Classic comedy: a summertime weekend in Edmonton theatre

Posted on July 13, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Belinda Cornish and Josh Meredith in Private Lives, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Vanessa Leticia Jetté and Daniela Vlaskalic in The Play That Goes Wrong, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Hey, Edmonton, look what’s waiting for you onstage this weekend. Something about summer inspires our theatre artists to tangle with the classics, reimagine them, put them in new shapes: A classic playwright (you guessed, Shakespeare), in camping mode in an outdoor community hockey rink. A  perfectly contoured Jazz Age comedy. A classic ‘20s murder mystery (dismantled by earnest thesps). Chekhov, but through a playful absurdist lens. Mythology tickled and bent by a selection of local playwrights.

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•The season finale at Teatro Live!, opening tonight on the Varscona stage, is Noel Coward’s witty, sparkling 1930 anti-romantic romantic comedy Private Lives — as dry and fizzy as the best champagne. For the occasion, and Private Lives is always an occasion, Teatro has borrowed director Max Rubin from Theatre Yes, where he’s the co-artistic director. His production, which runs through July 28, stars Belinda Cornish and Josh Meredith, as Amanda and Elyot, a couple who have uncoupled, then find themselves in an inflammatory situation — on their honeymoons with new spouses (Garett Ross and Priya Narine), in adjacent hotel rooms on the French Riviera. It runs through July 28 (stay tuned for a 12thnight review soon). Tickets: teatroq.com.

•In The Play That Goes Wrong, at the Citadel through Aug. 4, the earnest amateur thespians of the Cornley Dramatic Society are putting on an elaborate 1920s-style murder mystery. What could possibly go wrong? The comedy, a losing race against chaos that is still packing houses in London and New York, is by the cheeky insurrectionists of the English company Mischief (Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, Henry Shields) who brought us Peter Pan Goes Wrong a season ago. Dennis Garnhum, a former artistic director of Theatre Calgary and the Grand Theatre in London, Ont., directs the production, a partnership between the Citadel, Theatre Calgary, and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.

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

•It’s the final weekend of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, this year in exile — like the magus at the centre of The Tempest — from their home in Hawrelak Park. They’ve landed in a series of community outdoor hockey rinks (currently the Sherbrooke Community League). Dave Horak’s production of the strange and wonderful late-period romance leans into the comedy instead of the play’s darker tones. Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com. Have a peek at the 12thnight interview with star Nadien Chu, as Prospera, and the 12thnight review.

•At the 2024 Thousand Faces Festival, five Edmonton playwrights of very different stripe, are inspired by mythology in their five new plays. The festival’s “New Mythic Works Series” that runs Saturday and Sunday (2 p.m.) at the Alberta Avenue Community Centre (9210 118 Ave.). The lineup includes Christine Lesiak’s Rebel Rebel, Gavin Bradley’s SeanChai, Calla Wright’s Tiresias, Turning, Sophie May Healey’s Issun Boshi, The Inch-High Samurai, and Bailey Bieganek’s Hero and Leah. Tickets: eventbrite.ca

•At Walterdale, Edmonton’s venerable community theatre, you’ll find a kooky but genial Chekhovian mash-up in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, Christopher Durang’s  Tony Award-winning comedy of middle-aged regret and disappointment and under-achievement. Crammed with every kind of Chekhov allusion, it’s kind of an homage to, and kind of a take-down of, the storied wistfulness built into the sacred canon. Lauren Tamke’s production runs July 10 to 20. Tickets: walterdaletheatre.com.

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Fast and furious: the righteous frustration of Ashleigh Hicks’ characters in Brick Shithouse, at Found Fest 2024

Posted on July 2, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Brick Shithouse, fenceless theatre, Found Festival 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The largest production in the Found Festival’s 13-year history of unexpected encounters with art opens this week in a place you might not even know about yet.

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As in most of Found’s surprises, that place is not a theatre. The Tesserae Factory, a vast west end warehouse, is where seven struggling 20-somethings, “best friends/ worst enemies,” are secretly, illicitly, live-streaming their fight club, hiding behind the porous barricade of anonymity (and a pay wall) in Ashleigh Hicks’ Brick Shithouse. It is, declares the playwright, “a space that lends itself really beautifully to the stylistic conceit of the show… a dream come true.”

The vision they share with director (Sarah J Culkin), fuelled by the style of cinéma vérité, is “everything happening all at once, naturalism cranked up to 11… simultaneous conversations where you pick up bits and pieces depending on where you sit, which character you’re choosing to pay attention to, which conversation you choose to follow.”

“You’re actively eavesdropping,” Hicks say of a space that contains “places where characters can hide and have privacy from each other, too….” Which is a way of saying that your Brick Shithouse will be different than everyone else’s Brick Shithouse, depending on where you sit and whom you choose to listen to. As Hicks points out, you’ll have something to talk about with the person who sat five chairs away from you, but made different choices.

The play had a work-in-progress debut at Found last year when Hicks was the festival’s Fresh Air artist-in-residence. The inspiration, though, goes back nine years to a now-unrecognizable debut draft — “the sloppiest first draft you’ve ever seen!” they insist. Director Culkin, Hicks’s friend and theatre school classmate, “really latched onto it. She saw something special in it I definitely couldn’t see.”

“When I wrote that first draft nine years ago I was wanting it to be site-specific show, outside a traditional theatre venue. It’s been in the bones of the text since the beginning,” Hicks says. And they got their wish.

Nine years of life (and theatre) have left their mark on the play, says Hicks, who wrote the first draft at 20 and is now 29, around the age of the characters, and heading like them into the 30s. They remember that younger self who “wrote from a place of anger, and not knowing where to put it. I was 20 years old, up to my armpits in theatre school — before the #MeToo movement, before intimacy directors, before conflict de-escalation. I was working a crappy part-time retail job and still couldn’t afford to move out of my parents’ place….”

“I was so angry. I was getting older, becoming an adult,” and so many socio-cultural promises were vanishing into the ether: “You go to college, you get a good job, you buy a house.…”

So, in its first incarnations, Brick Shithouse was “a very angry show,” says Hicks. “What’s developed is that it’s about so much more than that now.” What director Culkin and her team of actors and designers have done, they think, is “infuse so much joy into the play while still holding space for that anger, that righteous frustration…. They’ve added so much to the storytelling; I’ve really felt the honour of trying to be better at my job to be worthy of the immense effort this team is putting in…. It’s remarkable and humbling.”

Brick Shithouse, fenceless theatre, Found Festival 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang

A diverse cast and design team led by Even Gilchrist have brought perspectives on “what it’s like being working-class and queer in Alberta, what it’s like being a person of colour…. It feels charged in a way that’s productive, as opposed to reductive.”   

“You’re heading into your 30s. You’re out of school. Half  your friends are still living at home, working part-time jobs at West Edmonton Mall, half are married with kids…. Not that the 30s are old, gawd, I hope not! But it’s a tumultuous time: this is when you turn around … and you’re starting to feel that this is what the rest of my  life is going to look like. All the characters are at an age where they’re feeling a bit like life is leaving them behind.”

The people of Brick Shithouse, as Hicks describes, aren’t strangers. “They have some sort of history with each other — childhood friendships in all the complexities and toxicities that come with that. Some are lovers, part or present; two are soon to be step-sisters.…”

What you’ll be overhearing at the Tesserae Factory is a story about the dreams and disappointments of “working-class young people in Alberta,” says the playwright. “Seven people looking at the economy and the state of the world… They’ve started live-streaming their fight club behind a pay wall, to help make rent in the freakiin’ housing crisis. You need a whole swack of jobs to make ends meet these days.”

The cast of Ashleigh Hicks’s Brick Shithouse, Found Festival 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang

They’re doing it anonymously, “but that anonymity is always at risk of being compromised…. Their ‘loyal audience’ starts making requests that their fights take a more explicit turn,” as Hicks describes. And the questions they have to grapple with, individually and as a group start multiplying: “how far is too far? What are your boundaries? What am I willing to do for 50 bucks? 100 bucks? 1,000 bucks? How much can I trust these people in front of me? how much can I trust people on the other side of the computer screen?”

“These things really change when there’s money on the table.”

Hicks, who has a drama degree from the U of A, has always been a writer. At age three, they remember knowing “I was going to be a writer. Forever (laughter). I’m nothing if not stubborn.” They realized pretty quickly that to arrive at the “emotional and psychological stamina you need to be an actor” would take a lot of work.

They’ve explored clowning, at the Manitoulin Conservatory run by John Turner of Mump and Smoot. And that’s been “hugely influential to me as a writer,” says the Cape Breton-born Hicks. “Most of my shows till now lean into style and away from naturalism.” Mine, for example, developed for last year’s RISER Edmonton, “had poetic moments, heightened dialogue, choral narration,” inspired by the Greeks.

In its heightened naturalism, Brick Shithouse is something of a departure, they agree, “and also a natural progression…. Everyone is talking like a real person 100 per cent of the time.”

And it’s the particular gift of director Culkin, Hicks thinks, that the plays issues of “the private and the exposed, sexuality, shame and pride are connected to a longer lineage of style.” You’ll see it in the set-up and lighting, too, of Brianne Jang’s promotion shots, which reference the paintings of Caravaggio.

“You’re watching the characters livestream, and when the camera is off, you’re still there.” There’s an exciting kind of voyeurism in that.

PREVIEW

Found Festival 2024

Brick Shithouse

Theatre: fenceless theatre

Created by: Ashleigh Hicks

Directed by: Sarah J Culkin

Starring: Mohamed Ahmed, Geoffrey Simon Brown, Alexandra Dawkins, Sophie May Healey, Jasmine Hopfe, Moses Kouyaté, Gabriel Richardson

Where: Tesserae Factory, 11210 143 St.

Running: Friday through July 14

Tickets: commongroundarts.ca

   

  

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Nostalgia at the lake: On Golden Pond at the Mayfield, a review

Posted on July 1, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Glenn Nelson and Maralyn Ryan in On Golden Pond, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“How does it feel to turn eighty?” a 15-year-old kid demands of Norman Thayer, the curmudgeonly retired English prof/ octogenarian wiseacre in On Golden Pond. “Twice as bad as turning 40,” he says without missing a beat.

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Age is a subject that comes up constantly in On Golden Pond, along with the passing of the years, the shrinking of the future and its ceding to the past, mortality. Ernest Thompson’s sentimental, lovably durable 1979 family comedy/drama, even better known for the 1982 film starring Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, is a familiar occupant of stages everywhere — including the Mayfield where it’s now ensconced for the first time in decades. And it’s as well-worn, overstuffed, and rustic as the cottage at the lake where Norman and Ethel, his wife of half a century, have retreated for the last 48 summers.

This year that annual summer idyll feels somehow different, thinks Ethel. Norman, the play’s bulwark against the sentimental, is as irascible than ever. But there are more references to the infirmities of age, including a short-term memory that’s fraying a bit around the edges. Mirrors, he says, are useful so he can check to make sure he isn’t fading. Books should be short, “something I can finish before I’m finished myself.”

The arrival of their estranged, perpetually aggrieved 40-something daughter Chelsea who hasn’t visited in years, her latest boyfriend Bill, and Bill’s cocky, disaffected 15-year-old son Billy, is the catalyst for such drama as there is in the play. The lovebirds are dumping Billy at the cottage for the summer while they go to Europe. Will the intergenerational friction resolve itself into a golden glow in the Thayers’ sunset years? Hmm. Let your imagination run riot.

The Mayfield production, directed expertly by Kate Ryan and led by Glenn Nelson as Norman and Maralyn Ryan as Ethel, both excellent as a vintage married couple, is what happens when you unleash a batch (a wealth? a flight?) of deluxe actors and a top-drawer creative team on a play that’s pretty thin, and in places downright threadbare. A play that depends, more than it should have to, on their lustre.

Ryan’s cast reassembles the trio of actors, Lora Brovold, Collin Doyle, and Maralyn Ryan, who were memorable in Workshop West’s premiere of Conni Massing’s Dead Letter last month. As Chelsea, who’s always been at loggerheads with Norman (she never calls him Dad), Brovold has the kind of warmth about her that makes you forget that the reason for the estrangement — this is not a spoiler alert —  is that Norman would have preferred a boy (what?) who’d have been a swimming champ (what?). The actor even negotiates a clunky scene, inserted late in the play, where Chelsea lists all the things that were wrong with her childhood (what?) by way of explaining things, in retrospect. Her mother wisely tells her to grow up. The inevitable rapprochement scene is a true test of actorly mettle, and Brovold is up for it.

Doyle plays the mail delivery person Charlie, notable for his cheery laugh and his hokey colloquialisms (“holy mackinolli” which I’m sure I’ve spelled wrong), who, touchingly, has held onto his childhood crush on Chelsea, she of the rotten childhood. And to this collection of characters, the play adds Ian Leung, first-rate in a tiny, thankless role as the dentist boyfriend Bill who’s the victim of Norman’s relentless “comic” badgering. Ah, and a notable performance by the charismatic young actor Will Brisbin as the teenage Billy.

Glenn Nelson and Will Brisbin in On Golden Pond, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The latter negotiates scenes of dated badinage with a kind of ironic aplomb, and the relationship that develops between Billy and Norman, beneficial to both, is one of the delights of the evening. You find yourself wishing the play let them go fishing together more often.

To return to the leads, Nelson’s performance finds the edgy combination of quick wit, acid, and fear that drive Norman through long scenes of hanging out at the lake. And he has a convincing partnership with Esther, a lovely performance from Maralyn Ryan as the attentive but increasingly exasperated wife, who’s finding herself supervising the old coot more and more. She’s the straight man, so to speak, to the comedy that is Norman. Both are entirely watchable and winsome, even when almost nothing is happening.

In short, director Ryan has the huge plus of luxury casting for this production of On Golden Pond. And the atmospheric setting positively exudes nostalgia thanks to Daniel vanHeyst’s stunning wood-ribbed lakeside cottage set, Trent Crosby’s lighting that evokes time passing better than the script does, and Brian Raine’s sound design.

Like the harvest gold velour couch that’s gathering dust at your own cottage, the springs have poked through this play. Still, that’s no reason not to go to the lake and play Monopoly and listen to the loons call. It’s fun to see what fine actors, direction, and design can do with a chestnut.

REVIEW

On Golden Pond

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Written by: Ernest Thompson

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Glenn Nelson, Maralyn Ryan, Lora Brovold, Collin Doyle, Ian Leung, Will Brisbin

Running: through July 28

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca   

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Finding Found, the festival of unexpected encounters with art and artists

Posted on June 30, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

The cast of Ashleigh Hicks’s Brick Shithouse, Found Festival 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“What’s going on here?”

There’s a question that tickles the perpetrators of the Found Festival, devoted to art (and encounters with artists) in unexpected places.

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For a dozen Julys, no alley or park, no warehouse, or ravine, or sidewalk, is safe from the inspirations of the Found experimenters whose bright ideas for shaking up the usual relationship between art and audiences are the festival’s raison d’être. “What are you doing?” is another good Found question, laughs festival director Whittyn Jason.

At the 13th annual edition of Found, with its biggest mainstage lineup yet, you could find yourself sitting around a campfire somewhere in the Mill Creek Revine, for example, hearing ghost stories from 10 writers who are diverse, in every way. Curated and directed by one of them, Philip Hackborn, Madness and Other Ghost Stories is a collection of personal first-hand accounts of being haunted by mental aberrations and dysfunctions.   

Banana Musik, Found Festival 2024. Photo supplied.

You might find yourself at a three-generation gathering of an immigrant family. Banana Musik, by the Regina-based FilipinX artist Kris Alvarez, is, as billed, a memory play, spun from “her immigrant experience and her care for aging parents,” as Jason describes.

At the John Walter Museum Alvarez takes us on a tour of her childhood home, and we actually get to meet Alvarez’s mom and dad. Though they’re not performers, they’re in the show, live. Her father’s original songs from the ‘60s and ‘70s, Banana Musik as he calls them, are in the show. Afterward, we’ve got an invitation to stick around for hot bread and conversation.

Kait Ramsden’s afterbirth, perhaps Found’s most mysteriously  indescribable show, as Brock laughs, occupies Found’s most conventional space, Mile Zero Dance headquarters (9931 78 Ave.). Brock calls afterbirth “beautiful, joyful, weird … a hyper neo-spiritual experience,” if that helps. He watched a 30-second snippet of the piece, “then I spent the evening watching the rest. It’s so mesmerizing.” Jason calls it “a guided meditation.” And hold this thought: “There’s cake and projections.”

Found 2024 even offers an outdoor experience you can’t watch. In Queen Elizabeth Park, The Nature of Us, created by Kevin Jesuino, Cass Bessette, and Jean Louis Bleau, is an unusual way to feel a rapport with the land. It’s “a devised sound installation” as billed, a 30-minute experience of nature with a recorded soundscape that includes a choir and monologues. “You can have the experience ; you can’t see it,” as Jason says.

The usual frontiers between disciplines are erased at Found, as you will glean. And they’re in performance spaces you didn’t anticipate. You can find Found mostly in assorted locations, unexpected nooks and crannies in Old Strathcona. But this year, the festival has ventured forth to farther-flung locales. The largest show in Found history, with an extended run past the festival (through July 14), Brick Shithouse, happens in the Tesserae Factory, a giant warehouse in the west end near the Telus World of Science (11210 143 St.) where opera and Freewill Shakespeare sets get built.

In Ashleigh Hicks’ play, directed by Sarah J Culkin, seven “best friends/ worst enemies” are anonymously live-streaming their fight club, behind a pay wall. They’re struggling to survive, and they need the money. Are there limits to what they will do to appeal to the invisible audience out there in the digital cosmos? Brock calls Hicks “an incredible, challenging playwright,” and Brick Shithouse (developed in Found’s Fresh Air Artist-in -Residence program of 2023) “fast and furious, gritty and funny.” Stay tuned for a 12thnight post about Hicks and their play, coming soon.

Geoffrey Simon Brown, Finding Four Leaf Clovers. Photo supplied.

In Finding Four Leaf Clovers, a title that sounds metaphorical but isn’t, you could hang out with the actor/ playwright/ director Geoffrey Simon Brown in a field in Strathcona  as he exercises his unusual knack for finding four-leaf clovers. “It’s a magical capacity,” says Jason, bemused. “A little freaky really…. It’s funny, it’s quirky, it’s uniquely Geoff. And uniquely Found.” At each performance Brown will be paired with musical guests, Ghost Cars on Saturday in End of Steel Park, and Bigfin Squid on Sunday in Light Horse Park. You don’t even need a ticket.

At “a secret location in Old Strathcona,” a very Found venue as described that way, actor/playwright Louise Casemore, this year’s Fresh Air Artist-in-Residence, is presenting a workshop of Lucky Charm (it’ll get a full production at Found 2025). And you’ll be attending a séance, which is to say attempting to cross the portal between the here and now and the Great Beyond. Bess, the widow of the late great magician Houdini, presides, in hopes of making contact. Apparently after he died, till she shuffled off this mortal coil herself, Bess conducted séances every Sunday in her house. And this is one of them, your chance to catch a first-hand glimpse of life after death.

Aren’t you curious? Lucky Charm sold out instantly when Found was announced; it’ll take one to get you a ticket. The dramaturgy is by playwright Beth Graham. Casemore’s collaborator is Jake Tkaczyk.

Islands of Utopia, Found Festival 2024. Photo by Dani Torres

The venue for Islands of Utopia: Veden äärellä, performed by Deviani Andrea and Janita Frantsi, is Queen Elizabeth Park Road, and the muse is dance. And it tells the story of two childhood friends in a physically, playful way. You’re invited to play along.

You’ll find a music series at Found, too. And a big Hoedown afterparty. And poetry. For the complete schedule, more show information, and tickets, see commongroundarts.ca.

PREVIEW

Found Festival 2024

Presented by: Common Ground Arts Society

Where: assorted locations in Old Strathcona and beyond

Running: July 4 to 7

Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca

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Storytelling in the theatre: a long weekend on Edmonton stages

Posted on June 29, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Joey Lespérance in Michel(le), Théâtre La Seizième. Photo by Gaëtan Nevincx.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A long weekend in Edmonton: four plays, four stories that demonstrate, in four very different ways, the possibilities of storytelling on a stage, in a theatre.

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•Michel(le), the season finale at L’UniThéâtre, from Vancouver’s Théâtre La Seizième, is the story of two brothers, queer stagestruck siblings bonded in their struggle to be fully themselves in a world of brutal orthodoxies. And it borrows that story from real life, which rattles your ribcage.

In its own vivid way Joey Lespérance’s solo play is, quite literally, a demonstration of the power of theatre . The brother we see before us is the Vancouver actor who wrote the play. Joey’s the one who stood up to the aggressive, pummelling homophobia of a childhood, a family, a bullying father, a working-class neighbourhood in the suburban Quebec of the ‘70s— by escaping, across the country and finding a life in the theatre. The fact that he’s hereThe brother Lespérance conjures, Michel, is also, and at heart, his sister. Michelle found happiness for a time in the showbiz flamboyance of the Montreal drag scene, starting to transition from one body to another more authentic body, dreaming of the life Joey was living in Vancouver.

The closet comes with shackles. Michelle’s tragedy is located in the steel chains of toxic parenting. To regain a mother, she de-transitioned to he. Pronouns are far from incidental in Michel(le). And that terrible retrenchment and self-denial in a world of horrifying violence leads to tragedy. But Michel(le) doesn’t end that way, amazingly. It’s for Michelle’s brother, the actor-turned-playwright, to make her theatre dream come true, in a surreal, flashy but poetic, journey on stage — and beyond the grave.

Regret, grief, anger, and the compelling need to make amends drive Lespérance’s compelling performance. The show itself, which unspools back from the murder into the past, then captures an imagined future, is partly an act of atonement through theatre. And it’s partly a memorable cautionary tale about the repercussions of two kinds of bad parenting.

The theatre curtain that dominates, and divides, the stage in Esther Duquette’s ingenious production, opaque till it’s not, isn’t merely decorative. Sophie Tang’s dramatic, and cunning, lighting is an indispensable participant in the storytelling. It conjures scenes from the mist of the past. Joey and Michelle’s unregenerate bully of a dad, Joe The Bull, appears in outsized shadowplay. Their glamorous mom emerges in a pink glow: “Intoxicating femininity meets toxic masculinity,” as the play says.

The idea and allure of performance is captured by the images, in lights and stagecraft, of the theatre stages, and backstages, where Joey and his bro-sister feel most alive. And the play is a fascinating exploration of the intersection between real life and theatrical speculation. Meet the playwright (and star)  in a 12thnight preview. Michel(le) runs through Saturday at La Cité francophone, 8627 91 St. Tickets: lunitheatre.ca.

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

• The Freewill Shakespeare Festival production of The Tempest has blown into another of its four locations for this weekend’s performances: the Kenilworth Community League outdoor hockey rink. On Tuesday David Horak’s production moves to Lessard through July 7, then finally Sherbrooke after that, July 9 to 14).

The play is one of one of the Bard’s strangest and most elusive. Nadien Chu stars as Prospera, the magician who stage-manages a story on an enchanted island, then renounces her magic. In Horak’s al fresco production, comedy rules over the play’s darker, more mysterious aspects. 12thnight talked to Chu in this preview. Have a peek at the 12thnight review. Tickets: tickets.freewillshakespeare.com.

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

•In the highly theatrical Zulu creation epic happening at Theatre Prospero, the gods, a fractious lot, are arguing about their most successful, most controversial, creation: mankind. In Anthem of Life Part 1, Tololwa Mollel’s adaptation of an epic Zulu poem by Mazisi Kunene, a large-scale colourful story, in which gods, people and animals mingle, gets told in dance, music, a clash of masked figures, a witty contemporary text. Meet Mollel in a 12thnight preview, and read the 12thnight review.

Anthem of Life, Part 1, which launches a planned trilogy, runs through July 6 at the Alberta Avenue Community League (9210 118 Ave.). Tickets: edmontonarts.ca.

•The Mayfield Dinner Theatre revives a perennially popular American comedy, Ernest Thompson’s On Golden Pond, which opened Off-Broadway in 1978, and became a classic movie (starring Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn) in 1981. The all-star cast of Kate Ryan’s production, which runs at the Mayfield through July 28, is headed by Glenn Nelson and Maralyn Ryan as an aging couple negotiating the tribulations of aging and intergenerational estrangement — and resolution. Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca.   

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Lost dreams restored in theatre magic: Michel(le) at L’UniThéâtre

Posted on June 26, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Joey Lespérance in Michel(le), Théâtre La Seizième at L’UniThéâtre. Photo by Gaëtan Nevincx

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Dramatic, tragic, eventful, and very singular.”

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That’s how Joey Lespérance describes the real-life story that inspired his first-ever solo play Michel(le). The L’Unithéâtre season finale opens Thursday at La Cité francophone (in French with English surtitles), after a successful run at Vancouver’s Théâtre La Seizième.

It’s the story of siblings, two queer kids growing up, and up against it together, in a big family in the working-class Quebec of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Joey and Michel both found their solace, and escape, in different, but related, ways — the one as an actor (and a busy one) on the other side of the country, the other in the Montreal drag scene, holding on to the dream of becoming a theatre artist.

And the narrative has an extraordinary arc: It’s the story of a “bro-sister,” a brother who became a sister for two years, and then a brother again. She “de-transitioned after a family event that turned out to be pressure.” And then, in a horrifying (and not un-related) dénouement, Michel(le) was murdered in 2005, “a tragic event that inspired the whole project,” says Lespérance.

“I use the magic of theatre, and I let Michelle live both her dreams.”” says the charismatic perfectly bilingual actor-turned-playwright, last in Edmonton in 2019 to play Pierre Elliott Trudeau in Darrin Hagen’s The Empress and the Prime Minister. Lespérance and L’UniThéâtre’s new artistic director Steve Jodoin have a shared 20-year history, back to shows like Kenneth Brown’s Cowboy Poétré and Porc-Épic.

Michel(le), says Lespérance, “is a gesture of reparation. It’s a love letter. It’s a scream of anger at heteronormative (repression).”

It was a culture “that wouldn’t let us be queer kids,” says Lespérance of the time and place of his background landscape. “We were constantly reminded of what not to be…. I was able to pull through. I was very fortunate; I confronted the male figure, the authority figure, the bully — my dad.” he says.

The show takes us back to the childhood in the Montréal suburbs shared by the siblings, just three years apart and allies in a hostile world. As kids,  “Michel and I did shows all the time, drag comedy…. People thought we were twins. As much as we knew about it we silently knew each other’s queerness; we knew each other. Both artists, both queer.”

“When I met Michelle my sister, it was so comfortable,” Lespérance remembers. “Then he re-surfaced…. Her tragic death happened to me too. It changed me forever.”

For one thing it sent Lespérance “straight to therapy, grief therapy. I didn’t have any point of reference.” Shockingly it took six years for the murder case to come to court. “Then, back to therapy.” And now, “my first solo show I’ve written myself…. I realize how important it is for me to speak my words the way I speak.” And part of that is that “I’m choosing to speak about my queerness,” an act in itself of defiance given the strictures of the working-class family he grew up in.

When a journalist, struck by the play, queried its “raw and harsh language,” he says, “I answered that you’re only hearing what we, as children heard. Harsh enough for an adult, but for a child….. We were bombarded daily,” the kind of verbal torture that leaves scars.

Have things changed in the world from which Lespérance fled as a young man? “Yes,” he considers after a pause, with the cavil “in certain places…. In smaller communities it’s more difficult. We’re not done; we have to be careful.”

This is of course real-life material for a very dark play. But Lespérance assures that “the show ends in something gorgeous, something with sparkle, something that gives life to Michelle’s lost dreams,” both of them, to be the woman she always was inside, and a theatre artist. A team of top-flight artisans assembled for director Esther Duquette’s Théâtre La Seizième production has seen to that, he says. “She’s young, so talented, so connected. A magic touch!” he says of the director, who moved to Montréal two years ago. “I knew she’d make me work hard….”

The story is vividly tough-minded, to say the least. But Duquette emphasized to Lespérance that “we’re here to do a show!” he says. “Absolutely! That’s the most important thing: it’s a show, and you’re gonna laugh along the way.”

“And at the end you’ll feel pure celebratory joy! That I guarantee.”

PREVIEW

Michel(le)

Theatre: Théâtre La Seizième at L’UniThéâtre

Created by and starring: Joey Lespérance

Where: La Cité francophone, 8627 91st Street.

Running: Thursday through Saturday

Tickets: lunitheatre.ca

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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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