The Sterlings, a coda

Posted on June 26, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Sterling night 2024

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Diverse disconnected thoughts from the Sterling gala Monday night.

•It was an evening of three-and-a-half-plus hours hosted by a pair of improvisers, Marguerite Lawler and Gordie Lucius from Rapid Fire Theatre who actually (on purpose?) managed to lose track of the script for a while. Because that’s what improvisers do. They acknowledged the irony that “people who don’t learn lines” were presiding over theatre awards. 

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• How Edmonton is this? The Sterlings evening began with an ode to pain. (Dentist, the very funny tribute to a career choice of inflicting it, from Little Shop of Horrors). It was delivered with maximum hilarity by John Ullyatt, nominated for the role he, er, nailed (bit into?) in the Citadel production). “I thrill when I drill a bicuspid….”

• Amazingly, the NHL took the risk of going up against the Sterlings Monday night. Generously, the gala acknowledged the competition. The excellent house band, in Oilers jerseys all, led by Erik Mortimer: The Play Offs. Lana Michelle Hughes, the new associate artistic director of Shadow Theatre, rushed onto the stage from time to time, in Oilers costume, to deliver updates from the game.

• The awards themselves designed by Tessa Stamp have Edmonton theatre built into them. They have the distinctive look of quilted logs, and they’re hand-crafted by Jaclyn Segal using scraps of materials from theatre sets this season.

•Rubaboo, the Métis cabaret that played the Citadel mainstage this season, is the first time in (their) living memory that Vancouver-based singer-songwriter-actor Andrea Menard and her Edmonton-based long-time musical collaborator Robert Walsh have ever worked in the same city at the same time. The inspiration for the show came, say the creators, via a phone call from Dennis Garnhum, the erstwhile artistic director of the Grand Theatre in London, Ont. who’s now at the Citadel rehearsing a summer production of The Play That Goes Wrong.

•Patsy Thomas, the beloved and nationally respected head of wardrobe at the Citadel (and the winner of the Ross Hill Award for Outstanding Achievement in Production) has a great theatrical speaking voice — deep, resonant, with edges. Just sayin’.

•In his charming acceptance speech for the Sterling Award he shares with Adam Dickson for their work on Small Matters Productions’ The Spinsters, Ian Walker noted that the occasion was “the first time a mechanical engineer has accepted a Sterling Award for costumes.” He’ll get no argument from me. Ah, that’s how the Ugly Stepsisters glided around the stage in their kickass ballgowns (which took seven sewers 1,500 hours to build).

•Edmonton theatre grande dame Margaret Mooney, who embodies that great showbiz mystery of star power, noted that it was the 22nd time she’d been onstage at the Sterlings to introduce the recipient of the theatre administration award named in her honour (this year, the multi-talented Elizabeth Allison-Jorde). Her reactions to that onstage role since the first time, as she noted with her usual acerbity, “ranged from ‘I really deserve this’ to ‘I have nothing to wear’.”

•As Northern Light Theatre artistic director Trevor Schmidt noted in his introduction, Allison-Jorde cannot be labelled. Her theatre contributions are both onstage and off-. She’s worked festivals (like the Fringe and Street Performers). She runs a theatre company (NextGen Theatre). She’s an actor, a director, a much sought-after stage manager…. The list of diverse gigs in a 30-year (and counting) career is impressive. In her acceptance speech, she gave “simultaneous credit and blame” for this showbiz career to her mother, the noted costume designer Pat Burden. She remembers her mom coming home to see that all her living room furniture was missing. Allison-Jorde needed it for a show. She was in high school at the time.

•Edmonton, indeed Alberta, is no longer rat-free. The inspired Fringe bouffon hit Rat Academy, the work of Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner (with director Joseph McManus) — the world seen through the eyes of the ultimate outcasts — will set forth on a year of touring. Call it a rat infestation; they do. “We didn’t think anyone else would like it!” said Yoner, and added “we’d do the show 8 days a week even if nobody liked it.”

• Elena Belyea, the creator and star of the “outstanding Fringe new work” This Won’t Hurt, I Promise, confessed to a sense of the surreal in their new hit: 60 minutes, they marvelled, of sharing their assorted anxieties with the audience, “then making them watch a video of my dog eating ice cream.” They reminded us that it’s a very tough time to be trans in Alberta; times are hard, and getting harder. It was a thought echoed in a long-distance message from Makram Ayache, whose The Hooves Belonged To The Deer was voted this year’s outstanding indie production.

• Belyea introduced this year’s recipient of the Sterling for outstanding contribution to Edmonton theatre. They called the 27-year-old playwright/ director/ producer/ promoter/ motivator par excellence Mac Brock — the managing producer of Common Ground Arts, RISER Edmonton, and the upcoming Found Festival — “indie theatre’s fairy godmother.” And his initiatives and unstoppable energy in boosting “other people’s work” have impacted “an entire generation of theatre-makers.”

• In accepting the choreography Sterling for her indispensable contribution to SkirtsAfire’s Mermaid Legs, Ainsley Hillyard paid tribute to the inspirational teamwork that went into Annette Loiselle’s multi-disciplinary production — and the care and support of the theatre community, a safety net for her personally in a very tough year.

• Here’s a tangible measure of the versatility of Edmonton theatre artists: playwright/actor Beth Graham. She’s fresh from a terrific starring performance in Teatro Live!’s lovely revival of The Oculist’s Holiday. Her play Mermaid Legs won five Sterling Awards, the most of any of the season’s shows, including outstanding production and best new play.   

•One of the (many) tantalizing things about the Fringe is a glimpse at shows you’d love to see again. Krampus, a clever Christmas musical comedy from the Straight Edge Theatre team of Stephen Allred and Seth Gilfillan, is one. It’s confirmed by seeing Amanda Neufeld, fierce and funny as the family matriarch patrolling Yuletide perfection, perform a number from the show. The songs are smart and funny….Are you listening, theatre companies?

The full list of Sterling Award winners is here.

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Celebrating the season in Edmonton theatre: Mermaid Legs leads the way at the 36th annual Sterling Awards

Posted on June 25, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire. Photo by Brianne Jang

Eric Wigston and Makram Ayache in The Hooves Belonged To The Deer, In Arms Collective at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo from Tarragon Theatre production by Cylla von Tiedemann

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The spirit of off-centre ‘small theatre’ originality blew through the 36th annual Sterling Awards gala Monday night as the theatre community gathered to toast the 2023-24 season on Edmonton stages. And two challenging productions that live outside the mainstream proved the top choice of jurors at the festivities, named to honour the theatre pioneer Elizabeth Sterling Haynes.

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At the festive bash hosted by Marguerite Lawler and Gordie Lucius of Rapid Fire Theatre at the Westbury Theatre, a new “surreal theatre dance fantasia” that premiered at this year’s SkirtsAfire Festival scored top honours, including outstanding production, from Sterling jurors. In all, Beth Graham’s moving and insightful Mermaid Legs, a theatrical multi-disciplinary exploration of mental illness and its existential ripple effects on a trio of sisters, came away with five Sterlings — the most of any show — of its nine nominations in 26 categories.

They included the outstanding new play award for Graham, in a hotly competitive category that included premieres by playwrights Trevor Schmidt, Ronnie Burkett, Conni Massing, and S.E. Grummett. As well, Ainsley Hillyard’s choreography, a movement score that captured the elusive equilibrium between order and chaos at the heart of the piece, was acknowledged by jurors. So was the ensemble work of Annette Loiselle’s cast of three actors and four dancers, and the sound design by Aaron Macri and Binaifer Kapadia.

Tenaj Williams in Little Shop of Horrors, Citadel/Arts Club Theatre Company. Photo by Nanc Price

The counterpart of Mermaid Legs in the outstanding musical category was the Citadel/ Arts Club Theatre co-production of the winsomely eccentric 1982 musical, Little Shop of Horrors. Strikingly, that was the sole Sterling, of its seven nominations (including three in the acting categories), picked up by Ashlie Corcoran’s production.

The indie In Arms Collective, which returned Makram Ayache’s provocative epic The Hooves Belonged to the Deer to its point of origin (and the playwright’s home town), took away four Sterlings. Jurors deemed it this year’s outstanding indie production. And Peter Hinton-Davis’s production garnered him the outstanding direction Sterling, as well as honours for Anahita Dehbonehie’s striking sand-filled set and Whittyn Jason’s dramatic lighting both indispensable participants in the horizon expander that took a Muslim immigrant kid in southern Alberta to the Old World, and a vision of a new creation myth in the Garden of Eden.

Robert Walsh, Andrea Menard, Karen Shepherd, Nathen Aswell in Rubaboo. Photo by Dahlia Katz.

Of the two other productions awarded with more than one Sterling, one was on the Citadel mainstage, a musical cabaret created by Métis singer-songwriter-actor Andrea Menard and her long-time musical collaborator Robert Walsh. Of Rubaboo’s three Sterlings, one was for Menard’s leading performance in a musical, one for the Menard/Walsh score, and one for Walsh’s musical direction.

Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis in The Spinsters, Small Matters Productions. Photo by Ian Walker.

The other, The Spinsters, an inventive and playful dark comedy by and starring Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis, from the physical theatre company Small Matters Productions, premiered at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Cinderella’s aggrieved Ugly Stepsisters, long relegated to anonymity, get their moment in the limelight. And the “bad bitches who bought the palace” now have two Sterlings — one for the show-stopper costumes by Adam Dickson and Ian Walker, which seemed to have a life of their own, and one for Walker’s multi-media design.

In the end, the Citadel’s tally of 27 nominations, the most of any company, translated into only four Sterlings — one for Little Shop of Horrors, three for Rubaboo. And of Edmonton’s mid-sized companies, only Theatre Network and the Varscona’s two resident companies, Shadow Theatre and Teatro Live!, took home a Sterling. The awards for those three companies were in acting categories.

Larissah Lashley, Abigail McDougall, Jayce Mckenzie, Hayley Moorhouse in Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Ronnie Burkett’s Sterling for outstanding performance in a leading role is  validation of the dramatic impact of the master marionettist, who writes for, creates, voices, and manipulates the entire cast in his latest puppet play Wonderful Joe, which premiered at Theatre Network. Both the Shadow and Teatro Live! Sterlings were for outstanding supporting role performances: Jayce Mckenzie, very funny as one of the title quartet in Shadow’s Robot Girls; Chariz Faulmino, sparkling as a nightclub newcomer in Teatro’s revival of the original homegrown musical Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s.

The Adventure of Young Turtle, So.Glad Arts at Expanse Festival 2024. Photo supplied.

The Sterlings in the theatre for young audiences categories — outstanding production and outstanding artistic achievement — both went to an inventive, identity-affirming new puppet musical, S.E. Grummett’s The Adventure of Young Turtle by Saskatoon-based So.Glad Arts. The puppets by the Sterling-winning a four-member creative team (Ali Deregt, S.E. Grummett, Rowan Pantel, Monica Ila), were created from found-object throw-aways.

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

Three of the five Fringe categories saw Sterlings go to Rat Academy by and starring Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner of Batrabbit Productions: outstanding Fringe production, Fringe ensemble, and Fringe director (Joseph McManus). The outstanding new work at the giant summer festival was deemed to be Elena Belyea’s This Won’t Hurt, I Promise from Tiny Bear Jaws. And the outstanding individual Fringe performance award went to Erin Pettifor in Stigma, Pistil, and Style.

As previously announced, the actor/ director/ stage manager/ administrator Elizabeth Allison-Jorde is this year’s recipient of the Margaret Mooney Award in Administration. The Ross Hill Award in Production went to the Citadel’s head of wardrobe Patsy Thomas. And Mac Brock, playwright, director, producer,  festival director, promoter, indie theatre agitator par excellence, was recognized for his Outstanding Contribution to Edmonton theatre.

The 2023/24 Sterling Awards

Outstanding Production of a Play: Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAfire).

The Timothy Ryan Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical: Little Shop of Horrors (The Citadel Theatre/ Arts Club Theatre Company).

Outstanding Independent Production of a Play: The Hooves Belonged to the Deer (In Arms Theatre Collective).

Outstanding New Play (award to playwright): Beth Graham, Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAfire).

Outstanding Performance in a Leading Role – Play: Ronnie Burkett, Wonderful Joe (Theatre Network).

Outstanding Performance in a Leading Role – Musical: Andrea Menard, Rubaboo (The Citadel Theatre).

Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role – Play: Jayce Mckenzie, Robot Girls (Shadow Theatre).

Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role – Musical: Chariz Faulmino, Everybody Goes to Mitzi’s (Teatro Live!).

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Play or Musical: The cast of Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAfire).

Outstanding Director: Peter Hinton-Davis, The Hooves Belonged to the Deer (In Arms Theatre Collective).

Outstanding Set Design: Anahita Dehbonehie, The Hooves Belonged to the Deer (In Arms Theatre Collective).

Outstanding Costume Design: Adam Dickson and Ian Walker, The Spinsters (Small Matters Production presented by Fringe Theatre).

Outstanding Lighting Design: Whittyn Jason, The Hooves Belonged to the Deer (In Arms Theatre Collective).

Outstanding Sound Design: Aaron Macri and Binaifer Kapadia, Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAfire).

Outstanding Score of a Play or Musical: Andrea Menard and Robert Walsh, Rubaboo (The Citadel Theatre).

Outstanding Musical Direction: Robert Walsh, Rubaboo (The Citadel Theatre).

Outstanding Choreography, Fight Direction, or Intimacy Direction: Ainsley Hillyard, choreography, Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAfire).

Outstanding Multimedia Design: Ian Walker, The Spinsters (Small Matters Production presented by Fringe Theatre).

Outstanding Individual Achievement in Production: Gina Moe, stage manager

Outstanding Production for Young Audiences: The Adventure of Young Turtle (So.Glad Arts).

Outstanding Artistic Achievement, Theatre for Young Audiences: Ali Deregt, S.E. Grummett, Rowan Pantel, and Monica Ila, puppet design and build, The Adventure of Young Turtle (So.Glad Arts)

Outstanding Fringe Production: Rat Academy (Batrabbit Productions).

Outstanding Fringe New Work (award to playwright): Elena Belyea,
This Won’t Hurt, I Promise (Tiny Bear Jaws).

Outstanding Fringe Performance – individual: Erin Pettifor, Stigma, Pistil, & Style (Wee Witches and Erin Pettifor).

Outstanding Fringe – ensemble: Rat Academy (Batrabbit Productions).

Outstanding Fringe Director: Joseph McManus, Rat Academy (Batrabbit Productions)

The Margaret Mooney Award for Outstanding Achievement in Administration: Elizabeth Allison-Jorde

The Ross Hill Award for Outstanding Achievement in Production: Patsy Thomas

Outstanding Contribution To Theatre in Edmonton: Mac Brock

   

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The gods have their eye on you: Zulu creation mythology erupts in dance at Theatre Prospero. A review

Posted on June 23, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Anthem of Life Part 1, Theatre Prospero. Photo by Joselito Angeles

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“In the time before time….” The gods were busy creating and discussing and arguing, and generally keeping an eye on cosmology. Because that’s what Zulu gods do. They’re busy.

Anthem of Life, Theatre Prospero. Photo by Jose Angelito

Actually, their all-seeing eyes are upon us, literally, in Tololwa Mollel’s Anthem of Life. They watch us and each other, in full stares and suspicious, sideways glances in the Zulu creation epic that comes to the stage — not one but two stages, and the space between them — at Theatre Prospero.

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Which is all the more remarkable since they are giant puppets, gorgeous, glistening, burnished heads created by Randall Fraser for Mark Henderson’s inventive production. The play, part one of a planned trilogy, is Mollel’s adaptation of a door-stopper Zulu verse epic by the South African poet Mazisi Kunene. And it’s a remarkably vivid, spirited affair, framed by the efforts of a young storyteller to capture on paper a mythology full of big personalities, and a race of humans, Abantu in Zulu, who seem to have a natural tendency to celebrate, to sing, to dance (choreographers: Mpoe Mogale and Enakshi Sinha) on every available occasion.

Which is the fun and the charm of Anthem of Life, a multi-disciplinary theatrical extravaganza with nine performers and a five-member band of versatile African drummers.

The gods are a a fractious bunch; husbands and wives, daughters and parents do not always agree. Hey, this is your chance to see a god exit in a huff. The sun, the moon, the stars are a big success, and then, because the world is empty, enter human beings.

Anthem of Life Part 1, Theatre Prospero. Photo by Joselito Angeles.

The larger of the two stages of Ami Farrow’s cunning design, with its horseshoe-shaped frame (across which her projections play), is an outsized drum that the god of thunder and lightning who is, I think, in charge of volcanoes, makes excellent use of, with his feet. Godly tantrums (with percussion back-up) resonate wonderfully well under the circumstances.

“The charm of life,” a beautiful outsized Fabergé egg design by Farrow, gets passed around, and lost, and found, in the course of the play. At the heart of Anthem of Life is the godly inspiration that creation is incomplete without people who are, it turns out, a great achievement and a big headache.

There’s no consensus about them in the heavens, a conflict that’s at the heart of Anthem of Life. Some gods think that people “are a big mistake,” not least because humans turn out to be creative, challenging, and powerful, themselves. A god gives birth to vicious wild dogs (impressively toothy creations by Fraser), but humans manage to figure that out, too.

Anthem of Life Part 1, Theatre Prospero. Photo by Joselio Angeles.

There are gods who are all for total annihilation of these uppity wayward human creatures; others are of the view that a creation should not be destroyed; others look for compromise. Humans have never been an easy issue, apparently. And then there are the hot-button questions, profound but playfully set forth, of whether humans should be flawed (“whatever is perfect loses the ability to improve and adapt”) and whether, crucially, they should be death-proof or mortal. Ah, there’s the Zulu take on questions that have absorbed Western writers forever, too.  There’s more to come in parts two and three of Mollel’s trilogy.

Meanwhile, his part one adaptation is witty and colloquial. The cast, who play masked gods, unmasked humans, and (in inventive Fraser designs) animals, negotiate it in solo asides and group chants. They create a non-stop swirl of theatrical images in Henderson’s production. And there’s cause for celebratory dance numbers all along the way.

REVIEW

Anthem of Life, part 1

Theatre: Theatre Prospero

Written by: Tololwa Mollel, adapting Anthem of the Decades: A Zulu Epic by Mazisi Kunene

Directed by: Mark Henderson

Starring: Brennan Campbell, Patricia Darbasie, Lebo Disele, Andrés Felipe, Beshel Francis, Sokhana Mfenyana, Vwede Oturuhoyi, Enakshi Sinha, Valentine Ukoh

Where: Alberta Avenue Community Centre, 9210 118 Ave.

Running: through July 6

Tickets: edmontonarts.ca

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‘Rough magic’ for the great outdoors: Freewill Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a review

Posted on June 21, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Chariz Faulmino and Nadien Chu in The Tempest, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Tech dress rehearsal shot by Brianne Jang.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

On a perfectly calm summer evening under an azure sky, a tiny ship, The Lady Capulet, careens among us, capsizing its way toward the stage, flinging drunken party people here and there, topsy turvy.

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It’s a measure of the comic muse at play in The Tempest, David Horak’s nine-actor outdoor Freewill Shakespeare Festival production of Shakespeare’s strange and wonderful late romance, that it opens with an imaginative, and comical, storm (choreographed by Ainsley Hillyard). It’s a device from the mind of the sorcerer who stage-manages from atop the multi-layered scaffolding installation of designer Stephanie Bahniuk’s set. And it sets the tone for an entertaining al fresco production that sees The Tempest primarily as a comedy and not so much as an elusively soulful, sometimes funny/ sometimes just plain weird play.

Like the magus Prospera herself (the impressive Nadien Chu), the displaced ruler of Milan — and like Freewill itself at age 35, in exile from its home in Hawrelak Park — we’ve found ourselves set down on an unexpected island.  It’s not a park; there’s not a blade of grass to be seen. It’s a pad of concrete that has another life as the Crestwood Community League’s outdoor hockey rink.

Nadien Chu as Prospera in The Tempest, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Tech dress rehearsal shot by Brianne Jang

Prospera’s “island” isn’t a tropical paradise; it’s dotted with blocks of compressed trash, old tires, utility netting. And Prospera and her daughter Miranda (Chariz Faulmino), and two locals, their indentured “servants,” Ariel (Megan Sweet) and Caliban (Brett Dahl), have kitted themselves out in improvised outfits (designer: Bahniuk) of recycled plastic bags, mismatched socks, tattered sheets of re-purposed cellophane, the odd plastic flower … not a natural fibre anywhere in sight. The footwear is telling: Caliban’s shoes are blue bags; the airborne fairy Ariel has two different rubber boots (costumes: Bahniuk).

Having been supplanted from her rightful authority as Duchess of Milan by a treacherous sister (Jessy Ardern), Prospera has taken charge of an island kingdom, enslaved the locals, and 12 years later is waiting for revenge, or maybe a chance to right a great wrong, or both. The opening storm that Prospera conjures brings her enemies within her grasp.

It’s a story that has invited every sort of interpretation — nature vs. nurture, thoughts about colonialism among them. Prospera is first a victim of the usurping impulse, and then becomes a (foreign) victimizer herself.

The visuals of Horak’s production are striking. There is, as billed, an ecological theme in the idea of a floating island of trash. You can see how that works to match the show to its bare, un-foliated setting. It’s not easy, though, to figure out how the concept actually works itself out in the story. Not least because Caliban, the native inhabitant who’s routinely referred to as a brute and a monster, has a ravishing speech about the magical beauties, in sight and sound, of the island. “The isle is full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not….” Brett Dahl negotiates a fascinating mixture of innocence and aggression as Caliban.

Is he then the possessor of the play’s most active imagination? In this production he delivers the speech as a soliloquy, alone on the stage, and not to the drunken clowns who’ve been bullying him. In any case, though unpredictable and scary (he’s attacked Miranda), his home, “this island’s mine!,” has been stolen from him.

The ecology theme does, though, have an inspired comic validation  in the scene in which Prospera conjures a banquet for the shipwreck survivors, only to make it vanish before they can eat. A garbage bin flips open, and a tray of fast food magically appears.

Jesse Ardern as Trinculo in The Tempest, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo of tech dress rehearsal by Brianne Jang

Horak’s production leans into the comedy of The Tempest, and not only in the stage time, attention, and funny costumes it gives two very dexterous comic actors Jessy Ardern as Trinculo and Troy O’Donnell as Stephano. Their farcical, zigzag progress through the play, the worst tourists and the dopiest colonizers in the world, is an escalation of booze, malice, and chaotic regime-change ambition. But there’s also considerable light comedy in the playful reactions of Faulmino’s pert and perky Miranda to her mother, and in her open-mouthed wonder when she meets Ferdinand (Hal Wesley Rogers). This is young love in light-hearted mode. And the impressively gigantic puppets of the wedding masque who appear and disappear conjure a sense of wonder that the production, outdoors with no artificial lighting, alludes to, amusingly, without really capturing.   

Megan Sweet is a cheerful, agile, rather pleasant Ariel, Prospero’s busy employee — which works fine without challenging the darker possibilities of that sprite. Dave Clarke’s original score provides wispy and tantalizing melodies, hints of music that’s magically both far off and near, festive and eerie. In a play full of music, though, and apt as it is, it doesn’t have the impact it might, perhaps because there’s not quite enough of it.

Chu, always so watchable, presides over the play with authority. Prospero’s maternal warmth peels off instantly when it’s challenged. She’s capable of delight and of anger on a slow burn . Curiously, she saves her most intense anger for a furious, startling delivery of the great and elegiac speech:“our revels now are ended…. ” It stops us in our tracks, momentarily, a last-minute reminder the stakes go beyond comedy and comic resolutions. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

REVIEW

The Tempest

Theatre: Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Directed by: Dave Horak

Starring: Nadien Chu, Chariz Faulmino, Meegan Sweet, Brett Dahl, Hal Wesley Rogers, Troy O’Donnell, Jessy Ardern, Melissa MacPherson, Cody Porter

Running: June 20 to July 14

Where: Crestwood Community League through June 23; Kenilworth Community League June 25 to 30; Lessard Community League July 2 to 7; Sherbrooke Community League July 9 to 14.

Tickets: tickets.freewillshakespeare.com.

 

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A first for Grindstone: a mainstage subscription season of big musicals at the Orange Hub

Posted on June 19, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Grindstone Theatre’s first-ever mainstage subscription season

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The little comedy theatre that never sleeps just got bigger.

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The little theatre with the insomniac energy has announced their first mainstage subscription season, three big musicals, two from Broadway and one original. With a big new mainstage to match: Grindstone has taken over the Orange Hub, the City-owned ex-MacEwan venue in the west end (10045 156 St.).    

It’s not like they weren’t already busy. Grindstone’s dizzying weekly roster of comedy shows — sketch, stand-up, improv — includes a hit all-improvised musical, The 11 O’Clock Number. They throw themselves into festivals like Fringe and Pride, and launch new ones — mural-painting, disco, a curated Comedy Festival (July 3 to 7) among them. The indefatigable Grindstone team of artistic director Byron Martin and composer/musical director Simon Abbott create original musical comedies and satires of their own: Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, ThunderCats, Die Harsh The Christmas Musical. Last year Grindstone produced a Broadway musical, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

No high holiday is safe from a Grindstone bash (and dance party). They run a theatre school with 120 students a term, assorted improv, comedy, musical theatre workshops … and a bar and bistro in their 85-seat Strathcona headquarters.

And now the Orange Hub. Grindstone’s artistic director Byron Martin, who magically exudes an air of the unhurried and laid-back, explains that “we won the management bid, a three-year lease” to manage the City-reno’ed building’s two theatres. And the 350-seat Haar and a flexible black box studio theatre with a 100-seat (or so) capacity depending on the configuration, have already roused a lot of interest from performing arts companies looking to rent, he reports. Grindstone is “the anchor tenant,” says Martin. “Depending on the time of year, we’ve had to squeeze ourselves in….”

“There aren’t many places you can see big musicals here,” he says of the scene. It’s in the Orange Hub’s big upstairs house, the Haar, where Grindstone’s ambitious debut mainstage season of musicals will happen. It opens Oct. 18 to Nov. 3 with a 21-performance run of Richard O’Brien’s hit Rocky Horror Show, an international cult classic that’s a sassy homage to the B-movie horror genre.

For a company with improv roots, and a love of playing with audiences, Rocky Horror is, as Martin points out, “a great choice…. It’s just so fun. And we enjoy the kind of audience interaction, the back and forth” that has propelled the show for the last 50 years. He anticipates a band of five or six and a cast of nine for the show, timed to sync with Halloween, a festive season in itself for Grindstone.

Evan Dowling, David Findlay, Mhairi Berg in Die Harsh The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

The Yuletide season marks the return of Grindstone’s holiday hit Die Harsh The Christmas Musical, Martin and Abbott’s inspired amalgam of the iconic action thriller and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The show, Sterling-nominated this season for its score, arrives back buoyed by full-house audiences, and a history of expanding every time out. The first incarnation, a one-act version at Grindstone itself, sold out even before it opened (“we did two shows a night, a marathon for the cast”). And much the same thing happened last December in a full-body two-act version at the 176-seat Varscona, where Abbott led a live four-piece band.

The run at the Orange Hub Dec. 13 to 29 on the much larger Haar stage “is a great new step for the show,” says Martin. “It was a real puzzle to put together. And this is a chance to see it with fresh eyes, see what can be tightened.” Or expanded. “We might add two swings to the five-member cast, hey, a chorus!” Which means, potentially, more tap dancing from the FBI in one of the show-stopping numbers. “Our main goal always: more tap,” laughs Martin.

A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder, a fizzy 2013 Tony Award-winning musical comedy, concerns the murderous swath cut by a penniless hero to advance his chances of inheriting an aristocratic title. Only eight relatives stand between Monty and his goal, and lo and behold they begin to drop like flies. Monty is a veritable Hamlet of a role, in quick-change musical comedy terms. The character leads a cast of nine. Martin reports the 120 actors have already signed up to audition this week for the new mainstage season.

Additionally, Martin, a Grant MacEwan musical theatre grad with an MFA from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow, will direct MacEwan’s production of the musical The Prom next winter. “Yup, no down time.”

“It’s pretty ambitious,” he says of the new mainstage line-up. “Massive, yes. We have this new stage, and you have to meet the demands of the stage, in a way.”

Fair to say “there’s a lot going on” elsewhere at Grindstone. For one thing, there’s a new Grindstone Martin/Abbott musical in preparation for the Fringe: Accidental Beach The Musical. “A sort of Bay Watch parody,” as Martin describes, it takes up the Hot Boy Summer initiative to create something of this place, for this place.

The origins of the new musical are, like ThunderCats, in improv. It started as an episode of the all-improvised 11 O’Clock Number (“we record every show now”). “We’ve used the text verbatim!”

Grindstone is bursting at the seams. “We’ve had to hire three full-time people for festivals and events,” he says. There’s a full-time rental person. There’s a full-time education person, based in the Grindstone space under the Mill Creek Cafe, who oversees classes in improv, acting, sketch-writing, magic, burlesque, plus summer camps for teams. They’ve added an education venue: the Ritchie Community League.

Grindstone’s Fringe lineup will happen in three venues, the original bistro, the theatre school and Mile Zero Dance headquarters…. And first there’s the Comedy Festival (with stars like Bruce McCulloch and Debra DiGiovanni).

Meanwhile, “we have season tickets on sale for the first time!” says Martin of the new mainstage venture. “It’s a big step for us! We never had our shit together before.”

Subscription season tickets: grindstonetheatre.ca.

 

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Our revels now have started: Nadien Chu stars in Freewill Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in an outdoor hockey rink near you

Posted on June 17, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Nadien Chu stars in The Tempest, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The play that launches the 35th annual Freewill Shakespeare Festival this week — destined for four outdoor community league hockey rinks — is full of strange transformations.

The Tempest, one of Shakespeare’s late-period “romances,” begins with the magical conjuring of a violent storm at sea and an orchestrated shipwreck. A mysteriously powerful magus banished from his rightful European kingdom has drawn his enemies — and us — to the spell-bound island he rules. “My high charms work…. They now are in my power.”

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And speaking of exile, that’s the situation of the festival itself, evicted from its home on the Heritage Amphitheatre stage in Hawrelak Park for three-YEAR renos (a stunning failure of creativity on the part of the City).

In the gender-crossing production, Freewill’s single offering this summer, directed by Dave Horak and opening Thursday at the Crestwood community league, the island is a hockey rink with its built-in perimeter, and the audience on three sides. And Prospero, the island boss, is a woman. Nadien Chu, who leads the nine-actor cast as Prospera, says “I wouldn’t call (this version) contemporary, or historical…. It’s a magical liminal space where something has to happen around forgiveness and family.”

Among the many interpretations The Tempest has attracted in four centuries, the most popular in contemporary times has been tuning it to colonialist themes, the enslavement by white Euros of the local Indigenous population. As Chu explains, this production isn’t one of them. “We are leaning into concern about the environment.” The oceans are filling with trash, and Prospera’s island is “one of the huge patches of floating garbage … plastic bags, nets lost by fishers, water bottle, cans…. That’s what we’re floating on.” And it has, she says, “mystical properties.”

Chu thinks of thinks of Station Eleven (the TV adaptation of the Emily Saint John Mandel novel), and its depiction of the rusted-out post-apocalyptic world through which a nomadic company of Shakespearean players travels.

Stephanie Bahniuk’s costumes are cued by that thought, says Chu. “A major part of my costume is a great big plastic bag.” At a fitting last week, she noticed a Save-On label,” product placement at its most equivocal. Prospero “has made herself the queen of the great garbage patch.”

If the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream take a forest as their playground (“I picture ancient trees, a subtropical rain forest, an island near Tofino!” says Chu), “the kind of magic in The Tempest feels more air-borne — the wind, the sky, the water.”

Brett Dahl and Nadien Chu in Twelfth Night, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

Of late Chu, as it’s turned out, has made something of a specialty of playing women in gender-switched male roles. At Freewill last summer, for example, she was that irrepressible carouser and all-night party animal Toby Belch in Twelfth Night. She was both the good duke and the bad usurper duke in Daryl Cloran’s Beatles-inflused As You Like It, in its Theatre Calgary incarnation this past season (with the Grand Theatre in London, Ont. to come next season). Most recently, she was in charge of the unruly sword-happy musketeer squad as the bossy, exasperated Mme de Treville instead of the usual Monsieur, in Cloran’s Citadel production of The Three Musketeers.

Heck, even Lady Bracknell, the formidable dragon lady and social arbiter of The Importance of Being Earnest, which opened the Citadel’s season, is just as often played by men as women. Pursed lips and a ferocious glare know no gender prescriptions.

Prospero has been played by women, to be sure — Vanessa Redgrave and Martha Henry among the stars actors — but usually as a man. When Prospero is a woman, Chu thinks, the central relationship of The Tempest changes from father-daughter to mother-daughter. “And they’re different.”

And perhaps, when both are women, the important sisterly relationship between Prospera and her usurping sister duchess (Jessy Ardern) changes too. Is Prospera driven by the spirit of revenge? “There’s a huge sense of betrayal, a fracture inside the family…. What has saved Prospera is her child, and her hopes for the child…. I guess at the heart of it is love, love for her family, whatever axes there are to grind. Despite the stormy weather, the garbage, the global warming….”

“A lot of baggage comes with these roles,” Chu says of Shakespeare. “People come to the show with an idea of what they want to see, what Romeo and Juliet is like, who Hamlet should be. And it’s fun, delicious!, to play against expectation and stereotype…. Let’s just see what would happen: it’s such an interesting investigation. And I’m always really curious!”

“Is (the play) different if Toby Belch is a woman? What kind of judgment do we bring to it if she’s a woman?” In the case of that unruly drunkard, Chu laughs that someone compared her to the Ab Fab women, “the way you’re working inside clown energy. “

Though The Tempest was ”never one of my favourites,” Chu says she’s found it fascinating, “so much fun to be immersed in and investigate…. I’m one of those actors who research and research — the more I’ve learned about it. The whole piece has such a strong heartbeat to it. It has a pulse that some of the others don’t. It resonates in the body differently — on a cellular level.”

She’s excited to be taking the play to neighbourhoods, “to meet the audience in a different way…. You can come out of your house, cross the street, and hang out.”

“It’s like the old days,” she laughs. “You get out of the buggy and ‘let’s sing! let’s connect!’ There’s music and art and stories…. We’re all in post-COVID recovery. And we’re going out to travel, meet folks!”

Freewill Shakespeare Festival artistic director Dave Horak talks about this year’s edition of the festival, and The Tempest, in On The Road Again, a 12thnight PREVIEW.

PREVIEW

The Tempest

Theatre: Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Directed by: Dave Horak

Starring: Nadien Chu, Chariz Faulmino, Meegan Sweet, Brett Dahl, Hal Wesley Rogers, Troy O’Donnell, Jessy Ardern, Melissa MacPherson, Cody Porter

Running: June 20 to July 14

Where: Crestwood Community League June 20 to 23; Kenilworth Community League June 25 to 30; Lessard Community League July 2 to 7; Sherbrooke Community League July 9 to 14.

Tickets: tickets.freewillshakespeare.com.

   

  

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Finding a creative spark that had gone missing: theatre director Dennis Garnhum walks the Camino

Posted on June 16, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Dennis Garnhum, director and author of Toward Beauty. Photo supplied

“The noise in my head has been quieted by the gentle sounds of the ocean….” — Toward Beauty by Dennis Garnhum

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

This is the story of a theatre artist who found something he thought he’d lost forever: his creative spark.

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It’s a story propelled by contradiction: heartbreak and joy, weight and buoyancy, shuttered prospects and sweeping vistas. And the happy ending (and the magical route there) is one that director Dennis Garnhum will share Tuesday night at the downtown library when he talks about his memoir Toward Beauty: Reigniting A Creative Life On The Camino of Santiago. Ah, and he’ll share another sort of happy dénouement for a dramatic story in July when his production of the riotous comedy The Play That Goes Wrong starts a summer run at the Citadel.

In that play, which mines comedy gold from the disaster potential of live theatre, the earnest theatre-loving amateur thesps of the Cornley Drama Society are valiantly attempting to stage a 1920s-style murder mystery. What could go wrong?

Irony irony. Everything did go wrong in live theatre in March, 2020 when COVID struck it down. As the exuberant Garnhum describes, pre-rehearsal last week, he and theatre were on a roll at the time. After 11 years as the artistic director of Theatre Calgary, he was seven seasons into his highly successful tenure at the helm of the Grand Theatre, in London, Ont. “We’d just announced the greatest season ever, we were going to take my Cabaret across five cities. And we were about to have the hottest show!” After a series of standing ovations by preview crowds, Garnhum’s production of Room, the North American premiere of the stage adaptation of the Emma Donaghue hit novel and film, was about to open on March 13, with Broadway prospects too.

On that fateful day, at the Grand’s traditional morning-of-opening-night hot breakfast, Garnhum had to announce to the assembled crew, cast, board that “we’re going to close for two months, and the next show is cancelled….” He told them “don’t worry, we’ll be back in two months. And it was two years.”

“Some people made it through and got stronger, and some people fell apart. I fell apart…. My purpose was lost; my creativity was gone. I didn’t know who or what I was any more,” he says candidly of the personal chaos that ensued. “I’m a theatre person. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done. I wasn’t ‘Oh, I’ll pivot; I’ve always wanted to work in film’. No. I don’t do that…. I couldn’t find my way out, the way other people do. It just wasn’t in my spirit.”

It was in “a last-ditch effort” to pull himself out of the slough of despond, after 17 months of “zombie-ing” as he puts it, that Garnhum took a more dramatic step, well 832 km worth of steps, on a rugged walking route along the Atlantic. “Some people go sit on a beach; I decided to walk across Spain by myself (laughter). So I put on a backpack and walked eight to 12 hours a day for 32 days.” He left the “why?” or “what” questions behind him. “I just knew I needed to take a break.” And during that sabbatical, “I discovered the ‘punch-line’: for the rest of my life I want to be consciously walking toward beauty,” the enlivening thought that give his first book its title, and impetus as both a memoir and a travelogue.

Garnhum didn’t arrive at a six-hour pre-Camino layover in Madrid airport thinking he was going to write a book about the experience to come. “I do love travel books, adventure books, transformation stories. And I guess I had an idea that I might write a book one day…. But I’d never written a book before.”

The immediate inspiration, he says, was “the thought that tomorrow when I start walking my life will change. I will only see my life in retrospect. So I’d better write down today what I feel.” And that’s what he did, every night on the Camino, after he took his boots off. “I came back with 40,000 words. And an editor and another year of work later, it became 80,000. All the detail was written daily.”

You wonder if, since Garnhum is of the theatre, the experience might have become a play. “Never a play!” he declares decisively. “I’m running away (from theatre), I’m going to Spain, and I’m going to come back and announce I’m never going to work in theatre again…. Whatever else, but not this any more!”

The book wasn’t a pre-meditated calculation. But “my adventures were so thrilling, things happened that were so magical and surprising….” He arrived with a pressing need for solitude — “I get to go away and maybe not talk to anybody, all day long, for five weeks, and if I see anybody I’m not going to talk to them!” In the event, he met people from around the world, and ended up in unexpected, freewheeling conversations in which theatre was never mentioned. It just didn’t come up, as he describes.

“I’m 56 now, and I spent three days walking with a couple of 25-year-old Parisians, French kids with sexy accents,” he laughs. “On the three day, Nico said ‘so you work in a theatre or something’. And I laughed, ‘something like that’” And that was it. As you discover in his book, “we talked about life and love, challenges, struggles,” not to mention boots, and food, and wine, and where to stay, and the breath-taking views of the ocean. “The first question is why you’re on the Camino…. And everyone else’s reasons for being on the Camino were more interesting than mine.”

“Everyone looks the same; we all look like hikers; we’re all wearing the same costume.”

The Camino de Santiago has Catholic resonances, to be sure, since the route leads to the shrine of the Apostle James in northern Spain. And Garnhum, who grew up Catholic until parting ways with the church and its homophobic cruelties at age 30, isn’t unaware of them. “I can’t pretend being Catholic wasn’t a big part of my life…. I literally brought letters of hate,” Garnhum says of his baggage. “But I came out of it more peaceful,” he says. And “pilgrims” can be as secular in their pilgrim’s progress as they choose. “God never came up once.”

“You can walk the Camino for a holiday,” he says. “But I don’t know that anyone can walk it and not feel a true magic power…. There’s something about the people, the gathering, the walking outside with the most gorgeous views. And you stop in a village and have the best Spanish food and wine. And then you wake up and do it again the next day. And all you want to do is start walking….”

“And the happiest part of it, a lesson for life, is you don’t know where you’re going. You turn a corner and … surprise! Every step’s a surprise.” He’s remembering walking through a forest alone, then up cobblestone stairs, and then o my god, a little town square that’s a movie set. What just happened?”

And speaking of surprises, there are the comedies that he’s been doing in his new life as a freelance director since he left the Grand. The last times Garnhum was in Edmonton to direct, a couple of decades ago, he did beautiful Citadel productions of To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. Now, he’s having fun figuring out how to make sets fall over and sabotage a mystery in The Play That Goes Wrong. “If you’d said to me, in 20 years you’ll come back to direct this crazy, wild, weird, wacky play I’d have said ‘no chance; I do heart-breaking!'” he laughs.

“I’m finding I love (comedies) more than I ever thought possible, the joy of being in an audience watching people laugh…. It’s funny and  I want it to be beautiful!” He pauses. “In theatre, I’ve always been unofficially heading toward beauty. Now I’m coming out, officially doing that!”

Garnhum will be talking about his Camino experience (and his book) at the Stanley Milner Library downtown, Tuesday at 7 p.m., as part of an ongoing book tour hosted by the Edmonton chapter of the non-profit Canadian Company of Pilgrims. The Play That Goes Wrong runs on the Citadel mainstage July 6 to August 4. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.

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Musical theatre, opera, comedy, hockey: the weekend on Edmonton stages

Posted on June 14, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

A Little Night Music, Nuova Vocal Arts. Photo by Nanc Price

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

On the stages of this theatre town this weekend, you can seek out an exquisite Stephen Sondheim musical, a classic opera buffa, a homegrown comedy with moving undertones. Plus a nutty (and kinda cool) idea by one of the country’s premium improv companies, always fast on their skates.

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Yes, since it’s Edmonton, festivals are involved. The NUOVA Vocal Arts Festival, a showcase for emerging opera and musical theatre talent from across the country, has already (and amazingly) opened three productions of various aesthetic stripes in an assortment of venues this month as part of their 25th anniversary edition. Tonight Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, in a NUOVA production directed by Brian Deedrick, opens a four-performance run (two alternating casts of emerging artists) in a theatre admirably suited, in elegance and nostalgia potential, to the setting of this 1973 musical, set at the turn of the 20th century: the Capitol Theatre at Fort Edmonton.

A Little Night Music, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Nanc Price.

Romances and love affairs, past and present, intertwine in A Little Night Music. The tone of the piece inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles Of A Summer Night is seductive, urbane, elusive. Deedrick, who lived in Sweden for a year propelled there by his love of Bergman films, says in his program notes that A Little Night Music has haunted him through his entire career. The production that runs tonight and Sunday, plus June 19 and 21, is a rare opportunity to see this haunting musical. Ah, and it’s your chance to discover the true context for the indelible song Send in the Clowns. Tickets: eventbrite.ca.

The Barber of Seville, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Nanc Price.

It’s the opening weekend, as well, for Rob Herriot’s NUOVA production of The Barber of Seville at the Capitol Theatre (also with two alternating casts). The Rossini opera is a comic gem of high-speed deceptions and disguises designed  to subvert the intentions of the older generation to obstruct the course of true love. It is (I think) the only opera in the world archive where the plot hinges on shaving. Will young love prevail? Note the opera’s subtitle: The Useless Precaution. It continues its run Saturday as well as June 18 and 20. Tickets: eventbrite.ca.

The NUOVA anniversary production of Titanic the Musical, directed by Kim Mattice-Wanat, is onstage June 22 and 23 at Concordia University’s Robert Tegler Hall.

Rachel Bowron, Oscar Derkx, Beth Graham, Cathy Derkach, Mathew Hulshof in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live!, photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Design by Chantal Fortin, lighting by Narda McCarroll, costumes by Leona Brausen

Continuing at the Varscona but only through Sunday: Teatro Live!’s revival of the Stewart Lemoine 2009 comedy of altered vision The Oculist’s Holiday. Belinda Cornish’s production, and a crack Teatro cast led by Beth Graham, give full weight to its breezy topknots and a dark underside of post-war damages and secrets. Check out the 12thnight review, and a preview interview with director Cornish. Tickets: teatroq.com.

You have to be impressed by Rapid Fire Theatre’s power play of an idea for your Saturday night entertainment: Improv Night In Canada. Watch the crucial angst-producing game on the big screen, while the company’s never-shorthanded team of deluxe comedians improvise live action to match, onstage. Humour has been sorely lacking in face-offs of late, as a recent poll has shown. This is billed as “the funniest face-off in Canada,” and why would you doubt it? 5:45 to 8:30 p.m. at the Rapid Fire Exchange, 10437 83 Ave. Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com.

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The thrill of the unpredictable: Improvaganza is back at Rapid Fire Theatre

Posted on June 14, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The only truly predictable thing about Improvaganza, besides laughter (yours), is that it returns, every June — with an international array of improv talent who are all about spontaneity.

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I’m not making this up. Making stuff up is what they do. Yes, Rapid Fire Theatre’s annual international improv and sketch comedy festival is back, with a four-day edition June 20 to 23, at their Exchange Theatre headquarters in Strathcona. Artistic director Matt Schuurman explains that the shortened duration of the festivities from their usual 10 days is a matter of “cash-saving,” and taking a run at a balanced budget in a tough year of post-COVIDian anxiety and stress at every theatre. But, he adds emphatically, “no compromise in quality!”

The opening night headliner is Andrew Phung, best known to television audiences for his starring roles in Kim’s Convenience and Run the Burbs, as well as the “reality comedian” show LOL: Last One Laughing. Improvaganza is a homecoming of sorts for this for the Canadian actor, “a longtime friend of Rapid Fire” with a history that goes back to his Calgary days at RFT’s improv sibling Loose Moose Theatre. The route between Calgary and Edmonton is a familiar one to Phung, often up here for “improv action shows” as Schuurman says. “Actually, it was at the Fringe that he got noticed for Kim’s Convenience.”

On Thursday’s opening night Andrew Phung will be joined by such RFT stars as Mark Meer, Gordie Lucius, and Joleen Ballendine in what Schuurman calls “a big ol’ improv show, one format in the first half, another in the second….”

Second City veteran Ashley Botting, something of a specialist in the virtuoso art of improvised musical theatre (witness Flop!, the show she and Ron Pederson played ht to the Exchange a year ago), is bringing two shows to Improvaganza. As Schuurman describes, Ashley with a Y is a solo improvised cabaret, with songs and stories devised before your very eyes from audience cues. In Botting and McGunnigle she pairs with a best friend and fellow Second City alumni Stacey McGunnigle, to “showcase different styles, on the spectrum of what improv can be….”

The lineup includes Branded Silk, an improv trio from New York (Onyi Okoli, Jeffrey Kitt, and Aaron LaRoche) who “have been generating a lot of excitement from other festivals, like the Black and Funny Improv Festival,” says Schuurman. They explore, through improv comedy, the complicated reality of being Black in the world. “They’re incredibly engaging, warm and welcoming. And they don’t hold back — mostly through the lens of race….”

The inspiration of Black Ground, a comedy troupe from Atlanta based at Dad’s Garage, is to improvise what Black characters might be doing in classic movies like Star Wars or Indiana Jones. The satirical potential is huge. “So funny and so subversive since the Black narrative is not really shown in Hollywood,” as Schuurman says. “One of my favourite concepts!”

The Deconstruction, Improvaganza 2024, Rapid Fire Theatre.

The festival is your chance to see improvisers take on “one of the classic improv forms,” as Schuurman describes The Deconstruction. It was developed by the legendary comedy and improv guru Del Close in Chicago. Brian James O’Connell, “the keeper of that format,” will lead an RFT ensemble of six in this challenging form that starts with a core scene. “It requires experienced players,” says Schuurman.

The Bloody Marys, a duo of Second City alumnae (Kirsten Rasmussen and Leigh Cameron), has a show. And one of Rapid Fire’s own most popular concepts The Maestro, an elimination-type show that Schuurman called The Hunger Games of Improv, will see the hometown talent joined by festival guests.

There’s even a Sunday a.m. show, “an early morning talk show for the Whyte Avenue brunch crowd,” as Schuurman puts it. And there’s an Improvaganza edition of RFT’s Saturday afternoon kids’ show.

Improvaganza runs at Rapid Fire Theatre’s Exchange headquarters (10437 83 Ave. June 20 to 23. For show details, the full schedule of shows and workshops, and tickets, check out rapidfiretheatre.com.

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Anthem of Life: a Zulu epic comes to the stage at Theatre Prospero to launch a trilogy

Posted on June 13, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Tololwa Mollel, Anthem of Life part 1, Theatre Propsero. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A swirling, full-blooded Zulu epic comes to the stage next week when Tololwa Mollel’s Anthem of Life premieres in a Theatre Prospero production, part 1 of a planned trilogy.

The ideas, the lush images, the stories, the extravagantly idiosyncratic characters — humans, gods, animals — all have been lodged in Mollel’s mind for … as he says, decades. Ever since the Tanzania-born Edmonton-based storyteller and playwright discovered Mazisi Kunene’s re-imagining of Zulu cosmology and mythology in his 12,000 line 15-book 300-page poem Anthem of the Decades: A Zulu Epic, published in the early 1980s. “I was blown away, captivated.”

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Actually, even before that. Mollel credits his introduction to African literature as an undergrad at the University of Dar es Salaam in the ‘70s. “It was an eye-opener,” says the genial and engaging Mollel, a literature and theatre major at the time. He’s remembering the seismic shift in cultural sensibility away from colonialist proprietorship toward an Africa-centered focus, as he describes. “We’d thought of literature as English literature, Dickens and Shakespeare.… Then, wow! you can have African literature, politics, history, mythology….”

“I came across Kunene’s poetry, mostly in Zulu,” says Mollel of the late South African poet, oral historian, and scholar who became the African National Congress representative in Europe and taught at UCLA. Kunene had translated some of his work into English, “but didn’t like to do that unless he had to,” says Mollel.

playwright Tololwa Mollel, performing in the 2017 workshop production of Anthem of Life Part 1, Theatre Prospero. Photo by Mat Simpson.

“All I knew of Zulu creation myths and cosmology at the time,” he says of his younger self, “was that mankind came out of reeds in a marsh. I knew that some gods, and a goddess who brings blessing like rain and fertility, were involved, including the Supreme Creato who was a bit aloof…. That’s all I knew till I read Kunene,” in English translation (Mollel is a Swahili speaker, whose mother tongue, one of 120 in Tanzania, is Maasai).

Worlds opened up.  He discovered that the Zulu gods, a fractious bunch, have a certain affinity with their Greek counterparts: “they had their strengths and their flaws, their weaknesses, their intrigues, their self-interest…. Some are confident and brag about their power; sometimes they can be pretty insecure. Some are spelled out clearly, others not.” There’s a god of pleasure whom “we see only briefly, only when there’s a party to be organized….”

As Mollel explains, the central conflict of Part 1 of Kunene’s Anthem of the Decades, and one that runs through the entire epic, is the momentous and controversial decision to create mankind (Abantu in Zulu). There is no consensus in heaven about this: “some of the gods did not like the idea.”

“The god and goddess of thunder and lighting are on board. The goddess of death, however, a leading opponent, “leads a campaign of terror against mankind.” This includes conjuring wild dogs. “The goddess who gives blessings tempers them but can’t eliminate them  since they’re children of heaven.”

The question of mortality/immortality for mankind is the crux. Not only is the goddess of death not in favour of immortality for them, “if she had her way she’d destroy mankind altogether,” says Mollel. The deal the other gods reach with her is that “destruction is part of creation. Men are going to die, yes, but one by one instead of wholesale.”

Mollel, who first came to Canada in 1976 to do a master’s degree at the U of A — as a theatre researcher rather than an actor; “my thing is storytelling” — kept going back to Anthem of the Decades over the years. “It’s a really good, challenging read! When I first read it I was a young man without much life experience, and I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about; it’s deep, profound, philosophical.”

Then he had the chance to meet Kunene himself on a research trip through the U.S. The encounter was inspirational. “he talked about poetry and epics, Mayan, ancient Egyptian, Chinese…” — and their conversation sent Mollel back to Anthem of the Decades. Since Mollel was working with Theatre Prospero on their new festival, he gave it to artistic director Mark Henderson to read. And it was Henderson who wondered, persuasively, if it could be a play. The result was a short workshop production in 2017.

playwright Tololwa Mollel, in 2017 workshop production of Anthem of Life Part 1, Theatre Prospero. Photo by Mat Simpson.

As Mollel describes, Anthem of Life Part 1 seems a natural for theatre, of the freewheeling multi-disciplinary kind built into the Tanzanian theatrical tradition. The production we’ll see next week has music and storytelling “and dance of course to go with the music,” as Mollel puts it. “Every other page there’s a celebration! Ah, and masks. Lots of masks (created by Randall Fraser) for nine very busy performers who are embodying gods, humans, and a slew of animals too.

“I made four songs in Swahili,” says Mollel, “tunes I remembered from when I was growing up.” There’s Indian music and dance, too (“with the same zest as African”), since there’s a South Asian artist in the cast. The play is not in verse (“I didn’t want to compete with Kunene”), except when “the drama calls for ‘a poetic effect’,” Mollel says. “In some parts I let my voice take over.”

“It’s a great story and I wanted to bring that to the fore…. In Anthem of the Decades, Kunene doesn’t really care whether it hangs together; storylines appear and disappear.…” Theatre has certain requirements: “I had to have it cohere.”

“When the time comes to take a message to mankind that (people) won’t live forever, the gods have to find a worthy messenger, and it has to be an animal.” The different animals must audition,” a knockout theatrical premise for a scene. Mollel laughs, “I’m glad it happens at the end; it’d be hard to top that!”

Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 in future Theatre Prospero seasons.

PREVIEW

Anthem of Life, part 1

Theatre: Theatre Prospero

Written by: Tololwa Mollel, adapting Anthem of the Decades: A Zulu Epic by Mazisi Kunene

Directed by: Mark Henderson

Starring: Brennan Campbell, Patricia Darbasie, Lebo Disele, Andrés Felipe, Mark Henderson, Sokhana Mfenyana, Vwede Oturuhoyi, Enakshi Sinha, Valentine Ukoh

Where: Alberta Avenue Community Centre, 9210 118 Ave.

Running: June 19 through July 6

Tickets: edmontonarts.ca

 

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