” — “not so beautiful, not so charming (pause), not so interested.”

Dana Wylie, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffmann in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The pair are surrounded by the working nurses of the hospital. In command, under the male military hierarchy of course, is Maude, a Scot convincingly played by Dana Wylie making a welcome return to theatre from the world of music. She’s proud of her charges, but speaks, from experience you assume, to caution against pressing their luck by arguing about the status of the medal of bravery they’ve been offered. “Don’t spoil all you’ve worked for here” by reinforcing the stereotype of women as “ungrateful, melodramatic creatures.” Emma scorns that view; the new century cannot come into its own fast enough for her.

The performances in Inglis’s production are closely meshed. Hoffmann as Georgie, a repository of wispy period songs and a steadfast spokesperson for the much-battered notion of hope, is a compelling figure, a tantalizing glimpse of the might-have-been for Helen. And Gabby Bernard is very funny and charming as the innocent — in a drawing room comedy she’d be the maid — trilling away cheerfully and cleaving to ‘the rules’ until she’s gradually drawn into a more wayward route to the future.

I’ve made this sound perhaps more schematic than it is. In all, Stars On Her Shoulders is a remarkably rich, full-bodied theatrical experience. And it speaks so movingly, in its theatrical way, to moments in human history that somehow feel seminal, when “comfort and pleasant thoughts” or “carrying on the best we can” just won’t cut it, and vigilance is required. Moments like ours.

I loved it.

Meet the playwright in 12thnight’s PREVIEW.

REVIEW

Stars On Her Shoulders

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Stephen Massicotte

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Hayley Moorhouse, Meegan Sweet, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Dana Wylie

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through Nov. 1 to 17

Tickets: All tickets are pay-what-you-will this season at workshopwest.org.

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