There’ll be much mistletoe-ing and hearts will be glowing … the festive season begins on Edmonton stages

Posted on November 25, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

A Christmas Carol 2025, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Some day soon we all will be together….”

This week, actually, the festive season onstage can now officially begin.

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•Ebenezer Scrooge (John Ullyatt), a misanthrope with a frozen heart will stride briskly onto the Citadel’s Maclab stage in a pinstripe suit, scattering Bah! Humbug!s instead of Christmas bonuses around him. And a last-minute  ghostly intervention on Christmas Eve will return him to the joy of human connectivity.  

After 25 years, there’s no way we Edmontonians can have ourselves a ‘merry little Christmas’, as the wistful song goes, without a lavish Citadel production of A Christmas Carol onstage. That’s just how it is here, a bona fide holiday tradition since 2000.

It began with 19 years of Tom Wood’s Victorian era version. Returning Thursday is the seventh iteration of David van Belle’s post-war adaptation, which re-locates the 1843 Dickens novella ahead a century and across the Atlantic (with a secular songbook to match).

The production created by Daryl Cloran and directed this year and last by Lianna Makuch is a return haunted by the tragic absence of Julien Arnold, one of our finest and most loved theatre artists, who passed away a year ago during show previews. He was an unforgettably skilled, dimensional, joyful presence in the Christmas Carol company in so many roles — starting with a quintessential portrait of the lovable and beleaguered family man Bob Cratchit and including most recently the magnanimously extrovert host Mr. Fezziwig. Surely Arnold was the first Bob Cratchit ever to venture so far from type to play Scrooge, as he did one year. This year he is in the theatre as the Voice of Jacob Marley, the ghost with the cautionary message of redemption for Scrooge.

The adaptation takes us through the revolving door of Marley’s department store on Christmas Eve, 1949, where Scrooge presides as the flinty, bottom-line obsessive proprietor. If he had his way, no employee would be home for Christmas.

John Ullyatt as Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Since his first appearance in the role in 2022, Ullyatt has brought substantial emotional depth to Scrooge’s rediscovery of the self he has lost along the way. He’s back to lead a cast of three dozen in Cloran’s handsome, music-filled production, directed for the second time by Makuch. Some of the actors are returning to roles they’ve memorably occupied in the past — Braydon Dowler-Coltman as Scrooge’s younger self, Oscar Derkx as Scrooge’s cheery ever-hopeful nephew Fred, Alison MacDonald as the widowed Mrs. Cratchit, as well as Ivy DeGagné as the eerily wispy Ghost of Christmas Past and Jesse Gervais as the ebullient Ghost of Christmas Present. There are newcomers, too, including Cathy Derkach as Mrs. Fezziwig (with Troy O’Donnell as her hubby) and Mrs. Dilber.

The cast of Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

A Christmas Carol runs through Dec. 24 at the Citadel. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820. Actually, the festive spirit wafts through the Citadel everywhere. The Vinyl Cafe, which weaves two of Stuart McLean’s most popular stories (Dave Cooks The Turkey and Rashida, Amir and the Great Gift Giving) into a new musical continues its premiere run on the Shoctor stage through Dec. 7. Unwrap the 12thnight review here. And upcoming at the Citadel, Dec. 18 to 21, is Bear Grease: Shack Up For The Winter, LightningCloud Productions’ holiday version of their “Indigenous joyride” take on the 1978 musical we all know.

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

•In this the hap-happiest season of all, ballet companies have their Nutcrackers; theatres have their Christmas Carols, or It’s A Wonderful Life, or Miracle on 34th Street. What is an improv comedy company supposed to do? Five Yules ago Rapid Fire Theatre had the improbable inspiration of The Blank Who Stole Christmas, a high-spirited musical hit that combines scripted musical theatre and improv, Dr. Seuss and the Actor’s Nightmare, in the most impossibly demanding and unpredictable way.

The script is by Gordie Lucius and Joleen Ballentine, the songs by Erik Mortimer and Chris Borger. And at every performance, a different secret guest star arrives on stage, as a character of their choice, unknown in advance to their impromptu cast-mates. So the five actors who’ve actually been to rehearsal and learned their lines have to improvise around the hitherto unknown villain of Grinch-ian provenance. And, as you’ll glean, comic chaos ensues, and every performance is different.

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

The Blank Who Stole Christmas returns to RFT’s home base, the Exchange Theatre Friday. “Generally I’m casting folks who are skilled improvisers or improv-adjacent as the Blanks,” says Rapid Fire artistic director Matt Schuurman. “In 2022 Luke Thomson played Bruce Springsteen, and in 2024 Vicky Berg and Lindsey Walker played Hall & Oates. This year I’m casting the net wider than ever before….”

There’s hilarity (and a big challenge for the RFT improvisers) in the unlikely villains some guest stars have chosen. I mean, come on … Tiny Tim? Mrs. Claus (Jana O’Connor)? Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Alain Sadowski)?  “One time we had a local construction company buy out an entire performance. And just for them Paul Blinov did an impression of their VP as The Blank,” says Schuurman. “Nothing like having the actual guy in the audience while you portray him as a villain. Especially when he’s paying the bill at the end of the night!”

For one performance Schuurman himself, a tall lanky guy, opted to play Jack Skellington of Tim Burton fame. “I was on stilts for two hours wearing a rubber mask and have never sweat so much in my life.” He’s predicting, mysteriously that one of the Blanks will arrive on “the most challenging costume yet.”

“Some of the most fun and challenging moments have been when the Blanks have made huge choices the irreparably change the storyline,” says Schuurman. And the improvisers of the cast, in whose brains the ‘say YES’ mantra is engraved, have to adjust. Schuurman, who points to the moment “Baba Yaga (Belinda Cornish) snapped the neck of a main character minutes into the show,” loves when that happens.

It runs Friday through Dec. 21, in three versions depending on the amount of raunch and swearing. Nice: “family-friendly.” Naughty: “playful and cheeky.” Nasty: for the 18-plus crowd, “completely unfiltered, bold, blush-worthy.” Tickets and full schedule: rapidfiretheatre.com.

•Trevor Schmidt’s new holiday comedy, doing fancy footwork and aerial lifts with the longest title of the season, premieres this week at Northern Light Theatre. How Patty and Joanne Won High Gold At The Grand Christmas Cup Winter Dance Competition is all about an unexpected friendship between strangers, and involves … tap dancing. Stay tuned for the 12thnight interview with the light-footed co-stars of Schmidt’s production, Jenny McKillop and Kendra Connor. The show runs Friday through Dec. 13. Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com.

Delia Barnett and Truus Verkley in A Kidmas Carole, Puddle of Mudd Productions. Photo supplied.

• At Fort Edmonton’s annual Christmas Market, Puddle of Mudd’s A Kidmas Carole is back at the vintage Capitol Theatre Saturday through Dec. 14. It’s a family-friendly, interactive sort of holiday entertainment, by and starring Delia Barnett and Truus Verkley, and the kids join in. It’s on the Capitol roster along with It’s A Wonderful Christmas Carol, a mashup of two seasonal classics starring Davina Stewart, Dana Andersen, Paul Morgan Donald and Andrea House (Saturday through Dec. 13). For both shows, a ticket gets you full access to the Park before and after the show. Tickets: yegxmasmarket.com.

Evan Dowling in Die Harsh the Christmas Musical. Photo by Adam Goudreau

•There’s more to come. The resident parodists of Grindstone Theatre (Byron Martin and Simon Abbott) have had the inspiration of  marrying the blockbuster action flick Die Harsh to A Christmas Carol. Who would do this? Die Harsh: The Christmas Musical has black comedy hilarity for days and nights. It returns to the Orange Hub for a third festive run Dec. 11 to 28. Tickets: grindstonetheatre.ca.

And Girl Brain, the ace sketch comedy troupe, has a new holiday show too: Girl Brain, Actually at Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre Dec. 11 to 21, directed by Bradley Moss as his farewell flourish. More about this fun in an upcoming 12thnight post.

•And mistletoe-free but holiday-friendly …

The 39 Steps, Teatro Live!’s season-launching comedy continues its madcap and ingenious four-actor romp through the spy thriller genre, and the Hitchcock film at the Varscona. Have a peek at the 12thnight review here.

The Mayfield’s The ‘90s: It’s All Coming Back To Me is your portal to revisiting the decade of Nirvana, Whitney Houston, Madonna…. It runs through Jan. 25. Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca.

Svitlo: Discover The Light Within, Vohon Ukrainian Dance Ensemble’s epic dance-theatre evocation of Ukrainian folkore onstage in all its strange and wonderful imagery and movement, finally arrives on the Jube stage Friday, with a cast of 50, including eight members of Gerdan Theatre from Ukraine. See 12thnight’s preview with creator/designer Larissa Poho here. Tickets: ticketmaster.ca.

The Castle Spectre, Paper Crown Theatre, Photo by Henderson Images.

The Castle Spectre, Paper Crown Theatre’s original stage adaptation of a 1797 gothic melodrama (with swordplay!) by M.G. Lewis, continues its run at the Gateway Theatre (8529 Gateway Blvd) through Sunday. Lauren Tamke directs.  Tickets: showpass.com. 

Counterintuitive holiday fare: Carrie The Musical, based on the blood-letting Stephen King novel. MacEwan University’s production at the Triffo Theatre (11110 104 Ave.) runs through Sunday. Tickets: purchase.macewan.ca.

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Vohon Ukrainian Dance Ensemble brings folklore to life in epic dance theatre. Svitlo: Discover the Light Within, a preview

Posted on November 18, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Svitlo: Discover The Light Within, Vohan Ukrainian Dance Ensemble. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Ukrainian folklore, the mythology of a rich and ancient culture, comes to life, on a grand scale, in the show that arrives on the Jube stage Nov. 28.

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Svitlo: Discover The Light Within is the work of the Vohon Ukrainian Dance Ensemble. And Larissa Poho, one of the company’s artistic directors and one of the creators of Svitlo, says “it’s what happens with artists who are into folklore and video games and Marvel movies….” And it has something in common, too, with the work of the Japanese animation studio Ghibli (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke).

The story Poho and her writing partner Matt Karpiak have fashioned for Svitlo is “a hero’s journey, an epic quest through darkness to discover light….” Which She undergoes a transformation, as she fights to return the light back to her home, which has been plunged into shadow when the Moon gains ascendancy over the Sun.”

In its own original, theatrical way, as she points out, the new dance-theatre piece, 50 performers strong, celebrates Ukrainian arts — stories, dance, song, folk art — as way to share Ukrainian identity, a medium for cultural resistance, resilience, and hope In a dark and oppressive world. “And it doesn’t shy away from the darker elements of our folklore, “the myths and legends of an oppressed and war-torn people.”

Svitlo: Discover The Light Within, Vohan Ukrainian Dance Ensemble. Photo osupplied.

“Matt and I had never seen a Ukrainian dance production that showed the darkness of our folklore,” says Poho. “Let’s not shy away from loss, from death,” they decided. The Rusalky, for example, the Ukrainian version of the alluring mermaids who appear in many cultural traditions, have their nasty side (“well, they do drown people and they’re terrifying,” says Poho casually).

Some of the creatures of Ukrainian folklore have a certain lightness (like the Poterchata, Ukrainian will-o-the-wisps) or a humorous quality, like Ukrainian household spirits. “They can be helpful; if you have good manners and are nice, they might just tease you.” Taking its cue from the world, the Ukrainian folkloric repertoire is marked by a constant “interplay of light and darkness,” Poho says. She quotes the Ukrainian national anthem, a poetic tribute to Ukrainian resilience: “our enemies will vanish like dew in the sun….”

Edmonton is a city of many Ukrainian dance ensembles, “each with their own culture, their own aesthetic.” Three years ago Poho, who notes that Edmonton is “the Ukrainian dance capital of Canada,” found herself particularly drawn to Vohon, mainly because “they love theatricality,” she says. “They love stage magic. They love fog, and fire (in fact, Vohon means fire in Ukrainian), and stage narrative…. Their core values are about inclusivity, and fun, in addition to their technical excellence.”

The love of theatricality is the through-line of Poho’s own amazingly multi-faceted career as a dancer, choreographer, actor, playwright, singer, musician, musical director and arranger, designer, visual artist. And Svitlo, which plays Grande Prairie, Calgary, Saskatoon and Regina before arriving in Edmonton Nov. 28, is a kind of manifesto for a multi-disciplinary artist like Poho. She’s been “part of the story crafting, choreography, direction, some costume and set building.” She’s the lighting designer and she’s also the stage manager, calling the multitude of cues that take a huge cast through mountains, villages, enchanted forests where the tree move, the bottom of a river … a journey of non-stop action in changing locations.    

“Matt (Matt Karpiak) and I wrote this show together two years ago, in his kitchen. And then we hired (Saskatoon-based) composer Jordan Welbourne to create a score.” Most Ukrainian dance companies often enlist their creative teams, including costumers and designers, from Ukraine, Poho says. “But since we are a diaspora community, and we want to support our own, we decided that for this production, we’d have Canadian-Ukrainian artists build the show. Our dancers themselves (there are 45 in the core company, ages 16 to mid-30s) stepped up as costume and scenic designers, and built everything themselves.” Poho was delighted: “I did the preliminary work, the research and sourcing, and they took it and ran!”

It’s been a skill-expanding experience for the Vohon dancers. One took stilt-walking lessons especially for the show, for example, and performs four feet off the stage as the river guardian. Morgan Yamada led fight and stunt training workshops with the cast.

Gerdan Theatre, Svitlo: Discover The Light Within, Vohan Ukrainian Dance Ensemble. Photo supplied.

For the first time in Vohan’s 37-year history, “we are collaborating with a folk ensemble from Ukraine…. Eight top artists, five women and three men, from the popular Gerdan Theatre, based in the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi, are integrated into the storytelling of the show. In one striking scene they’re the dryads (tree spirits) who move the trees through the enchanted forest as they sing.. “The sound is amazing, other-worldly,” says Poho. “When they sing they sound like 40 people.”

“They’ve never collaborated with a dance group, and Vohon has never performed with live vocalists. So for both Svitlo is a big first.” The Gerdan artists are all fluent in English, but Poho has conducted rehearsals in both languages, “so they’d feel more at home.”

Poho, who encountered the Gerdan ensemble on one of her trips to Ukraine, started Ukrainian dance at age four. “Such a huge part of my life.” Her entry point into theatre was theatre design at the U of A. After that, it was musical theatre at MacEwan (“I’d never performed in a musical or sung in English before”). And she makes an extraordinary accumulation of theatrical skills sound inevitable. “Every step came up organically for  me,” she says, casually. “I love storytelling. I’m interested in how do we tell the story? How do we get all the elements together to support the story?”

Poho, a busy theatre designer and musician whose own “Ukrainian kitchen party” show Moonshine sold out every performance at last summer’s Fringe, has gathered a team of her fellow theatre professionals to help bring Svitlo to the stage. “This is me bridging two worlds. It’s Larissa’s heart on the stage.”

“It’s very important to me to share Ukrainian stories in an accessible way…. And it’s important for my community to see that our stories deserve to be told to a wider audience,” says Poho. “They belong outside community halls and in the bigger community, on the world stage…. Everyone has a connection to a folk tradition, a heritage, global lore. I try to tap into this universal concept of belonging.”

PREVIEW

Svitlo: Discover The Light Within

Theatre: Vohon Ukrainian Dance Ensemble with Gerdan Theatre

Written by: Larissa Poho and Matt Karpiak

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

When: Nov. 28

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca

 

  

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A test of comic timing and ingenuity: The 39 Steps launches Farren Timoteo’s artistic directorship at Teatro Live!, a review

Posted on November 16, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Geoffrey Simon Brown in The 39 Steps, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It seems exactly right, inspired really, that Farren Timoteo should launch his Teatro Live! artistic directorship of the comedy theatre company with a show that turns a 1935 Hitchcock spy thriller into a manically high-speed, hilariously low-budget adventure for four actors. Correction: four actors, plus four trunks, four chairs, a ladder, a movable door, and a whole bunch of hats.

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In an age of inflated big-money stage extravaganzas, you’ve got to love any theatrical enterprise that starts with the actors assembling stuff on a bare stage.

The 39 Steps, Patrick Barlow’s stage riff on the movie thriller adapted from John Buchan’s intricately plotted 1915 spy novel, is a test of ingenuity and comic timing that’s a tribute to theatre and its less-is-more brigade of practitioners. And it’s also a chance to use the words zany and clever in one sentence; I’m grabbing it while I can.

It begins with our ridiculously suave hero Richard Hannay, recently returned from Canada, languishing in ennui, pipe in hand, in his London flat. In the production directed by Timoteo (himself a Teatro leading man of note), the dashing Hannay is played in high tweedy style by Geoffrey Simon Brown, with a ’30s Leslie Howard accent that’s as clipped as his moustache.

He’s bored with the world, the news of endless “wars and rumours of war,” and himself. He requires “something mindless and trivial. Something utterly pointless,” he says. “I know! A trip to the theatre!”

And so it begins, with a theatre joke and a slinky femme fatale (Priya Narine in the first of her three femmes fatales in the show) with an unidentifiable mittel-Euro accent, a gun, and a knife in her back. And suddenly Richard Hannay, accused murderer, has been seduced out of his armchair into a sinister international intrigue that involves the fate of the whole country.

Katie Yoner and Michael Watt in The 39 Steps, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

What ensues in this Hitchcock spoof cum homage is a top-velocity chase, by train, by car, by crop-duster (a little wink at North By Northwest), on foot, through the fog and mist of the Scottish highlands into sinister hotels, remote inns, creepy farmhouses, cop shops…. It is for the Clown 1/ Clown 2 duo of  Michael Watt and Katie Yoner, the one statuesque and the other petite, to populate the stage with 130-plus characters. Newcomers both to Teatro, they start with a funny music hall duo at the Palladium, and expand their escalating repertoire to include hapless coppers, vaudevillian detectives, rustics, hoteliers, aassassins, innkeepers, a milk man, a professor, an engineer, sheep …), a lot of moustaches, and a dizzying assortment of accents — sometimes multiples in a single scene.

Yoner (of Rat Academy fame) is an experienced bouffon with a tiny (sometimes inaudible) voice. Watt, whose purchase on a whole lexicon of accents and volumes is unerring, is a find as a physical comedian. They both commit, valiantly, to the most outlandish theatrical demands, as they scramble to keep up with the plot.

Michael Watt, Katie Yoner, and Geoffrey Simon Brown in The 39 Steps, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

And since their theatrical duties include rearranging the trunks, the chairs, the ladder and the door, and the odd lamp (designer: Chantel Fortin) to establish locales, assisted materially by Rory Turner’s noir-esque lighting — their inventiveness and comic busy-ness are extreme. The crop-dusting image is executed ingeniously with a ladder and lights. Lighting and Brown’s agility conjure a chase scene in and on top of a hurtling train. A walk-through in a sinister Scottish mansion is amusing theatrical legerdemain.

Minimalism is a strenuous workout with a big comic payoff, it turns out. As the plot gathers more and more characters and voices, the quick changes get more frenzied, and sillier. Weapons, along with Brian Bast’s wigs, hats, costume pieces, fly through the air. This larky Timoteo production is based on the rarefied art of the timed near-miss (and the mysterious wandering impulses of fake moustaches).

Priya Narine and Geoffrey Simon Brown in The 39 Steps, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Brown’s dashing Hannay, the straight man of the enterprise, perpetually on the move, gets nearly trapped over and over, and escapes by the skin of his teeth, without breaking a sweat. Must be those years in Canada, old chap. But will Narine’s Hitchcock blonde, or her the rural maiden, be his undoing? Is this a classic case of cherchez la femme fatale?

The actors and Timoteo and co embrace high-style silliness, so that you can just sit back, take your mind off worry mode, and let clever theatricality work its magic. The first show of the Timoteo tenure is a ripping night out.

REVIEW

The 39 Steps

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Patrick Barlow, adapted from Hitchcock’s movie The 39 Steps

Directed by: Farren Timoteo

Starring: Geoffrey Simon Brown, Priya Narine, Michael Watt, Katie Yoner

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Nov. 30

Tickets: teatrolive.com

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‘The perfectly imperfect holiday’: Vinyl Cafe The Musical premieres at the Citadel, a review

Posted on November 14, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

The cast of Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Vinyl Cafe The Musical, the new Canadian holiday musical premiering at the Citadel in a Daryl Cloran production, is a cool idea bravely built on a double challenge.

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On one hand it’s an homage to a bona fide Canadian institution, as vintage as the vinyl in the hero’s indie record shop, very Canuck in an appealingly unself-conscious way. For its inspiration it dips into the story and character archive of the late great storyteller/humorist Stuart McLean, a voice in the ear of nostalgic CBC Radio listeners from 1994 to 2017.

On the other hand Vinyl Cafe The Musical is … a musical. A singing dancing musical theatre entertainment for 2025, and the festive season. For an audience that includes people who know nothing in advance of the Toronto couple Dave and Morley, and their kids, their neighbours, their urban ‘hood (or CBC Radio).

That duality made for a fascinating opening night experience Thursday. When the hapless and hopeful Dave (Mike Nadajewski) says to his wife Morley (Patricia Zentilli) at the outset, “it’s Christmas. Relax. We got this….” by way of brushing away her mounting mental checklist of seasonal tasks, there were those in the house seats who got it as a pre-emptive punchline to Dave’s chronic misadventures (Dave, the man of famous last words), and laughed. And there were those (I sat near an assortment) who didn’t. Fair enough. You don’t have to study up to enjoy.

Mike Nadajewski and Patricia Zentilli in Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

In any case making a big piece of musical theatre from stories grounded in the small, and the familiar homey details of daily life (the motto of Dave’s shop: “we may not be big but we’re small”) is a delicate theatrical matter. The charm of the episodic source material, with its texture of the quotidien and its distinctive narrative voice, is tricky to capture as reinvented for the stage in a musical’s more extrovert energy, bolder outline, and heightened dramatic frictions.

Does Vinyl Cafe The Musical succeed? On this first viewing, there’s a lot to love, and some things to reconsider, about the new 16-actor six-musician musical, two years in the making, created (and directed) by Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran with longtime Vinyl Cafe producer and McLean estate executor Jess Milton.

Damon Pitcher and Muhaddisah in Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

The book — curiously, this most Canadian enterprise is by a Mexican-American playwright, Georgina Escobar, with Milton — has hits and misses, which will no doubt be worked on for future iterations of the show.

The driving force is the relationship of all the characters onstage to Christmas, the most stressful holiday of them all, the one with the weighty obligation to make people joyful and the tendency (and to-do lists) to make people crazy. And the musical weaves together two of McLean’s most popular stories, Dave Cooks The Turkey and Rashida, Amir and the Great Gift Giving, the latter an amusing newcomers’ perspective on festive traditions.

Morley, who’s feeling beleaguered by Christmas, Martha Stewart’s holiday tips, and ‘101 ways to fold a napkin’, longs to reclaim the special holiday spirit. In order to appease her, Dave’s one obligation is to take charge of the fateful turkey. And his breezy confidence that this will be easily accomplished is what threatens to be his undoing. It all becomes Dave and Turkey, a funny, farcical, hallucinatory union (with its own duet and pas de deux, amusingly choreographed by Gianna Vacirca), which I won’t spoil for you. It’s a literal embodiment, in poultry form, of go big or (maybe and)  go home.

Leon Willey and Nadien Chu in Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The dramatic conflict starts in the friction between easy-going Dave, embodied with loose-limbed ease by Nadajewski, and his officious, fiercely competitive, perfectionist neighbour Mary Turlington (Nadien Chu, in riotous comic red-alert), the President of the Neighbourhood Christmas Club. It escalates into a veritable war for the ownership of Christmas in the ‘hood. When Dave sings “we’re heading for a very Mary Christmas,” it’s an opening gambit.

If you know Dave and his turkey situation from the story, you’ll know that a posh hotel kitchen figures prominently in his solution to his culinary deadline crisis. But the hotel scenes and a disjointed little subplot about Tommy and his Aunt Sue, a hotel chef with her own backstory, could use a re-think. They seem to stop the show, until Dave’s back in action, wing to wing, puns akimbo, with poultry.

Kristin Johnston, Nadien Chu, Jameela NcNeil in Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

On this first hearing, the pop songs by the Canadian team of composer Colleen Dauncey and lyricist Akiva Romer-Segal are accessible, comfortably rhymed, and mostly a bit on the bland side with some notable exceptions. These include a funny tango number for Dave and Mary locking horns, and a couple of knock-out songs for Morley, beautifully delivered by Zentilli. I Am A Train is all about her feeling that Christmas is a grinding milk-run of repeating duties. Along Comes Life, in Act II, is a lovely ode to going off-book in your life plan. Stephanie (Rain Matkin), the teenage daughter of the family, has a sweet duet Scare Me Away with Tommy (Shaemus Swets), the boyfriend she’s brought home to meet the family. Family, incidentally, rhymes with calamity.   

But the opening song, which has Dave at the door of his shop, seems oddly flat and generic. And the only rock number, The Beast Inside, sung by Dave and Morley’s nerdy pre-teen son Sam (Benjamin Hill, a real theatre find, alternating with Cooper Nash Rajotte), is energetic but seems like a set piece inserted awkwardly (the sound mix didn’t help) that doesn’t get much of a pay-off except a fleeting sight gag.

Cloran’s cast is excellent, and the production establishes a real family dynamic. It’s led by the rueful, distractible Dave as conjured by Nadajewski, a remarkably physical comic actor. He’s a particularly Canadian sort of hero, forever misstepping blithely and then scrambling to pry himself out of scrapes. Nadajewski the human pretzel has an inspired scene actually inside a Canada Post letter box. Zentilli is just right as the graceful, more practical Morley, exasperated by Christmas as overtime. And the neighbour couples, Rashida and Amir (Muhaddisah and Damon Pitcher) and the Turlingtons, Mary the Yuletide dragon and her affable, defeated hubbie Bert (Chu and Leon Willey) are vividly cast too.

Nick Boegel and Rain Matkin in The Vinyl Cafe, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Cory Sincennes’ set conjures a whole neighbourhood of rooms — bedrooms, a kitchen, competing living rooms, a record store —  sliding magically across the stage behind the brick townhouse facade. And Jareth Li’s lighting has fun with a sparkly season.

Naturally, you don’t have to be a prophet to feel a resolution coming on; it isn’t a spoiler to say that Vinyl Cafe The Musical ends with a validation of community and family — Christmas as ‘a beautiful day in the neighbourhood’ — where festive joy prevails, as per the catchy finale ensemble number about a “perfectly imperfect holiday.” Speaking of imperfections and working with them, if the translation of story and characters into musical hasn’t quite arrived yet in a satisfying and cohesive final form, the new musical has a lot going for it as it starts its journey to other theatres across the country. And you leave feeling the seasonal bounce.

REVIEW

Vinyl Cafe: The Musical

Theatre: Citadel Theatre, based on The Vinyl Cafe story collection by Stuart McLean

Book by: Georgina Escobar with Jess Milton

Music and lyrics by: Colleen Dauncey and Akiva Romer-Segal, respectively

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Mike Nadajewski, Patricia Zentilli, Nadien Chu, Rain Matkin, Muhaddisah, Damon Pitcher, Kristin Johnston,  Jameela McNeil, Nick Boegel, Benjamin Hill, Cooper Nash Rajotte, Leon Willey, Sheamus Swets, Andrés F. Moreno, Kristel Harder, Koko

Running: Saturday (in preview) through Dec. 7

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

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‘I’m starting with the man in the mirror’: MJ moonwalks the Jube stage, a review

Posted on November 12, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Jordan Markus as MJ, and the company of the First National Touring Company. Broadway Across Canada, photo by Matthew Murphy

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

MJ, the touring Broadway bio-musical that has arrived on the Jube stage, is a curiosity in every way. Like its star, and subject, Michael Jackson, arguably the 20th century’s greatest and most influential entertainer, a singer/dancer nonpareil, it’s complicated, contradictory, conflicted. It’s also amazingly light on its feet, and dazzling to behold.

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A jukebox musical, crammed with some of the biggest hits in pop music history in its song list of three dozen, MJ dances its way out of the circumscribed dimensions of that genre with an agile cast, choreography by director Christopher Wheeldon, a specialist in dance musicals — and in Jordan Markus a sensational star. He moves the Michael Jackson moves; he dances the Michael Jackson dance (in all its concave dipping, leg-forward glides, Fosse diagonals); he (moon)walks the walk. He captures the strangely wispy other-worldly figure with the breathy high whisper of a voice, who’s perpetually in motion at the centre of MJ.

Robert as MJ, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy

A first-rate band of a dozen or so, conducted by Nathanael Wilkerson, is onstage too. And the sound quality, for once at the Jube, is just excellent (original sound designer Gareth Owen). So you’ll hear, and see, Thriller, Billie Jean, Bad, Man in the Mirror, in top form. In short, MJ has great music and great dancing going for it. And lots of both. And it’s on a grand theatrical scale: a stunning design (Derek McLane), brilliant lighting (designer: Natasha Katz), layers of Peter Nigrini’s gorgeous projections, a eyeful array of costumes by Paul Tazewell that re-create the performer’s famous wardrobe.

But here’s the thing. Since its existence depends on compliance with the Michael Jackson estate (“by special arrangement” as the program says), MJ is curatorial about the Michael Jackson story, alert to re-polishing a legacy tarnished by plausible allegations of child sexual abuse that started emerging immediately after the 1992 present time of the play.

It is a sympathetic portrait of the star. And, as many reviewers have pointed out since the musical’s 2022 Broadway debut, whether you can get past queasy accusations that are once known impossible to un-know, will have an impact on your experience of the show. The opening night audience loved the show, clamorously cheering the donning of the sparkly glove, the doffing of the signature hat.

Jordan Markus and Devin Bowles in MJ, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy

In the libretto written by the celebrated playwright Lynn Nottage (Intimate Apparel, Ruined, Sweat), who’s won the Pulitzer Prize twice, Jackson is a prodigious talent traumatized by his past. And his present is infiltrated constantly by a harsh childhood of touring with his siblings in the Jackson 5, abused by a vicious stage father (Devin Bowles). In Nottage’s script there are three Michael Jacksons, the startling little boy (Quentin Blanton Jr.), the teenager who’s beginning to understand his own talent (the terrific Brandon Lee Harris), and MJ.

And along with his father and mother (the warm-voiced Ranané Katurah) his younger selves physically infiltrate the life of Jackson in the present, not only as flashbacks but also inhabiting other characters in MJ’s story of a brilliant performer haunted by ghosts. The double-casting of Wheeldon’s production is meaningful. The impact of Bowles as both the father and the tour manager, two contrastive authority figures, has particular weight.

MJ is nothing if not cleverly put together. Except, that is, for the inept framing device — crude, for such an accomplished playwright — of an MTV reporter  (Kristin Stokes) who’s scored a rare interview with media-averse Jackson for a documentary. “I wanna keep this about my music,” he says.  “But is it possible to separate your life from your music?” she asks.

There’s a question that weaves its way through MJ (and quite possibly all jukebox biomusicals). And his aggrieved response taps into a continuing theme that the tabloid media are predatory and the truth is beside the point. “No matter what I do it always get twisted….Just because you see it on a TV screen don’t make it factual.”

But the verbal exchanges with the reporter, as written, are oddly banal and dull, starting with gambits like “what drives you creatively?” or “when you perform it’s like a switch gets turned on….” Or this one: “It feels like you’re courting controversy.” Well, yeah. It’s one thing to allude to the shallow water in which the media swim, with Jackson as victim; it’s  another to actually build those questions into the script.

Jordan Markus as MJ, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy

So, Michael, where do you get your ideas? Yikes. It’s telling, not showing, to hear that “I process my ideas through my body.” And the showing, is well within the compass of Markus’s performance — the way life events and their emotional accretions seem to arrive in his movement lexicon, with its original angles, strange playfulness, tortured extensions. The Jackson 5 scenes, including an Amateur Night performance at the Apollo, are vividly realized onstage, and like past and present they flow wonderfully together in this production. If Jackson never seems quite grown-up or of this earth, it’s to the choreography and direction we look, not the thudding script.

The trickiest thing about MJ, bound to seem slippery, is that when Rachel, desperate as she claims to “get inside his his head” (ah, those crack MTV investigative reporters), frequently alludes to allegations and tabloid stories, she’s actually talking about his whitening skin colour and his enhanced nose, not the allegations and stories the musical knows we’re thinking about. It’s one thing to be (contractually) evasive; it’s another to drop hints in order to sidestep them.

The song lyrics themselves, in numbers astutely positioned in the musical, tell a story with reverb, too — Beat It, with its advice to avoid responsibility (“it doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong”), or Human Nature with its title as the answer to every why? question about human behavior.

The show begins at the outset in the rehearsal hall where Jackson’s corps of dancers are limbering up,“Five minutes to Michael!” Then “two minutes to Michael!” says the man in the suit. And after that, fanfare cum warning, there he is, the artist himself, sliding quietly into the rehearsal hall, right into Beat It. And we get to see a driven and demanding working pro, constantly tinkering, in detail (and expense), with the upcoming, maybe ruinously costly, Dangerous tour. There’s a delish scene where MJ dances with Fred Astaire and Bob Fosse, and the Cotton Club’s Nicholas Brothers.

That perfectionist, a true original whose music videos remain peak experiences of that form, is remarkable to see in action in MJ’s big, full-bodied production numbers in this fulsome touring show. The rest of the story unspools in clouds.

REVIEW

MJ

Broadway Across Canada

Book by: Lynn Nattage

Directed and choreographed by: Christopher Wheeldon

Starring: Jordan Markus, Devin Bowles, Kristin Stokes, Brandon Lee Harris, Quentin Blanton Jr. (alternating with Bryce A. Holmes), Michael Nero, Rajané Katurah, J. Daughtry, Austin Rankin

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca

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Ray: a little tribute to a great theatre lover

Posted on November 11, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Ray Christenson, 1931-2025

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

With the passing of Ray Christenson this month, at 93, Edmonton theatre and its community of artists have lost someone essential to what they do, how they create — and, especially, why.

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The live theatre isn’t alive, after all, without an audience. And Ray (as he was known to everyone, of every age, in his expansive circle of friends and acquaintances), was the ideal audience, the theatre lover every artist loves (or should): curious, open-minded, receptive to new experiences on any evening, eager to discuss.

If Ray asked you what you thought of a production, and the two of you disagreed, he was fine with that. If you were resistant to a show (there’s diplomatic reviewer talk for you), and the word “excruciating” came unbidden to your critic’s brain, Ray was there to remind you of a bright performance in a small role, perhaps, or something special about a scene, or a telling line of dialogue.

Chatting to Ray at intermission or post-show, or running into him at the Fringe, was always a reminder that for the audience there’s invariably something positive, discussable, challenging, in every creative experiment, no matter how imperfectly realized or out-and-out screwed-up onstage. What a valuable lesson that is for any theatre reviewer.

No matter how extreme the point of view in a show, how harsh and ugly, or confrontational, anti-social, or self-indulgent for that matter, Ray was remarkably non-judgmental and open-hearted. He remained outward-looking, optimistic, ready to be delighted, to listen and entertain other points of view, to see the world through other eyes.

He had tickets and subscriptions to a wild assortment of theatre companies in town, big-budget theatre, indies, student shows, church basement productions…. Until he was physically unable to venture forth, he happily sat through every kind of Edmonton theatre, including of course Catalyst productions created by his son Jonathan Christenson, the company’s artistic director. And then when his eyesight began to fail, Ray bore the affliction with patience and exemplary fortitude; as his vision dimmed, his impish smile did not. Ray’s final exit came “just shy of his 94th birthday,” says the Park Memorial obituary. It will be the only time that “shy” and “Ray” ever appear in the same sentence.    

Ray wasn’t an artist; he was a champion of artists who wasn’t a pushover.  And he transcended, effortlessly at every age, the stereotypes of chronology and career. He was a pastor and university chaplain who was pretty much unshock-able; an arts lover who, like his great friend director/actor Jim DeFelice, got a big kick out of hockey and back in the day Trappers baseball. You’d run into the two of them in Strathcona cafes or on Whyte, in intense, incomprehensible pre-game confabs about sports stats.

We track artists; we follow their careers, their creative initiatives. But how often do we acknowledge the contribution to theatre of audiences, who are inspired to connect, ready to buy into a whole variety of mind- and heart-expanding experiences? In rooms they share with a community of other people, in house seats and onstage? It’s the moment to appreciate a quintessential appreciator.

Every encounter with Ray was not only fun, but made me understand that rapport better. And the Ray-less theatre world seems diminished.

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A new (and all-Canadian) season at L’UniThéâtre launches with Le Palier

Posted on November 6, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the play that launches the new, all-Canadian season tonight at L’UniThéâtre, Alberta’s only professional francophone theatre company, an unlikely friendship blossoms, fast, in an unlikely place.

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As director Steve Jodoin explains, Le Palier opens with 11 quick scenes, “and no talking” — on the third floor landing (le palier) of an apartment building. The 2005 play, a touching two-hander by Quebec’s Réal Beauchamp and Jean-Guy Côté, chronicles an unexpected, intergenerational, bond between neighbours: “a lady nearing the end of her life and a young university student who doesn’t know what to do with his…. The whole play happens in a year and a half.”

Neighbourly connection, friendship, loneliness, compassion: Le Palier embraces them all, says Jodoin, L’UniThéâtre artistic director. “Laughter and hard reality.” His production (in French with English surtitles), starring Ève-Marie Forcier and Gabriel Gagnon, is the first of four shows (and the return of an annual festival) in the 2025-2026 season at the 33-year-old company. It’s attracted a top-drawer design team, including Paul Bezaire (set), Scott Peters (lighting), and Dean Stockdale and Ryder J. McGinnis (sound).

Le Palier runs at the Servus Credit Union Theatre at La Cité francophone (8627 91st St.) tonight through Sunday. Tickets: lunitheatre.ca.

Bouée, a buoy or a lifeline in English, by Céleste Godin, takes L’UniThéâtre audiences for the first time across the river to Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre. A six-actor touring production from Satellite Theatre in Moncton N.B., it’s “cool and quirky, very physical,” as Jodoin describes. “It explores the ‘what’s next’,” he says. “Sci-fi meets everyday life,” in an absurdist, highly theatrical experience, as a group of scientists sets about updating the received portrait of humanity. It touches down in March 6 and 7 at the Roxy, 10708 124 St.

The season includes the premiere of a new play by Edmonton theatre artist Sophie Gareau-Brennan, set in Alberta. Bouanderie/ Boulangerie, a rom-com as Jodoin describes, is named for the two businesses, a laundromat and a bakery, next door to each other in a small Alberta francophone community. Among its quartet of characters is an a complex geometry of friendship and love, reunion and rediscovery. Part of the annual Theatre 8-Pack initiative that includes eight productions from eight different Edmonton theatres, the production co-directed by Jodoin and Gareau-Brennan runs May 21 to 24 and 28 to 31 at the Servus Credit Union Theatre in La Cité francophone.

In alternating seasons, L’UniThéâtre and their Vancouver counterpart Théâtre La Seizième take turns producing a kids’ show that tours in Alberta and B.C. It’s a long-time collaboration that counts as a bona fide Canadian theatre success story. This season the show is Petite Ondine, written by Anaïs Pellin and inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, a co-production between Vancouver partners Théâtre La Seizième and Kleine Compagnie. And its particular aesthetic is miniature and found objects, a puppetry that happens directly onstage amplified by live video (and accompanied by the songs of Nina Simone). Jodoin plans a public performance here for this touring show at the end of May.

The L’UniThéâtre season also includes the return of an annual theatre festival for junior and senior high school students.

The L’UniThéâtre season happens in French, with English surtitles. Tickets and subscriptions: lunitheatre.ca.

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Vinyl Cafe: The Musical. Stuart McLean’s beloved characters come to life in the Citadel’s new holiday musical, a preview

Posted on November 5, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the new Canadian holiday musical that premieres next week at the Citadel, characters we know well do something they’ve never done before. They step out of the radio and off the page — and, for the first time ever, onto the stage, 3-D. To breathe the air of live theatre, and speak and sing for themselves.

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Vinyl Cafe: The Musical taps into the much-loved quintessentially Canadian CBC Radio story collection created over 20 years by the late great Stuart McLean. It’s inspired by the stories of the Toronto couple Dave and Morley, their kids, their neighbours, their ‘hood, and in particular two of the archive’s holiday classics, Dave Cooks The Turkey and Rashida, Amir and the Great Gift-Giving.

Five years in the development, Vinyl Cafe: The Musical is the bright idea of Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran, who directs the premiere production that starts previews Saturday. And it’s been on his mind for a decade at least, since his time as artistic director of Western Canada Theatre in Kamloops.

“I reached out to the Vinyl Cafe team (led by Jess Milton, the long-time Vinyl Cafe producer, podcaster, and the executor of the McLean estate). They always considered it would make a good musical but didn’t have time to pursue it.” Not till 2020, that is, “when Jess and I built a fast friendship, and started to build the team…. We had similar ideas of what this could be, what it would look like as a musical.”

Citadel Theatre artistic director Daryl Cloran. Photo supplied

Musical theatre isn’t an outlandish destination for The Vinyl Cafe, of course. Far from it. “Music was such a big part of Stuart’s radio shows (and his live touring concert/shows),” says Cloran of the signature McLean format, with musical interludes featuring the hippest bands across the country. And after all, Dave is the owner of a vintage record shop.

“We started with the music,” Cloran says. And after considering submissions by a variety of artists, he and Milton went with the Canadian composer/lyricist duo Colleen Dauncey and Akiva Romer-Segal. “They’re quite something,” Cloran says, pointing to The Louder We Get (formerly The Prom Queen, book by Kent Staines), which premiered at Theatre Calgary during COVID, and Grow, a new musical comedy about a couple of green-thumbed Amish kids in partnership with a cannabis dispensary, slated for a 2026 premiere at Montreal’s Segal Centre. “They write a great contemporary pop musical, super-catchy tunes. Definitely you’ll be singing the songs as you leave the theatre.”

“In the sense that the characters sing their feelings as part of the story, it’s a traditional musical ” says Cloran. As an example he points to the song I Am A Train. Dauncey and Romer-Segal wrote it as a musical response to Morley’s line, in Dave Cooks The Turkey, where she describes the unending to-do list attached to being a mother at Christmas.

Stuart McLean, creator of The Vinyl Cafe. Photo supplied

The book was a challenge for theatre, as Cloran describes, not least because the voice of McLean, with its signature cadence, pauses, and intonation, is so inextricably built into his stories. He’s a storyteller. In his radio and live shows “he doesn’t play a bunch of characters,” the way Farren Timoteo does, for example, in his solo show Made In Italy, or Rod Beattie does in his Wingfield series. “So it’s quite something to see them come to life,” Cloran says of Dave and Morley and the rest onstage.

“How do you take a story and make it something that leans into the power of theatre?” That was the question that propelled the development of The Vinyl Cafe: The Musical. “We made a conscious decision not to have a narrator or a narrative voice, not to have somebody pretending to be Stuart.” Instead, two of the most popular Dave and Morley holiday stories (Dave Cooks The Turkey and Rashida, Amir and the Great Gift-Giving) “are intertwined into a narrative musical…. For the first time the characters are being embodied.” The musical isn’t “telling” the stories, as Cloran says. As a piece of theatre, it “leans into action and dialogue.”

The book for the new musical is written by Mexican-American playwright/librettist Georgina Escobar along with Milton. “We wanted someone with experience writing musicals, someone with a unique take on it,” says Cloran. Citing Milton, he says “there’s an inherent nostalgia about these stories and the tone of The Vinyl Cafe…. Jess knows these characters inside out. So she’s able to say ‘in this situation Dave would do this.”

The goal, says Cloran, was to honour the history of The Vinyl Cafe “and speak to contemporary audiences.” In locating stories written 15 or 20 years ago in a contemporary setting, Rashida, Amir and the Great Gift-Giving was particularly apt, as he describes: “new Canadians who’ve moved into a neighbourhood as they take in all the neighbours’ wacky stress about this particular holiday.”

“Escobar was really able to tap into that experience…. We approached a whole bunch of writers, and Georgina’s take on it was the one that got the team the most excited.”

Damon Pitcher and Muhaddisah in Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

Vinyl Cafe: The Musical is heir to such Citadel musical premieres as Full Moon and Prison Dancer. With its $800,000 budget and 16-actor cast, led by Shaw Festival veteran Mike Nadajewski as Dave and Edmonton theatre star Patricia Zentilli as Morley — plus a six-piece band — it’s on a scale. And Cloran has hopes its appeal, its sense of humour, its Canadian-ness, will have appeal across the country and beyond. “Other (Canadian) theatres have been sniffing around about the show,” he says. And The Vinyl Cafe has always had American fans; the CBC Radio series was  picked up by some 80 public radio stations in the U.S.  

Meanwhile ticket sales have been “quite impressive,” as he puts it. So brisk, in fact, that  weeks ago, “unheard of for us, that early,” the Citadel announced an extension to the run. “If we do this right, there’s a good chance it will have a life after the run here.”

Canadians, Cloran among them, have a history with The Vinyl Cafe. “They feel a connection, not only to the stories themselves but the (family) ritual of hearing those stories on the radio every Sunday, and going to the live Christmas concerts.” His wife’s parents took the family to the Christmas shows in Toronto every year. “It’s been a big part of my life.”

Threaded through the radio broadcasts are McLean’s jocular “don’t get ahead of me” asides to audiences anticipating developments in the stories. At the workshops (there have been three since 2020) of the new musical, “people would be laughing at the jokes half-way through. Fascinating to see,” reports Cloran.

“As we navigate into previews making changes,” he and Milton have been at pains to create something for long-time fans (“with little Easter eggs”) and for Vinyl Cafe newbies who “just want a great night out….”

PREVIEW

Vinyl Cafe: The Musical

Theatre: Citadel Theatre, based on The Vinyl Cafe story collection by Stuart McLean

Book by: Georgina Escobar with Jess Milton

Music and lyrics by: Colleen Dauncey and Akiva Romer-Segal, respectively

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Mike Nadajewski, Patricia Zentilli, Nadien Chu, Rain Matkin, Muhaddisah, Damon Pitcher, Kristin Johnston,  Jameela McNeil, Nick Boegel, Benjamin Hill, Cooper Nash Rajotte, Leon Willey, Sheamus Swets, Andrés F. Moreno, Kristel Harder, Koko

Running: Saturday (in preview) through Dec. 7

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

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Opening the doors into the past: Ecos, a multi-generational dance/theatre piece from Common Ground. A review

Posted on November 3, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Tatiana Duque and Alexandra Lainfiesta in Ecos, Diaspora Diaries Collective, Common Ground Arts. Photo by Mat Simpson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the opening scene of Ecos, a woman arrives onstage to build, piece by piece, an altar of tiny objects — bottles, a wine glass, flowers, a little cake, picture frames, salt, a dead plant.…

A funeral tribute collection? A shrine? We wonder about that. “I need this to work,” says Amaya (Tatiana Duque). “I am so lost…. I don’t know who I am.”

As we learn in this lyrical bilingual (English and Spanish) dance/theatre piece by Elisa Marina Mair-Sánchez, Amaya is an immigrant who left her home and her family of immigrants 15 years before, and hasn’t returned. And she hopes to “open the doors to the past,” ever-receding in time and memory: “how hard it is to remember everything; how hard it is to remember anything.”

And “la ofrenda,” the offering she’s assembled, is her way of conjuring her past, her immigrant parents and their immigrant parents worlds away — and their dreams, motives, and regrets about changing their lives. “Coming to Canada was easy,” says Amaya. “Now I don’t know if it was the right thing to do.” The question that haunts her, and propels Ecos forward, dead plant included, is “Can I still grow if I have no roots?”

Tatiana Duque and Alexandra Lainfiesta in Ecos, Diaspora Diaries Collective, Common Ground Arts. Photo by Mat Simpson

Ecos, a bilingual word if ever there was one, is a ghost story of sorts. And the first to arrive on the scene through the curtains that separate present and past (designers: Even Gilchrist and Whittyn Jason) is Eli (Alexandra Lainfiesta), a bright bold-outlined figure from Amaya’s childhood, demanding to know “why we are here.” Whether she’s a sibling, a friend, a young version of Amaya, an incarnation of the playwright, is up for grabs. But Eli is here to challenge Amaya to confront her motives and doubts full-on.

After that, the multi-generational stories come to life, in the play first developed at Common Ground Arts’ Found Festival (as El Funeral). Amaya and Eli host a sort of memory pageant. In Andrés F. Moreno’s evocative Diaspora Diaries Collective production, the finale of Common Ground Arts’ new Prairie Mainstage Series, characters appear and disappear through sliding curtains at either end of the stage, in atmospheric scenes. And sometimes they’re shadows in motion, visible echoes of the past. The lighting is evocative.

Fernando Garcia Reyes and Phany Peña, Tatian Duque and Alexandra Lainfiesta in Ecos. Photo by Mat Simpson.

The grandparents on one side of the family, who moved from the U.K. to Mexico (Phany Peña and Victor Snaith Hernandez), glide into view dancing, a love story that becomes a triangle. The grandparents on the other side (Ana Mulino and Fernando Garcia Reyes), who moved from Spain to Argentina, are a love story, too — one that begins to bend and crack under the stresses. Amaya’s parents (Reyes and Peña), who left Argentina for a life in Mexico, arrive too. As choreographed by Jason Romero and costumed in a time-travelling way by Gilchrist and Jason, they are vivid ghosts who seem to slide in and out of memory. The clarity of the storytelling, and Moreno’s production, are bona fide achievements.

The scenes are framed by a chorus of much-repeated self-doubting questions from Amaya — “was leaving the right thing to do?” or “what am I supposed to do?.” And they come to seem rather long on self-analysis, and grow unnecessary, not least because Duque is such an appealing, expressive actor, eminently able to convey doubt without words. And her counterpart, Lainfiesta as Eli, is charismatic, too. The look is beautiful; Nano Uribe’s  soundscore, after suspenseful opening riffs, seems a bit generically melancholy.

This six-actor indie production by a playwright mining her own past as a immigrant, is a welcome insight. It’s a rich and fulsome reminder, in this country of immigrants, that new Canadians move here for many reasons, bravely setting forth, leaving lives-in-progress, and bringing with them fascinating, dramatic pasts. They gain something, as we’re fond of reminding everyone, but they give up things too. They make big changes in their lives; they adapt; they regret; they sacrifice for love.

REVIEW

Ecos

Theatre: Diaspora Diaries Collective, Common Ground Arts Society

Written by: Elisa Marina Mair-Sánchez

Directed by Andrés F. Moreno

Starring: Tatiana Duque, Alexandra Lainfiesta, Ana Mulino, Victor Snaith Hernandez, Phany Peña, Fernando Garcia Reyes

Where: Mile Zero Dance, 9931, 78 Ave. 

Running: through Nov. 9

Tickets: commongroundarts.ca 

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How tough do you have to be? Surviving trauma: Tough Guy gets a visceral premiere production, a review

Posted on November 1, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In Tough Guy, an exhilarating new play by Hayley Moorhouse, a queer up-and-coming filmmaker tries to justify turning their camera on their friends, survivors of a shooting in queer nightclub mere days before, and reeling from the death of one of their circle.

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Emerson (Autumn Strom) has arrived back home too late for the funeral (“I lost track of time”). Their artistic concept, in progress, is a film capture of “queer joy,” something visceral and powerful (also words in the Emerson lexicon). They’re arguing for the idea of art, self-expression, the compelling need to put the queer story out there in the world and thereby restore “agency” to the queer experience. And their friends, shattered in various ways, aren’t buying.

They accuse Emerson variously of pretentiousness, of “trauma porn,” of putting career and “a vanity project” ahead of friendship. They have no patience with phrases like “an unmistakeable fragility,” or Emerson’s argument that the concept is more “a reflection, a meditation” than a documentary. “But who is it for?” demands Ella (Michelle Diaz).

It takes a tough guy of a playwright, one with chutzpah and wit, to enfold this acidic kind of artistic self-reflection into her own play, and invite us to consider it. Tough Guy is brave that way, with its multiple frames and angled mirror reflections of friends splintered by trauma. And the production, directed and choreographed by Brett Dahl, premiering in the Fringe Theatre season, explodes onstage, no holds barred. It’s riveting, a sensational barrage of visceral (I know, that word, right?) movement, a pounding Kena León score that’s nightclub fabulous and rib-rattling — and acting from a five-member cast who don’t just inhabit the characters but live them.

Jasmine Hopfe in Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson

They all process horror and grief in their own way, starting with Strom as the filmmaker character who brings their own complicated trans history to their filmic exploration of queer joy. There’s Quinn (Jasmine Hopfe), who’s the reason there’s a punching bag centre-stage in Lieke den Bakker’s set design, strikingly lighted to invoke both a nightclub and a boxing ring. In a flashing, thrashing world, Quinn is a taciturn boxer, who communicates with blows not words. “You wanted to talk,” they say to Emerson, landing a punch on the bag. “This is me talking.”

Ella (Diaz) habitually takes the teaching-moment outreach position. “I don’t have time to be traumatized,” they say. “People are counting on me…. How can we make change if we don’t step outside our echo chamber?” Ella is the one who sets up the memorial wall, the one who takes the trouble or the risk to post on social media, who’s a bit conciliatory about the conservative, religious parents who signally failed to even mention the queerness of their murdered daughter Jamie (Mel Bahniuk) at the funeral.

“They’re old-school,” says Ella, much to the outrage of the sardonic Sutton (Marguerite Lawler), the wiseass of the bunch, who survived the shooting with a gunshot wound.

Marguerite Lawler and Michelle Diaz in Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson

And since Moorhouse’s play flips back and forth between the present and assorted, incremental moments in the pre-event past, Jamie is a presence, both alive and dead, in Tough Guy. They’re only a year out of the closet, “a baby queer,” as they say, a new and happy addition to the circle of friends we see — in Emerson’s queer joy footage dancing the night away at the fateful club Aria, or just hanging out, camera-free, making each other laugh in the garage with the punching bag.

Rage and humour are rarely stage roommates; here they’re in bed together. “Being sad all the time, it’s the most lesbian thing you can do,” says one of the characters, and it’s a big laugh line.

How tough do you have to be to be authentically queer in a stressful world of homophobic and transphobic violence, where a queer club is targeted by a shooter and then the memorial wall in honour of the victims gets graphically vandalized? How tough do you have to be to not go it alone? To admit need, as a way to not be paralyzed at a moment that seems to freeze time? The characters are in motion, trying to find that out.

Moorhouse’s intertwined dialogue, which dispenses with narration and exposition, is muscular, staccato, and believable. And the performances are inflammatory.

REVIEW

Tough Guy

Theatre: Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre

Written and produced by: Hayley Moorhouse

Directed by: Brett Dahl

Starring: Mel Bahniuk, Michelle Diaz, Jasmine Hopfe, Marguerite Lawler, Autumn Strom

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

Running: through Nov. 8

Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca

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