The year in Edmonton theatre: the 2023-24 Sterling Award nominations

Posted on June 6, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Mel Bahniuk, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Noori Gill in Mermaid Legs, nominated for 10 Sterling Awards, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A “surreal theatre dance fantasia” that premiered as the centrepiece of this year’s SkirtsAfire Festival proved decisively the top choice of jurors as the 35th annual Sterling Awards nominations were announced Thursday at the Westbury Theatre.

Beth Graham’s Mermaid Legs, a vividly theatrical multi-disciplinary collaboration, conjured the mysteries of mental illness and its reverb in a trio of jostling sisters. It put three actors and four dancers onstage to tell a story both of and beyond words.

Dayna Lea Hoffman (aloft) in Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire Festival. Design by Narda McCarroll (set), Whittyn Jason (lighting) and Rebecca Cypher (costumes). Photo by Brianne Jang.

Annette Loiselle’s production, her last as artistic director of SkirtsAfire, has 10 nominations in 26 Sterling categories — including outstanding production of a play, plus nods for playwright Graham in the outstanding new play category, for director Loiselle, choreographer Ainsley Hillyard, and the star performance of Dayna Lea Hoffmann. She led the Sterling-nominated ensemble, and there are nominations as well for dancer Tia Ashley Kushniruk in the supporting role category, for Narda McCarroll’s billowing set of draperies, Rebecca Cypher’s bleached costumes, and Aaron Macri’s sound design.

Tenaj Williams in Little Shop of Horrors. Photo by Moonrider Productions for Vancouver Arts Club Theatreedmon

Ashlie Corcoran’s Citadel/ Arts Club Theatre co-production of the sassy and appealing 1982 musical Little Shop of Horrors, that Howard Ashman and Alan Menken raised from the potting soil of a shlocky ‘60s B-movie, wrapped its tentacles around seven jury nominations, too, including best musical and best director. The performances of both leads, Tenaj Williams as the underachiever florist shop employee Seymour and Synthia Yusuf as his bruised and abused co-worker Audrey, are nominated. So is John Ullyatt’s performance as Audrey’s psycho dentist boyfriend. Gianna Vacirca’s choreography, laced with ‘60s references, and the musical direction of Caitlin Hayes and Ruth Alexander are also Sterling contenders.

Stephanie Gruson, The Great Great Spiegeltent Spectacular, Cristal Palace spiegeltent. Photo by Liz

Named for the Edmonton theatre pioneer Elizabeth Sterling Haynes, the Sterling Awards celebrate the season just past on Edmonton stages. And the jury nominations, dispersed to include big, medium, and small theatre, this year include, unusually, a nomination for an aerial arts/ magic variety show, in the independent production category: The Great Great Spiegel Spectacular by Firefly Theatre  in the K-Days speigeltent.

The Hooves Belonged To The Deer, In Arms Collective at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo of Tarragon Theatre production by Cylla von Tiedemann

A provocative indie production and a winsome new multi-hued Canadian comedy each received six nominations. Playwright Makram Ayache brought his challenging epic The Hooves Belonged to the Deer, that aims at nothing less than a new creation mythology, back to his home town. And Peter Hinton-Davis’s production, nominated in the indie category, garnered him a director’s nod, with Sterling acknowledgments for Brett Dahl’s supporting performance, Anahita Dehbonehie’s set, Whittyn Jason’s lighting, and Corey Tazmania’s “intimacy direction,” the latter a first for the Sterlings.

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

The six Sterling nominations for Trevor Schmidt’s Robot Girls, a fresh, winningly funny, and touching foray into the fraught lives of teenage girls, which premiered at Shadow Theatre, span outstanding production, new play, director, two supporting performances (Jayce Mckenzie and Abigail McDougall), and an honour for the exceptional ensemble work in the production directed jointly by John Hudson and Lana Hughes.

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

Other top draws for jurors include The Spinsters, an imaginative and zestfully theatrical exploration of the world of Cinderella through the eyes of the much-aggrieved Ugly Stepsisters. Jan Selman’s Small Matters Production at Edmonton Fringe Theatre scored nominations in five categories including outstanding production. The flamboyant costumes by Adam Dickson and Ian Walker caught the jury’s attention, along with the show’s multi-media design (Ian Walker), sound design (Michael Caron), and score (Michael Caron and Lindsey Walker). The musical cabaret Rubaboo by and starring Métis artist Andrea Menard at the Citadel, also has five nominations.

Bella King, Josh Travnik, Andrea House, Mark Sinongco in Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The Teatro Live! revival of Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, a zestful 2009 musical of and about this place, has four nominations, three for the performances — by Andrea House in the flamboyant title role, along with Chariz Faulmino and Bella King in supporting roles — and one for costumes by Leona Brausen who starred as Mitzi in the original production devised by Teatro up-and-comers 15 years ago.

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The quartet of nominations for Citadel production of Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop, includes nods for director Patricia Darbasie and both co-stars Ray Strachan and Patricia Cerra, along with Amelia Scott’s multi-media design.

In the end, the Citadel comes away with 27 Sterling nominations, the most by far of any other company. And they’re rather evenly divided among Little Shop of Horrors, Rubaboo, The Sound of Music, The Mountaintop and the season swashbuckler The Three Musketeers. That total includes a striking predominance in musicals: four of the five nominees for outstanding leading performance, and three of five nominees for outstanding musical. The Mayfield’s production of Grease and the seasonal production of With Bells On! The Musical, an appealing combination of flamboyant and heartwarming at Theatre Network, are the other contenders.

Six of Shadow Theatre’s seven nominations are for Robot Girls. Of Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre’s six nominations, three are for Heather Inglis’s production of Mob, two for Conni Massing’s Dead Letter, with one for Tori Morrison’s multi-media ingenuity in David Gagnon Walker’s touring show This Is The Story of the Child Ruled By Fear.

The new play category seems particularly competitive this year, including the work of such stellar and seasoned playwrights as Massing, Ronnie Burkett, Beth Graham, Trevor Schmidt, as well as S.E. Grummett of So.Glad Arts, less known to Edmonton audiences.

Joe and Mister in Wonderful Joe, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionette. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Notable is the nomination of actor/ playwright/ director/ designer/ puppeteer Burkett, in the outstanding production, and leading performance categories, as well, for his moving marionette play Wonderful Joe, a multi-cultural multi-generational vision of the contemporary city, which premiered at Theatre Network.

The theatre for young audiences Sterling categories are dominated by two original musicals: Cinderella, the latest in Alberta Musical Theatre’s ingenious contemporary re-workings of fairy tales, and The Adventure of Young Turtle, an endearing found-object “queer puppet musical for kids” by the indie collective So.Glad Arts. And the Fringe nominees span a range of bouffon shows, musicals, thrillers, satires.

At the Sterling gala June 24 at the Westbury Theatre, Elizabeth Allison-Jorde will be honoured with the Margaret Mooney Award for achievement in administration, with the Ross Hill Award for outstanding achievement in production going to Patsy Thomas. And Mac Brock, a theatre artist for whom the term multi-talented was invented — playwright/ actor/ director/ artistic director/ festival producer/ mentor/ agent provocateur — will be receiving the Sterling Award For Outstanding Contribution to Edmonton Theatre.

The 2023/24 Sterling Award Nominations

Outstanding Production of a Play: Robot Girls (Shadow Theatre); Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAFire); Wonderful Joe (Theatre Network); The Spinsters (A Small Matters Production presented by Fringe Theatre); The Drawer Boy (Shadow Theatre)

The Timothy Ryan Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical: Little Shop of Horrors (The Citadel Theatre/ Arts Club Theatre Company); Grease (Mayfield Dinner Theatre); Rubaboo (The Citadel Theatre); The Sound of Music (The Citadel Theatre/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); With Bells On! The Musical (Theatre Network)

Outstanding Independent Production: The Hooves Belonged to the Deer (In Arms Theatre Collective); There We Are. There (Good Women Dance Collective); The Great Great Spiegel Spectacular (Firefly Theatre)

Outstanding New Play (award to playwright): Beth Graham, Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAfire); Trevor Schmidt, Robot Girls (Shadow Theatre); Ronnie Burkett, Wonderful Joe (Theatre Network); Conni Massing, Dead Letter (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre), S.E. Grummett, The Adventure of Young Turtle (So.Glad Arts)

Outstanding Performance in a Leading Role – Play: Patricia Cerra, The Mountaintop (The Citadel Theatre); Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAfire); Ronnie Burkett, Wonderful Joe (Theatre Network), Ray Strachan, The Mountaintop (The Citadel Theatre); Lora Brovold, Dead Letter (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre)

Outstanding Performance in a Leading Role – Musical: Andrea Menard, Rubaboo (The Citadel Theatre); Synthia Yusuf, Little Shop of Horrors (The Citadel Theatre/ Arts Club Theatre Company); Tenaj Williams,  Little Shop of Horrors (The Citadel Theatre/ Arts Club Theatre Company); Priya Narine. The Sound of Music (The Citadel Theatre/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre);  Andrea House, Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s (Teatro Live!)

Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role – Play: Jayce Mckenzie, Robot Girls (Shadow Theatre); Tia Ashley Kushniruk, Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAfire); Abigail McDougall, Robot Girls (Shadow Theatre); Graham Mothersill, Mob (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre); Brett Dahl, The Hooves Belonged to the Deer (In Arms Theatre Collective)

Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role – Musical: John Ullyatt, Little Shop of Horrors (The Citadel Theatre/ Arts Club Theatre Company); Chariz Faulmino, Everybody Goes to Mitzi’s (Teatro Live!); Christina Nguyen, The Sound of Music (The Citadel Theatre/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); Bella King, Everybody Goes to Mitzi’s (Teatro Live!); Melissa MacPherson, Grease (Mayfield Dinner Theatre)

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Play or Musical: the cast of Six: The Musical (Citadel Theatre/ Mirvish Productions); the cast of Robot Girls (Shadow Theatre);  the cast of Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAfire); Rubaboo (The Citadel Theatre); the cast of The Great Great Spiegel Spectacular (Firefly Theatre)

Outstanding Director: John Hudson and Lana Hughes, Robot Girls (Shadow Theatre); Peter Hinton-Davis, The Hooves Belonged to the Deer (In Arms Theatre Collective); Annette Loiselle, Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAfire); Patricia Darbasie, The Mountaintop (The Citadel Theatre); Ashlie Corcoran, Little Shop of Horrors (The Citadel Theatre/ Arts Club Theatre Company)

Felix LeBlanc, Alexander Ariate, Darren Martens, Braydon Dowler Coltman, Garett Ross, Morgan Yamada in The Three Musketeers, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Outstanding Set Design: Anahita Dehbonehie, The Hooves Belonged to the Deer (In Arms Theatre Collective); Cory Sincennes, The Three Musketeers (The Citadel Theatre/ Arts Club Theatre Company); Michael Gianfrancesco, The Importance of Being Earnest (The Citadel Theatre); Narda McCarroll, Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAfire); Daniel vanHeyst, The Drawer Boy (Shadow Theatre)

Outstanding Costume Design: Adam Dickson & Ian Walker, The Spinsters (A Small Matters Production Presented by Fringe Theatre); Michael Gianfrancesco, The Importance of Being Earnest (The Citadel Theatre) Rebecca Cypher, Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAfire); Leona Brausen, Everybody Goes to Mitzi’s (Teatro Live!); Cory Sincennes, The Three Musketeers (The Citadel Theatre/ Arts Club Theatre Company)

Kristin Johnston in Mob, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Outstanding Lighting Design: Whittyn Jason, The Hooves Belonged to the Deer (In Arms Theatre Collective); Alison Yanota, Mob (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre); Sophie Tang, The Three Musketeers (The Citadel Theatre/ Arts Club Theatre Company); Sandi Somers, Pochsy IV (Theatre Network); Rae McCallum, Donna Orbits The Moon (Northern Light Theatre)

Outstanding Multimedia Design: Tori Morrison, This is the Story of the Child Ruled by Fear (A Strange Victory Production presented by Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre); Matt Schuurman, Donna Orbits the Moon (Northern Light Theatre); Kira Franchuk, Mob (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre); Ian Walker, The Spinsters (A Small Matters Production Presented by Fringe Theatre); Amelia Scott, The Mountaintop (The Citadel Theatre).

Outstanding Sound Design: Michael Caron, The Spinsters (A Small Matters Production Presented by Fringe Theatre); Dave Clarke, Candy and the Beast (Northern Light Theatre); Aaron Macri and Binaifer Kapadia, Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAfire); Darrin Hagen, Mob (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre); Chantal Vitalis, Pochsy IV (Theatre Network)

Outstanding Score of a Play or Musical: Tommy Newman, With Bells On! The Musical (Theatre Network); Simon Abbott, Die Harsh (Grindstone Theatre); Michael Caron and Lindsey Walker, The Spinsters (A Small Matters Production Presented by Fringe Theatre); Andrea Menard and Robert Walsh, Rubaboo (The Citadel Theatre); Ruaridh MacDonald and Rae Spoon, The Adventure of Young Turtle (So.Glad Arts)

Outstanding Musical Director: Caitlin Hayes and Ruth Alexander, Little Shop of Horrors (The Citadel Theatre/ Arts Club Theatre Company); Jennifer McMillan, Grease (Mayfield Dinner Theatre); Andrew St. Hilaire, The Sound of Music (The Citadel Theatre/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); Robert Walsh, Rubaboo (The Citadel Theatre); Ryan Sigurdson, With Bells On! The Musical (Theatre Network)

Outstanding Choreographer, Fight Director, Intimacy Director: Ainsley Hillyard, choreography, Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAfire); Jonathan Hawley Purvis, fight choreography, The Three Musketeers (The Citadel Theatre/ Arts Club Theatre Company); Julio Fuentes, choreography, Grease (Mayfield Dinner Theatre); Corey Tazmania, intimacy direction, The Hooves Belonged to the Deer (In Arms Theatre Collective); Gianna Vacirca, choreography, Little Shop of Horrors (The Citadel Theatre/ Arts Club Theatre Company)

Outstanding Individual Achievement in Production: Andrea Handal Rivera, stage manager; Kat Evans, production manager; Liv Bunge, production manager; Simon Wicks, house technician; Gina Moe, stage manager.

Outstanding Production for Young Audiences: The Adventure of Young Turtle (So.Glad Arts); Cinderella (Alberta Musical Theatre Company); Silver Skate Folk Trail 2024 (Silver Skate Festival)

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

Outstanding Artistic Achievement for Young Audiences: Jay Northcott, director, The Adventure of Young Turtle (So.Glad Arts); Farren Timoteo, director, Cinderella (Alberta Musical Theatre Company); Even Gilchrist, designer, The Adventure of Young Turtle (So.Glad Arts); Deanna Finnman, costume design, Cinderella (Alberta Musical Theatre Company); 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); This Won’t Hurt, I Promise (Tiny Bear Jaws); Stigma, Pistil, & Style (Wee Witches and Erin Pettifor); Krampus (Straight Edge Theatre); Morningside Road (Morningside Road Productions)

Outstanding Fringe New Work (award to playwright): Dayna Lee Hoffmann and Katie Yoner, Rat Academy (Batrabbit Productions); Elena Belyea, This Won’t Hurt, I Promise (Tiny Bear Jaws); Samantha Fraughton and Theresa Cutknife, Talk Treaty to Me (ReadyGo Theatre); Jezec Sanders, The Cabin on Bald Dune (DogHeart Theatre); Seth Gilf Ilan and Stephen Allred, Krampus (Straight Edge Theatre)

Outstanding Fringe Performance by an individual: Elena Belyea, This Won’t Hurt, I Promise (Tiny Bear Jaws); Erin Pettifor, Stigma, Pistil, & Style (Wee Witches and Erin Pettifor); Lauren Brady, Interwebbed (HEYWire Theatre); Amanda Neufeld, Krampus (Straight Edge Theatre); Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Rat Academy (Batrabbit Productions)

Outstanding Fringe Ensemble: Rat Academy (Batrabbit Productions); Krampus (Straight Edge Theatre); Talk Treaty to Me (ReadyGo Theatre); The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties (Hysterical Ladies); What Was is All (Nextfest Theatre)

Outstanding Fringe Director: Geoffrey Simon Brown, This Won’t Hurt, I Promise (Tiny Bear Jaws); Stephen Allred, Krampus (Straight Edge Theatre); April Banigan, The Cabin on Bald Dune (DogHeart Theatre); Jacqueline Russell, Stigma, Pistil & Style (Wee Witches and Erin Pettifor); 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 slow unstoppable spread of a rumour: Jezec Sanders’ Where Foxes Lie at Nextfest

Posted on June 5, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Actor/playwright Jezec Sanders, whose play Where Foxes Lie is at Nextfest 2024. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Here’s a very Nextfest sort of question: “What is something I have yet to try my hand at?”

Jezec Sanders, who evidently has never seen a comfort zone he didn’t want to exit (stage left), has already written two hit plays that scored big-time with Fringe audiences, critics, and the all-powerful word-of-mouth grapevine. Both Hacking and Slashing (2022) and The Cabin On Bald Dune (2023) were built for two actors on intricate infrastructures of mystery. The latter, an adroit psychological thriller, was expertly propelled through its black comedy set-up by Sanders’ witty dialogue.

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Where Foxes Lie, the Sanders play that premieres Thursday at Nextfest in a ReadyGo Theatre production is something very different for a playwright who says “I feel like I flourish when I’m writing dialogue for two people.… I love writing dialogue!”

Sanders’s new play, by contrast it’s “a one-person direct-address show. And those two things are very scary to me” (not least because the actor-turned-playwright himself is that ‘one person’, onstage directly addressing us). “Which is probably a sign I should do it,” says Sanders, an engagingly quick-witted and thoughtful sort in conversation. “I feel like every show I want to be doing new things and pushing myself in new ways.”

Sanders, who comes from a notable ‘showbiz family’ of actors, directors musicians, improvisers, filmmakers, has theatre on his mind: how it’s constructed, how it can engage its audiences, how stories can get told onstage without overt authorial intervention. “What would the characters say to each other through the course of natural conversation? The audience is smart: they can can tell when a line only exists because they’re supposed to know it exists. Why does the character need to know?”

Sanders pursues the thought: “it is completely in my control how much the audience does or doesn’t know at any given time. And there’s really no rule about when and how to deliver information.” Except perhaps this thought: “If you want to add mysteries you also want them to pay off in the end.”

The idea that launched The Cabin on Bald Dune, he says, came to him on a trip to Nice in France, and a stay in an Airbnb overlooking a building that seemed to be completely vacant. “But the lights would turn on and off indiscriminately, randomly. And my brother and I became obsessed with how creepy that was….”

I wanted to keep (that play) in an Airbnb; I wanted to keep it isolated … so, an island,” where, crucially, the characters can be pried away from cellphone service. “And I also wanted to keep it in Canada. So, OK, that really narrowed it down.” Setting is a catalyst for Sanders; “it informs a lot of choices about the plot.”

Where Foxes Lie by Jezec Sanders, Nextfest 2024. Graphic supplied.

Sanders went Canadian, and specifically the very small town of Killam, Alberta, for the setting of Where Foxes Lie. With this new play,“I was really inspired,” he says, “by movies like the psychological thriller The Gift … about how a rumour can spread and supplant the truth and possibly ruin someone’s life.”

In one-person shows, “the audience automatically gets locked into sympathizing with the character they see onstage…. They have no choice really, there’s no one else up there. And I wanted to take advantage of that.”

At first we don’t know if the person we see onstage, Koen, is the victim of a rumour, or the perpetrator. But we find out pretty fast, says Sanders, that Koen is the latter. “It isn’t supposed to be a plot twist; it isn’t a secret, more of a slow unravelling….”

“I wanted to write about how gossip spreads in a little community, the trajectory of how ideas about people take over … how something as seemingly innocent as telling a white lie about someone changes and changes, person to person to person. Like a really messed up game of telephone.”

In communities that are insulated, where people don’t come and go to dilute the spread, a rumour leaves an indelible stain. “Something happens that gets misconstrued, or people already have (fixed) ideas of someone, and they’re predisposed to believe a story they hear. It’s really hard to shake a reputation…. And the results can be devastating.”

“This show is by no means designed to take on Killam; it could have been any small town. It happens everywhere.”

The play’s spins on the double axis of two characters: Koen, “popular, star hockey player, goes to church, does everything that’s expected of him,” and Albert, “who doesn’t fit that mould.” He’s different, an outlier. And because he’s already “the designated outsider in the town,” people are ready and willing to believe the story Koen makes up about him.

Sanders cites the plays of Hannah Moscovitch, East of Berlin among them, in which the protagonist anticipates audience antagonism. In Where Foxes Lie, “Koen is standing trial, trying to plead his case, justify himself.” Sanders laughs. “Writing 101 — everyone thinks they’re the hero of their own story.”

“My relationship with theatre has always been as an actor for most of my life,” says Sanders, who majored in philosophy and creative writing at the U of A. “Then COVID happened and I needed something to do to not lose my mind. So I tried my hand at playwriting. And his friends persuaded him to submit Hacking and Slashing to the U of A’s New Works Festival.

“It’s a great space for developments very supportive , very gentle. As it should be,” he says of that experience. The Fringe was “my first time putting my work in front of people who had no attachment to me, or the works…. I felt a lot of positive affirmation,” he says of the enthusiastic response. “It really showed me I was on to something….”

And now, at Nextfest ReadyGo Theatre is back, a collective of multi-taskers that includes director Erik Richards and producer/dramaturg Ryan Blair. “It was really important for us to all go off and try our hands at different projects. And we’re coming back together with a lot more knowledge.”

They still operate in guerrilla mode. “We haven’t quite lost that fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants style of producing theatre.” They’re gathering props from stuff they have at home; they’re shameless scroungers.

“We’re all young artists,” Sanders says cheerfully. “But between us we have a lot of experience!”

Check out 12thnight’s survey of theatre at Nextfest, a preview with festival director Ellen Chorley. Plus interviews with Nextfest playwrights Tori Kibblewhite and Jameela McNeil.  

Where Foxes Lie plays the Nextfest mainstage Thursday 8 p.m., Friday 4:30 p.m. and Saturday 5 p.m. Tickets and further details: nextfest.ca.

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‘An ode to my community’: Ms. Pat’s Kitchen at Nextfest. Meet actor/playwright Jameela McNeil

Posted on June 3, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

actor/playwright Jameela McNeil, whose play Ms. Pat’s Kitchen premieres at Nextfest 2024. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If you saw Jameela McNeil’s blistering performance as the sister of an ambitious Black boxer in The Royale last season at the Citadel, you already known something about the intensity and focus of this young theatre artist onstage.

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And the Sterling Award-winning actor is poised to have the same sort of reverb in the adjacent backstage world of playwriting (and producing). In Ms. Pat’s Kitchen, premiering at  Nextfest 2024 in a Black Arts Hub production directed by Sue Goberdhan, the emerging playwright takes us into the heart of a Jamaican family here and now: a fractious relationship between an 18-year-old daughter and her mother with all the intergenerational miscommunication that implies. And it unlocks a conversation about the thorny, culturally nuanced issue of consent.

“I wanted to write an Edmonton story,” says McNeil, whose own family background includes Jamaican grandparents, and roots in both Alberta and Ontario. “I was very fortunate to grow up (here) with a lot of Jamaican connections in the Caribbean community that came to Alberta for work.” She calls Ms. Pat’s Kitchen “a little ode to my community. I wanted to celebrate my culture, the food, the people….”

Ms. Pat’s Kitchen by Jameela McNeil, Nextfest 2024. Graphic supplied.

The initial idea that took McNeil into Ms. Pat’s Kitchen was “writing about a mother-daughter relationship, miscommunication between the younger and older generations, and bridging the gap so they can see each other and understand each other….” The 18-year-old daughter is “at that stage of life that’s a real shift for people, and for their parents.”

“We all have a story…. Of the five characters, four of them are women. I want to create women that (emphasize) we’re not all the same. Our dreams, our aspirations are different. We are all our own person.”

Says McNeil, a conversation about the difficult thorny issue of consent comes up. “In previous generations, there was no real way to talk about it…. We deal in different ways” across the age gap.

Jameela McNeil, Kristen Alter, Jesse Lipscombe in John Ware Reimagined. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography 2017

As an actor McNeil had caught the eye of directors across town and beyond, not long after graduating from MacEwan theatre arts in 2017. Audiences have seen her at the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, the Mayfield, the Citadel (The Color Purple in 2019). It was at Workshop West in 2017 that a life-changer of a role came her way — one whose reverb would find its way into the playwriting and producing branches of her expanding theatre career. She played the wife of the real-life title character of Cheryl Foggo’s John Ware Reimagined, a fascinating 19th century Black Albertan cowboy hero whose outlines have blurred in the mists of our white-centric historical consciousness. It was the first time, McNeil has said, that she’d been part of a story that grappled with Black history.

As a kid she’d written short stories and poems. And she’d been attracted to screen-writing in high school (“I let that dream go when the pandemic happened”). For Orange Skies, “my first play,” which she worked on as part of Tarragon Theatre’s Young Playwright Unit, “I did a lot of digging into the history of the Black experience in the 50s and 60s, in Alberta and Ontario.” In the program’s cohort of three emerging playwrights, McNeil found an inspiring mentor in Makram Ayache (The Hooves Belonged To The Deer).

And while she was part of the Stratford Festival company last year, (Much Ado About Nothing, Les Belles Soeurs, The Wedding Band), McNeil was part of the RBC Emerging Artist Program, as a writer. On her days off, she met, on Zoom, with mentors like playwright Foggo. “I”m a big fan of her work,” says McNeil, who starred in Foggo’s Heaven at Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary in 2022.

Her growing interest in Black Albertan history and emigré cultures has led to Black Arts Hub. Its debut venture is Ms. Pat’s Kitchen, but there will be more, McNeil says. The collective is about “connecting Black artists in different disciplines who might not otherwise meet each other,” across diaspora cultures. “When people move to Edmonton, I hope to be the somebody they can connect with.”

Not only is Nextfest a showcase for her new play, “which has room to grow” into something bigger and longer, the festival’s program of workshops includes how-to training for new theatre producers. McNeil, now in her late 20s, is a keen student. “I didn’t know what it took to create a production. I’ve learned a lot!”

“I’m trying things out,” she says, which might be a Nextfest mantra in itself. “I have a lot of community in Edmonton, and that includes the theatre community as well….” No matter where a burgeoning career takes her, “I’ll always be connected to Edmonton.”

Check out 12thnight’s survey of theatre at Nextfest, a preview with festival director Ellen Chorley. And an interview with Nextfest playwright Tori Kibblewhite here. 

Ms. Pat’s Kitchen continues on the Nextfest 2024 mainstage Tuesday  at 8 p.m., Saturday at 7 p.m. More details and tickets: nextfest.ca.

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A play and a playwright with blue-chip hockey credentials: Your Heart Gushes Lavender at Nextfest 2024

Posted on June 2, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

The cast of My Heart Gushes Lavender, premiering at Nextfest 2024. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In theatre we don’t get a lot of chances to meet people from the world that actor/ playwright Tori Kibblewhite conjures for us in Your Heart Is Gushing Lavender, premiering on the mainstage at Nextfest 2024.

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The characters are hockey players (uncanny timing!). They’re friends who find themselves together on a bridge, outside a small-town end-of-summer house party. As Kibblewhite says, “theatre is often about theatre people, or the type of people who go to see theatre…. I just wanted to see the people I grew up with onstage.”

Kibblewhite themself, who’s part way through a U of A BFA degree in acting and fresh from a physical theatre workshop with the celebrated Brit company Frantic Assembly, belongs to a rare subset of theatre artists. At 20, about the age of their characters, their own hockey credentials are blue-chip and first-hand.

playwright/actor/hockey player Tori Kibblewhite, in action on the ice. Photo cupplied

Kibblewhite grew up in Stony Plain, playing hockey (#9 for the Onoway Eagles), surrounded by hockey players. As they explain, their mom’s a cheer coach, their dad’s a hockey coach, one sister is a cheerleader, their younger sister and their brother are both excellent hockey players. “I’m kinda the oddball,” they say cheerfully of a family who will make “a fascinating audience” at Nextfest. “I’m very interested to see how they’ll react.”

Hockey players, they’ve found ,“tend to be a repressed group,” verbally speaking. “The play gets dark but the characters lend themselves to humour,” they says. “The ‘hockey boy’ talk, the way they communicate with each other in the dressing room is really something! Definitely a different language; I wanted to peel back the layers of that.”

The other idea that found its ways into Your Heart Is Gushing Lavender, Kibblewhite says, is “someone’s struggle with mental illness, and how that can put the people around them in harder places. It can cause other people a lot of pain.” The “morality of that” interests them.

“I wanted to play with the realism of two characters, two hockey players who don’t really know how to express their feelings…. What if we forced them to express their feelings to the penultimate degree?” That invites a theatrical dimension beyond realism. “I also wanted to explore moments of abstraction, in their relationship and their struggles,” they say of the sound, movement, colour that take over beyond words. “The play bursts from inside the characters. It’s kind like the characters are bursting at the seams.”

What was the draw of theatre for the kid with the very unusual skill set? They pause. “Hmm, that’s a hard one…. I’ve always known that’s what I want to do. There wasn’t a moment I picked; it was just incredibly clear; it was something I’ve always wanted,” says Kibblewhite, who’s also a painter. “I feel like there aren’t many moments in life where you’re totally sure,” and theatre was one of hers.

Your Heart Is Gushing Lavender is Kibblewhite’s second play. A playwright was born, just out of high school, with Painting of Two Girls At A Bus Stop, 15 minutes long. Two girls happen to be at a bus stop. “Both happen to be artists. Both happen to have a shitty boyfriend.” And in the swiping on their respective cellphones they discover they’re both dating the same guy. A double break-up ensues. “A very naturalistic piece,” says Kibblewhite, who’s engaging and droll in conversation. “Nothing crazy, pretty tame to be honest, cute, comedic….”

This theatre town is, it need hardly be said, a hockey town, too. Kibblewhite “definitely wants to continue (with Your Heart Gushes Lavender), expand on the characters, explore more. But I really don’t have a super-big plan yet.…”

There’s this, though: “I don’t often see sports onstage,” they say, noting the exception of  Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, about a girls soccer team, produced by the Maggie Tree at the Citadel in 2022. “Sports are a kind of theatre event; people get dressed up; people perform…. My play doesn’t include actual hockey onstage. But I want to express more of my experience.”

Your Heart Gushes Lavender runs today at 6 p.m., Tuesday at 7 p.m. and Wednesday at 9 p.m. on the Lorne Cardinal stage at the Roxy Theatre (10708 124 St.). See nextfest.ca for tickets and further details.  A 12thnight Nextfest survey, with festival director Ellen Chorley is here.   

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A comedy of adjusted vision: The Oculist’s Holiday at Teatro Live, a review

Posted on June 1, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Oscar Derkx and Beth Graham in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The title will make you smile. In its way The Oculist’s Holiday, the 2009 Stewart Lemoine comedy with the whimsically archaic handle, is all about optics — vision, perspective, focus, correction.

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And in the play, set in the impossibly picturesque lakeside town of Lausanne in Switzerland in the early 30s, that vision is constantly adjusted, as you’ll see in Belinda Cornish’s crack revival — its first in 15 years — at Teatro Live!.

The opening scenes are powered by the exhilaration of being on a holiday, an ocean away from the prosaic, the sensible — in a guest house run by an exotic American emigré, Princess Volodevsky (Cathy Derkach) on the lam permanently from all of the above. Chantal Fortin’s design is a kind of oasis (foreign booze bottles, cocktail glasses, amuse-bouches involving caviar) that seems to have landed in a glow of magical horizon-less lighting by Narda McCarroll.

The eyes through which we see the world belong to Marian Ogilvy (the terrific Beth Graham), a congenitally practical Canadian teacher and writer of school textbooks, with all that that implies. We meet her, in her sensible shoes — Leona Brausen’s costumes are a ’30s story in themselves — delivering an inspirational address to the new grads of the Southern Ontario Business College For Women. The play that follows is her story, remembered and set before us: like a Henry James heroine, Marian will shed her old myopic self in the magic of budding romance, in parallel to the seductive views of the Old World.

The characters do repeatedly refer to the awe-inspiring views, which get better and better the higher they climb from the lake through the hillside town. The play opens with Marian’s ‘morning after the night before’ observation that the lake is best observed without the filter of sunglasses. But the sheer dazzle is too much. And she and the genial young American optometrist Ted (Oscar Derkx) she’s met the previous day (and night!) re-apply their shades. A romantic comedy is unfolding, and with it the rom-com obstacle of new arrivals at the Maison de la Princesse.

Mathew Hulshof and Rachel Bowron in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Charlie Hastings (Mathew Hulshof) and his aggressively loud, vulgarian wife Laurette (Rachel Bowron), at first amusingly ignorant, are of the post-war generation chronicled, as playwright Lemoine has noted, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Did you know that this is the same lake as they have in Geneva?” Like the Divers of Tender Is The Night, they seem to be paid-up members of the Lost Generation post-Jazz Age generation that drifted around Europe after the war, purposeless and extravagant, flinging their money around, drinking too much till they’re not quite so charming.

As The Oculist’s Holiday and Cornish’s five-actor ensemble production calibrate, the bright buoyancy of the European holiday that never ends gradually reveals a dark, surprisingly dark, underbelly of damages: through a comic lens darkly. The choice of music, as specified by Lemoine, is Old World classical (a Mendelssohn piano trio) that’s a light lyrical shower of notes on top with more moving undertones. It’s a capture of how the play works.

All the characters of the play, strangers who intersect at the guest house, are from somewhere else, propelled by their own stories. Only Princess Volodevsky, née Dorrie, from Indiana via Paris and marriage to a Russian nobleman doomed by that revolution, is happy to be candid about revealing the secrets of her route to Lausanne. In Derkach’s performance Dorrie, amused and amusing, breezy in delivery, enters and exits at a trot, talking and always bearing libations.

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

The quintet of actors are expert at riding the humour and articulate nuance, and the funny rhythms, of Lemoine’s dialogue. Graham’s smart, appealing performance as a someone unused to being perplexed or  impulsive charts the gradual erosion at the edges of Marian’s sturdy self-possession and clear perspective (ah yes, the question of focus). Marion is evidently not someone who normally answers “why not?” to a “should I…?” question. Has her vision been blurred by a new on-location attraction to a young man of unthreatening good humour? Derkx’s performance as a doctor, open-faced, professionally devoted to improving vision, captures an unforced, unflamboyant ease and charm.

Rachel Bowron and Oscar Derkx in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The train wreck American couple who crash into the budding romance at the Maison de la Princesse are vividly set forth by Hulshof and Bowron. The crazy hilarity of Laurette, who has neither idea nor  interest in knowing where they are, turns vivacity into something else, something more imperious and more dangerous, in Bowron’s performance.

Hulshof, making a welcome return to Edmonton theatre, captures with great comic precision a kind of fragile sophistication, poised precariously over an abyss.

Lemoine’s comedies have expanded their emotional palette (and the more predictable sightlines of ‘comedy’) over the years since 2009. But in a production unafraid of double-vision, that gives full weight to disappointment, confusion, and desperation, The Oculist’s Holiday still stands out. That’s a realization that qualifies as a sense of distance. Put on your specs; you can, you should, get the close-up view at the Varscona.

Have you seen 12thnight’s preview interview with Belinda Cornish? It’s here.

REVIEW

The Oculist’s Holiday

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Stewart Lemoine

Directed by: Belinda Cornish

Starring: Beth Graham, Oscar Derkx, Rachel Bowron, Mathew Hulshof, Cathy Derkach

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through June 16

Tickets: teatroq.com

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‘Not quite like anything else he’s written’: Belinda Cornish directs a Teatro revival of Lemoine’s The Oculist’s Holiday

Posted on May 31, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Stewart Lemoine play that opens Friday at the Varscona in the Teatro Live! season is certainly a comedy, says Belinda Cornish, who’s directing the first revival of The Oculist’s Holiday since its 2009 Fringe debut. And “it’s very funny….”

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The “and yet…” hangs in the air. And yet, she says, “it’s not quite like anything else Stewart has written,” Cornish thinks. “A really unique play,” and one that expands the usual dimensions of “comedy” to include darker, more wistful, more complex tones, she thinks, invoking the cadre of “beautiful plays” in the Lemoine archive, The Exquisite Hour, Fever Land, Witness To A Conga among them.

As the playwright noted in his introduction to a 2011 volume that includes The Oculist’s Holiday, “I’ve been reading a fair bit of F. Scott Fitzgerald lately.” And Cornish, herself a playwright (Category E, Hiraeth, Little Elephants, The Garneau Block, ), detects that influence and flavour in the world of the play, set in the early 1930s in Europe: “the tail end of the Lost Generation, the ‘bright young things’,  just post-Wall Street crash.”

Oscar Derkx and Beth Graham in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva in Lausanne to be precise, is the romantic location where a Canadian teacher on holiday meets an American optometrist — and has her vision of the world change forever. What Lemoine and Fitzgerald share, Cornish thinks, is “an extraordinary understanding of the human condition, which they then articulate through the particularities of their own perspective…. A perspective that’s unique, but accessible and relatable.”

Like The Oculist’s Holiday, Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender Is The Night “has a particular character, an antagonist/catalyst who has a significant impact on everybody else’s lives, and then sort of disappears…. Without being bleak or heavy by any means — it’s a delicious comedy — within the shadow of the war, that lingering impact has an undertone.”

Belinda Cornish, director of The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo supplied.

Cornish, a member of the Teatro Live! ensemble who named her own indie theatre company Bright Young Things, is drawn to that dark/light period, and its theatrical repertoire. And she appreciates the “nuanced, delicate, hard-to-describe feel of the play.… It’s not leaned into, but it’s the feeling of the Lost Generation, and the sheer joy that comes out of something so dark, with people carrying those scars. They just go forward with their lives — in discovery, in joy — carrying those experiences with them.”   

The Oculist’s Holiday is set predominantly, as Cornish explains, “in a beautiful boutique guest house in Lausanne.” La Maison de la Princesse is run, as the play has it, “by a curious sort of noblewoman of mixed pedigree,” a Lemoinian description if ever there was one. In Lemoine, “it’s never somebody with a straight-forward back story,” Cornish laughs.

Rachel Bowron and Oscar Derkx in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

“It’s dealt with so very lightly, but all five people who find themselves at the Maison de la Princesse, including the Princesse herself, have been unexpectedly drawn to Lausanne. They didn’t plan to go there, but find themselves going ‘I think I’m going to stay here’.” The Princesse, for example, was en route to Geneva, “and when the train stopped she told her husband ‘O darling, I think I’m home’.”

In Lemoine comedies, strangers often seem to meet in unplanned encounters in train stations or at hotels or cafe tables. “People find themselves unexpectedly in the place they need to be,” as Cornish puts it. “There are elements of mystery and discovery, another Fitzgeraldian (feature)…. You cannot anticipate where this play is going to take you,” she says. “And yet in a beautiful arc, it makes the most sense. Very cool…. And very moving.” She cites the actor/playwright Phoebe Waller-Bridge of Fleabag fame: “when you get people to laugh they drop their defences; they’re disarmed. And it empowers the way they’re emotionally affected.”

Mathew Hulshof and Beth Graham, The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

“You just play the dialogue and the moment; it’s all there, in how the characters are drawn,” says Cornish, a veteran Teatro actor herself (witness an acting archive that includes Witness to a Conga, The Exquisite Hour, Evelyn Strange among many others). And her cast, an all-star quintet of Teatro faves led by Beth Graham, know exactly how to find the comedy beats, she says. Ah, and how to ride the words and rhythms in a way that’s never laboured.

Cornish, who’s been Teatro Live!’s co-artistic director with Andrew MacDonald-Smith for several seasons — it’s always been an artist-run company — has left that shared gig (MacDonald-Smith is now artistic-directing single-handedly), but not her involvement with Teatro as an director and actor. Her lengthy Teatro resumé continues with a starring role in the upcoming July production of Noel Coward’s sparkler Private Lives, directed by Max Rubin.

Meanwhile, in addition to theatre and improv, Cornish has been exploring “a completely different world.” She’s been writing for the horror fiction role-playing adventure game Call of Cthulhu, developed by Chaosium and inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft. And it’s led to film. Occasionally she joins her husband Mark Meer who is, among his multiple talents, a professional Dungeon Master, in improvised D&D role-playing games across the continent and abroad. “A crazy old combo of theatre, improv, and (the game platform),” as she says.

It stands in high contrast to the delicate hues of the unusual Lemoine comedy that opens Friday. “Can I use the word ‘magical’?” Cornish wonders. “Or is that inappropriately whimsical?”

PREVIEW

The Oculist’s Holiday

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Stewart Lemoine

Directed by: Belinda Cornish

Starring: Beth Graham, Oscar Derkx, Rachel Bowron, Mathew Hulshof, Cathy Derkach

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday through June 16

Tickets: teatroq.com

     

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‘New artists, new art’: Nextfest returns to the Roxy for a 29th annual edition

Posted on May 30, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What are they up to, the next generation of artists, the up-and-comers? Your chance to find out is close at hand. Nextfest, Edmonton’s multi-disciplinary festival of emerging arts, returns today to take over Theatre Network’s Roxy and environs for a 29th annual edition.

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“New” is the operative word at the 11-day festivities, which showcase — on stages, on walls, on screens, at performance “niteclubs,” in the park across the street — the work and the work-in-progress of 500-plus emerging artists. They create across the frontiers in theatre, visual art, dance, music, digital arts, film….  Ah, and original combinations of any or all of the above.

Nextfest director Ellen Chorley.

“Cool new stuff!” is the flag under which festival director Ellen Chorley flies. A multi-disciplinary artist herself who claims Nextfest as her own artistic birthplace in her high school years, the effervescent Chorley, who talks with built-in exclamation marks, explains that “emerging” isn’t a matter of chronological age; “it’s being in the first 10 years of your career.”

“Cool new stuff” in theatre, always bountiful at Nextfest, has expanded in Nextfest 2024. There are 15 mainstage plays, in addition to an assortment of play readings and ‘progress showings’. And there’s a new performance venue at the Roxy.

“A really strong year of applications” was the inspiration for adding a new theatre space to the Roxy’s Nancy Power and the Lorne Cardinal theatres, Chorley says. Nextfest has turned Theatre Network’s airy second-floor rehearsal hall into a little black box theatre. “It’s an intimate space, a big/little stage, with 30 seats and four mainstage one-person shows.

Where Foxes Lie by Jezec Sanders, Nextfest 2024. Graphic supplied.

It’s a high-contrast quartet, as she describes. The Ether Journey, by and starring Asia Weinkauf-Bowman, is storytelling, “an exploration of the importance of dreams and myths” as billed. Sophie May Healey’s Hysteria’s House is “a wild clown character piece,” says Chorley appreciatively.  Maiden Voyage, written and directed by Maigan Van Der Giessen is an experimental performance piece woven from improvised music and spoken word poetry. Chorley describes Jezec Sanders’ Where Foxes Lie intriguingly as “a dark kind-of-thriller.”

The number of applications for a theatre berth at the festival was the usual 100 or so, she says. This year Chorley led a Nextfest foray into the theatre season, October to December, called “My First Play,” a program designed to attract artists of diverse backgrounds — film, music, acting — who were interested in trying their hand at playwriting. And several pieces in Nextfest’s mainstage theatre lineup emerged from the work of 22 participants, much to Chorley’s delight. Ride Like Hell, as one example, is by Aldynne Belmont, a filmmaker by background. It’s a cross-country odyssey billed as “an irreverent riff on pulp literature and sapphic cinema,” that “just blew us away; we all at there laughing!”says Chorley.

This year Nextfest held a Playwrights Weekend in February, along with a workshop on producing theatre. Nextfest tries to follow artists through stages of development, from reading to “progress showing” to full production. And at Chorley’s instigation, Nextfest has been making a point of extending its reach into other festivals. The ambitious folk-rock musical What Was Is All and Madi May’s She/They have appeared at the Fringe in Nextfest productions. This summer Nextfest will produce Grace Fitzgerald’s Carter And The Train at the Fringe.

The Nextfest lineup in the Lorne Cardinal Theatre, the Roxy’s downstairs black box, includes plays by Christina Hollingworth (Meet Me At The Riverside), Ali Muhammad Khowaja (Pepperoni and Cheese), Megan Sweet (The S.P.O.T.T.), and Tori Kibblewhite (Your Heart Is Gushing Lavender).

Ms. Pat’s Kitchen by Jameela McNeil, Nextfest 2024. Graphic supplied.

And in the Nancy Power, you’ll find Grace Fitzgerald’s Carter and the Train, Jameela J. McNeil’s Ms. Pat’s Kitchen, Aldynne Belmont’s Ride Like Hell, Elyse Roszell’s The Hand That Feeds, and What Am I Looking At?!. The latter, by Stretcher Hymen and Hunny Moon, takes backstage at a drag show.

Nextfest’s popular curated performance/immersion nite clubs return on the weekends, starting with The SINsational Cabaret Friday, which finds its theme in the seven deadly sins, followed by the Pride Nite Club Saturday. The following weekend includes the annual Smut Nite Club (a perennial hot ticket), and for the first time there’s an all-ages event, The Kids Are All Right, a matinee nite club. As the Nextfest mantra goes, “come for the art, stay for the party.”

There’s free stuff, too. The first-come first-served workshops, for example, 15 in number and free for anyone intrigued, address a variety of subjects, including those that lean into practicality, “the business of the arts,” as Chorley says. You don’t have to be an artist to find out about clowns and clowning in a workshop led by star clown Christine Lesiak. Or Usha Gupta’s “Kathak: North Indian Classical Dance.” Or Katie Cutting’s “That’s The Spirit: How To Make A Movie Without Funding.” Chorley herself leads “Theatre Producing For Beginners.” And there’s even a one-on-one Nextfest mentorship program that pairs you with an arts professional.

Meanwhile, there’s tonight’s opening night ceremonies, which include performances, previews, music, a dance party DJ’ed by Moody Lion, and pizza. “Come and party with us,” says Chorley. “And celebrate new artists and new art in Edmonton.”

Let the Next-ing begin.

Nextfest 2024 runs through June 9 at Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre (10708 124 St.) and environs. Full schedule and tickets: nextfest.ca.

 

 

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Get your festival on (and other theatre, too) this week

Posted on May 29, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

The LIbravian, Brú Theatre. International Children’s Festival of the Arts.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a three-festival week in this theatre town (in addition to a much anticipated theatre revival and an intriguing opera experiment).The festive season is here, and the moment is at hand for you to venture forth and sample widely.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

•Nextfest, Edmonton’s innovative multi-disciplinary emerging arts festival, returns to Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre Thursday for 11 days, with a 29th annual edition that embraces 500-plus artists and the chance to see what’s new with the next generation — in theatre, dance, music, film, digital creation, visual art, and experiments in amalgamating all of the above. Stay tuned for a 12thnight survey with festival director Ellen Chorley, and interviews with some of the Nextfest playwrights. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca or at the door.

•At the Citadel, the annual Collider Festival returns Saturday and Sunday to celebrate new play development — and especially scripts scaled especially to find a home on the country’s largest stages. Festival director Mieko Ouchi has assembled a high-contrast selection of four new works-in-progress from the Citadel Playwright’s Lab which has focused on adaptations this year. And the first act of each will get a (free) reading at the festival.

Saturday night’s offerings pair Nowhere With You: A Joel Plackett Musical Experience by James Odin Wade with Sue Goberdhan’s The B-Team. The former, in which the protagonist returns to his home town to reassess his life, is inspired by music. The latter is, as billed, “a contemporary twist on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic The Scarlet Letter.

playwright Collin Doyle

Sunday night’s pair of readings, co-presented by Script Salon, include Katherine Koller’s adaptation of the Jane Austen novel Persuasion and Collin Doyle’s The Riverside Seniors Village Theatrical Society Presents: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

And the weekend includes workshops. Saturday’s is “Adaptation For Large Spaces,” led by playwright Belinda Cornish, whose own adaptation of the Todd Babiak novel The Garneau Block premiered on the Citadel mainstage in 2021. Sunday’s workshop, with musical theatre veterans Kate Ryan and Steven Greenfield, is “Building A Musical.”

Full schedule and tickets for the workshops: citadeltheatre.com.

•The world is crazy, unstable, unpredictable. But there is reassurance, my anxious friends:  just up the road in St. Albert, the young at heart will find that the Kids Fest, the venerable International Children’s Festival of the Arts now in its 40s, has returned to the banks of the mighty Sturgeon Thursday through Sunday.

The seven mainstage productions, from across the country, the U.S. and Ireland, include Grimmz, a hiphop uptake on Grimm stars like Cinderella from American touring duo Experiential Theatre, The Libravian (from Ireland’s Brú Theatre, based in Galway), and Dino-Light from New Orleans’ Lightwire Theatre.

As always at the Kids Fest, the startlingly accomplished St. Albert Children’s Theatre is doing a show: the “junior version of Polkadots: The Cool Kids Musical, inspired by The Little Rock 9, a group of courageous Black kids in the ‘50s who stood up against segregationist attempts to bar them from entering an Arkansas high school. You can meet three Indigenous puppets in The Bighetty & Bighetty Puppet Show, the creation of artists from Pukatawagen, Manitoba. And there’s more — outdoor performances, activities both ticketed and free, and an all-pervasive festive vibe.

The full Kids Fest schedule and tickets: tickets.stalbert.ca.

Oscar Derkx and Beth Graham in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

•The Teatro Live! season continues Friday with a revival of Stewart Lemoine’s funny,  delicately nuanced 2009 comedy The Oculist’s Holiday, which takes its characters, and us, to Switzerland and the shores of Lake Geneva in Lausanne  in 1931. The all-star Teatro cast of Belinda Cornish’s production is led by Beth Graham as a Canadian teacher on holiday, with Oscar Derkx, Rachel Bowron, Mathew Hulshof, and Cathy Derkach. Stay tuned for a 12thnight interview with the director, a playwright and actor of note herself. The Oculist’s Holiday runs on the Varscona stage (10329 83 Ave.) through June 16. Tickets: teatroq.com.

Das Rheingold, Edmonton Opera. Photo by Nanc Price.

•Edmonton Opera’s unconventional “chamber” version of Das Rheingold, the opening opera of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, takes a truly wild story of fractious gods, Rhine maidens, giants, a lecherous dwarf, and its huge emotional landscape to a place it’s never been before: “a hotel in Edmonton 1964.” It’s fascinating to see the imaginative vision and stagecraft of the celebrated theatre/opera director Peter Hinton-Davis unleashes on this.  And it happens out in the open on a thrust stage, the Citadel’s 685-seat Maclab Theatre, surrounded by the audience.

The adaptation by Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick finds a way to reduce the orchestral forces from 85 to a lean mean 18. Wotan (Neil Craighead) is asleep and dreaming of conducting his own production of Das Rheingold. In place of the magisterial king of the gods figure, here he’s a rumpled figure who seems to wake up with a killer headache when the Rhine maidens start singing and his wife arrives, on his case. And he’s taken aback (no wonder) by the sheer force of the gold thief Alberich in Dion Mazerolle’s knock-out performance. Andy Moro’s stunning design and lighting are indispensable dramatic participants in the Wagnerian cosmology, from the bottom of the Rhine to the celestial sphere, of this highly theatrical production, which moves through the whole joint and among us, up and down staircases and through the aisles.

Das Rheingold continues Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday at the Citadel’s Maclab Theatre. Tickets: edmontonopera.com.

•AND it’s the last weekend for Workshop West’s lovely production of Conni Massing’s Dead Letter, an intricately layered comedy that darkens into a murder mystery and beyond, into more existential mysteries. Tickets: workshopwest.org. Check out the 12thnight review here, and an interview with the engaging playwright here.

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Hints, signs, omens of spring: theatre possibilities this weekend

Posted on May 24, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Lora Brovold in Dead Letter, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the terrific new Conni Massing play Dead Letter, premiering at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre we meet a woman who’s desperate for meaning, obsessed by the unaccountable, hyper-alert to any small sign from the universe that might connects the random dots of our existence. The play is funny and dark, and it wraps itself around a murder mystery with clues and heartbreak. It’s a lot for a play and a trio of top-flight actors (Lora Brovold, Collin Doyle, Maralyn Ryan) to do, and they all rise wonderfully to the occasion. You can read the 12thnight review here, and an interview with the playwright here. Dead Letter continues its run at the Gateway Theatre through June 2. Tickets: workshopwest.org.

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•And speaking as we are of omens and signs, the colour green has officially returned to the world, ergo it’s the moment for Sprouts. As the name hints, Concrete Theatre’s annual event is all about theatrical seedlings. Sprouts plants new and original playlets, from a writers of diverse backgrounds, for kids and their families. And over the years more than a few of them have grown into full-length plays for kids that tour and join the Canadian canon.

Sprouts 2024, Concrete Theatre.

This year’s 22nd spring edition happens Saturday at the Westbury Theatre (12:30 and 2:30 p.m.), with a trio of theatre sprouts. And you and your young companions (0 to 12, as billed) can see them all in about an hour.

What’s Sprout-ing? Two are by theatre artists Edmonton audiences have known so far mainly ias actors. Helen Belay’s The Dog and The Donkey That Brays chronicles the quest of the title companions who set forth in search of independence, “who must learn to think before they act and how to use their voice.” The mismatched title characters of Alex Ariate’s The Monkey and the Turtle, based on a classic Filipino fable, are also on a journey of discovery — through a forest in search of food. Solidarity is required.

The third of the Sprouts trio is Lucy, Alison Neuman’s story of a disabled girl passionate about dance. Her adventure is to join live dance classes, and challenge the commonplaces about what dancers look like and how they move. The Sprouts cast directed by Jenna Rodgers includes Julie Andrew, Mohamed Ahmed, and Chelo Ledesma.

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

MASKS!, Rising Sun Theatre. Photo supplied.

•It’s the 20th anniversary of Rising Sun Theatre, devoted to opening the doors of theatre to cognitively disabled people, and providing opportunities for them to practice the art of theatre. Their new show MASKS!, collectively created by the cast under the mentorship of professional theatre artists, focuses on the meaning and magic of the masks, how and why we wear them in life, and what’s underneath.

Most of the masks in the show, says director Becca Barrington, were created by the cast “to represent a character they wanted to explore…. The stories and scenes in the play were developed entirely by the group inspired by their mask characters — who they are, how they move, and what adventures they get up to.”

“We also have some scenes that explore how we use masks and movement in our daily lives to challenge and support our feelings. For example, how to move our mask from sad to happy, or how we can change a frustrated/chaotic mask to something even more powerful… a calm mask.”

MASKS! runs at the Nina Haggerty Centre (9225 118 Ave.) Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3:30 p.m.  Tickets: eventbrite.ca

cast of Grease, Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux

•If You’re The One That I Want doesn’t stick in your brain when you see that song title written out in black and white, consider a sensory deprivation tank getaway for your holiday this summer. Continuing at the Mayfield through June 16, Kate Ryan’s big-cast high-spirited production of Grease, choreographed by Julio Fuentes, adds some urban grit to the nostalgia for our collective alma mater Rydell High. Fun fun fun. The 12thnight review is here. Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca. 

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Your invitation into a world of dreams: Peter Hinton-Davis directs a chamber version of Das Rheingold at Edmonton Opera

Posted on May 23, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Peter Hinton-Davis, director of Das Rheingold, Edmonton Opera. Photo by Adanya Dunn.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The dream is as epic as the world, and as small as … a ring.

Das Rheingold, the opening gambit in Richard Wagner’s monumental four-opera Ring Cycle, is the grand finale of Edmonton Opera’s 60th anniversary season. And it’s the first time the company has ever undertaken it, with plans to unroll the whole cycle opera by opera in subsequent seasons.

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In honour of the occasion, they’ve enlisted one of the country’s most distinguished theatre and opera directors, to bring it to the stage in a highly unconventional downsized “chamber version” we’ll see up close. That theatre thrust stage itself is an unusual destination for the company, the Citadel’s 685-seat Maclab house — instead of Edmonton Opera’s usual Size Large 2,500-seat home at the Jubilee Auditorium — starting Tuesday. And the forces in the adaptation by Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick which premiered at Birmingham Opera in 1990, are a dramatic re-think of size, too: 12 singers with an orchestra of 18 (instead of the usual 85).

The job of conductor Simon Rivard, says director Peter Hinton-Davis, “is everything that happens when (the cast) are singing; my job is everything that’s happening when they’re not singing.”

Wagner wrote his monumental Ring Cycle, a project of some 35 years in the creation, in reverse order with Das Rheingold, the opener, last, as Peter Hinton-Davis explains. What Wagner called “the preliminary evening” launches a wildly dramatic multi-generational story that begins with a shaft of sunlight on gold at the bottom of the Rhine River — and the fashioning of that Rhine gold into a magic ring that will give the possessor the power to rule the world, if (a gigantic caveat) they renounce love.

Das Rheingold plunges us into a outsized world of river nymphs, giants, dwarfs, gods and demi-gods, some of it co-opted from Norse mythology, some of it original. Jealousy, greed, the lust for power, treachery, betrayal … the curse of the ring: there is nothing meagre about the imaginative and emotional scale of Das Rheingold. “Big strokes!” declares Hinton-Davis, a playwright himself, whose startlingly broad resumé encompasses innovative contemporary versions of the classics and new Canadian work (including a major commitment to Indigenous theatre). “And yet, what is so crazy, it’s so precise, so accurate in the way people behave….” Unexpectedly, moment to moment, “there’s a precise psychological realism to it.”

The doom-laden entry of the gods into Valhalla at the end of Das Rheingold means eternal sanctuary, yes, but also their own death. As Hinton-Davis says, “they have knowledge of what they stand to gain at the end of the opera, and what they stand to lose…. What are the aspirations of the gods and what are the moral costs and consequences?” The quintessence of the cursed ring is the trade-off between power and love, the tension between the love of power, and the power of love. “All the characters lose hugely in this pursuit of power.”

It was that question, “big ideas, the costs of getting something achieved, the moral lines and ‘is it worth it?’” that drew him to Das Rheingold, says the Stratford-based Hinton-Davis, last in Edmonton to direct a stunning production this past season of Makram Ayache’s provocative epic The Hooves Belonged To The Deer. “It made me think so much about what we do as artists, the sacrifices, the price to be paid.”

Legend has it that The Ring came to Wagner, a multi-disciplinary artist if ever there was one, in a dream. And Hinton-Davis has been thinking, he says, of the dream of the founders of Edmonton Opera six decades ago. “What does it take to take to do something bigger than ourselves?”

Das Rheingold, stage rendering, designer: Andy Moro. Edmonton Opera. Photo by Adanya Dunn.

In Hinton-Davis’s conception, Wotan, the king of the gods, “is a conductor who has a dream of doing the Ring; he’s haunted by it.” His production takes place in a hotel room, “a messy dishevelled hotel room” where in the opening scene Wotan is sleeping in a bed surrounded by scores and take-out containers. “The opera itself is a dream of what he wants to create.” And Wotan has dreams within dreams.

The scope of the Ring, as is nothing less than a mythology, but the story does happens on the human, and even the domestic, plane, too — husbands and wives, lovers and daughters, the dwarf Alberich who steals the gold and instigates the whole multi-opera narrative. With Das Rheingold “I was trying to find a container for it that people could find relatable, rather than a hillside, or a mountain top, or an abstract location,” says Hinton-Davis. “The dream-like structures are inherent in the way the opera is built…. You’re invited into a world of dreams and dream images.”

The idea of a hotel room — “transient, nowhere and everywhere at the same time” — is an original, and radical, departure from the international archive of Ring Cycles that set about capturing the grandeur of the music in massive designs, like the groundbreaking technology created by Robert Lepage for the Metropolitan Opera in 2012, or the giant steel mills of the controversial Industrial Revolution Ring created by Patrice Chéreau for the Bayreuth Festival in the ‘70s.

The relationship between theatre and opera juggles aspects of scale, to be sure. “It’s the dream of many theatre actors to do aa show at the Citadel, the big house,” laughs Hinton-Davis. “For opera singers, the Maclab is intimate, chamber!” He hears “it’s so small” in wonder from his cast at every rehearsal.

The Maclab’s thrust stage, around which the audience wraps, “is a wild departure and experiment for opera,” which has traditionally made its home as an art form on huge proscenium (framed) stages, with a clear separation from the audience.  For one thing, there’s no pit for the orchestra. “And the singers are so accustomed to watching the maestro down centre stage.” So attending to multiple directions, and playing diagonals, all part of stagecraft on a thrust stage, “are all very new to them.”

The spirit of the Birmingham reduction is accessibility. Dove and Vick “thought it a shame that Wagner was not available to so many opera companies” for budgetary reasons. A few characters are cut. “But we’re very accustomed to this in theatre…. It’s rare for someone do an uncut version of a Shakespeare play, for example,” as Hinton-Davis points out. “My goal is to make ‘chamber’ not mean small but ‘intimate’. So the audience gets close to it; it’s not overwhelmed by tons of scenery and pageantry…. It’s a rare opportunity to get into the heads of the characters.”

“People think of Wagner and they think of women with horns and breastplates. And very loud singing,” grins Hinton-Davis. Das Rheingold is “a more lyrical opera….” And the philosophical and psychological nuances are profound: “this is Wagner just before Freud and Nietzsche.”

Wagner himself was an innovator, musically, operatically, theatrically, dramatically; “he even devised theatres for his operas to be performed in,” as Hinton-Davis notes. He muses on the adoption of Wagner (who did have a personal dark side of anti-semitic views) in the 20th century as a poster artist by the Third Reich. “If anything, the Ring Cycle is such a cautionary tale about the abuses of power.” The goddess Erde appears with a repeat warning for Wotan against taking the ring and succumbing to the seduction of power. “‘Love is everything’,” she tells him. “So haunting, so wild, such an intimate moment…. What is the world we want to live in? What are its values? What are the costs of how we treat the environment? What will become of us?”

Hinton-Davis, whose own director’s archive includes many seasons at the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, as well as the artistic directorship of the National Arts Centre’s English theatre, will direct Shaw’s Major Barbara next season at the Shaw Festival. And he was intrigued to find that in the playwright’s 1905 preface, GBS pairs Wagner and Ibsen as theatre’s greatest innovators, “who changed the way we think about theatre.”

A companion surprise in synchronicity was completely inadvertent. On a break from total Wagner immersion, in his own Edmonton hotel room he stumbled on a random episode of the ’60s TV series, in which Kaye Ballard and Eve Arden, those kooky pop culture stars, are singing that catchy Ride of the Valkyries.

“The music is rarely decorative and never unmotivated,” Hinton-Davis has found in rehearsal. “And Wagner writes very human gods.”

Das Rheingold

Edmonton Opera, in partnership with the Citadel’s Heart and Hub Program

Adapted by: Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick

Directed by: Peter Hinton-Davis

Conducted by: Simon Rivard

Starring: Neil Craighead, Roger Honeywell, Dion Mazerolle, Catherine Daniel, Sydney Frodsham, Jim Yu, Vartan Gabrielian, Giles Tomkins, Jaclyn Grossman, Mariya Krywaniuk, Madison Montambault, Renee Fajardo

Where: Citadel Maclab Theatre

Running: Tuesday through June 1

Tickets: edmontonopera.com

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