The return of The Invisible: Catalyst’s hit spy musical is back, before it sets forth on tour

Posted on September 25, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Melissa MacPherson, front, in The Invisible – Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Catalyst Theatre at the Grand Theatre. Photo by Dahlia Katz. .

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Catalyst hit spy musical that opens Thursday at the Eva O. Howard Theatre returns to us Jonathan Christenson’s compelling all-female World War II espionage story, pried from history and imagined in a high-style, thrillingly theatrical way.

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And as a bonus, The Invisible – Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which launches a three-city tour (Vernon B.C., Saskatoon, Regina) here, rediscovers for Edmonton audiences “a great theatre,” as Catalyst artistic director Jonathan Christenson declares it. A theatre they may well not know about.

The Eva O. Howard, with its big stage, inviting raked seats, and full fly-tower, lies embedded in the Victoria School of The Arts. Until the Jubilee Auditorium was built in 1957, it was Edmonton’s largest theatre, a traditional 800-seat proscenium house. And by artistic happenstance it dates from the same era, the ’40s, as the 2019  musical by Christenson (book, music, and direction) and Bretta Gerecke (production design). “It’s a beautiful theatre, a place where you’d want to see other shows.”

The Invisible – Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Catalyst Theatre 2020. Photo by dbphotographics

One of the last shows to open in February 2020 before the global COVID shutdown of theatre, The Invisible has played stages across the country. This time, Catalyst is producing it in partnership with Victoria School of the Arts, an experiment, as Christenson explains, in “re-engaging with the audience after the pandemic.” As theatres across the country have marked,  “people have shown a bit of reluctance to make their way back into theatres…. Why not take the work to the audience rather than ask the audience to come to us?”

After all, “high school kids, late teens, college-age people have been a huge fan base for Catalyst historically,” he says of the company’s enviable link to the much-coveted younger audience. “And this was a great opportunity for us to re-connect and bring them into the work in a new way…. We rehearsed here, we tech-ed the show here. We’re running here,” he says of the Eva O. Howard. “There have been lots of chances for the kids to come to rehearsal and observe, and for us as artists with do Q&A’s with them, and workshops….”

“We’ve been very present in their lives since we arrived, and it feels like there’s a real sense of their ownership of the show,” he thinks. “So exciting. I think they’ve really enjoyed having a team of professional artists around, and we’ve enjoyed having the energy of these kids, at the point in their lives when the world is their oyster and they’re excited about all the possibilities.”

At the same time, the Vic theatre department has been rehearsing a student production of Christenson’s 2007 play-with-music Frankenstein, opening late October. “When these kids come to Invisible rehearsals, they have pretty insightful questions for the actors.”

Melissa MacPherson in The Invisible – Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare, from 2020. Catalyst Theatre. Photo by dbphotographics

“The challenge of writing a show for an entirely female cast” was part of Christenson’s original attraction to creating The Invisible, he says. When the story of Churchill’s top-secret Special Operation Executive who recruited and trained an elite international corps of women agents — each with her own specialty in stealth warfare —  and sent them behind enemy lines into France in 1940, came to his attention, Christenson knew he’d landed his inspiration.

One of the powerful thrusts of the storytelling is that the unseen heroes (“here today, gone tonight”) who risked everything are “ordinary” women who looked at the state of the world, subverted the womanly restrictions of the times, and opted to be extraordinary. Some of his characters are based on real women. Melissa MacPherson, for example, plays Evelyn Ash, inspired by the Romanian-born spymaster Vera Atkins, the assistant to the head of SOE in charge of female recruits. Others, like Maddie the Parisian chanteuse, are fictionalized composites.

“It came out of a time when the questions ‘what do I really believe in?’ and ‘what would I be willing and ready to fight for?’ were (pressing).” And they haven’t gone away, to say the least. “The times are pretty scary right now,” as Christenson says. “Every time we come back to the show, the world is showing more examples of the very same issues….” He points to “a deepening sense of the relevance of the piece, sadly, as we’ve worked on it.”

“Though the ending is not a happy one, the goal is to offer some sense of hope, that change is possible, that the spirit of resistance endures.”

The Invisible – Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Photo by Citrus, 2019 Photography

Though very different than Catalyst creations of the past, Nevermore, Frankenstein, and Hunchback among them, “I think The Invisible is recognizably Catalyst’s work.” It is, perhaps, closer in its dramatic storytelling to Vigilante,  Catalyst’s 2015 rock ‘musical’ spun from a violent chapter in the history of southern Ontario, and the fortunes of the Irish immigrant Black Donnellys.

The Catalyst signature includes bold physicality, striking theatrical imagery, inventive and unusual use of music in storytelling. The Invisible has, arguably, Christenson’s more richly varied musical score. The text that happens in Gerecke’s projection and light design suggests a cross between film noir and a graphic novel. “You’e always on a journey,” muses Christenson, on the life of a theatre artist. “And it’s not always conscious; the piece takes on its own life…. Every show I learn a bit more.”

Of the seven-member cast, some are returning to this high-tech production and some, as always with Catalyst productions, are newcomers. The dynamic always changes with fresh energy, says Christenson. A week ago, Chariz Faulmino valiantly took on the part of Maddie the chanteuse. “I’ve rewritten the role to reflect Chariz’s Filipino background. And I love what she’s bringing to the role, a new feistiness to the character.”

After all, Catalyst’s m.o. is that every iteration of a show is a draft, and a chance to do some re-thinking, re-writing, improving. And that, says Christenson, has happened again.

PREVIEW

The Invisible – Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare

Theatre: Catalyst

Written, composed, and directed by: Jonathan Christenson

Production design by: Bretta Gerecke

Starring: Chariz Faulmino, Kristi Hansen, Melissa MacPherson, Katie McMillan, Amanda Trapp, Tahirih Vejdani, Justine Westby

Where: Eva O. Howard Theatre, Victoria School of the Arts, 10210 108 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Oct. 5

Tickets: simpletix.com 

 

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Welcome to the Rock! Come From Away comes from away, back to the Jube

Posted on September 23, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Touring cast of Come From Away, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Come From Away, the homegrown Canadian musical Broadway hit that travels the world on a jet stream of raves, major awards and sold-out runs, has come from away, again.

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It lands at Jube for the third time since 2019, in a Broadway Across Canada touring production that starts Friday. A story of generosity, hospitality, open-heartedess — with a true-life source — is back in its country of origin again. This time it’s with a cast that includes newcomers like Tyler Olshansky-Bailon, whose first time in Canada came onstage in Vancouver earlier this month, playing Diane Gray and singing Stop The World.

That number is a peak moment in a real-life Diane-Nick love story captured in the musical. That it has uncanny parallels to the actor’s own real-life love story…. in circumstances that have a certain resonating similarity, as the exuberant Olshansky-Bailon recounts, on the phone from Calgary where Come From Away has been playing this weekend. “I felt so connected.”     

In the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist attacks on New York, and the unprecedented closing of American air space, 38 international flights were diverted to Gander, Newfoundland. And a hospitable little town of 9,000 “on an island between there and here” as the opening number has it, welcomed 7,000 stranded passengers from everywhere to The Rock — and housed and fed them for five days.

The real-life story of the musical by the Toronto-based husband and wife team of Irene Sankoff and David Hein was culled from interviews with the townsfolk and the passengers. Among other characters she plays in the ensemble, Olshansky-Bailon is Diane, a Texan divorcée returning home from England on a flight from London Gatwick. Two unforeseen days in Newfoundland changed her life. In a queue waiting for a blanket, she met Nick, a Brit business traveller who’d been on the same flight. In the course of a couple of days, they fell in love. By November 2001 they were married (the Marsons honeymooned in Newfoundland), and are frequently to be found in Come From Away audiences, wherever it’s playing.

Olshansky-Bailon, who grew up in Arizona and spent a decade and a half in L.A. after high school, was delighted by the chance to connect with the real Diane and Nick. “They’re lovely, so open; they love to talk about their experience. What’s cool is I didn’t expect I could connect on Facebook and just chat….”

“And I could relate to their experience to my own love story,” which has international geographical coordinates, too. “Meeting my husband was similar in a lot of ways.” They met working on a cruise ship. Olshansky-Bailon was performing; Luigi, who’s from Italy, is a chef…. I’m considerably older than my husband and Diane is considerably older than Nick.”

“We were new-ish as a couple on board a ship when COVID hit,” she says, of another global calamity, the devastating pandemic that changed the world, closed borders, severed human connectivity, fuelled the fear of the ‘outsider’. “We were separated from each other in different cities. What was going on? How can we make this work? How can this work? When will we see each other again?”

In this “my first time playing a real live living person,” she empathizes,  too, with “the feeling of guilt” experienced by real-life Diane and Nick. “We found something really special at a time when an awful thing was happening all over the world.”

Olshansky-Bailon’s husband has since become an American. And after living for a time in New York/ New Jersey, they relocated to Miami where Luigi has opened a restaurant. It’s not news that COVID was devastating for the showbiz industry. “I was auditioning but there was no work, and I ended up pivoting to a remote job.” Olshansky-Bailon stayed in that gig till this Come From Away tour.

Touring cast of Come From Away, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

Come From Away is, and always has been, an unusual Broadway hit.  For one thing, a 12-member ensemble both Newfoundlanders and their unplanned visitors with a mere change of hat or jacket. A lot of plaid is involved, and nary a sequin. In addition to Diane, a leading role, Olshansky-Bailon conjures a couple of Newfoundlanders, a quick transformation that depends, she says, on “body language, and tweaking my voice.” Ah, and there are the accents. Diane’s Texan accent isn’t hard she says. What was tricky was the special cadence of Newfoundlanders talking. “We had a dialect coach, and we went line by line.” The goal was to sound natural and spontaneous, not exaggerate an accent “that could easily go Irish.”

Instead of spectacle, Come From Away has ingeniously stylized low-tech stagecraft. The Beowulf Boritt design is framed by a stand of bare tree trunks, and a back wall of wood, which turns out to be slatted when slivers of light glint through. And the set consists largely of mismatched chairs rearranged to suggest plane interior, a school bus, the Legion, the local Tim Horton’s. In defiance of the standard Broadway playbook, there’s no real star, except a whole community; there’s no real villain except for the state of the world. And it’s about people being, well, nice.

“It’s very different,” agrees Olshansky-Bailon, who’d never seen the show live (only the streamed Apple+ TV performance) before she joined the cast. She points to “the pacing of it, so fast. Once it starts it’s barrels through; it’s almost like it has a pulse.”

Timing, as has often been pointed out, has played its part in the massive success of a piece that began in a student workshop production at Toronto’s Sheridan College in honour of the 10-year anniversary of 9-11. Via premieres at Seattle Rep and the La Jolla Playhouse, Come From Away arrived on Broadway in 2017 to celebrate hospitality and generosity at a moment when the world seemed particularly mean, distrustful, not to say hostile, to outsiders.

To say the least, 2024 won’t persuade anyone that’s changed. “There is unfortunately in this world a sense of other-ing,” as Olshansky-Bailon puts it, delicately. “Come From Away shows there are still people, quite a few of them, who can restore your faith in humanity…. In the face of it all, there are good humans out there, people who just want to help. I’ve never taken for granted the kindness of strangers.”

It’s a production that ends with a big Newfoundland screech-in party — a shot of acquired-taste rum, and the ritual kissing of a cod — at the Legion. The dancing, the high spirits, the Celtic-flavoured music from an eight-piece band: “it’s a blast. I’m having the time of my life!” declares Olshansky-Bailon. “The one way I’m different from Diane (the character): I would kiss the cod!”

PREVIEW

Come From Away

Broadway Across Canada

Created by: Irene Sankoff and David Hein

Directed by: Christopher Ashley

Where: Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium

Running: Sept. 27 to 29

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca

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Reaching for magic: Lindsey Angell stars as Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, launching the Citadel season

Posted on September 20, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Citadel Theatre, in association with Theatre Calgary. Promotion graphic supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“The world is violent and mercurial–it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love. …We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.” — Tennessee Williams, in correspondence

On the first day of rehearsal for Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, launching the Citadel season (Saturday, in preview), director Daryl Cloran presented his 12-actor cast with the playwright’s remarkably poetic thoughts about love. And it’s resonated powerfully with Lindsey Angell, who stars as Blanche DuBois, the bruised but defiant Southern belle who’s been set adrift by the loss of the family plantation, and a way of life, to creditors.

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Her arrival, suitcase in hand, at the crowded and chaotic New Orleans apartment of her younger sister Stella (Heidi Damayo) and rough-cut brother-in-law Stanley (Stafford Perry) sets this celebrated 80-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner on its fateful course.

With the Citadel production (in association with Theatre Calgary), the first Streetcar Cloran has directed, Angell inherits a role that comes with its own suitcase — a veritable who’s who of actors starting with Jessica Tandy in 1947 and Vivien Leigh in the 1951 film, both opposite the young Marlon Brando.

Even in high school, Angell says, Blanche captured her imagination and, she says, “curiosity about this hyper-feminine character who’s trapped in a world that doesn’t have the capacity to hold her fragility any more…. I’ve always had a fascination with the dark beauty of Tennessee Williams’ characters, Blanche in particular.”

Lindsey Angell stars as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Citadel Theatre in association with Theatre Calgary. Photo supplied.

“I loved her then, and I think I love her even more now,” says the actor. Finding her own individual way “in” to a fascinating character who has invited a whole lineage of interpretations, Angell has found, is all about responding to the balance between Blanche’s vulnerability, and her strength. “Her  capacity to fight to stay standing in the circumstances that unfold around her.… It’s connecting with that resilience, especially as a woman now, and identifying with the strength of this fragile, delicate creature. And how that comes out, whether it’s choosing imagination and retreating into her mind or her memories, or reaching towards her sister Stella, trying to access love from the people around her.”   

“She’s in the midst of an attempted escape (from the past) … to re-group, try and move forward — with a new idea, a new dream, a new possibility,” Angell thinks. “And she’s resistant to acknowledging the harm and the trauma she carries, that she didn’t have the tools to process or deal with.”

There’s something child-like about Blanche, she’s found. “So womanly in some ways….” Angell is often struck by Blanche’s ability to act; she’s a performer.

When Blanche meets Stanley, the poster boy for a kind of primal sexual masculinity, she is meeting her doom, and at some level she knows it. “There’s a whole multiplicity of eventualities…. Her resistance is what’s exciting for an audience be part of,” says Angell.

She’s been in Cloran productions before, two that originated at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach. In Cloran’s much-travelled ‘60s era hit As You Like It, a romantic comedy in which Shakespeare teamed up with the Beatles, she was the witty, playful heroine Rosalind. In his production of  Love’s Labour’s Lost, set in the 1940’s and “a juicy fun time,” as she says, she was the breezy Princess of France. Both productions, incidentally, were full of music, and Angell is an actor who sings, and “adores musicals.”

In the production of Streetcar we’ll see, as Angell describes, “music really beings the time forward.” A live jazz trio plays. “It adds texture and immediacy; it’s exciting to feel the time and place. It feels so alive to have this heartbeat. Jameela McNeil (who plays Stella and Stanley’s upstairs neighbour Eunice) sings. … The craft of telling the story is supported by everyone onstage.”

The small-town kid from High River AB, who was Angell’s younger self, was drawn to theatre, she says “by the community theatre in my home town, how extraordinary it felt to make something with the people of my community — all ages, all social classes, all ethnicities. It felt like this special ritual that tied us all together. … I loved the unique experience of having it all come together, and it’s gone! And then there’s something new. I really cherished that.”

“And I found such a warmth in the Edmonton theatre community. ” Vancouver-based Angell went to theatre school at Mount Royal in Calgary, and then Vancouver’s Studio 58. “The impetus to study and grow more came from, being cast as the ingenue in Shakespeare plays, and feeling a bit of discontent playing women on the periphery, with very little to say,” she says.

Since then she and her husband, also an Albertan, are back and forth — to Vertigo, Theatre Calgary, the Citadel. This season, when Cloran’s As You Like It joins the Grand Theatre season in London, Ont., Angell won’t be in the cast. Parenting calls. When the show began to tour, Angell’s two young sons were very little; one was two, the other an infant. “Breast-feeding and all that, then a pandemic. Sometimes (in theatre), you have wonderful experiences, and then have to bid them adieu.”

In the meantime A Streetcar Named Desire is the first time Angell has worked away from her kids. “My husband is holding down the fort in Vancouver.” Hurray for Facetime. And she’s grateful “to take this time to fully step into my craft, make my own creative choices….”

Later this season she’ll join an all-star cast at the Vancouver Arts Club in Nick Green’s Casey and Diana — as Princess Diana, who visits an AIDS hospice and changes the course of social history. “A whole different accent,” Angell laughs.

Last weekend as the cast prepared to move onto the set and finalize all the lighting and sound cues, “the anticipation is tremendous,” says Angell. “This flower we’ve all been nurturing is about to bloom, and you want something really special for Edmonton audiences…. It’s a very spicy, sexy show!”

PREVIEW

A Streetcar Named Desire

Theatre: Citadel Theatre in association with Theatre Calgary

Written by: Tennessee Williams

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Lindsey Angell, Stafford Perry, Heidi Damayo, Sheldon Elter, Jameela McNeil, Emily Howard, Elisa Marina Mair-Sanchez, Paul-Ford Manguelle, Daniel Briere, Ahmed Mokdad, Andrés F. Moreno, Eric Wigston

Running: Saturday (in preview) through Oct. 13

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com 

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‘Saints and Rebels’: Workshop West announces a new season and a bold experiment in ticketing

Posted on September 16, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre, 2024-2025 season “Saints and Rebels.” Poster image supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre turns 46 with a new season, two Canadian premieres, a Christmas show, and a bold invitation to the audience to “pay what you will” for every ticket to every show.

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“A pilot project,” says artistic producer Heather Inglis of the gutsy ‘pay what you will’ initiative. Workshop West is the only the second professional theatre in the country, besides the Belfry in Victoria, to sign up for the experiment. Says Inglis, it’s all about “maintaining broad access to absolutely everybody!”

“Given the climate of risk in which Workshop West lives,” as she puts it, the hope is to expand the audience, especially the younger crowd, and to encourage donation revenue.

The new season, dubbed “Saints and Rebels” and announced Monday at the Gateway Theatre, is bookended by two new Canadian plays, one from a veteran star playwright and the other from an exciting up-and-comer, Albertans both.

playwright Stephen Massicotte, Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre. Photo supplied.

In Stars on Her Shoulders Stephen Massicotte returns to the First World War setting of his 2002 memory dreamscape hit Mary’s Wedding, a bona fide Canadian theatre classic, and one of the country’s most widely travelled plays ever.

The characters in Massicotte’s new play are nurses, Canadian and British, at a Canadian hospital in Doullens, France, bombed by the Germans in 1918. Two Canadian nurses are working through the night to get the survivors out. “It’s a time of huge international turmoil, and it also happens in the context of the suffragist movement and fighting for rights, and what activism means,” says Inglis, who will direct the premiere production (Oct. 30 to Nov. 17). “One of the great hopes is that women might have the vote.”

“Not only is it set in 1918,” she says, but, unusually, “it’s also written in the style of 1918.” Think Terence Rattigan, the English playwright of nuance, turmoil beneath genteel surfaces. “There is activism, queerness, misogyny in the play, but it’s not about issues; it’s a more poetic experience than that…. It lives in a world of nuance.”

“It’s a unique flavour for us,” says Inglis, who was immersed in the period and the aesthetic in her directing apprenticeship at the Shaw Festival early in her theatre career.

Like Mary’s Wedding, Stars On Her Shoulders breathed its first public air at Workshop West’s Springboards Festival in March. And it had “a phenomenal response,” Inglis reports, “an immediate Wow.” Calls from other theatre company artistic directors ensued.

Inglis’s cast of five includes Hayley Moorhouse, Meegan Sweet, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Dana Wylie (the latter making a long-delayed return to theatre from her musical career for the occasion). And the production sponsors are an unusual group: Fruit Loop, the Evolution Lounge, and the Department of Veteran Affairs.   

The season finale is a debut play from an accomplished newcomer actor/playwright, Kole Durnford, a Métis theatre artist from Stony Plain. In Horseplay, a horse and his jockey, Horse and Jacques, bonded like brothers, are faced with an ultimate test of their love and friendship. If they don’t win the next race Horse will be sold. Should they go for broke?  “What happens when a relationship is pushed to the limit?” as Inglis puts it.

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

“Horse should not be played like a horse, and Jacques is not French,” specify Durnford’s stage directions. “A special piece that doesn’t fit into any known category,” says Inglis who, like Workshop West dramaturg in residence Darrin Hagen, was struck by a play “that’s full of whimsy, a vaudevillian sense of humour, and by the same token, heart — enduring friendship and a sense of the magic of theatre…. The characters comment on the dialogue; there’s a meta-theatricality to it.”

“Riding horses, and the feeling of freedom and boundlessness is part of the play too!” says Inglis, who directs the Workshop West production (May 14 to June 2). The cast is yet to be announced, but the set design is by Beyata Hackborn, with lighting by Alison Yanota and score by Jason Kodie.

Workshop West has done shows in December before now. But their first “Christmas show” (Dec. 11 to 22) is Krampus: A New Musical, in partnership with Straight Edge Theatre. Book and music by Seth Gilfillan and Stephen Allred and orchestrations by Michael Clark, the sassy, sharp-eyed piece debuted mid-summer at the 2023 Fringe. And it returns in an extended form, with the Edmonton Pops Orchestra and new songs.

Krampus, clever and macabre as I know from its Fringe incarnation, takes us to the heart of a “perfectly perfect family” at the #1 time of year for domestic dysfunction and inter-family one-upmanship. Yep, Christmas Eve. The songs are smart and funny, the sense of humour tongue-in-cheek goth. The Grinch and Tim Burton spring to mind.

The season includes an edition of Springboards, Workshop West’s signature new play festival March 25 to 30. It is a tangible festival testimonial that Conni Massing’s Dead Letter this past season, as well as Stars On Her Shoulders and Horseplay, have all arrived on the mainstage via Springboards.

Additionally, Keith Alessi brings his solo memoir Tomatoes Tried To Kill Me But Banjos Saved My Life (Feb. 19 to 23), now a global traveller, to the theatre town where it all began — at the Fringe. It’s a true story of the transformation from corporate CEO to banjo-playing banjo-obsessed artiste via a terrible cancer diagnosis. And it started its life at the Edmonton Fringe. The production is a fund-raiser for the theatre (thus outside the pay-what-you-will experiment).

As for that initiative, you’ll be able to choose what you pay for any ticket (suggested price: $40) and subscription (suggested price: $150). Inglis cites a Rozsa Foundation study that the 70 per cent of theatre-goers who aren’t currently going explained that it was too expensive.

“I’d rather have someone who paid $15 for their ticket than an empty seat…. Full houses create an atmosphere — it’s just more exciting for artists, and for the audience.”

“We’re taking down walls,” Inglis says, “to get people excited about Canadian theatre … so absolutely anyone has the opportunity to be part of Canadian storytelling.”

Tickets, subscriptions, and more information: workshopwest.org.

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Theatre Network at 50: an anniversary season and a story of Canadian theatre

Posted on September 16, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Mump and Smoot in Exit (Michael Kennard and John Turner), at Theatre Network. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

When a pair of horror clowns named Mump and Smoot take to the Roxy mainstage Oct. 8 for the first time in a decade, those interplanetary existentialists from Ummo will be launching Theatre Network’s 50th anniversary season. And that’s a history in which they’ve played their part.

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The Network premiere of their new show, Mump and Smoot in Exit (Oct. 8 to 27) — directed by Karen Hines, a masterful  clown satirist herself — is part of a big-birthday lineup of three productions that renew the theatre’s connection with premier artists who  have a past with an influential little company that’s Canadian through and through.

As artistic director Bradley Moss describes the opening graveside gambit of the new Mump and Smoot show coming our way, the macabre pair with the knack for gore (Edmonton audiences first met them at the 1989 Fringe) “come out onstage with their bodies, to bury them … only to realize, ‘oh we’re still here, what now?’.”

Esmé Massengill and Schnitzel in Little Dickens, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, at Theatre Network.

Mump and Smoot and Moss, which sounds like a show title, go back. In 1999 Mump and Smoot in Something Else With Zug was part of Moss’s second Theatre Network season. His first featured the weird and wonderful Street of Blood by another true Canadian original, marionettist/ playwright/ actor/ designer Ronnie Burkett, whose seven-show history with Network dates back to the gothic romance mystery thriller musical Awful Manors in 1990.

Last season Burkett premiered Wonderful Joe — a transcendent vision of a multi-cultural urban ‘hood through the eyes of an aged outlier — on the Roxy stage. And he’s back for the big five-oh.

Schnitzel as Tiny Tim, Little Dickens, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes at Theatre Network. Photo supplied.

The Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes’ returns Dec. 3 to 22 with a Christmas show, Little Dickens. And that show, says Moss, was where he started assembling the 50th anniversary season. After Little Willy (the Daisy Theatre takes on the Bard) and Wonderful Joe Moss wondered if he should wait a year. “And then I came to my senses,” he laughs.

Little Dickens is the raucous (adult!) Burkett version of that seasonal roasted chestnut A Christmas Carol, with a marionette cast that includes Daisy Theatre stars: the aging diva Esmé Massengill as the flinty Scrooge and the fairy child Schnitzel as the Yuletide heartthrob Tiny Tim. “C’mon! How funny and fun is that going to be!” says Moss. Since a Burkett show is never without its improvised moments, “you can be pretty sure he’ll have a go at the American election.”

The third of the trio on the Nancy Power mainstage, Jupiter (April 1 to 20) — “a full-bodied family drama with a beautiful dog” as billed — is the premiere of a new play commissioned from two-time Governor General’s Award winner Colleen Murphy (Pig Girl, The December Man). Moss, who’s directed Network productions of Pig Girl, Armstrong’s War, The Society For The Destitute Present Titus Bouffonius among others, admires the playwright for a fearless tough-mindedness that never loses sight of the need to be entertaining.

Monk, in Jupiter by Colleen Murphy, Theatre Network. Photo supplied.

As he describes, Jupiter is set in the living room of a multi-generational working class family with dark secrets. It unfolds in three different time periods, separated by 10 years, to follow the fortunes of “a young girl with a lot of smarts, a promising talent.… And you see her world unravel.” The production is big: a cast of seven and a dog. Ah yes, a handsome golden retriever named Monk is the only actor who’s been cast so far.

The season also includes the return of Nextfest (June 5 to 15), the multi-disciplinary festival of emerging artists, for its 27th annual edition, and the Phoenix Series, in which Network hosts other companies and indie artists.    

In a half a century Theatre Network has had its dramatic, not to say seismic, re-locations, renos, struggles, not to mention flames and flood. It’s a story that includes the devastating fire in 2015 that destroyed Network’s ex-cinema Roxy home on 124th St. in the midst of its 40th anniversary season. It seemed like the end. That the story turned out a new chapter instead, and seven years later a spiffy new $12 million Roxy, rising from the ashes of the old, amazingly on the same footprint, is nothing short of a theatrical coup. But there were near-death experiences before that: read on.

The challenge to generate new Canadian work and support local artists, and along with it draw an audience, isn’t exclusive to Network, to be sure. Fortunes are not to be made that way. As Moss puts it, “if the focus is on art: are you a hit-chaser or a hit-maker?”

The Network story began 50 years ago as a collective of young U of A theatre school grads,  creating on location and touring the results. Tanya Ryga, one of the original group, recalls that “the group came together courtesy of Pierre Trudeau’s Opportunity For Youth Grants.” The story of a hard-knock Alberta town, Elnora, bypassed by the new highway, caught the eye of one of their number, Dennis Robinson. “And in the spring of 1975, six of us headed there…. We lived and worked among the farmers, teachers, children, merchants, hospital staff, bar staff and families to create Theatre Network’s inaugural play Two Miles Off or Elnora Sunrise With A Twist of Lemon.”

actor/playwright Tanya Ryga, part of the collective that started Theatre Network. Photo supplied

“I cringe sometimes when I think of our hippie attire and urban demeanour, long hair, beards, bra-less 20-something know-it-all artistes descending on this quiet village of 211 people. But they didn’t flinch.” All 211 showed up for opening night.

Two Miles Off… toured across Alberta and across the country. And until 1981 the core group, Ryga says, “continued pioneering the ‘immersive experience becomes the next play’ approach.” The most notable Network play of the period was hatched in Fort McMurray “where we lived in a school bus in the summer of 1977,” and got odd jobs to sustain the enterprise.

By the summer of 1978, with help from playwrights Gordon Pengilly and Leslie Saunders, the musical Hard Hats and Stolen Hearts: A Tarsands Myth was ready for an international trek, “through Alberta, across the prairies to the National Arts Centre, the Maritimes and finally Off-Off Broadway.”

By 1981 the touring collective had transitioned; they put down roots in a 140-seat ex-Kingdom Hall on a cul-de-sac near the old Coliseum that had been home to the Tournesol dance company. And not only was it a dive, it was “unfindable,” says Stephen Heatley, who became artistic director in 1982. All tickets came with instructions about where to turn left.

“We wanted to be an Edmonton theatre. But we didn’t have an Edmonton audience…. We needed to re-establish the connections with the community….

“My brag line,” laughs Heatley, now a drama prof at UBC, “was that in my first season I increased the box office 1,000 per cent. And it wasn’t that hard….”

“We had no money and no audience. So we figured we’d better spread our seed a bit,” by touring. Raymond Storey’s Country Chorale was part of his first season, and in the cast was a big-boned gal from southern Alberta, an unknown named k.d. lang.

“For the first three seasons (which included the charming The Other Side of the Pole and a musical adaptation of The Shooting of Dan McGrew), we did joint productions with Red Deer College,” where the shows got built and rehearsed, and where they played after Edmonton. Gradually audiences started to find the little theatre, and hits emerged. The musical Your Wildest Dreams, by Marianne Copithorne and Murray McCune, which extended for a week before touring to Victoria and Ontario, was one. Heatley remembers a city councillor phoning him during the holdover to say “you can’t be sold out; I need to see the show.” Heatley suggested that since there were literally no more chairs in the joint he might be able to sit on someone’s lap.

As Ryga says “we had all grown up seeing British and American plays dominating our training and gracing our Canadian stages. We wanted tell our own stories.” At Network, as Heatley says, the theatrical fare was “not just Canadian but almost exclusively Albertan….” And that came with challenges. “We weren’t doing popular hits from Off-Broadway; we worked by the grace of the audience who grew to trust that our shows would be done with integrity. They were our stories. And they’d forgive us one or two bad ones for the ones that were movers and shakers.”

By Christmas 1989, “we had a sense we’d done as much as we could in that building, and probably more.” So it came to pass that Network moved across town to the Roxy, the funky ex-cinema on 124th St. that Nancy Power “sold to us for a song ( $200,000)….”

“It had a history before we moved in,” as Heatley says. “I often felt there were ghosts.” With ghostly spaces to match, like the crawl space under the stage where the unlucky stage hand pushed things up onto the stage through trap doors. (side note: touring that space made me the claustrophobe I am today).

“I was a little nervous about the idea of a theatre company owning property,” admits Heatley, who left the company in 1993 when the board vetoed his production of Conni Massing’s The Aberhart Summer as too large-scale (it later happened at the Citadel). “But I’ve re-thought that over the years….”

The old Roxy wasn’t luxurious digs, to say the least, and survival never stopped being precarious. Heatley remembers continuing arguments with Equity about the chemical toilets backstage (“we didn’t have the money for plumbing”). The low water mark of the Network story might actually be in plumbing. In the 1994-95 season when artistic director Ben Henderson and general manager David Hennessey “inherited a mess,” as Moss puts it, “the toilets and hot water tank were re-possessed, and the theatre operated out of the phone box across the street.”

A certain ramshackle bohemian quality, that flourished under that perpetually leaky roof, was arguably part of its charm. “It was beautiful,” says Moss, “because as a small theatre we were able to surpass your expectations. You walked in, tiny little lobby, crappy bathrooms, and then, inside, there was magic. Ronnie or Lorne (Cardinal) onstage. And you walked out going Wow! Now (laughter) it’s the opposite: people walk into a great building with expectations!”

So many plays important to the Canadian theatre repertoire were developed, produced, presented, at the well-named Theatre Network, in all its locations. And so many notable Canadian playwrights are connected to the big-impact little theatre:  names like  Raymond Storey, Conni Massing, Frank Moher, Brad Fraser, Beth Graham, Collin Doyle, Eugene Stickland, Vic Albert, Karen Hines, Michael McKinlay, the playwrights of this 50th anniversary season (Murphy, Burkett, Kennard and Turner) linger in the air. The list goes on. And Moss, who grew up in Quebec, has made a point of producing Quebecois playwrights (Michel Tremblay, Dominique Champagne and more).

Supporting artists is the crucial thing, says Moss. “We want to be the venue where a show evolves and grows. The show you arrive with isn’t the show you should leave with…. The craft is a process. And the missing ingredient is always the audience.” .

Further information, subscriptions, tickets, memberships: theatrenetwork.ca.

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Nashville Music City: the 50th anniversary season opener at the Mayfield does its storytelling in music. A review

Posted on September 8, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Lisa MacDougall, Allison Lynch, Pamela Gordon, Andrea House in Nashville: Music City, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Nashville: Music City, which launches the 50th anniversary season at the Mayfield, begins and ends with Will the Circle Be Unbroken. It’s a thought that counts in any half-century birthday celebration in the world of theatre.

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And in a way the 1907 gospel chestnut embodied in the seminal 1972 album by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, as it gathered the forces of elite classic country together with its contemporary country rock acolytes, shapes this fulsome joint creation by Van Wilmott and Tracey Power.

“It all starts with a song,” we’re told at the outset of a show that traces the course of country music back to the ‘50s and the early days of the WSM Grand Ole Opry, equally divided between the calls of music and the insurance industry. And songs are what this musically lavish show, stylishly performed by an 11-member ensemble of terrific musicians, real pros every one, is all about.

Let no one argue that the Mayfield has ever been stingy in the song lists of their musical compilation shows. Au contraire. And this one, the next instalment of the original ‘Musicians Gone Wild’ series (it began with last season’s Rock The Canyon), is especially extravagant, as two hours-plus of singing by a very hardworking cast — who wear their labours and their bootcut jeans lightly — attest. Spoken narration and annotations about the country music mythology of  “ordinary stories told by ordinary people” are relatively sparing. Ditto truisms (“never underestimate the banjo”). Nashville: Music City does its storytelling in songs. Power’s script confines itself mostly to small, pointed anecdotes about the humble origins of country stars like Dolly Parton (an epigram specialist), Tammy Wynette, or Johnny Cash.

Narda McCarroll’s multi-levelled set conjures a country bar, with add-ons like neon for the Nashville hangout Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, Matt Schuurman’s projections, and Jillian White’s surges of showbiz lighting.

Devon Brayne, Pamela Gordon, Allison Lynch in Nashville: Music City, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Act I conjures the ‘50s in country music in Nashville, and starts in a period when the musical talent didn’t actually live there at first, and had to be attracted to come. Flatts and Scruggs, the “hillbilly Shakespeare” Hank Williams, the Carters…. Pamela Gordon wraps her big multi-angled voice into Lovesick Blues with a kind of period twang that will gladden the heart of aficionados. The trio of Gordon, Andrea House, and Allison Lynch tuck into the harmonies of Carters’ It’s My Lazy Day. Devon Brayne walks the line unerringly with the rich rumbling baritone of Johnny Cash. And there’s Brad Wiebe’s Elvis take on the Bill Monroe classic Blue Moon of Kentucky, a killer version from Gordon of the Patsy Cline take on Crazy, and more and more. 

It’s a show that rewards versatility. Lynch is an accomplished fiddler as well as singer, for example. House, who apparently can sing in any genre and style, and plays guitar, stand-up bass and auto-harp, not only delivers Stand By Your Man, but nails it with startling dramatic intensity like Cleopatra invoking Mark Antony. “I spent 15 minutes writing it, and a lifetime defending it,” Tammy Wynette notes wryly. It’s paired with Brayne’s version of Jackson. House and Gordon make a duet of Dolly’s Jolene, that gathers into an ensemble number for five, in Wilmott’s artful arrangement.

The vocal harmonies by the ensemble are impressive.  The excellence of the band is by now a Mayfield signature: full marks for having a pedal steel guitar player (Bob Blair).

Nashville: Music City is not without a certain tartness. Act II, which adds pop and rock to country à la Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, alludes to Nashville’s love of “the sound of money.” Which gives Kenny Rogers The Gambler — “there’ll be time enough for countin’ when the deal is done” — a certain angled approach. Nashville the music city is “always looking for the next big hit.” Judging by the song list of this show, it wasn’t exactly unsuccessful.

Songs by Randy Travis, Shania Twain, Garth Brooks and other stadium-fillers, and ah yes, a star-in-progress with country origins, Taylor Swift by name (Lynch does a version of Our Song) are part of the show. And the Dixie Chicks, now the Chicks (in a song led by strong-voiced keyboardist Lisa MacDougall) and the great, lamented John Prine are included too.

Comprehensive, yes. This is a music show that’s built on music, lots and lots of music. But it doesn’t take us to the present: there’s still plenty of room for the Mayfield to play in.

REVIEW

Nashville: Music City

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre, 16615 109 Ave.

Created by: Tracey Power and Van Wilmott

Directed by: Tracey Power

Starring: Devon Brayne, Pamela Gordon, Andrea House, Bob Blair, Lisa MacDougall, Steve Hoy, Allison Lynch, Mark Sterling, Derek Stremel, Harley Symington, Brad Wiebe

 Running: through Nov. 3

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca

 

 

   

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Edmonton has play dates: here’s a dozen intriguing prospects in the upcoming theatre season

Posted on September 6, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Mump and Smoot open Theatre Network’s 50th anniversary season, in Exit. Photo supplied.

Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s time to play. After a year of continuing struggle, with rising production costs and dwindling funding, theatre companies and artists are finding their way back to stages large and small. Our mighty summer Fringe, as always, is a hint that the live experience is what we’re after (this year’s edition sold 127,000 or so tickets to 216 shows). And it always leaves us wanting more.

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The Mayfield launches its 50th anniversary season this week with Nashville: Music City, the next instalment (through Nov. 3) of Musicians Gone Wild, a series devoted to seminal eras in pop culture history that began with last season’s Rock The Canyon. The Citadel is in rehearsal for Daryl Cloran’s production of the Tennessee Williams classic A Streetcar Named Desire. Mump and Smoot, those existentialist horror clowns, have arrived at the Roxy to prepare for their new show The Exit.

A season announcements from Workshop West Playwrights Theatre just happened,  with news of a Stephen Massicotte premiere and a bold experiment in ticketing. And in the wings are indie productions as yet unannounced. But to whet your theatrical appetite, here’s a little selection (in no particular order) of intriguing shows happening this season, from what we know so far, to look forward to.   

Goblin:Macbeth, Spontaneous Theatre. Image supplied.

Goblin: Macbeth. Something wicked this way comes. Finally. After hot-ticket runs at Bard on the Beach, Stratford, and Calgary’s Vertigo Theatre, at last we get to see this inspirationally weird Spontaneous Theatre creation by Rebecca Northan (Blind Date, Undercover) and Bruce Horak — theatre artists who are the correct answer to “who would even think of doing this?” Three goblins, who’ve stumbled on a Collected Works of Shakespeare, decide to “do theatre,” and pick their favourite: the goriest, and the shortest. It re-launches the Citadel’s Highwire Series, on hiatus for a season, Jan. 11 to Feb. 2.

On The Banks of the Nut. In Stewart Lemoine’s 2001 screwball comedy (a “bucolic escapade” as billed), the “federal talent agent for Wisconsin,” on a rural quest to find “a citizen of rare talent” in 1951, is accompanied by a plucky temp, who seems to be a natural agent of chaos. As in so many Lemoines, music is by no means incidental. Here, the  post-horn solo in Mahler’s Third Symphony unleashes an unexpected life force reaction in the proprietor of Nut River Lodge. Lemoine himself directs the Teatro Live! revival, the first since 2010, that runs on the Varscona stage May 30 to June 13. And you can expect to see a new generation of Teatro talent, joining the company from this year’s auditions.

Mump and Smoot in Exit. The rumours are true! Brush up your Ummonian, Edmonton: the stellar pair of nightmare ‘horror clowns’ from the planet Ummo, who haven’t been sighted onstage in a decade, are back among us this season. Michael Kennard and John Turner are premiering their new show at their home away from Ummo, Theatre Network, as part of that company’s 50th anniversary season. In their slides across the country on a trail of gore and gizzards, existential rumination and, you know, death and torture, Edmonton has always figured prominently— ever since their sensational earliest appearance at the 1989 Fringe, Mump and Smoot in Something. The Exit, directed as usual by Karen Hines of Pochsy fame, herself a specialist in the darkest reaches of hilarity, runs at the Roxy Oct. 10 to 27, in a season that also welcomes back Ronnie Burkett for his Christmas show Little Dickens.

Monstress. It’s been a prolific year for playwright Trevor Schmidt, with premieres of Robot Girls, his hilarious and insightful coming-of-age comedy at Shadow and the thriller Candy & The Beast at Northern Light. And the artistic director of NLT has a new one coming up, to open the company’s 49th season, ‘Making A Monster’. Monstress (Nov. 8 to 23) has an eerie Frankenstein-ian thrill about it: a disgraced doctor in Victorian England who’s enlisted to re-create the dead-neck daughter of a wealthy man. Gradually, as Schmidt has described, the identities of the doctor and her creation begin to intertwine. Schmidt’s production stars Sydney Williams (Fresh Hell) and Julia van Dam (A Phoenix Too Frequent).

The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow. Six seasons ago Shadow Theatre scored a hit with Neil Grahn’s The Comedy Club, the remarkable true story of members of the Princess Patricia Light Infantry Division summoned in the darkest days of World War I to start turning out musical comedies to enhance the morale of Canadian soldiers. The playwright, who also works in improv and sketch comedy, film and television (and leans into a captivating combination of documentary and comedy), returns to Canadian World War I history for this story of the extraordinary life and career of one of Canada’s most highly decorated Indigenous soldiers. His new play, which launches the upcoming Shadow season (March 20 to April 7), tells of the star scout and sniper who returned home after the war to find himself in a world where he didn’t even have the right to vote. And so another kind of trench warfare began for the warrior/ Chief-turned-activist. Ryan Cunningham as Francis Pegahmagabow leads a cast of five in the production jointly directed by John Hudson and Christine Sokaymoh Frederick.

Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812. The innovative allure of Dave Malloy’s through-sung 2016 Broadway hit, lies both in its indie rock/electropop/ folk/ musical theatre score and its highly unconventional storytelling, is lifted from a 70-page segment of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Which is to say there’s nothing like it in the repertoire. I’ve seen it once in a sort of spiegeltent in New York, and once on Broadway (the Crows Theatre production in Toronto was extended twice this past season). It was a coup for MacEwan University’s theatre arts to get the rights for the student production, directed by Jim Guedo, that runs Feb. 12 to 16.

playwright Colleen Murphy

Jupiter. Any new play by the great (and fearless) Colleen Murphy is a Canadian theatre event. This Order of Canada appointee has a long history with Theatre Network (Pig Girl, The December Man, The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius). And that’s where her latest premieres, as part of their starry 50th anniversary lineup. Jupiter, set in Murphy’s own Quebec and northern Ontario home turf, happens over four days in a family living room — with dog! And it’s billed as exploring themes of “faith, truth and family dynamics.” Bradley Moss directs the production that runs at the Roxy April 1 to 20.

Dance Nation. This highly unusual dance/theatre amalgam by the American writer Claire Barron, a 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist, is the mainstage production at the 13th annual SkirtsAfire Festival (March 6 to 16). Intriguingly, it’s set in the tumultuous pre-teen girl world of competitive dancers, but it calls for a multi-generational all-ages cast of adult women. Amanda Goldberg, the festival’s new artistic producer, directs, as SkirtsAfire returns to producing (and not simply presenting) after the success of last season’s Mermaid Legs.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The 70s Musical. The cross-border success of Daryl Cloran’s Shakespeare-Beatles mash-up on As You Like It has inspired this latest venture (Feb. 22 to March 23). It match-makes Shakespeare’s most popular romantic comedy and its complications in the woods with David Bowie, Elton John, the BeeGees, Marvin Gaye, Olivia Newton-John…. Who are the hopeful thesps, Bottom the weaver and cohorts, the most reliably funny inhabitants of Dream, in this 70s world? An aspirational rock band? Cloran partners on the script re-do with Kayvon Khoshkam, the artistic director of Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan. At very least, a virtuoso turn in song rights acquisition is in the works.

Alphabet Line. AJ Hrooshkin’s play, the winner of this year’s Westbury Family Fringe Theatre Award, is tuned to the prairie vibe — rural/ urban, distant horizons, the need for connection in vast space — and what it means to be gay in the western Canada hinterland. In the late 1940s a queer man living on the family farm sends out daily messages by radio in hopes of a response. And then he gets one — from the big city of Saskatoon. It premieres in the Fringe Theatre season April 25 to May 3.

A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder. In a first for the enterprising and indefatigable little theatre, Grindstone, the new manager of the theatre spaces at the Orange Hub (10045 – 156 St.), is launching a mainstage subscription series of three big musicals there. And this riotous 2013 Tony Award-winning musical comedy is one of them (May 23 to June 1). It chronicles the murderous swath cut by a penniless, disinherited hero en route to an earldom. Only eight relatives stand between the aspirational Monty and his goal. It’s a quick-change virtuoso role, and the nimble character leads a cast of nine. Byron Martin directs, and casting announcements await.

Heist. There’s big and lavish in the Citadel’s upcoming season (think Let It Go). And there’s also this intriguing (and rare) theatrical proposition: a crime caper for the stage. Alberta playwright/ screenwriter (who’s also an ophthalmologist, in a rare double career) Arun Lakra has devised a heist with all the trimmings — double-crosses, diamonds, guns, lasers. It premiered last season at Calgary’s Vertigo. The Citadel production directed by Haysam Kadri, the artistic director of Alberta Theatre Projects, runs March 22-April 13.

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The curtain comes down on Find Your Fringe: more tickets sold, bigger artist payout.

Posted on August 25, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Funny Beyond Words: A Physical Comedy Cabaret at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

After 11 days and nights of sunshine and stars (and also wind, smoke, rain both horizontal and vertical), the 43rd annual edition of our monster summer theatre bash is about to exit the stage tonight. “Our Fringers are hardy,” says artistic director Murray Utas in admiration.

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By Sunday noon (with an afternoon and evening of shows still to come), Find Your Fringe had found itself with some warming box office stats, starting with the 127,000 tickets sold to its 216 shows (update later).

That’s a sizeable increase from the 114,000-plus tickets to the 185-show Fringe landscape of 2023. And, perhaps most impressively, the payout to artists, who take home 100 per cent of the ticket sales (minus the Fringe surcharge), has climbed to $1.3 million. Which is up, relative to the number of shows, from the seam-bursting 258-show 2019 Fringe with its $1.4 million pay-out, spread among a lot more artists, and the $1.2 million that went back to artists at The Answer Is Fringe last summer. In fact, says Fringe Theatre executive director Megan Dart, “it’s the second-highest payout ever at the festival!”

Another box office number that delights Dart and Utas is 397 sold-out performances as of Sunday noon, and 11 totally sold-out runs of Fringe shows. As Dart pointed out Friday, that number includes Fringe shows whose entire runs were sold out before the festival even began. And the visits to the festival’s Old Strathcona site were calculated at 750,000, up from 550,000 last year. Which will have happy consequences for Sea Change beer sales when the final tally is in.

Alas, though, the Sustain Fringe hasn’t arrived at its $300,000 end-of-Fringe goal (it was at $228,000 at noon Sunday). But Dart does report that the 34 monthly donors who signed up when the campaign launched in March have become more than 500. “We were quite vulnerable when we put out a call for help…. It’s a testament to the important of this event here,” this in a country where fully 25 per cent of arts organizations didn’t make it through the pandemic.  Sustainability on a scale remains in crisis mode in a landscape pummelled by rocketing production costs and shrinking funding.

The 2024 edition of Edmonton’s theatre extravaganza, though, was big and defiant. New this year was the move of the Late-Night Cabaret, a midnight tradition that’s been a hot ticket and a gathering place for Fringe artists for more than a decade — from the Backstage Theatre to the Granite Curling Club. Not only is the venue much larger — “a backup (300-seat) venue in case of smoke, rain, snow, hail…” says Dart, but the move eliminates the need to keep the Backstage configured as a cabaret space. “Yup, we returned a theatre venue to a theatre festival!” says Utas. A meteorologist on call has turned out to be a good move too, custom-made predictions minute by minute for planning at a festival with a large-scale outdoor carnival component. “So well written, they could have been read by Judi Dench,” says Utas.

Meegan Sweet in The S.P.O.T.T., Squawk Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo supplied

If you like me were thwarted by Sold Out notices in your quest to see, say,  The Flying Doctor, Empress of Blandings’ small-cast contemporary update of the Moliere comedy, or a solo show starring a raccoon who dreams of being a  human, Meegan Sweet’s The S.P.O.T.T., you’ll recognize the continuing, rejuvenating surprise that is the Fringe. Indie theatre is forever a struggle, and the Fringe and Fringe audiences are a boost to its artists, both in the development and springboarding of new work.

Lauren Brady’s OWEAaDEBT, HEYwire Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo by Joel Sims.

There are, to be sure, obvious ways audience participation happens, at a festival where fourth walls are in short supply. Lauren Brady’s OWEaDEBT, for example (held over this week at the Fringe), unleashes a sly and winking sense of humour about including the audience directly in a highly original, reimagined version of Swan Lake, with its urgency about the  transformative power of romantic love. In Stéphanie Morin-Robert’s Soft Spot, an elastic-sided mix of comedy, karaoke, and something a lot queasier and more traumatic, she asks us “does anyone want to come up here and save me, I’m drowning,” And someone does.

Jenny McKillop and Garett Ross in Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina) – a new musical, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Ryan Parker.

But the Fringe audience, more directly accessible to Fringe artists in small informal venues, participates in other ways, too, more subtle perhaps but important in developing a script or testing a creative idea. Sometimes it’s via feedback; sometimes it’s just a matter of being there, and reacting. Kate Ryan, the artistic director of Plain Jane Theatre, directed Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina), an experiment in making musical theatre that’s held over this week at the Varscona Theatre. It took up the challenge of turning Collin Doyle’s beautiful and intricate hit play Let The Light of Day Through into a musical (with composer Matt Graham) with a future. Changes happened right till the curtain went up on opening night, and then kept happening at every performance.

“Fringe,” says Ryan, “has definitely been an invaluable part of the process of this new musical! So many parts to balance with script and music. We knew that an audience would be a part of the new step in the development…. Collin, myself, and Matt, who’s playing live are at every performance, listening and feeling it, and checking in with actors after. There has been a couple of script and song additions, and allowing moments to breathe more. We’re excited about the next steps for this piece. And grateful for any and all feedback too. We want it all!.”

Garett Ross, who co-stars with Jenny McKillop, thinks Fringe audiences “have had an impact on how far we could go with the lightness and darkness of the piece. This was something I didn’t realize until we actually had an audience, how willing they would be to buy in to the joy and the grief….”

“Fringe audiences lean in. They want to be moved, affected…. They take time off work to invest in this! I totally love this about them. I love standing at the door to greet them as they enter and leave. I learn about how the show impacts them. And I’ve heard it all — the best learning experience for me as a director.

Stephanie Johnson and Thomas Buan in Who’s Afraid of Winnie The Pooh? Clevername Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo supplied.

Is the Fringe still the right place for indie theatrical experiments? It’s a question that gets asked yearly. Dart takes “the freedom to experiment at the festival” as one of its great strengths. On their first visit to Edmonton,  Minneapolis-based Clevername Theatre would agree. They brought us an audacious production, Alexander Gerchak’s bold and unusual Who’s Afraid Of Winnie The Pooh? which actually does present the Edward Albee scorcher with the A.A. Milne characters. It premiered at the 2022 Minnesota Fringe, like many of the company’s most experimental pieces.

“It always involves a bit of a leap of faith taking a newer work to a new community,” says Gerchak, “even when the venue is geared toward more experimental work…. We have been incredibly pleased to find that Edmonton has connected to our show in a big way…. Our company is a big believer in the strange and provocative and thought-inducing. And after getting a chance to see a number of other works at the Edmonton Fringe, and the audience’s engagement with them I believe the festival is a welcome home for such work (and for ours).”

Mermaid Entertainment’s Alison Wunderland, a kooky high-speed musical comedy which sold out every performance in its months-long run at the tiny commercial Spotlight Cabaret, the Fringe was an experiment in moving from Off-Off Broadway to the big house, the Garneau Theatre (and it’s held over this week at the Varscona Theatre). “Audiences did show up!” says Aimée Beaudoin, in the cast herself with her Spotlight co-producer Jeff Halaby. “We averaged 225 people per show which was wonderful.”

A show based on playing directly, up close, hand-on-shoulder so to speak, with the Spotlight dinner-show audience had to change in an exponentially larger venue. “We relied on the script,” says Beaudoin, “since there’s no time to talk to the audiences before the show and gather ‘intel’. In a way I like this better, using the actual jokes we wrote, rather than throwing in a joke about ‘Bob’s 50th birthday’ for a cheap laugh. It gives the show more integrity, and the audience is just as delighted with a straight-up show.”

“The Fringe,” she thinks, “opens us up to new audiences and this is wonderful for Spotlight! We’d love more of the theatre crowds to come see what we’re doing in our regular season.”

And in the end, that link between the Fringe and the theatre scene the rest of the year is something that shouldn’t be fragile or hit-and-miss. It’s the research-and-development branch of theatre, where a lot of the excitement of new talent and new ideas happens, and the risks get taken. It’s what keeps us coming back for more.

Have you checked out holdovers of Fringe shows in three venues?

 

 

 

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The Fringe heads into its final weekend on a roll

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Find Your Fringe, the 43rd annual edition of the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival.

Find Your Fringe finds itself going into its final weekend on a roll. With good news to share.

As of Friday morning the 216-show 43rd annual edition Edmonton’s 11 day-and-night summer theatre binge has sold 13,000 more tickets to indoor shows than at the same point in last year’s Fringe. And as Fringe Theatre executive director Megan Dart reports, to her particular delight, the payout to festival artists (who take home 100 per cent of ticket sales, minus the $5 max festival surcharge) has already broken the $1 million barrier. Which does more than hint that last year’s $1.2 million artist payout will easily be surpassed by Sunday night.

“Our goal is always to build audiences, and give artists the support they need,” says Dart. And this year’s 216-show dimensions, an incremental rather than an exponential increase from 185 in 2023, feels like “a comfortable fit” for audience engagement, she thinks. “Deep roots instead of wider branches.”

So far, Fringe organizers report “more than 300 sold-out performances.” And, says Dart, multiple shows (among them Rat Academy, High School Musical, Evil Dead the Musical, Colin Mochrie: Live At The Fringe!) sold out their entire Fringe runs before the festival even began. The Fringe’s nightly Late-Night Cabaret, always a magnet for insomniac fringers in its 13-year history at the 120-seat Backstage Theatre, “continues to bustle every night,” as Dart puts it, in its new digs, the Granite Curling Club, a venue twice the size.

The beer tents have been so busy that the Fringe’s usual mid-week mid-festival order, traditionally Wednesday, had to be bumped back to Monday instead.

Like many other arts organizations across the country, it’s been a year of struggle for our Fringe, the oldest and still the biggest on the continent. The skyrocketing costs of producing the massive festival, and shrinking (or frozen) funding from every level of government, have seen to that. The festival’s “Sustain Fringe” campaign was launched in March, with the aim of raising $300,000, in $5-a-month pledges. It started with 34 monthly donors, and as of Friday morning, there are 420-plus. And the current campaign total stands at $210,000.

“If every Fringe fan donated $5 a month, the Fringe would instantly be sustainable,” says Dart. Opportunity knocks: fringetheatre.ca/give/sustain-fringe/.

And meanwhile there are shows to see, lots of shows. Have a peek at 12thnight’s reviews; you can find them gathered under the heading “Fringe 2024,” at 12thnight.ca.

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Wait, there’s more Fringe to find: holdover shows in three Fringe venues

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Lauren Brady in OWEaDEBT, HEYwire Theatre at Edmonton Fringew 2024. Photo by Joel Sims

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Yes, Find Your Fringe, the 43rd annual edition of Edmonton’s big summer theatre bash, has its grand finale Sunday night. But if you haven’t quite succeeding in translating Find into Found!, a dozen of the most intriguing and popular shows at this year’s festivities are held over, in three Fringe venues — the Westbury, Rapid Fire Theatre’s Exchange Theatre, and the Varscona — next week.

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At the Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, in the Westbury Theatre

100% Wizard (Keith Brown): Friday (Aug. 30) 9 p.m., Saturday (Aug.31) 7 p.m.

Let’s Not Turn On Each Other (Walters and Watt): Friday (Aug. 30) 7 p.m., Saturday (Aug. 31) 9 p.m.

OWEaDEBT (HEYwire Theatre): Wednesday (Aug.28) 9 p.m., Thursday (Aug. 29) 7 p.m.

Shirley Gnome: Titular Character (Heartichoke Arts): Wednesday (Aug. 28) 7 p.m., Thursday (Aug. 29) 9 p.m.

Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner in Rat Academy, Batrabbit Productions. Pghoto supplied.

At Rapid Fire Theatre’s Exchange Theatre

Big Business (New Noise Productions): Friday (Aug. 30) 7 p.m.

Marv n’ Berry Presents: Trash Pony (Rapid Fire Theatre): Friday (Aug. 30) 9 p.m.

PLAYS BY BOTS (Rapid Fire Theatre): Saturday (Aug. 31) 7 p.m.

Rat Academy (Rapid Fire Theatre): Friday (Aug. 30) 5 p.m., Saturday (Aug. 31) 9 p.m., Sunday (Sept. 1) 7 p.m.

The Dancing Donairs in Alison Wunderland, Mermaid Entertainment at Edmonton Fringe 2024. Photo by Darla Woodley

At the Varscona Theatre

Accidental Beach: A Previously Improvised Musical (Grindstone Theatre): Tuesday (Aug. 27) 9 p.m.

Alison Wunderland (Mermaid Entertainment): Thursday (Aug. 29) 7:30 p.m., Friday (Aug. 30) 7:30 p.m.

Bright Lights (Blarney Productions): Tuesday (Aug. 27) 7 p.m., Wednesday (Aug. 28) 9 p.m.

Rob and Chris (Bobby + Tina) – A New Musical (Plain Jane Theatre): Wednesday (Aug. 28) 7 p.m.

Holdover tickets: fringetheatre.ca/holdovers

  

  

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