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

Posted on February 7, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REVIEW

Disney’s Frozen The Broadway Musical

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

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

Directed by: Rachel Peake

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

Running: through March 2

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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

Posted on February 6, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REVIEW

An Oak Tree

Theatre: Theatre Yes

Written by: Tim Crouch

Directed by: Ruth Alexander

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

Where: The Aviary, 9314  111 Ave.

Running: through Feb. 12

Tickets: theatreyes.com

 

   

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

Posted on February 5, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Straddling cultures on an adventure in Chinatown: Barbara Mah directs King of the Yees at Walterdale

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

When director Barbara Mah discovered King of the Yees, she knew she’d found a soul-mate of a play. An alignment of the stars perhaps?

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The Walterdale community theatre production that opens Wednesday is the result of this match-making between a director and a writer who share “the lived experience of being born in North America to Chinese parents.”

“She calls it the most autobiographical of her plays,” says Mah of Lauren Yee (Cambodian Rock Band), who’s a writer character in her own comedy, at a play reading in the first scene. Her 2017 play is about “trying to bridge the communication and culture gap between herself, very much a modern American living in San Francisco, and her dad, who was raised in Chinatown.”

“There are plenty of plays about newcomers and the immigrant experience,” says Mah. “Not so many about people born to immigrant parents and having to straddle both cultures.”

The story of King of the Yees is set at the time of the California State Senate race of 2015, when the real-life Senator Leland Yee was found guilty of corruption “and the Lee name went to pot,” as Mah puts it. “Lauren’s father disappears into Chinatown to try to restore the dignity of the name, and Lauren tries to find him….” Her quest “turns out to be a fantastical adventure where she has to negotiate all the things she pooh-poohed earlier, in order to ask questions and get help to find her father.”

Ruth Wong-Miller and Stan Woo in King of the Yees, Walterdale Theatre. Photo by Scott Henderson, Henderson Images.

“It’s all about a father (Stan Woo) and a daughter (Ruth Wong-Miller) coming to the point of understanding where each comes from. And Lauren gains a greater appreciation of her heritage and how it relates to her modern life.”   

As Mah describes, “the play takes place in the Yee Family Association. “The Yees, the Wongs, and the Mahs, have ‘family associations’ which arose out of necessity due to racist policies of the time built into the Canadian Immigration Act, and in the U.S. the Chinese Exclusion Act.”

Tim Lo (centre, as Model Ancestor), Grace Li, Ivy Poon in King of the Yees, Walterdale Theatre. Photo by Scott Henderson, Henderson Images

It all rings a bell with her, says Mah, Walterdale’s artistic director. She’s the daughter of Chinese immigrants who arrived here as part of a wave of Chinese newcomers in the late 50s at the time of the Communist takeover, when exclusionary legislation in North America was lifted. “I was born in 1961, and I’m among the oldest of the first generation of Chinese Canadians….”

Her grandfather Henry Mah, who owned a grocery story in Chinatown, was a founder of the Mah Family Association in Edmonton. And her dad assisted him. More recently, some of the younger Mahs here got a grant to research family history, “and put together a  timeline and a fascinating exhibit of the Edmonton Mahs, The Journey of the Horse (Mah is ‘horse’ in Chinese). “They interviewed surviving elders late in 2022, including my dad (now, alas, deceased) and my aunt. I was present during the interviews and heard stories I’d never heard…. Part of the culture is not showing the bad things,” she laughs.

‘The Journey of the Horse’ exhibit is on the walls of the Mah Family Society in Chinatown. As Mah explains, the ‘family societies’ became basically drop-in social clubs. “To this day every other Friday they give free pay-what-you-can mahjong lessons, as part of Chinatown revitalization.”

In their time “the family societies helped people come over here…. If you didn’t need your legal papers, because you weren’t planning to emigrate, you sold them to other who needed them.” And you took whatever name was on paper. Mah’s dad, a civil engineer for the Alberta government till he retired, was a so-called “paper son’. When the Canadian government granted amnesty to ‘paper sons’, says Mah, “no one took them up on it…. The Chinese immigrants had made themselves at home. They were successful. They’d fit into Canadian society and I don’t think they wanted to rock the boat.”

Mah herself  “didn’t learn English (her parents spoke Toisanese) till I got dumped into a kindergarten.” But she didn’t grow up in Chinatown. “We moved to an upper middle-class white neighbourhood when I started school,” she says. “And until I was in high school, my sisters and I were the only Asian people in our school, until the ‘boat people’ started coming over.”

Piano and ballet lessons “were the done thing” for white kids in that milieu. “So I got sent to them,” says Mah, who has both a biology degree and a business degree. Much to the dismay of her parents, “the dance classes really took, and I ended up in university touring with a musical theatre dance troupe.” Parental dreams of a Dr. Mah in the family ended there. “It’s touched on tangentially in the play,” says Mah of the playwright, who went to Yale theatre school and married a white man.

Mah has assembled an all-Asian cast for the Walterdale production, including nine Chinese actors and one Filipino, and the stage manager is Asian, too. “Some were born here, one is a recent immigrant to Canada. And it was interesting to share with people how much this play reflects their experience,” says Mah of rehearsals. “It’s fun working with actors who have backgrounds similar to yours. And lived experience enriches their characters onstage. Five or six in the cast work regularly in theatre; for the other half of the cast King of the Yees is their first time onstage. And they’re having a riot…. It’s a wonderful thing that Walterdale is a teaching theatre.”

Erhu player Ivy Poon, King of the Yees, Walterdale Theatre. Photo by Scott Henderson, Henderson Images.

In the course of Lauren’s trip through a “heightened version of Chinatown” she meets a ‘lion dancer’. “So we sent our actors to a lion dance studio, the Hung Mon Athletic Club, to get authentic training. And the club did our choreography for us. There’s an erhu player in the show, too. And the violinist in the cast has been taking up the challenge of that Chinese instrument, a challenging cross between the violin and the bass.     

Above all, says Mah, King of the Yees is a comedy. Stereotypes come under comic attack. “The playwright pokes real fun at the perception North Americans have of Asian and Chinese people.” She points to a scene where “two Chinese actors are rehearsing, trying to teach other other how to do a Chinese accent.” Or a scene in which the FBI is looking for a gangster, “and someone says it doesn’t matter who they catch: we all look alike to them.” Stage directions indicate that Model Ancestor “appears by way of RuPaul.” Says Mah, “our actor (Tim Lo) has been having so much fun chewing the scenery!”

Most of all “it’s a comedy about miscommunication,” says Mah, to be enjoyed by “anyone who’s had parents,  ever. Very funny, heart-warming in places. The audience will have a good time!”

PREVIEW

King of the Yees

Theatre: Walterdale

Written by: Lauren Yee

Directed by: Barbara Mah

Starring: Andrew Kwan, Kingsley Leung, Ruth Wong-Miller, Tim Lo, Ivy Poon, Stanley Woo, Rupert Gomez, Tsz Him Hymns Chu, Grace Li, Helen Massini

Running: Feb. 5 through 15

Tickets: walterdaletheatre.com

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War as the human constant through time: After The Trojan Women, a review

Posted on February 3, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Autumn Strom, Tatiana Duque, Jasmine Hopfe in After The Trojan Women, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The centrepiece of the stage is a gory altarpiece that looks a red tree upended, or maybe a giant artery wrenched out by its roots.

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Alison Yanota’s striking design for After The Trojan Women cuts to the heart of the matter, literally and figuratively. There’s never a wrap on war; there’s never a war to end all wars, as the world  continues to demonstrate.  And women have never stopped paying a heavy price — in grief and suffering and loss, as displaced survivors. “The men are back in the dark earth, the women remain.”   

From the eternal topicality of Euripides’ great anti-war play The Trojan Women — performed first in 415 BEC in the aftermath of the Trojan War and adapted ever since — a pair of contemporary playwrights, Amena Shehab and Joanna Blundell, have taken their cue.

In their ambitious new play, After The Trojan Women, produced by Common Ground Arts Society, they find a continuity across time in the plight of women wrenched from their home by non-stop wars in the Middle East. Three contemporary Syrian women and three women of ancient Troy find themselves on the same shore, looking across towards Greece, destiny or fate depending on how you figure it.

The former are fleeing the upending violence and lethal chaos of their homeland, and stopped by the sea mid-narrative. The latter — Hecuba, her problematic seer daughter Cassandra, her daughter-in-law Andromache — are victims on the losing side of the Trojan War, soon to shipped off to slavery in Greece as the commodities, the spoils of war. Separated by thousands of years they may be, but both trios are mourning the human cost of war, the loss of husbands, children, home, prospects, hope.

There’s no shortage of adaptations of The Trojan Women, which hits home in every age. After The Trojan Women, though, is unusual in that it throws women of ancient Troy and contemporary Syrian women actually together on the stage, in conversation, in a liminal space, so they can compare notes, so to speak.

It’s a vivid theatrical idea, visually and verbally, but one that seems to require more than a little exposition, in two cadences of language that slide into each other. Bold, yes, and a context for remarkable gut-wrenching real-life stories from modern Syrian women. But straddling classical tragedy this way by counterpoint is all a bit beyond the dramatic resources and weight of the production directed by Liz Hobbs.

Tatiana Duque, Julia van Dam, Monica Gate in After the Trojan Women, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

“We’re all in this together” doesn’t seem to quite rise to the occasion that’s been set up. The Syrians are only mildly surprised to be sharing a beach with Hecuba and Cassandra, and vice versa. But in addition to their annotations — “war brings nothing but mindless pitiless violence” — the Trojans have to explain to their modern sisters, and us, who they are and what their terrible prospects are, for one thing. There are periodic invocations by a moon goddess (impressively delivered by Tatiana Duque); there are moments where a sort of Chorus forms, to comment. As proposed by the goddess, the search for a happy story is pretty much doomed in this female company. “A happy story? Seriously?!” as one of the Syrian characters says.

It feels like a lengthy process, where repetition is the point. And, as it unrolls onstage, you can’t help longing for more about the haunting, and horrifying, stories of individual Syrian women, and less time spent on establishing the classical framework.

In any case, a cast of nine, variable in experience, do really commit to the show. And there are stand-out individual performances, Annette Loiselle’s for one, as Hecuba, a queenly mother figure whose family has been decimated by war. Kristi Hansen plays a hard-edged, sardonic female prison guard, a fascinating character who stands her ground when attacked by her Syrian sisters and crumbles when the truth about her fiancé is revealed. When she says “wanna hear a story?” we do … hers. And it’s a startling one.

After The Trojan Women, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.

Michelle Todd as a fierce, grieving mother, and Monica Gate as a mother whose daughter has vanished in a checkpoint incident create characters whose stories do eventually land, in the midst of the rather cumbersome theatrical complications.

All the characters get big moments, but their impact is reduced by scenes that seem to be there to re-establish what we already understand about the insight that war never goes away and what was true in 415 BEC remains tragically current now.  “We tried to escape war, and we ended up in another one,” says Huriya (Todd).

Yanota’s lighting against a backdrop of translucent plastic drapery captures a disturbing sense of elusive reality — internal organs in motion? — behind the scenes. Rebecca Cypher’s costumes and Ashley Weckesser’s sound score are there to reinforce the sense of time as an echo chamber where time gathers but doesn’t move forward.

The stories of survival against the odds, and unthinkable human losses suffered by women: these are the worthy heart of After The Trojan Women. “I never wanted to leave home,” says one of the Syrian characters. And look what happened. This is a country populated by immigrants and refugees who know something about the world that we should need to know. “Ordinary life is a privilege.”

REVIEW

After The Trojan Women

Theatre: Common Ground Arts Society

Written by: Amena Shehab and Joanna Blundell

Directed by: Liz Hobbs

Starring: Tatiana Duque, Michelle Todd, Monica Gate, Kristi Hansen, Annette Loiselle, Julia van Dam, Stephanie Bessala, Autumn Strom, Jasmine Hopfe

Where: Backstage Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: through Feb. 8

Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca

12thnight talked to co-playwright Amena Shehab, a refugee herself, in this preview. 

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We’ve lost a remarkable theatre artist: a tribute to the late great John Wright

Posted on February 1, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

John Wright and Marianne Copithorne in Jim Guedo’s Phoenix Theatre producion of A Lie of the Mind, 1987. Photo by Ed Ellis.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

With the passing of John Wright last weekend, far too soon at 74, the Canadian theatre and its audiences have lost not only a superb artist and mentor but an engaging, authentic, real-life character with a uniquely magnetic presence off the stage too. Edmonton theatre has been the particular beneficiary of his multiple gifts.

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At last Sunday’s sad news, a strange and wonderful reaction started happening on Facebook. FB erupted with tributes to a formidable talent lost, of course. And these were accompanied by a virtual gallery of re-posts by the recipients of the beautiful, personalized digital birthday cards, with portraits, specially designed by Wright for the members of his beloved theatre ‘family’. As his health declined in the last few years and he retired from the stage, Wright, who’d taken up photography in a very creative way, fashioned individual pieces of art for his fellow artists and theatre lovers. And there’s something very Wright-like in that sharing.

The theatre community is saluting, in an outpouring of admiration, the electric connection Wright always made onstage with audiences, in a wide range of roles, the classics to contemporary theatre, Scrooge to Lear, low-life hitmen to unravelling kings, booze-soaked patriarchs to preening aristocrats to washed-up poets. And they’re remembering the offstage Wright with great affection: the wicked sense of humour, the signature combination of crusty on the surface — he was the reigning monarch of the withering observation about the state of the culture, politics, the theatre industry — kind and sweetly thoughtful within.

John Wright as Macbeth, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 1999. Photo by Ryan Parker

That warm embrace is why summer Shakespeare cast parties invariably happened in his garden, a kind of Midsummer Night’s Dream nature walk in itself, that Wright created behind the Westmount house where he lived with his theatre star wife Marianne Copithorne and an assortment of dogs.

Wright’s curmudgeon carapace was droll, witty, at times daunting to the uninitiated (but not when you’d spent any time with him). ”I’m remembering the crusty guy, the gruff guy, whom no one was ever afraid of,” says John Ullyatt, who’s shared many a stage and a green room with Wright. “I’m remembering that same guy who giggled, sometimes at his own jokes, often with shared silliness.”

“He was such a titan,” says actor/director/playwright Belinda Cornish. “A simply magnificent actor and a hell of an inspiration, and, beneath his determinedly curmudgeonly exterior, just the kindest, warmest man. He was a no-bullshit kind of fellow, in the very best possible way.”

“His crusty exterior shrouded the most beautiful heart,” says James MacDonald, the first Freewill Shakespeare Festival artistic director and both a Wright director and cast-mate. “He cared so deeply for the theatre, for his fellow artists, for his friends, for the work, and for the audience. He was the most generous, honest, and soulful scene partner…. John Wright is the person who taught me to direct.”

The current Freewill artistic director Dave Horak echoes the thought. “John was indeed a bit terrifying, at first. He certainly played many characters that had a certain dark and ‘masculine’ energy. And yet once you pierced the exterior you found a real sweetie.”

The last of a distinguished Canadian theatre family that included his three sisters, Susan, Janet, and Anne, Wright came to Edmonton from his home town of Saskatoon. He’d been here before, touring with the Citadel On Wheels during the John Neville years in the 1970s (and had a supply of funny touring stories).

It was director Jim Guedo, a Wright friend and colleague of 48 years standing, who brought his fellow Saskatchewanian (along with Wright’s sister Susan) here in 1987 for his inaugural production as the new artistic director of Phoenix Theatre: Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind. The Phoenix repertoire leaned into the new, the raw-edged, the contemporary. It suited Wright’s particularly earthy, grounded intensity, and his go-for-the-gusto rapport with gritty dark comedy. And best actor Sterling Awards for such productions as Road and Sight Unseen would follow.

“The first show I saw John in was Persephone Theatre’s Cruel Tears in 1975,” says Guedo.” The premiere and cross-country tour of Ken Mitchell’s country/folk/trucker version of Othello, a Canadian theatre landmark as it turned out, was a Wright family affair; “John shared the stage with sisters Janet and Anne.”

“Arriving at the University of Saskatchewan in 1977,” says Guedo, “I watched from the wings and booth to see him play Alan Strang, the young boy in Equus. He directed me a year later in Play It Again Sam for our U of summer stock….” Their theatre history together includes eight shows in which they acted together, “and I directed him in 18, as well as designing five shows he appeared in.” Together Guedo and Wright did Shakespeare, Pinter, Mamet, and Shepard in Saskatoon.

And then came Edmonton. A Lie of the Mind at Phoenix was momentous for Edmonton theatre in more ways than one. It’s where Wright met and fell in love with Marianne Copithorne, the actor (then director, then artistic director of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival) who would become his wife. And Edmonton theatre would turn on its axis.

“John came back a season later to do Being At Home With Claude and Hurlyburly” at Phoenix, says Guedo, now a theatre prof at MacEwan University and artistic director of the indie company Wild Side Productions. “He stayed on in Edmonton, and the rest is Edmonton theatre history.”

John Wright, Shaoon Larson, Paul Morgan Donald, Daniel Arnold, John Kirkpatrick in Much Ado About Nothing, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2000. Photo supplied.

That history would soon include Wright appearances at every company in town, including many at the Citadel — and notable summer excursions into the great outdoors in Freewill Shakespeare Festival productions where you can look characters in the eye in broad daylight. Which suited Wright just fine.

John Wright and Belinda Cornish in The Merchant of Venice, 2017. Photo by Ryan Parker.

Belinda Cornish remembers the experience of co-starring with Wright in Copithorne’s Freewill Shakespeare Festival production of Titus Andronicus in 2009. The weather, the ultra-violent play, the role, the whole thing was a bit overwhelming as she found one day in rehearsal. And she disappeared into the loo for a cry. When she emerged, Cornish recalls, “John looked at me with gruff concern and asked if something had happened. I told him I was fine, it had all just been a bit much. He nodded kindly, and said, ‘Yep, sometimes you just need to go and cry it all out’. Then he briskly patted my shoulder and said ‘just don’t do it on stage’. Fine advice from one of the finest, most generous, funniest and most deeply loved actors I have ever had the privilege to work with.”

John Wright and Ron Pederson in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Ryan Parker.

Ron Pederson says “I was in awe of John when I first saw him in those amazing Jim Guedo productions at the Phoenix…. He had an intimidating cool and intensity, and I was so nervous working with him the first time,” which happened at Workshop West in Marty Chan’s (spiky political satire) The Old Boys’ Club. “John had to strangle my weasley character to death at the end of Act 1. And the twinkle in his eye I’ll never forget.”

“He was a fun and sardonic curmudgeon backstage and (talking) about the business, but when he played he was mischievous and full of joy.”

Marianne Copithorne and John Wright in Macbeth, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo supplied.

Wright seemed to have a natural rapport with Shakespeare, witness his original performances in big roles — Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Claudius the murderous usurper in Hamlet, Prospero in The Tempest, Shylock (twice) in The Merchant of Venice, Leontes the king undone by jealousy in The Winter’s Tale … “and all the dukes over the years,” as Ullyatt says.

Was it his natural, always intelligible, way with iambic pentameter? Was it his complete commitment to character? The sense that he conveyed of thinking on his feet in the immediate present?

All of the above. “I’m remembering John’s style of acting,” says Ullyatt. “He was never bombastic or overly musical; he didn’t push. It seemed effortless, but somehow you got every word that he said, every meaning. He understood it and felt it and shared it….”

Dave Horak and John Wright in King Lear, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2013. Photo supplied

Horak, who played the Fool to Wright’s Lear (directed by Guedo) in his first Freewill show in 2013, was “fascinated with John’s ability to really pull that Shakespearean text ‘off the page’. He excelled at thinking through the words and you really believed he was making it up in the moment. There were times onstage when I forgot we were ‘acting’ and he forced me to really listen to him. He was unpredictable … totally committed to being completely present.”

Annette Loiselle and John Wright, Twelfth Night, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 1997. Photo supplied

“I know he sometimes suffered from stage fright and so I think it took a lot out of him to be onstage,” Horak says. “And I think he made a decision that if he was going to be there, it had better matter.” Ullyatt has a similar thought: Wright as “someone who, as mighty as he could be onstage, also seemed fragile of heart and soul.”

The great fight choreographer and director J.P. Fournier found himself unfailingly impressed by the actor’s charisma. As Burgoyne, the witty British general in Fournier’s U of A production of Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, “John would come on in the last 20 minutes, and he walked away with the show every night! In that, and so many productions, you couldn’t take your eyes off him” says Fournier. “You couldn’t not watch him! A fabulous actor.”

John Wright as Propero in The Tempest, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2002. Photo supplied.

“Whenever he was onstage, I was hooked. Every time…. He never ‘acted’. He was SO in the moment.” And Wright was a great asset to the young actors of the company. “His suggestions were so casual, so full of depth.”

You had to love an artist whose outrage at the state of the world didn’t peter out. Wright devoted energy to exasperation, as well I know. In the last 38 years how many times did I hear him say, after a show or over an occasional barbecue in his magical garden, that he’d had it with theatre and the lack of real support from the culture? A dozen times? He didn’t need theatre, he’d done his last show, and he was thinking of retiring, going back into the family electrical business in Saskatoon to make a proper living instead. We were all so lucky for a long time that he didn’t actually do it.

As MacDonald says, “John and Marianne were such leaders together in our community…. We will truly never see his like again.”

A GoFundMe has been created to support John Wright’s wife Marianne Copithorne: https://tinyurl.com/499dbpe8.

 

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What makes the theatre magical? An Oak Tree at Theatre Yes, a preview

Posted on January 31, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There is nothing predictable, run-of-the-mill (or run-of-deMille for that matter) about the Theatre Yes production that opens a short run Wednesday.

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Just for starters, An Oak Tree happens in a venue where you’ve probably never seen theatre before (The Aviary, 9314 111 Ave.). And that’s just the start of its surprises.

Then there’s this: the co-artistic directors of Theatre Yes have switched roles for the occasion. Actor/ musician/ playwright Ruth Alexander is the director — “my directing debut in Canada,” as she says over coffee one Saturday morning not long ago. Director Max Rubin, Alexander’s husband, who “hasn’t been onstage in 15 years,” is one of the two actors in the show.

Ruth Alexander, Theatre Yes. Photo supplied.

And then there’s the play itself, by the insurrectionist English playwright Tim Crouch whose body of work, says Rubin, is “a full-frontal assault on everything about the conventions of going to the theatre. He never allows the audience to settle into a routine they’re familiar with.”

Max Rubin, Theatre Yes. Photo supplied.,

The play gets its title from a painting, in the National Gallery of Australia, of a glass of water. The title of the painting? “An Oak Tree.” An art-life confrontation that’s a bit like 180-degree reverse Magritte, and the Belgian artist’s painting of a pipe entitled Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

There’s no set, no costumes, no sound or light cues. So the lights don’t go down in the time-honoured signal that a play is about to begin. And Rubin is onstage with an actor, a different one every performance, who has never seen or read the play, much less rehearsed it.

An Oak Tree has its own disturbing premise. A stage hypnotist has accidentally killed a child with his car. And months after that, the child’s father volunteers for the act. Rubin plays the hypnotist. “But as the play goes on,” he says, “it becomes less and less clear whether I’m that character or the actor, or the ‘stage manager’ instructing the other actor…. And then the roles reverse, and the other actor instructs me.”

Adds Alexander, “sometimes the hypnotist will play the wife of the father, sometimes the father…. A lot of devices in it to disconcert the audience on purpose. And remind you you’re looking at a play…. And you’re still emotionally involved!”

“Fascinating,” she says. “It’s ‘look at how the magic works’. And it’s still magic, and amazing. And that’s theatre!”

It’s not improv, though; every word the second actor says is scripted, but after that, “there’s huge leeway in how they do it.” The play is created on the spot, discovered by the audience and the second actor at the same time, and “I imagine each show is going to be quite different,” as Rubin says.

Says Alexander, “the second actor can’t prepare, can’t ‘act. All they can do is to be open and to listen. They can make decisions but they can’t plan anything; they have to be in the moment…. It’s what everyone at drama school always tells you.”

“They can’t make friends with the audience, or clown. They have to be vulnerable.”

Alexander and Rubin, experimenters par excellence, re-located from England to Edmonton in 2017. And they announced their arrival at Theatre Yes with The Play’s The Thing, a two-night collective production of Hamlet, with each scene randomly assigned to a different Edmonton performing arts company, to be presented in their own signature style. For An Oak Tree they’ve assembled a starry roster of game and experienced actors of varying ages who might — who will — come with very different affiliations to parenting and grief. Belinda Cornish, Mark Meer, Luc Tellier, Patricia Zentilli, Patricia Darbasie, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Oscar Derkx, Nikki Hulowski.

“You need experience from the second actor,” Alexander thinks. “They’re literally creating a character cold, in the moment.”

Directing An Oak Tree “isn’t really a directing job,” she says. Which is why she agreed to do it. “This is making sure the story is clear for the audience, and also fully supporting the second actor.” As for Rubin, “well, my wife made me do it,” he jokes. The hypnotist “isn’t really an acting part; he’s more of a a facilitator.…” It’s not a ‘go into character and stay there’ situation.

“There are different versions of the hypnotist character, and they bleed into each other,” says Rubin, who was last onstage in 2011 as Satan in a Lodestar Theatre production of The Master and Margarita in England. “I’m just not remotely interested in acting any more. But this is an entirely new challenge!”

“It really says ‘what’s the theatre?’,” says Rubin of the play. “What makes the theatre magical?” Alexander thinks of it as “philosophy in action. A statement, a manifesto. It’s about transformation, and the power of suggestion.” One of the first lines of the play, as Rubin says, is “ask me what I’m being. I’m being a hypnotist.”.

You wonder what Theatre Yes rehearsals can possibly be like, since half the cast won’t, can’t, be present. “We rehearse in our living room, and move the dogs,” Alexander laughs. “I read all the father’s lines…. We have four ‘stooges’, rehearsal actors (to be the second actor), so Max has four cracks at it, to see what works.”

As Rubin reports, in honing the script for 18 years, Crouch has compared that process to kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, so it’s more beautiful than ever. “I love that!” Rubin says.

“This is the ultimate non-theatre theatre show.”

PREVIEW

An Oak Tree

Theatre: Theatre Yes

Written by: Tim Crouch

Directed by: Ruth Alexander

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

Where: The Aviary, 9314  111 Ave.

Running: Feb. 5 to 12

Tickets: theatreyes.com

 

   

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‘A story lives forever’: Meet Amena Shehab, whose new epic play After The Trojan Women premieres at Common Ground

Posted on January 30, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

After The Trojan Women, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There is a certain inevitability that theatre artist Amena Shehab would find inspiration from Greek tragedy in creating (with Joanna Blundell) her first and “very personal” play. After The Trojan Women premieres Saturday at the Backstage Theatre, in a Liz Hobbs production under the Common Ground Arts Society flag.

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In so many ways The Trojan Women, Euripides’ tragedy of 415 BCE, one of the theatre repertoire’s most powerful explorations of war, its aftermath, and the heavy price paid by women, tells a harrowing story of displacement and migration that speaks to her own. Shehab’s is the story of a refugee fleeing the perpetual war zone that is the Middle East, on the move country to country, leaving from Qatar and finding a destination here in 2013, with her three children, ages 15, 12 and 3 1/2 at the time.    

playwright Amena Shehab. Photo supplied.

As a Palestinian born and raised in a Syrian refugee camp, Shehab couldn’t help but be struck by the uncanny geography of the Euripides tragedy — and the image of the enslaved women of the vanquished Troy across the sea from Greece, home of the victors and at their mercy. Izmir, on the Turkish coast — a name carved into the collective consciousness in 2015 news stories of millions of dangerous Mediterranean crossings towards Greece — is not far from ancient Troy.

“Always people leaving the shore, the same shore, with the same destiny. Three thousand years of fleeing from war,” as Shehab puts it. She’s thinking of the people she knows, her own relatives, desperate on the shores of Turkey, terrified but hopeful “trusting the sea more than the land. And when the the sea, in a boat, is more stable than the land, well….”

Stephanie Bassala in After The Trojan Women, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.

Is human history one long, eternal war? Shehab is inclined to think so. “It never goes away. Ever. Ever. Ever. Death never stops.” She says “the characters we chose are fictional. But the stories, blended, are real,” says Shehab of After The Trojan Women, in which a trio of modern Syrian women and the women of Troy — Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache — are fleeing war and occupy the same shoreline, across time. “We’re talking about women’s suffering, children’s suffering, the human stories…. It’s not a news story or a documentary; it’s the human story that makes (the Euripides tragedy) live for three thousand years….”

“It’s women who pay the price for war, and it’s a very expensive one.”  It’s the point Euripides made all those centuries ago. Shehab cites a telling line from her play. “Now the men are back in the dark earth and the women remain.”

And the Middle East, where east, west, north and south intersect is “a messy kitchen,” as Shehab puts it. “Many people cooking meals, and boiling, and everyone involved.” It’s an axis of money and power and the men who “take over, rule everything, make the rules….”

Autumn Strom, Tatiana Duque, Jasmine Hopfe in After The Trojan Women, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

“What’s home?” There’s a question that doesn’t have one answer in Shehab’s experience. “I lived in many countries. And I try to make a home where I go, to survive and have peace where I go, even in small places, even an office…. Home for me is a concept not walls.”

It’s a lesson Shehab learned as the youngest of 10 children in a Palestinian family that’s been constantly uprooted by war since 1948. “My mother lost both parents and a brother at 12, and lived through five wars…. Nothing is impossible. As women we learn how to survive. Life will never be easy. My mother would say if your heart falls down, pick it up and run. Don’t ever give up…. If you don’t run and do something, you will lose.”   

Shehab studied classical theatre (with a specialty in theatre criticism!) in Damascus and worked as a TV producer before returning to her first love, the stage. She met her British writing partner Blundell, a journalist for Al Jazeera English at the time, when they were both living in an international compound in Qatar, with people from around the world. They’ve never lost touch.

“When I left home I tried to close the doors behind me,” says Shehab, who’s friendly, warm, and intense in conversation. “But the doors are heavy.” And I couldn’t really close them.” There was a human story to be told. As Horeya, one of the Syrian women, says, “I want my story to be told.”

How does Canada figure in her story? Shehab smiles, and remembers her younger self, a Grade 7 girl, in Al Yarmouth refugee camp, where Canadians had assisted in building the first real school there, “with real classrooms, not an old house….”

“The Canadian flag was there. And a Canadian soldier arrived from the embassy — clean clothes, beautiful! — for the launch of the school.  We had a translator and I was the host, and read a poem. The guy took my hand and said ‘thank you’. And I said ‘one day I will go to Canada’. And he said ‘you’ll need a jacket!’.”

In Canada Shehab and her kids have found a home. “I’m happy where I am!” she says. You know if you’ve prevailed, she thinks, “if your kids come out of the school smiling.” Hers do. “We did this together,” she says of becoming Canadian en famille, adapting to a new language, new weather, new customs, new food, new air. “I jump off the cliff: I start learning English; I start to act.” She laughs, “I’m brave and I’m crazy. I don’t look; I just jump.”

Edmonton audiences saw her in the Maggie Tree production of Nine Parts of Desire in 2017. Since then, she’s appeared onstage regularly, including Dave Horak’s production of E-Day, and a solo show, Hagar: War Mother, that played the Edmonton Fringe in 2023, and the Edinburgh Fringe in 2024. She’s the coordinator of The Shoe Project, a Workshop West/ SkirtsAfire initiative to empower newcomer women to tell their stories.

And now Shehab is a playwright with a story to tell. In 2019, Blundell came to Edmonton and “we spent three weeks in my basement” working to make a play. What followed, after the forced hiatus of the pandemic, were workshops in London and in Toronto. “And now our baby is ready to see the light,” Shehab beams.

Tatiana Duque, Julia van Dam, Monica Gate in After the Trojan Women, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

The script may be in its ninth draft. “The structure has changed,” says Shehab, who writes in Arabic and then translates. “But the story, never.” Hobbs’s production isn’t a small undertaking by the standards of indie theatre: nine actors, including six characters, with a Greek chorus of three. “The chorus is the voice of the people.”

“You can destroy a city. But a story lives forever.” That’s Shehab’s mantra. “I don’t believe in messages. I believe in feelings and stories, and sharing. I can’t change the world. But I can tell the story.”

PREVIEW

After The Trojan Women

Theatre: Common Ground Arts Society

Written by: Amena Shehab and Joanna Blundell

Directed by: Liz Hobbs

Starring: Tatiana Duque, Michelle Todd, Monica Gate, Kristi Hansen, Annette Loiselle, Julia van Dam, Stephanie Bessala, Autumn Strom, Jasmine Hopfe

Where: Backstage Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Saturday through Feb. 8

Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca

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The Citadel announces their upcoming 60th anniversary season

Posted on January 27, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Edmonton’s largest playhouse, which entered the scene 60 years ago, celebrates this anniversary — and an expanding repertoire of local, national, and international connections — in the 2025-2026 season unveiled Monday.

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At the centre of the upcoming 11-production $13-$14 million Citadel Theatre lineup announced by artistic director Daryl Cloran is his new production of a great American classic staged in the theatre’s very first season in 1965, and the world premiere of a new Canadian musical based on a beloved national story trove.

The latter, Vinyl Cafe: The Musical (Nov. 8 to 30, 2025) is spun for the stage, by Georgina Escobar and the composer team of Colleen Dauncey and Akiva Romer-Segal, from the late Stuart McLean’s legendary CBC Radio story collection. It’s a Cloran idea, “a few years in development,” as he says. “A full singing and dancing musical, holiday-themed, built on some of the most popular Dave and Morley stories” of the Toronto couple, their kids, their neighbours, their ‘hood — ‘Dave Cooks The Turkey’ among them.

The signature sense of humour, the quintessential Canadian-ness, the national and inter-generational reach, all appealed to Cloran, who directs the new musical. “I feel it has great potential for national interest,” and with audiences across the border too (Vinyl Cafe has a considerable coterie of American fans too).

“At our workshop in December, people were laughing at the jokes before we got to them. People are so connected with the characters; people have a history with the stories. Cloran is one of those people. He remembers going to McLean’s live-audience holiday shows as a family tradition.

In this project, an heir to such Citadel musical premieres as Full Moon and Prison Dancer, the theatre has partnered with long-time Vinyl Cafe producer Jess Milton, who now has a podcast called Backstage At The Vinyl Cafe.  “When we were looking for the right book writer and composer, we asked (candidates) to musicalize a section…. Morley has a line in ‘Dave Cooks The Turkey’ describing how to be a mother at Christmas, ‘I am a train!’. Colleen and Akiva turned the line into a gorgeous song.”

In a nod to Citadel history in this anniversary season, Cloran’s production of Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s ageless 1949 gut-wrencher (Jan. 24 to Feb. 15, 2026), returns Willy Loman, the iconic travelling salesman of American Dream mythology to the mainstage, where he hasn’t been for 14 years. In the 2011 production directed by Bob Baker, John Ullyatt played Biff, Willy Loman’s football hero-turned-drifter son, crushed by the weight of his father’s delusions. This time Ullyatt plays Willy Loman, tattered purveyor of dreams, with Nadien Chu as Willy’s long-suffering wife and enabler Linda.

Cloran cites in particular “the incredible work John (Ullyatt) has done with Scrooge” (a role to which he returns in the 2025 edition of A Christmas Carol). “He’s so ready to sink his teeth into a role like Willy.” And along with Ullyatt a theatre star of apparently limitless versatility, Chu,“so funny so fierce in The Three Musketeers,” as Cloran says, is “one of the finest actors in Edmonton if not Canada.”

The season opens (Sept. 13 to Oct. 5, 2025) with Life of Pi, adapted by the English writer Lolita Chakrabarti from the Yann Martel novel. Life of Pi has been onstage in the West End and moved to Broadway. “We’re the first theatre to be licensed to create our own production, a non-replica…. It’s a real coup for us,” says Cloran, “and speaks to the Citadel’s reputation that the company gets a crack at it.”

The story of the title hero, stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific with a Bengal tiger as his companion, comes with particular theatrical challenges, including visual imagery and puppetry. “It’s such a great theatrical re-imagining of a story that so many people love,” says Cloran, “with all the things that are great about theatre.” Haysam Kadri, the artistic director of Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary, directs.

Casey and Diana (April 4 to 26, 2025) is by actor/playwright Nick Green, a U of A theatre school grad well known to Edmonton audiences for such plays as Happy Birthday Baby J and Coffee Dad, Chicken Mom and the Fabulous Buddha Boi. It’s Edmonton’s first look at a notable play that premiered at Stratford in 2023, and has since played to full houses and critical raves elsewhere. Set in the AIDS crisis of the 1990s, the play, “a beautiful story and a beautiful theatrical idea” as Cloran describes, takes us to Casey House, a Toronto AIDS hospice as its residents prepare for a visit by Princess Diana, whose public compassion helped changed the harsh optics of the era.

The director for the Citadel/Alberta Theatre Projects co-production has yet to be announced.

The season finale (May 2 to 24, 2026)) is a new adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, the swashbuckling Edmond Rostand romantic adventure where the wordplay is as crucial as the swordplay. It’s commissioned from Edmonton actor/ playwright Jessy Ardern (Queen Lear Is Dead), who’s made something of a specialty of contemporary re-thinks of the classics. “She really gets the humour, the romance, the poetry of it,” Cloran says. Amanda Goldberg’s production will come to the stage in full period flourish, but with “contemporary resonance.”

“Our audiences love sword-fighting and luscious design,” laughs Cloran, citing enthusiasm for the lavish Citadel/ Arts Club production of The Three Musketeers, about to open in Vancouver.

Besides Vinyl Cafe, the season’s roster of four musicals includes a classic of the repertoire, a Broadway hit, and the return (with holiday trimmings) of an Indigenous Alberta-made take on a ‘70s fave.

The “big family musical” is The Wizard of Oz (March 7 to April 12), which as Cloran points out wryly, takes up the conversations of the moment about the buzzy prequel to the whole yellow brick road story, Wicked. “Good timing, right?” Thom Allison, who appeared as an actor at the Citadel in Kat Sandler’s double-bill The Party and The Candidate, returns to direct The Wizard of Oz, the 1987 version (for the Royal Shakespeare Company) of the indelible L. Frank Baum story that licenses the stellar music of the 1939 movie.       

Expect to see a vivacious, plucky pink-clad heroine this summer at the Citadel. Legally Blonde (July 5 to Aug. 3, 2025), a bouncy 2007 Broadway musical blockbuster of the optimistic, heartwarming stripe (“super-positive, super-catchy tunes, speaks to different ages and backgrounds,” as Cloran describes) is the show. Stephanie Graham, of Thousand Islands Playhouse, directs and choreographs.

And the holiday season includes a quick six-performance run (Dec. 18 to 21) of LightningCloud Productions’ Bear Grease: Shack Up For The Winter – Holiday Special. It’s the holiday edition (with additional songs and scenes to match) of their Indigenous variety show take on the 1978 musical Grease. “A great local Indigenous success story,” as Cloran puts it, the show directed by Crystal Lightning, “which more than doubled our sale expectations” this past fall, returns to Edmonton after an Off-Broadway run in the summer. “This is a victory lap for them!” says Cloran.    

Both shows in the Citadel’s returning Highwire Series in the Rice Theatre, have theatre cred elsewhere, and strong Edmonton connections. Big Stuff (Oct. 18 to Nov. 9, 2025) is the work of married improv artists Matt Baram, who grew up here, and Naomi Snieckus, who met at Second City in Toronto, along with director Kat Sandler. “It lives very much in the world of Every Brilliant Thing,” as Cloran describes the comedy memoir that proved a hit in Toronto this past November/December.

“So funny, so heartfelt, so surprisingly moving…. It’s about stuff — the stuff you hang onto in your life and the stuff you can’t let go of, because of their connection to people you’ve lost” There is, he says, “an element of gentle audience interaction,” involving writing on a card an object that you’ve held onto, for use during the show.

The solo play Burning Mom, which arrives in Edmonton (Feb. 14 to March 8, 2026) as part of an Arts Club tour, is the work of playwright/director Mieko Ouchi, the associate artistic director of the Citadel. The play, which premiered in Winnipeg a season ago, is inspired by Ouchi’s own family. When her husband passes away, and the dreams of an RV retirement tour seem to be kaput, a 63-year-old widow takes to the road herself for a odyssey of discovery to the Burning Man art festival in the middle of the desert.

Meanwhile, season #59 continues apace at the Citadel, with Goblin: Macbeth running through Sunday in the Rice Theatre, and Disney’s Frozen: The Broadway Musical, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The 70s Musical, Heist, and Little Women to come.

Subscription packages for the upcoming season are on sale now (780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com), with Legally Blonde tickets on sale March 19, and single tickets for the rest of the 2025-2026 season July 4.  

Looking ahead at the Citadel’s 2025-2026 season

Mainstage series: Life of Pi (Sept. 13 to Oct. 5, 2025); Vinyl Cafe: The Musical (Nov. 8 to 30, 2025); Death of a Salesman (Jan. 24 to Feb. 15, 2026); The Wizard of Oz (March 7 to April 12, 2026); Casey and Diana (April 4 to 26, 2026); Cyrano de Bergerac (May 2 to 24, 2026).

Summer presentation: Legally Blonde (July 5 to August. 3, 2025).

Highwire series: Big Stuff (Oct. 18 to Nov. 9, 2025); Burning Mom (Feb. 14 to March 8, 2026).

Holiday productions: A Christmas Carol (Nov. 23 to Dec. 24, 2025); Bear Grease: Shack Up For The Winter – Holiday Special (Dec. 18 to 21, 2025).

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Portrait of a men’s movement recruit: Angry Alan at Northern Light, a review

Posted on January 26, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There are so many reasons to dismiss a guy like Roger, the protagonist of Angry Alan, a smart, surprising little stinger of a play, and the latest in Northern Light Theatre’s ‘Making A Monster’ season.

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I mean, c’mon, how does a guy with half a brain get won over, by the preposterous claims of the ‘men’s rights’ movement? And yet….

As a perfectly judged performance by Cody Porter reveals, in this Trevor Schmidt production of Penelope Skinner’s 2018 Edinburgh Fringe hit, Roger is a mark, ripe for recruitment. And his radicalization is a win for toxic masculinity, a monster in innocuously reasonable online camouflage.    

Roger, as he explains at the outset, is stuck. He used to have a snazzy job with AT&T. Now he’s the third assistant store manager at a Safeway, “the man you can yell at.” He’s estranged, sort of (for reasons he doesn’t understand), from his son who lives with his ex-wife. He feels indefinitely stalled, under-appreciated. He’s a frustrated, chronic underachiever with bargain basement self-esteem, a simmering sense of injustice, and a building cache of resentment about his life.

Angry Alan is a fictional surrogate for Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate and their ilk in the online world, captured by sound and projection designer Amelia Chan. And when he stumbles on the website of the title, Roger gets the acknowledgment for which he’s been hungering. He has an epiphany, a life-changer, what he calls “a red pill moment.”

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

The “Google vortex” leads Roger to Angry Alan’s explanation — “with data!” — of what’s gone wrong with his life. Roger has been in a cage, the “gynocentric sexism” created by the excessive outreach of feminism and “the witch hunts of #MeToo.” And “the red pill doesn’t solve the problem,” he says. “I’m still in the cage. But I know about the cage….”

Angry Alan acknowledges, validates, and gives voice to Roger’s frustrations. “Hey, I’m Roger. I feel like I could have done so much more with my life. I feel inadequate. I feel like a failure. And until this morning I didn’t even know that’s what I was feeling.”

In Porter, the play finds an ideal Roger, a Roger who makes the seductiveness of the men’s movement plausible. He’s not some sort of aggressively male maniac, on the make. He’s a decent guy, sincere, trustworthy, likeable even. When called out by his partner Courtney for his new preoccupation with the online world, he still helps with the dishes. He has no beef with her recent discovery of feminism in a women’s studies course at the local community college. He’s rueful, even genuinely wounded, by the alienation of his son.

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

As Porter’s performance reveals, Roger’s susceptibility to the narrative proposed by Angry Alan has a certain (albeit maddening) quality of innocence about it. That it’s compelling to Roger makes a cautionary tale of recruitment of  “ordinary” men to a preposterous cause funny, yes, but a whole lot scarier. What this says about developments across the border is downright chilling.   

Schmidt’s production starts with Roger at a microphone, with illustrations on the outsized computer screen where YouTube photos, chapter headings, and text message exchanges with his son appear. There’s a web of strings attached to the screen, metaphorical and literal, as part of Schmidt’s design, dominated by a conference table strewn with water bottles and paper clutter. The inventive sound design by Amelia Chan has the suspenseful clang of a TV thriller. The lighting by Rae McCallum has an online flicker about it.

What Porter brings to Roger’s monologue is the air of evaluating, of thinking thoughts in the moment as he revisits the story of his “enlightenment.” The highlight is his re-creation of excitement about his weekend at a men’s movement conference in Cincinnati. OMG, the real Angry Alan will be speaking live! A dream come true for Roger.

I’m going to stop telling you about the story, just to say that this is a play with a real kicker of an ending. A quick, gut-punch theatre thriller.

REVIEW

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: through Feb. 8

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

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