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

Posted on June 19, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Grindstone Theatre’s first-ever mainstage subscription season

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The little comedy theatre that never sleeps just got bigger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscription season tickets: grindstonetheatre.ca.

 

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

Posted on June 17, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREVIEW

The Tempest

Theatre: Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Directed by: Dave Horak

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

Running: June 20 to July 14

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

Tickets: tickets.freewillshakespeare.com.

   

  

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

Posted on June 16, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

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

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on June 14, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on June 14, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Deconstruction, Improvaganza 2024, Rapid Fire Theatre.

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on June 13, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREVIEW

Anthem of Life, part 1

Theatre: Theatre Prospero

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

Directed by: Mark Henderson

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

Where: Alberta Avenue Community Centre, 9210 118 Ave.

Running: June 19 through July 6

Tickets: edmontonarts.ca

 

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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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