Don’t look now, but who’s that behind you? The Woman in Black, at Teatro Live! A review.

Posted on October 12, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Geoffrey Simon Brown and Julien Arnold in The Woman in Black, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Have sympathy for your audience!” roars The Actor (Geoffrey Simon Brown) emphatically at the start of The Woman In Black, the hit thriller that launches the Teatro Live! season at the Varscona. “Draw on your emotions and our imagination.”

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Andrew Ritchie’s crack production does both.

The Actor has been hired to coach a stiff elderly solicitor, one Arthur Kipps (Julien Arnold), in the fine art of performance. Arthur is a test case for beginner thesp lessons (one of our best actors, Arnold tackles bad acting expertly). But he persists. He feels a compelling need to release the nightmare burden that’s haunted him for 30 years by telling his story to an audience, his family. “Terrible things have happened to me,” he says. “The story must be told.”

The story is a classic old-school goth chiller, of Edwardian provenance. It takes us to a gloomy mansion in a desolate salt marsh on the northeast coast of England, a house so isolated it’s only accessible across a skinny causeway at low tide. But as for the storytelling, the fun of The Woman In Black, a cunning and intricate 1987 adaptation by English playwright Stephen Mallatratt of Susan Hill’s novel — it ran in the West End for 34 years before it closed in 2023 — is that it belongs so fully to the theatre.

It engages “our emotions and our imagination” in the ingenious ways it uses deliberately minimalist theatrical props (a trunk, a couple of chairs, a door, a doll) designed by Alison Yanota, and the technical resources of the theatre. It’s a study in unlocking the power of suggestion to create suspense. When a rocking chair rocks, by itself, in Act II, the audience gasps. Which reminds you how fun it is to share a gasp with an audience.

Geoffrey Simon Brown and Julien Arnold in The Woman in Black, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Ritchie’s production, and his team of designers, are inspired by the possibilities of this theatre playground. Leona Brausen’s costumes — bowlers, Edwardian suits, rustic garb for the northerners — locate the story in time. The Actor and Arthur Kipps marvel at the “recorded sound,” as they put it, and there’s unnerving live sound too, interspersed with creaks, the whoosh of wind, disembodied shrieks at various imaginary distances, all part of Tori Morrison’s dramatic sound design. And the lighting created by T. Erin Gruber is a character too, an unsettling landscape of semi-visibility, shadows, darkness erupting into startling flashes, flickering lights from mysterious sources. Lighting and sound surround us in this storytelling, from behind, through the aisles, in the unexplored pockets of darkness at the edges of the stage.

Both sound and light play across a gauzy screen that separates past and present. And it opens to reveal — no, suggest — the mysterious labyrinth of Eel Marsh House, in Yanota’s design.

In short, the theatre feels occupied, so to speak, by the story. The play begins in a darkened Edwardian theatre, and the Varscona, with its proscenium, its red velvet curtains, its brick and wood, turns in a fine period performance. That Strathcona venue has never felt smaller, and that’s a compliment.

Geoffrey Simon Brown in The Woman in Black, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

I’ve left the narrative to the last, because there’s a lot that mustn’t be revealed in advance (as The Actor says at the outset, “have sympathy for the audience” and I’m all for that.”). The Woman In Black is a play within a play, and there’s a moment when the inner play slides in and takes over, and the actors switch places. Geoffrey Simon Brown plays the younger Arthur Kipps, a skeptical lawyer sent by his London office to the village on the marsh, to settle the affairs of the elderly occupant, deceased, of Eel Marsh House. He doesn’t believe in ghosts, but…. The performance charts the gradual escalation of his unease into terror. “What are you holding back? I must know!” he cries to a local.

Julien Arnold and Geoffrey Simon Brown in The Woman in Black, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

And Arnold, unleashing a whole arsenal of accents, plays everyone else the young Kipps meets on his life-changing journey north, taciturn villagers and eerie pony cart drivers included. In Arnold’s performance the characters are precisely differentiated. “You may doubt,” says one village dweller. “We know.”

In a thriller with only two credited actors (and one uncredited dog, excellent in the role of Spider), the challenge to the actors to conjure the full cast is extreme. And these are actors who dig in. This, incidentally, is the second production of the theatre season in which a character will holler “Stella!” at top volume.

There’s the tickling suspense of wondering, and there are scary surprises, my friends, in this season of the scary. Buy in — the invitation offered by the production is alluring — and see what live theatre can do.

Check out 12thnight’s PREVIEW interview with director Andrew Ritchie.

REVIEW

The Woman In Black

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Stephen Mallatratt from a novel by Susan Hill

Directed by: Andrew Ritchie

Starring: Julien Arnold, Geoffrey Simon Brown

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Oct. 27

Tickets: teatrolive.com

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The existentialists from Ummo are back: Mump and Smoot in Exit, at Theatre Network. A review.

Posted on October 11, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Mump and Smoot arrive, as always, from a mysterious place, through the crowd — inhabitants of another mysterious place, the theatre (that’s us!). And, as always, they’re mid-adventure, mid-conversation, en route to the stage.

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It’s dark; they’re carrying lanterns. Each is chained to the heavy burlap sack they’re dragging. And we’re never quite sure whether their nightmare is us, or vice versa.

After a decade’s absence, the ‘clowns of horror’ from the planet Ummo are back among us, at Theatre Network to premiere a new show, Mump and Smoot In Exit. And it’s an original, unusual even in an archive with a notable attraction to the grotesque and the macabre.

In their collected canon, the interplanetary travellers, who speak Ummonian (a language that hints now and then at English, “Wow”, “I’m outta here”), have found themselves in locations we’ve all experienced: a tent in the wilderness, a wake, an airplane, a restaurant negotiating spaghetti…. Eruptions of blood and gore, unhinged entrails, severed limbs, rarely to be found in Trip Advisor, just happen. The familiar is a slippery slope it seems.

Anyhow, in Mump and Smoot in Exit, the latest from the prize Canadian theatre artists Michael Kennard, John Turner and director Karen Hines (whose character Pochsy is one of the country’s great creations too), they have arrived in a smoky place where none of us has been. And we’re discovering it together. There are clues, to be sure (design consultant: Andraya Diogo). It’s a landscape dominated by a skeletal tree (Beckett’s vagabonds, waiting around Godot to show up, would recognize it), full of bones and skulls, enigmatic monuments, a gargoyle with glowing red eyes. The entrance is an electrified archway of skulls. And they are not always alone there (Lauren Brady, listed in the credits as “Actor,” in full spectral get-up).

Mump and Smoot (Michael Kennard and John Turner) In Exit, with Lauren Brady as Gog. Theatre Network, photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

There will be a moment for Mump and Smoot when it dawns on them where they are; it’s a moment we’ve been wondering about, too. Incidentally this poses a special problem for a writer: there’s so little I can tell you about the story without spoiling it. So I’m leaving that aside, for your own good.

Mump (Kennard) is the bossier, shirtier, more aggressive one in a tuxedo jacket, with the single periscope horn. He’s the one who takes charge and gets mightily irritated when things go south. Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Smoot (Turner) is more pliable and impulsive, distracted by the audience, and ready to play. If he were to see a skull (and he does) he’d pick it up and give it a pat on the bonce. I’m pretty sure I heard “alas poor Yorick” emerging from the Ummonian phrase book. Ditto “don’t touch” from Mump. Everything that happens in In Exit is a test of this comically fraught, signature relationship.

Mump (Michael Kennard) and Smoot (John Turner) “In Exit,” Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

They arrive onstage in a kind of daze, as if the show is an aftermath of something. Smoot isn’t feeling 100 per cent. Mump, who’s whispering, isn’t quite his usual confident self either; he looks oddly bewildered, then downright appalled. They are trying to remember how they got where they are. And it’s a measure of Kennard and Turner as actors in action, in detailed comic performances, that we understand, without language, an existential conundrum.

Smoot, with his chipmunk voice, is the follower, the voluble one who ingratiates himself with the audience (we go “awwww” and Mump grimaces). Mump, the skeptic, rolls his eyes; he makes of congenital exasperation an entire repertoire of reactions in Kennard’s performance. His characteristic gesture is throwing his hands up, an eloquent ‘whatever’ at moments of maximum aggro.

Victor Snaith Hernandez’s lighting is rather spectacular. And Greg Morrison’s superb original score, with its strange jagged dissonances and mad violin riffs, is in itself an aural exposition.   

It’s a show unusually laden with props. And much to Mump’s chagrin (and the general hilarity in the house), they were wayward on opening night. But hey, that gave us a chance to appreciate Kennard and Turner’s skills as improvisers. For me, the more overt sequences with the audience, a group invocation to Ummo for example and a bilingual conversation soliciting individual audience members to answer a question, might be tuned up, along with the scenes involving puppet versions of the characters. So far, the seams do show a bit.

The particular genius of Mump and Smoot is the way they put the physical — no, the visceral — into dark comedy. We’re only held together by a wing and a prayer, apparently; otherwise our arms and legs would fly off, a foot here, a bone or two there. These things happen when you’re a clown of horror. And, speaking as we are of visceral, there’s lip-smacking fine dining onstage.

But in Mump and Smoot in Exit, black comedy is infiltrated by questions of good and evil, life and death. Religion — they are disciples of the god Ummo — is put to the test. Is memory a haunting? Can you really know if you’re in a bad dream or actually conscious? Mump and Smoot In Exit wonders about things like that. And so do we. It’s high-stakes hilarity, and we laugh and keep on laughing.

REVIEW

Mump and Smoot in Exit

Theatre: Theatre Network

Created and performed by: Michael Kennard and John Turner

Directed by: Karen Hines

Running: through Oct. 27

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca

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Let’s do the Time Warp again: on being Dr Frank-N-Furter in Grindstone’s cult classic season opener

Posted on October 9, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski as Frank-N-Furter in Rocky Horror Show, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s time warp time. Picture this: a little kid in the single-digit age bracket, with Halloween insomnia, sneaks downstairs way past his bedtime and turns on the TV. He flips through the channels; he stumbles on a sight, and an attitude, he would never forget. He finds himself immersed in the fun and games at Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s place.

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“It was the first authentically queer film I ever watched,” says the exuberant Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The 1975 celluloid incarnation of a sci-fi rock n’ roll goth fantasy cult musical devised two years earlier by an out-of-work B-movie-obsessed London actor (that would be Richard O’Brien) made an indelible impression. “I was swept away by the outrageousness and the irreverence, not knowing either of those words — and the aggressive unashamed queerness of it!” Talk about “another dimension, with voyeuristic intention,” as the Time Warp number has it.

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski in Rocky Horror Show, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

That was the ‘90s. And Parsons-Lozinski’s awestruck, and receptive, younger self (“I don’t know what this is, but I’m confident I AM this!”) could hardly have predicted that his grown-up theatre artist self would be onstage in the Halloween season of 2024, starring as the “sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania” in the cult classic. Byron Martin’s production of Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show launches Grindstone Theatre’s first-ever mainstage series of big musicals at the Orange Hub (Oct. 18 to Nov. 3). “I think shows come into your life when they’re meant to!”

“I jokingly say that the plot is ‘straight couple makes gay friends’,” declares Parsons-Lozinsky, who arrives at a Strathcona coffee joint in pink sequinned clogs and a leopard coat with cuffs the size of truck tires (“my fashion sense is ‘enthusiastic’”). He has one of those laughs that could pop the earbuds out of email-ers three tables away.

Bella King, Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, Cameron Chapman in Rocky Horror Show, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

If you’ve ever snapped your rubber gloves along with Frank-N-Furter at an interactive performance on stage or screen, I don’t need to tell you this. But, what the hey, it involves the dark-and-stormy-night arrival of newly engaged innocents Brad (Cameron Chapman) and Janet (Bella King) at the mansion of the enterprising scientist, “an unapologetically queer space” as Parsons-Lozinski puts it. The raucous (singing) household includes the show-stopping creepy butler Riff Raff (Josh Travnik) and his sister Magenta (Kendra Humphrey) — and Frank-N-Furter’s pièce de résistance. Which is the unveiling of his latest lab creation, the muscular specimen of the title (Mark Sinongco).

Parsons-Lozinski arrives in fishnets (“and lots of skin”) on the Orange Hub stage that once belonged to his alma mater MacEwan Theatre Arts, and his student performance as Man #1 in The Music Man, now lost, alas, in the mists of time. He brings with him a resumé packed with punk, club dates, cabarets, drag shows as his high-heeled persona Lilith Fair, and playwriting (The House That Fucks played Off-Broadway in the Fringe Encore series in 2022).

His drag debut was in a show for a vanished Edmonton troupe wth an enigmatic name, Rabbit Marmot. And after graduation he worked for Aimée Beaudoin (now the co-owner and co-producer of Spotlight Cabaret) on the Jubilations Dinner Theatre circuit. He was the first full-time drag cast member in their Orange Is The New Pink — as Lilith Fair.

He’d long been fascinated by drag and its theatrical possibilities. A remount of Guys in Disguise’s BitchSlap! was “the first drag show I’d seen where the drag wasn’t the joke; it was the medium for telling the story.” And he held that thought.

The Pansy Cabaret, starring Zachary Parsons-Lozinski and Daniel Belland. Photo supplied.

Recently, Parsons-Lozinski, Calgary-based “for now,” has been leaning into theatre. “I feel like I’m moving into a different stage of my career,” he says. The turning point, he thinks, was The Pansy Cabaret at the Fringe in 2022, Darrin Hagen’s meticulously researched exploration of a vivid, playful, and brave chapter of showbiz history: the flowering of queer and drag culture on Broadway and vaudeville during the Prohibition era in New York. And its utter erasure by homophobia in a single decade when Prohibition ended. The jaunty performance style, the sounds of that era and its cheeky and sometimes poignant Edwardian song repertoire, the sassy interaction with the audience … all were well within the Parsons-Lozinski compass in a bold, resourceful star performance, as Edmonton audiences discovered.

“Darrin,” he says, “has been my biggest inspiration…. He changed my life by putting me in The Pansy Cabaret. That show put me on a completely different path.” And its “homage to the people who came before me and who bravely put it all out there so I can be the artist I am now” inspired a post-Pansy Cabaret creation of his own. Millennial Sex Witch is “a continuation of that thought, through a contemporary lens, what it’s like to be a drag artist now.”

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski and Thomas Jones in With Bells On, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, EPIC Photography

In With Bells On, the 2023 Devanand Janki/ Tommy Newman holiday musical based on Hagen’s two-hander comedy of that name, Parsons-Lozinski played a drag queen, in full seasonal regalia, stuck in an elevator with a mousey sad-sack accountant. “Family friendly! A lovely heartwarming Christmas show. And transgressive because of that,” says the actor cheerfully.

At the other end of the spectrum, tonally speaking, is Liam Salmon’s furiously articulate, politically scathing solo play Local Diva which premiered at last summer’s Fringe. Fuelled by exasperation, then outrage, the Local Diva character was “the most aggressive thing I’ve ever done,” says Parsons-Lozinski. And it unleashed, not unexpectedly, a toxic deluge of homophobia on social media.

He’s done lots of musicals, and is about to do another. But even though he graduated from a theatre school specializing in musical theatre, Parsons-Lozinski doesn’t really think of himself as “a musicals person” per se, “I don’t read music. And I love to smoke…. I sound more like Kathleen Turner every day.”

Rocky Horror is “the perfect intersection of the aggression of Local Diva and the frivolous fun of With Bells On,” he thinks. “It’s so powerful to be able to come into this show which formed so much of the comfort I have with my identity now, and the body of work I would pursue. And to use it as a middle finger….”

The timing is right: “there’s so much aggression and resistance to queer work,” he says. “I have been on the receiving end of so much vitriol on social media, from people who want to vilify my community…. I’m channelling both my love for the material, and this anger I have about we are being talked about,” he says. “That aggression, that resistance … I feel like I’m able to throw it back!” And, hey, there’s no fourth wall.

Each performance of the show will feature a new guest as the Narrator. And Grindstone is going full-interaction with the production. Which makes Rocky Horror  “a great choice” for the little company that brought us Hot Boy Summer and Die Harsh. “Their roots are in improv,” as Parsons-Lozinski points out. And in this musical “the audience is its own character.”

With his club cred, Parsons-Lozinski has always savoured that direct connection. Be warned. He can hardly wait.

Check out Grindstone’s mainstage season lineup at the Orange Hub (where they manage the theatre spaces) here.

PREVIEW

Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show

Theatre: Grindstone Theatre

Created by: Richard O’Brien (music, lyrics, book)

Directed by: Byron Martin

Starring: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, Bella King, Cameron Chapman, Kendra Humphrey, Mark Sinongco, Josh Travnik, Karlee Squires, Evan Dowling

Where: Orange Hub, 10045 156 St.

Running: Oct. 18 through Nov. 3

Tickets: showpass.com

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The fun of being scared together: Andrew Ritchie directs The Woman In Black, to open the Teatro Live! season

Posted on October 5, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“People love to be scared,” says Andrew Ritchie decisively. (And  he’s got a whole movie industry to back him up on that).

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The genial director of The Woman in Black, the atmospheric horror-thriller opening the Teatro Live! season on the Varscona stage Friday, hopes to “make us scream.” He has at his disposal a long-running hit that had been doing exactly in London’s West End for 34 years until it closed in 2023. What Ritchie has in mind, beyond the dread and the shivers and the jump scares is “sweeping us up in the story and making us care about the characters.”

Ritchie’s Teatro debut is an ingeniously theatrical two-actor adaptation, by the English playwright Stephen Mallatratt, of the gothic 1982 novel by Susan Hill. “Scary fun… and at the heart of it a tragic story,” as Ritchie says, looking for vagueness. “Real tragedy happens to some people … a family … families.…. I don’t want to give too much away!”.

The Woman In Black is an Edwardian era ghost story that takes us to the eerie windswept marshes of northeastern England, and a haunting. And it comes with all the classic remote country house trimmings, and “a Victorian era Dickensian sort of vibe,” as Ritchie puts it. “It lives in a similar world to the other ghost play that’s done in Edmonton every year, A Christmas Carol.”

The particular cleverness of The Woman In Black is that’s a play within a play, with a cast of only two who play many characters. And it starts in a theatre.

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

An elderly lawyer, one Arthur Kipps (Julien Arnold), has hired an actor to turn the mysterious story of what happened to his younger self 30 years before into a drama. “The play is so theatrical, meta-theatrical,” says Ritchie in appreciation. “So much of the play — someone hiring an actor/director to help him perform a piece of text — mirrors our own process in the (rehearsal) hall. You are watching a play. And we are working on a play together….”

A director friend described it to Ritchie as “the play tells you how the magic trick works, then shows you the magic trick,” he says. In effect, the theatre is the set. And this has delighted the founder and director of Thou Art Here Theatre, a company that specializes in site-specific original work. “The play is so theatrical, meta-theatrical…. It really embraces its medium; it embraces its space, and places itself in a theatre.”

“We’re really using the Varscona and being inspired by the space that we’re in,” he says of the formally old-school, red velvet curtain theatre. Theatres are famously haunted places. And the Varscona, the storied home of many companies, re-built from the ground up in 2016 to include bricks from its previous incarnation, has its share of ghosts. For Ritchie himself, it’s “a theatre where I spent a lot of time as a younger artist…. I feel very lucky; this is coming home to a place with a lot of memories.”

Andrew Ritchie is directing the Teatro Live! production of The Woman In Black. Photo supplied.

“Improv with Rapid Fire Theatre, that’s how I got my start,” he says. And the Varscona was the epicentre of RFT’s late-night improv, with full-house audiences lining up outside in every kind of weather. He still remembers his Grade 10 self, coming to the Varscona in 2003 to see Theatresports, at 11 p.m. “And it blew my mind! I fell in love with improv…. It led me back to the U of A to take a drama drama class, and eventually to directing. Improv was definitely my gateway drug….”

“There was just an energy around the Varscona. And it’s so cool to be back in the building, directing on that stage! Working on such a smart play…. I’ve been working a lot of new plays the last couple of years. Which is fantastic. But it’s a real shift and a welcome one, to work on something you could call tried and true.”

Scaring audiences in live theatre is tricky, to be sure. What the audience can see, and not see, is easier to control in film, with camera angles, cuts, “what you show, what you don’t.” The technical resources of theatre, the possibilities of light and sound, are the playground for the Teatro creative team.  Darkness figure prominently in the design of lighting whiz T. Erin Gruber, Ritchie says.

With its traditional ghost story accoutrements, the piece stands in high contrast to the usual original indie ventures of Thou Art Here Theatre, Ritchie’s theatrical home base. Next up there is his own Cycle (Dec. 11 to 22, at the Mile Zero Dance Warehouse), an exploration of urban bicycling, the gig culture, a vision of cities. Meanwhile he’s enjoying the liberation of being a freelance director at Teatro. As indie artists “we produce our own work, and fund-raise for ourselves. And the opportunity to be hired as a director, and focus on the craft of directing and not worry about (all that) is such a gift.”

Ritchie has collaborated with Brown before, in a variety of applications (the latter is the Cycle dramaturg, for example) but never directed him onstage. And it’s his first time working with Arnold, a veteran Edmonton theatre artist and Teatro star. “They’re great to work with,” he says, “very funny people, and they’re actors that love acting. They dive into their roles! …. And because there are just two actors, they have to trust each other.”

The play offers the kind of challenge expert actors love, says Ritchie. “A full range of emotions, multiple characters, different dialects, different physical bodies, switching between them very quickly.”

Is The Woman In Black an unusual choice for a self-identified “comedy company”? “The more I thought about it, the more it feels in the realm of what the company has always been doing,” says Ritchie. After all, the work of the company’s resident playwright (and founder) Stewart Lemoine “lives in a world with a certain kind of language, (fuelled by) the power of words and language. And The Woman In Black feels in that world, set like some of Stewart’s plays in a kind of nebulous past, a bygone time.”

And the Teatro Live! archive does include thrillers, Rope, Deathtrap, Sleuth among them. “It’s all about having fun, exploring different kinds of fun,” Ritchie thinks. “This one is scary fun…. Enjoyable horror, pleasurable fear. It’s pleasurable to be scared together.”

PREVIEW

The Woman In Black

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Stephen Mallatratt from a novel by Susan Hill

Directed by: Andrew Ritchie

Starring: Julien Arnold, Geoffrey Simon Brown

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Oct. 10 to 27

Tickets: teatrolive.com

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Exploring the Great Beyond: ‘Mump and Smoot in Exit’ premieres at Theatre Network

Posted on October 3, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Mump and Smoot in Exit, at Theatre Network. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It took them a while to get back here with a show. A decade to be precise. But there was something entirely natural about finding Mump and Smoot and their director Karen Hines last week in the basement of the Roxy under an arch of skulls, discussing death.

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Not for the first time has that favoured subject come up with Canada’s horror clown duo. By no means. It’s deeply grooved into the Mump and Smoot psyche, sensibility, and comedy aesthetic. And you know it if you’ve followed the riotously nightmare oeuvre of the interplanetary travellers from Ummo — ever since their arrival at the 1989 Fringe on a trail of gore and giblets and severed limbs.   

Even the title of their new show Mump and Smoot in Exit, launching Theatre Network’s 50th anniversary season next week, has a double-edged black comedy frisson about it. Exit stage left? Exit from … life?

They have a history with death, you might say. The Ummonian pair have taken us to a funeral, where the leg comes off the corpse and then the head, and they can’t resist improvising a game of baseball with their new bat and ball. Since then they’ve taken us to the wilderness to face their demons. They’ve tested the theory that what goes up must go down, by undertaking air travel. They’ve pushed their fraught relationship in visits to a surgeon, or the dentist (feel free to flinch). In Cracked, which played the Roxy in 2010, we actually went home with Mump and Smoot, back to their place on Ummo; they’ve died and been reborn.

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

Michael Kennard and John Turner, Mump and Smoot’s artist alter-egos, have always played along the frontier where the clown question “what can go wrong?” might just get max’ed. Turner, who plays the oft-aggrieved Smoot, the more impulsive and suggestible of the two, says, “we need to throw in the word ‘mischief’….” Their shows are not exactly satire, of the micro kind that Hines executes brilliantly with her own pop culture-soaked clown character Pochsy. “It’s macro … critical thinking about life and death, a view of the world,” says Hines of the thoughtful pair, three old friends who all met at Second City in Toronto.  “Bigger things, like life and death, and spaghetti dinners,” Turner laughs. They all laugh.

Kennard, who plays Mump, the bossier, more aggressively confident of the two, says “death is so prominent right now. The world is being threatened by death everywhere….” He says of the new show “we don’t have war onstage, or famine. It’s all about their relationship, and what happens when you die. We’re just proposing that question. It’s all about death.”

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

“It’s dark, true…. But I’ve laughed more (in rehearsal) than I have at any other show,” says Hines, who has high standards in dark comedy. “The show feels like it’s questioning the societal take on death, how upset we are by it, and isn’t it OK to go, and how lucky we are to be here.”

There was an inspirational Mump trip to Mexico for the Day of the Dead celebrations. Turner adds that MAID (medical assistance in dying) “has brought the discussion about death to the forefront; it’s all about choice.”

“For me the setting is juicy right away,” he says. Hines points out that “even Mump and Smoot’s very first show took us to a wake.” Kennard argues that “death is the high stakes of theatre…. Almost all fear, to me, is derived from death.” That takes the trio back to Mump and Smoot’s official five-point credo, established early and oft referred to, which in addition to fear also includes “enjoy the process of living,” as Hines points out.

John Turner and Michael Kennard, aka Smoot and Mump, in serious writing mode. Photo supplied.

So, back to the question, downstairs at the Roxy under the glare of a gargoyle with light-up red eyes: where have they been for the last 10 years? Kennard has been here, a U of A drama prof who like Turner and Hines is a prized mentor to the next generation(s) of artists. Turner’s Clown Farm headquarters on Manitoulin Island in Ontario burned to the ground in 2014 (a year before the same fate overtook the old Roxy, Theatre Network’s ex-cinema home on 124th Street), and the rebuilt clown school there didn’t survive two years of pandemic shutdown. He and his wife have moved to Cape Breton (“I suddenly realized I’m living on an island in the North Atlantic!”) and he teaches regularly at One North Clown in Sudbury. Hines, based in Calgary and frequently to be found in Toronto, has been writing full-length plays (Crawlspace and All the Little Animals I Have Eaten among them) and after 15 years returned Pochsy, her toxic pixie character, to the stage at Network last season, with the sequel Pochsy IV.

“It takes a lot of energy to put up a show,” Kennard sighs. “It takes us longer and longer to get around to it…. The struggle to put up new creative work doesn’t get easier. And it’s not like things are way better for artists than they were 30 years ago.” Au contraire. It’s harder than ever, and “not just because of our age but because of the world…. We keep trying to exit theatre, and we keep getting brought back. From beyond the grave” (laughter).

“What keeps bringing us back is, hmm,  that we can’t stop,” he says. Besides, “we have fun. It’s such a great time,” says Kennard.

Did Hines, who has evidently mastered the rarefied art of directing Mump and Smoot shows, egg them on to create a new one?  “I said ‘please don’t!’” she jokes, to general amusement. “No, I patiently watched from the outside. Honestly I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d said ‘we’re gonna sign off’…. But it’s a calling, and you just can’t ignore that.”   

“On one side you feel, a bit betrayed, having put in so much time, and ‘what? you’re making it harder?’” says Turner of diminishing support and artistic freedom that’s more not less circumscribed. On the other, the disintegrating state of the world is the “hot fire that inspires the next creation.” Kennard shrugs, “it has always been a struggle, and it always will be be. Because we’re clowns.” Says Hines, “the (clown) challenge is to get away with it.”

Turner remembers the lucrative contract to tour to kids’ schools that got dangled in front of them in their first year of being Mump and Smoot in the ’80s. They turned it down because “we were fighting against preconceptions of what (the art form) clown is and who it’s for.” Mind you, they did spend three summers in Fredericton N.B. working on a kids’ TV show. “Thirteen shows in seven days,” says Kennard. “Was it great TV? You’ll notice we didn’t tell you the title.” Hines shudders: “I watched it. Once.” But the $9,000 they made was how Turner bought the Manitoulin farm, so chalk it up to experience, in a good cause.

They decided to go ahead with Mump and Smoot in Exit “even without money.” The Canada Council turned their grant application down; only recently did the CC reconsider. What aspect of the show has changed the most as a result? wonders Hines. “It didn’t afford us more time. But we could up the production values,” says Kennard. “Home Depot!” He points to the skull arch, and they laugh.

“And the artists are getting paid properly,” he says of the cast, the director, and the addition to the cast of Lauren Brady (OweADebt), a clown mentee of both Kennard and Hines. “We were facing doing the show without a stage manager,” just like their early days at the Edmonton Fringe, when they camped at Rainbow Valley, and put their makeup on in a tent.

By now Kennard and Turner, often a big wide country apart, have a Mump and Smoot way of putting a show together. This past summer they spent two weeks together at Kennard’s “in-the-bush place in Ontario,” as Turner describes the rustic cabin. “After those two weeks they did send me a script. It was a scant two pages long, and in point form,” says Hines. Last week it had grown to four pages. And the unique process of rehearsing a Mump and Smoot show was underway.

“We go in to each scene and each moment to to make sure it’s perform-able and repeatable, solid enough so they can break out of it to improvise,” she says. In rehearsal “sometimes they wear (clown) noses; sometimes they don’t.” And on the route from outline to show, they flesh out the scenes on their feet. “There’s something about developing shows onstage that makes it feel incredibly spontaneous, that it’s happening for the first time.”

Mump and Smoot do play with the audience: there’s improv, to be sure (“we give ourselves 10 minutes wiggle room,” says Kennard). But there is always a solid infrastructure to a Mump and Smoot production. “Freedom, the freedom to go anywhere, through structure,” as Turner puts it. “Lack of structure is chaos, and is actually a prison…. We have to take (the audience) into our world. And if we don’t have a world we have nowhere to take them.” Creating that world is “the mischief and fun of it!”

“Some clowns don’t like directors,” says Kennard. He and Turner are emphatically not of that camp. “I get on their wavelength, try to envision their vision,” says Hines. I call myself a ‘realizer’. They already know in their bones what they’re doing. And I have to help make it real.”

PREVIEW

Mump and Smoot in Exit

Theatre: Theatre Network

Created and performed by: Michael Kennard and John Turner

Directed by: Karen Hines

Running: Oct. 10 to 27

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca

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Illusion and delusion: A Streetcar Named Desire at the Citadel. A review

Posted on September 27, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

One of American theatre’s greatest plays about illusion and delusion — and the power and limitations of both — is the season-opener at the Citadel. And in Daryl Cloran’s beautifully acted production of A Streetcar Named Desire, it comes wrapped onstage in all its contradictions — with weight to its enduring ambiguities.

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The centre of Tennessee Williams’ 1947 Pulitzer Prize winner is the memorable figure of the outsider — the solitary, white-gloved, pastel-hued Southern Belle, fleeing, in high heels, her own history. After the loss of the family plantation, Blanche DuBois (Lindsey Angell, in a finely tuned and magnetic performance) comes to New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella (Heidi Damayo) and husband Stanley (Stafford Perry).

Blanche’s visible shudder of distaste, the clear signal that the repertoire’s most celebrated fantasist feels herself slumming, is the catalyst for a valiant, if doomed, struggle for survival, space, and power. In this she is up against a new world, and on an individual level, the brutal carnal energy and masculine earthiness of her realist brother-in-law. And she says as much to her sister, cornered by Blanche’s arrival into the role of intermediary. “Don’t hang back with the brutes.”

The beauty of Angell’s performance is a certain steel, an unexpected fierceness in the increasingly desperate way she pitches her coyness and fall-back girlish flirtatiousness against something a lot more visceral and primal, in the person of Stanley. She poses teasingly, she semaphores with her hands; it’s a kind of Blanche ballet of physical closed captioning.  “A woman’s charm is 50 per cent illusion,” she tells Stanley, in response to his “don’t play dumb.”

In her way, as Angell conveys, Blanche is formidable. But she has the weight of reality resisting her ‘performance pieces’. These are not without cruelty, and as things chez Kowalski deteriorate they have an increasing harshness and vintage brittleness about them.

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

It’s not easy to play Stanley the brute in 2024. And at first I couldn’t help thinking Perry, buff, and organized in both his physicality and the rejoinders that sometimes rise to acid wit, seemed an unusual choice for a character capable of Stanley’s kind of violence and physical brutality.  But in the course of the show I grew to appreciate that Perry’s performance doesn’t stack the deck to extremes in favour of sympathy for Blanche.

Andrés F Moreno, Paul-Ford Manguelle, Stafford Perry, A Streetcar Named Desire, Citadel/Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price

His Stanley is capable of exasperation, not just raw anger. Witness his reaction to Blanche’s continual casual taunts that he’s an animal, a thug.“I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks…. I am one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth….” The line has a very different ring, ominously populist but also not without dignity, in our time than it did in 1947. And Perry’s performance takes that into consideration.

Damayo negotiates the difficulties of being Stella, in a household full of volatile personalities and close-quarter tensions. “I am not in anything I want to get out of,” she says, standing up to the disapproval of her sister. And Sheldon Elter is simply terrific as Mitch, decent, awkward, a civilized fellow who, under the circumstances in a rough-house circle of the poker guys, is brave about holding his own. He has a heart available for the breaking, and succumbs to Blanche’s relentless campaign of charm because he recognizes a fellow solo traveller. It’s to Mitch that she finally reveals her guilt about the past, in a finely executed scene.     

Director Cloran frames the arrival of Blanche in the Kowalskis’ cramped two-room apartment in Elysian Fields (an irony not lost on Blanche), intermittently, with a kind of stylized swirl and buzz, the jostle of communal vitality. Music from a club with a live jazz trio (led by rich-voiced Jameela McNeil), neon, the odd passing vendor, the metallic din of the streetcar, the noise of voices from fractious upstair neighbours who bicker, and have sex, at top volume … they all stand in contrast to the tragic aloneness of the Southern belle in her last stand, on foreign soil, so to speak.

This Citadel/ Theatre Calgary co-production is your chance to savour the delights of a classic to which the resources and budget of a big theatre have been devoted, in a fulsome and atmospheric way. It is an absorbing evening in the theatre. And the time (two and three-quarters hours) flies by.

Blanche, who says “clothes are my passion,” finds an ally in designer Jessica Oostergo,  whose costumes are a treat to look at.

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

Brian Dudkiewicz’s multi-level set sandwiches the Kowalski apartment between the singers above and the street life below, against a moody urban backdrop. It’s atmospheric, but the downside of the design is that the pitched battle that sets Streetcar in motion is pretty far upstage and removed from us, happening in a series of long-shots and tableaux. And in the back half of the theatre, lighter ‘Southern-style’ timbres like Stella’s, in contrast to Stanley’s vibrant bellows or Eunice’s hollers at her wayward husband, don’t always reach. Williams’ poetic text, after all, isn’t something you want to miss.

Jameela McNeil and Eric Wigston in A Streetcar Named Design, Citadel/ Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price

The music, by sound designer and composer Joelysa Pankanea, has impact. In addition to the urban soundscape of people living at close quarters, the production enfolds jazz standards like It’s Only A Paper Moon (“it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believe in me”) for their uncanny aptness. And McNeil (who also plays feisty upstairs Eunice) attacks them with gusto.

Bonnie Beecher’s outstanding lighting animates the drama and the storytelling wonderfully. And Streetcar is, in a sense, about lighting, and its transformational magic. One of the first orders Blanche has for her little sister is to turn off the light; “I won’t be looked at in this merciless glare.” She puts a paper lantern over the bulb: lighting is part of the package deal in denial and self-delusion. “I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.”

It can’t help but end tragically, of course, in a world that is hard about softness. But via a flawed and fascinating heroine, Williams and this handsome production have made a case for art, poetry, creativity, love over bare-bones desire.  “I don’t want realism. I want magic!” Blanche cries in her own defence. “I don’t tell truth. I tell what ought to be truth.” And you can’t help admiring that human impulse.

REVIEW

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: through Oct. 13

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.

 

 

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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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