A glorious score that’s already in your brain: The Sound of Music at the Citadel, a review

Posted on March 14, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Priya Narine (centre) in The Sound of Music, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Sound of Music, now delighting audiences at the Citadel, is at the top of a tiny list of resistance-is-futile musicals whose mere titles dig into the tune retention part of the brain and won’t let go.

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“My heart wants to sing every song it hears,” as Maria’s title song has it. “I know I will hear what I’ve heard before….” Exactly.

The 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, the final collaboration of the most successful musical theatre partnership in history, has an oddball history, to be sure. The story is based on the autobiography of Maria Von Trapp, and the producers originally (what were they thinking?) were keen to include only music that the Von Trapps actually sang in their concerts, with just one song by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The latter pair nixed that, needless to say, and the world continues to sing along.    

Even hardcore cynics who habitually seek out irony in song lyrics are helpless in the face of the glorious score, and The Sound of Music’s distinctive combination of inspirational nuns, adorable kids, a love story, Nazis, and Alps. And to this unique mix has been added the vocal and physical flourishes of the signature 1965 Julie Andrews film that’s indelibly imprinted, right down to the arm gestures, on the collective consciousness.

The Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production directed by Rachel Peake, now the artistic director of the Grand Theatre in London, Ont., is on a lavish scale: a cast of two dozen including alternating casts of Von Trapp kids, and an excellent band of 12. It doesn’t shirk the cultural duty to weave allusions to the movie throughout, in tableaux on the serviceable multi-framed set designed by Lorenzo Savoini, with evocative dawn and dusk lighting by Larry Isacoff and Even Gilchrist. But it’s smartly playful about reanimating the epic storytelling for the stage.

The Sound of Music, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

After the nuns singing devotionals in the abbey (shimmery sound design by Emily C. Porter), we meet the wayward, free-spirited postulant Maria (Priya Narine) who enters the musical from among us, descending towards the Shoctor stage, down a mountain or two, singing “the hills are alive.” Indeed, yes we are. And whenever anyone refers to the mountains, they look out at … us, in all our stand-in alpine glory. This is not a production that conjures Alps with projections or cutouts.

You know the story, set in Austria on the eve of the Anschluss in 1938. High-spirited novitiate gets booted from the abbey to be governess to the seven children of a stern naval war hero widower (Charlie Gallant) who’s a steel-ribbed Austrian nationalist. He’s got principles, yes, but he’s so nutbar tyrannical on the domestic front that he’s even forbidden music in the household (in a musical! good luck with that). And he blows a whistle, military-stye, to have the children line up for inspection.

The movement score by choreographer Ainsley Hillyard is responsive to the music, supple and flexible for nun and kid alike, never too studied.

Maria’s inherent exuberance (and musical inclinations) win over the children first, and then melts the frozen heart of the Captain. And, long story short, the kids get their dad back, and a vivacious new mother. And they form a family singing group with a kooky act that will stand them in good stead later in the plot.

The Sound of Music (Priya Narine with guitar), Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

From the start every producer of The Sound of Music has to solve a problem like Maria. And Narine (whom Freewill Shakespeare audiences saw as Isabella in Measure For Measure) is a captivating Maria, with a bright impulsive charm and comic energy about her. It’s not a performance particularly strong of voice, but it is spirited in delivery. Maria’s scenes with the children are winners. Not least because the kid actors (the Whiskers corps the night I saw the show, including Elowyn Temme, Penelope Carew, Halle Leschert, Elizabeth Shakeshaft, Ben Hill, Pierce Briggs) are terrific and touching, and deliver individualized characters under Peake’s direction.

As Liesl, the eldest of the Von Trapp kids, Christina Nguyen captures all the hopeful nervous grace of “sixteen going on seventeen.” It’s a lovely version of that song, one of the musical’s most tuneful — the number she shares with Rolf (Jesse Drwiega), the boy who will break her heart by being fatefully seduced by Third Reich upward mobility.

Priya Narine and Charlie Gallant in The Sound of Music, Citadel Theatre/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

As for Captain Von Trapp, the role occupied grudgingly (according to his memoir) in the film by Christopher Plummer, Charlie Gallant’s performance doesn’t exactly bristle with charisma, or set forth in early scenes a portrait of a dauntingly stern disciplinarian whose formidable defences will be gradually worn down in the course of the musical. As is often the case in productions of The Sound of Music, the Captain is a little bland, in short. He arrives at romance, if not chemistry, and committed fatherhood in the end — and he really lands Edelweiss, his emotional solo number near the end. But it sells a little short the discovery of a self he had long suppressed, the infrastructure of the storytelling.

Kristi Hansen and Charlie Gallant in The Sound of Music, Citadel Theatre/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Kristi Hansen is an exceptional Elsa, Von Trapp’s wealthy, entitled fiancée, who sails onto the stage in a slither of satin (costumes: Jessica Oostergo) and noblesse oblige. And her numbers with the amusing impresario and born compromiser Max (the excellent Kevin Klassen), both songs that didn’t make it into the film — No Way To Stop It and How Can Love Survive?, the one a political shrug and the other a tease — are sung with wry pizzaz.

And as the Mother Abbess, Lara Ciekiewicz, who’s from the world of opera, has stage presence for days and rocks the rafters with her big voice in her big number. When she sings Climb Ev’ry Mountain, she’s not kidding: the Von Trapps take her advice, get backpacks, and walk to Switzerland.

The family exit from Austria, cleverly stage-managed by Maria (and by Peake), will lift your heart. And so will a musical that’s all about … music. Here’s a full-bodied production that gives you the welcome chance to renew your bond with one of the most loved musical scores in the canon.

REVIEW

The Sound of Music

Theatre: Citadel Theatre and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre

Written by: Richard Rodgers (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (lyrics), Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse (book)

Directed by: Rachel Peake

Starring: Priya Narine, Charlie Gallant

Where: Citadel Shoctor Theatre

Running: through March 31

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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Life lived precariously, on land and sea: some thoughts on Mermaid Legs at this year’s SkirtsAfire Fest

Posted on March 11, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

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.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At the very last moment on the weekend I finally got the chance to see Mermaid Legs, the theatrical centrepiece of this year’s SkirtsAfire Festival.

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And there was magic to it. Not only was Sunday the final performance of Beth Graham’s new “surreal theatre dance fantasia,” it was the finale of an annual multidisciplinary celebration of female artists that, from birth, has always been resourceful, adaptable, experimental in spirit and light on its feet.

And the closing performance of Annette Loiselle’s production of Mermaid Legs was, too, a celebration of the dozen years of her artist-led artistic directorship since the festival she and her actor friends started was born.

Since 2013’s debut edition, a small, but not that small, bright idea has grown roots in this theatre town, and expanded. It’s worked to acquire audiences, profile, venues, grants, sponsors, multi-disciplinary branches. It’s re-calibrated itself, in agile live and online ways, through a pandemic shutdown. Like another festival (Freewill Shakespeare) of which Loiselle was a co-founding parent, the SkirtsAfire that its new artistic producer Amanda Goldberg inherits have become a venerable and elastic-sided cultural institution.

A lively post-show video paid tribute, with testimonials of all sorts, to Loiselle’s sunny temperament, a chronic tendency to say yes and why not?,  and present a welcoming demeanour to new ideas from artists of every stripe at every stage of development.

A veteran actor turned playwright and director who habitually uses the pronoun “we” instead of “I”, Loiselle bids not farewell but au revoir to SkirtsAfire with her premiere production of Graham’s Mermaid Legs, a festival commission. And, fittingly, its intricate vivid theatrical conjuring of the great mystery of mental illness, is a veritable testimonial to the possibilities of multidisciplinary collaboration.

Dayna Lea Hoffmann (centre), Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianna Jang

The text from Graham, a witty and clever writer with a sharp ear for minute adjustments in family chemistry, gives us verbal exchanges along fracture lines that widen dangerously, like cracks in the ice you aren’t sure are weight-bearing, over a bottomless lake. The movement script, a collaboration between choreographer Ainsley Hillyard, playwright Graham, and director Loiselle for cast of three actors and four dancers takes us into the realm of feeling that explores an illness where words are beached on the shore. The title of the play, after all, conjures a hybrid creature who is neither entirely committed or fully suited to water or land, and must adapt to life in both.

At the centre is a trio of jostling sisters, responding in high contrast ways to the continuing series of crises ignited by the unpredictable behaviour of one of them. “How are you feeling?” the unseen therapist asks Billie (Dayna Lea Hoffmann, who’s terrific), the “problematic” sister whose unexpected disappearance from an apartment left in disastrous disarray prompts the sibling red-alert.

Noori Gill, Mel Bahniuk, Dayna Lea Hoffmann in Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang.

How are you feeling? There’s the crux of Mermaid Legs in one unanswerable question. And the way Billie’s inner disorder triggers an existential conundrum for all three sisters, beautifully played by Hoffmann, Mel Bahniuk and Noori Gill, is the beauty of this insightful and moving piece. Ava (Bahniuk) is inclined to cheery optimism; she has faith in the salutary bonds of sisterly support. Scarlet (Gill), the sardonic seething one, is a powerful portrait of weary frustration at the chaos Billie’s illness creates for the people around her. Both sisters are up against the endless delays in finding the right health professional, not to mention the elusive mix of medication and dose that might help Billie find some sort of equilibrium between wild fluctuations in order and impulse, calm and chaos.

In the opening moments, we see Billie struggling to join an ensemble in which she is ever so slightly out of alignment if not actively contrary to the group momentum. And Mermaid Legs captures a pattern in which Billie, imprisoned in fathomless despair within and without, sometimes bursts free of her chains in escapades of pure joy — conjured in ecstatic physicality and liberating bursts of colours and light (expressive lighting designed by Whittyn Jason) that play across the white drapery of Narda McCarroll’s graceful set design.

That whiteness of design, reflected in Rebecca Cypher’s costumes, is sometimes clinical, the bleached metaphorical straitjacket of mental illness. And sometimes the stage is in motion like the dancers, billowing like wind-moved sails. Binaifer Kapadia’s original score grasps both harsh solitude and warm harmony.

Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang.

As Loiselle’s captivating production conveys theatrically, Mermaid Legs is a story of life lived precariously, in a stormy world of extremes. Hoffmann memorably captures, the way Billie ricochets between them in a jagged rhythm, struggling for footing, or for air, or for survival, grasping at moments of sheer raw unedited happiness that don’t seem sustainable. Her sisters, on the other hand, plant their feet on terra firma, and find the map dissolving and the ground splintering beneath them.

The play is billed as “a fantasia” rather than a story. Narratives drift toward resolution, but in Mermaid Legs, the truisms about human connection and the human journey toward meaning are constantly subverted by an isolating illness without a “cure” in the usual sense. It’s a tricky challenge, in life and in art, to embrace tension without trying to eliminate it. And this insight has moved a top-flight ensemble of artists, led by playwright Graham, to shine light on a mystery terrain in a mix of words and images and sounds.

If the Skirt fits, is a holdover out of the question?

 

 

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Making A Monster: Northern Light Theatre announces the upcoming 49th season

Posted on March 5, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Cody Porter in Angry Alan, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Where do monsters come from? Do we all have one lurking in our dark cores? What conditions are ideal for creating or discovering or releasing our inner monster? Ah, and is there a point of no return?

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The mysterious human capacity to be monstrous underpins the trio of plays in Making A Monster, Northern Light Theatre’s upcoming 49th season announced by artistic director Trevor Schmidt Monday. Two of the three are of Brit provenance; the third is the world premiere of a new Schmidt play, Monstress.

The world around us is rife with scary validation of Northern Light’s season exploration, to be sure; it hasn’t been a good year for reliable human decency, let’s face it. “In one play,” as Schmidt describes, “the theme is literal. In another, it’s by outside manipulation. And in the third, it’s a slow gradual process between two people who unduly influence each other.”

“The idea of a monster waiting in all os us to be discovered or revealed, or released …” has fascinated him, and generated question after question. “When do we turn into our primal selves? When does self-interest override community, love, safety? What step is too far? When is it too late to turn back after committing a monstrous deed, a betrayal, a crime?”

“The 2024-2025 season theme,” he says, “began to emerge, as it always does, once I found the first play, one that I responded to emotionally and viscerally.” That was Angry Alan, a very dark solo comedy by the Brit playwright Penelope Skinner (Fucked, Meek, The Village Bike), about masculinity in crisis and its toxic spinoff — in the mens rights movement that’s “quite terrifying,” as Schmidt puts it.

Roger the protagonist is the frustrated third assistant manager at a Safeway, stalled indefinitely in his rise to authority, seething with a sense of injustice, radicalized by the narrative promoted by the online activist of the title.

As Schmidt reflects, “there are some very persuasive men out there on social media that have perfected how to tap into male anger and disaffectedness, and radicalize it for their own advancement, building a kind of male army. It’s clever to tap into someone’s feelings of inadequacy, or under-appreciation and foment an anger that can be weaponized- all while appealing to someone’s “righteousness”. I would point to Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.”

Schmidt’s production (Jan. 24 to Feb 8, 2025) stars Cody Porter, “my first and only choice for Roger.” He is, Schmidt says feelingly, an actor seen far too infrequently on Edmonton stages.

Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

In Monstress, the new Schmidt play premiering Nov. 8 to 23, the playwright returns to his love of the Gothic in storytelling (We Had A Woman Before You). “A disgraced doctor, a woman ahead of her time in a male-driven world … a warped version of Victorian England,” as the playwright describes, is enlisted to revive, à la Victor Frankenstein, the dead-neck daughter of a wealthy man. And the identities of the doctor and her much-changed ‘creation’ begin to intertwine. Which one is the real monster?

“Definitely Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” says Schmidt of his inspirations for the new play, with its female narrator/protagonist. As for the double image of the women, “I would recall Persona by Ingmar Bergman, but I have never actually seen it! But the idea has lingered for years…. The blurring of identity, the creation of self, the idea of motherhood or caregiving, the moral responsibility of care….”    

Schmidt’s production stars Julia van Dam — introduced to Edmonton audiences in Northern Light’s A Phoenix Too Frequent at the start of the current season — and Sydney Williams as the doctor.

Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matckin in Radiant Vermin, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jan

Schmidt describes the season finale, Radiant Vermin, as a wicked satire cum dark comedy “SO brazen and bleak- and screamingly funny as it sends up the current housing market and superficial commercialism and greed.” Nothing like real estate to bring out the worst in people, right?

It’s a 2015 piece by Philip Ridley, “a very controversial and edgy playwright who helped found the ‘in-yer-face’ theatre movement in the UK,” as Schmidt puts it. The prickly questions it volleys at the audience abound: “How far would you go to achieve your goals? How much would you compromise your ethics? Your morals? Does doing bad things for a good purpose cancel itself out? Can you do bad things and still be a good person?”

Says Schmidt, Radiant Vermin has “a crazy, shocking premise that i can’t reveal, but i gasped out loud while reading it.” And, trust me, it takes a lot to make the Northern Light Theatre artistic director/muse gasp out loud. A young couple acquires their dream home — at a cost. I mustn’t say more.

Schmidt’s production (April 18 to May 3 2025) stars two recent MacEwan University theatre arts grads, Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk, and veteran favourite Holly Turner (The Testament of Mary, The Origin of the Species).

The season marks a continuation of a prolific creative era for Schmidt the playwright, whose new play Robot Girls premieres at Shadow Theatre next week. Schmidt’s script for Two-Headed/ Half-Hearted was shortlisted for the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Prize. We Had A Girl Before You had its U.S. premiere in Boston last fall, “also very validating in releasing a real fast and furious flow of writing,” he says. And his new thriller Candy & The Beast premieres at Northern Light, the season finale in April.

Subscriptions for the 2024-2025 Making A Monster season are now available at northernlighttheatre.com.

   

   

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SOUND OFF, the unique national Deaf theatre fest, is back for an 8th annual edition

Posted on March 1, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Lumina, SOUND OFF 2024. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

SOUND OFF, the influential national festival unique in the country and the continent, is back, and here in its hometown, for an eighth annual edition Tuesday.

The brainchild of Chris Dodd, SOUND OFF is dedicated to Deaf performing arts and artists, accessible and welcoming to both Deaf and hearing audiences. And the term groundbreaking doesn’t go amiss in the six-day multi-disciplinary multi-lingual (ASL and English) festivities.

This year’s edition includes six live in-person mainstage performances, two online shows, workshops, panel discussions. We caught up with the multi-faceted festival founder and artistic director — actor/improviser, playwright/ director/ activist — to find out more about range of featured SOUND OFF artists, from Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec.

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Each year a theme or pattern magically emerges from the multiple cross-country submissions. “Last year it was Deaf dance,” says Dodd. “We collaborated with mainstream dance company, Dance Novella from Vancouver, as well as our home-grown (dance/theatre) show Carbon Movements with Ainsley Hillyard and Connor Yuzwenko-Martin. In addition, we also had a hearing and Deaf collaborative movement group, roots2reach, who led a workshop.”

This year? Dodd says the submissions leaned into personal stories transmuted into theatre and told onstage. Speaking Vibrations, in which four women connect and discover a way to convey their stories, is SOUND OFF’s first partnership with the SkirtsAfire Festival.

“Speaking Vibrations and Disorder are both very personal works,” Dodd says, “reflecting upon the lived experiences for the artists. Even more so for But The Truth Is, billed as “a compelling portrayal of the Deaf experience, focusing on the challenges and triumphs faced by the Deaf community in their daily lives.”

Dodd describes Speaking Vibrations, as “a multi-disciplinary show with built-in accessibility from the ground up: it will have captions, ASL, voice-over, along with audio description and the use of vibrotactile (technology).” As with Carbon Movements, the fascinating experiment of last year, this involves Woojer belts that sync with the music and sounds of the performance, for an interactive experience.”

The inspiration, as in last year’s show, is that the Deaf and hearing audiences could share the same theatrical experience. The “creative captions” are designed to “make them more alive,” by which Dodd means that “the captions tell story as much as they narrate it.”

But the Truth Is, as Dodd describes, is an eight-artist collaboration of three Deaf professional company: Dancing Hands Theatre, 258 Signs Productions, and Adeline. They were the creators of Fernando and His Llama, a hit at last year’s festival. This new production, says Dodd, targets more mature audiences, “and is a testament to the strength and creativity within the Deaf community, fostering greater awareness and appreciation for their unique journey.”

The protagonist of The Red Rose Bleeds, a wealthy Deaf serial killer, is a dab hand with a cleaver and revenge on her mind. Which should be a tip-off that this solo piece by Gaitrie Persaud is a real original, and runs dark, noir and beyond. SOUND OFF audiences will remember the Toronto-based creator and star, who runs her own performance company Phoenix the Fire, from last year’s dark, spiky comedy The Two Natashas.

“The show promises to be bold, dark, audacious and also very entertaining,” says Dodd. “The story draws from Gaitrie’s own personal experiences when she was younger.” The character is fuelled by a sense of personal justice. SOUND OFF is the show’s debut and I am very much looking forward to seeing how it evolves beyond this festival.”

Disorder, SOUND OFF 2024. Photo supplied

Disorder, as Dodd describes, is “a dance/movement show featuring ASL and voice-over, led by a hard of hearing and Deaf dancer duo from Montreal.” And, set on the frontier between the written word and the spatial language of ASL, it immerses us in their lived experiences, the one involving language and the other a more poetic and perhaps more expressive physicality.

Chris Dodd in Deafy, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Dodd, whose own solo show Deafy (in 2023 the first play by a Deaf playwright to be produced on the Citadel MainStage in 58 seasons) explores the complex challenges of life in the Deaf world, appreciates the insights of Disorder. As he says, “Deaf identity is complex and very much a spectrum of your use of sign language, use of speech, level of involvement within the Deaf community. There is no one way of being Deaf or deaf. So it’s up to each of us to navigate our own personal journey within both the Deaf and hearing worlds.”

And there’s comedy! Lumina, an entirely wordless physical theatre show, stars five clowns from Montreal led by veteran clown Marie-Pierre Petit, at SOUND OFF last year as half the duo Pafolie and Jaclo.

And as per SOUND OFF comedy tradition, the festival continues its collaboration with the Edmonton’s Rapid Fire Theatre. Deaf/hearing improv is a perennial favourite with audiences. Maestro: SOUND OFF Edition happens online; Theatresports: SOUND OFF Edition happens live on the Westbury stage. As Dodd has said, when language is removed, both ASL and English, the Deaf improvisers invariably prove formidable physical comedians.

The digital lineup includes Mark of a Woman, by the British/Japanese Deaf artist Chisata Minamimura. Her Scored in Silence, about the lingering horrors of Hiroshima on the Deaf community there, was a highlight of the 2021 SOUND OFF. Minamimura’s new play, says Dodd, “is about celebrating and exploring personal histories and authentic accounts of the undertold relationships between women and tattooing cultures…. Chisata has a very unique artistic style of combining live performance with digital projects and it is a must-watch.”

 Dodd is encouraged that “more companies in Edmonton are waking up to the value of having ASL interpreted shows. The Fringe has been doing a wonderful job with ensuring that the year-round programming they bring in has interpretation. Another excellent example is the Free Will Players’ Twelfth Night last summer, which offered ASL interpretation for the first time in their 34 year history.

Concrete Theatre’s Songs My Mother Never Sung Me, with its ensemble of Deaf and hearing actors is, as Dodd puts it, “a beautiful example of what you can do when you incorporate integrated accessibility from the very beginning.”

As for Dodd’s Deafy, recently at MT Space in Kitchener for the IMPACT Festival and Vancouver’s PI Theatre, its travelling life continues. It’s part of Victoria’s Incoming Festival in April, with more dates to come. And Deafy goes international with a run in The Hague in the Netherlands in the fall. And the playwright is  working on “a new large-cast script,” to be honed at the Banff Playwrights Lab next month.

He emphasizes that SOUND OFF is for both Deaf and hearing audiences. “We want to act as a bridge connecting these two communities together.”

SOUND OFF 2024

Where: Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Tuesday through March 10

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca. All mainstage shows are pay-what-you-can

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A-line, mini, midi, pleated … what’s on at SkirtsAfire 2024. Meet the new artistic producer Amanda Goldberg

Posted on February 24, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

 

Annette Loiselle and Amanda Goldberg, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls 12thnight.ca

SkirtsAfire, the multi-disciplinary 12-year-old festivities that celebrate and support women in the arts, is having a a transitional big-M Moment.

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Founder and artistic director Annette Loiselle, the veteran actor/director whose bright idea SkirtsAfire was in 2012 — motivated by the striking imbalance of opportunities for men and women in the theatre profession — is moving on. Her production of Beth Graham’s new play Mermaid Legs, the mainstage commission that’s the centrepiece of the 2024 edition, opening Feb. 29, is her SkirtsAfire grand finale.

The incoming artistic producer of a festival that started small and got big is Amanda Goldberg, the freelance director whose riotous production of Twelfth Night alternated with Romeo and Juliet at last summer’s Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Goldberg has done much of the curating of this year’s edition, from 85 applications, working for the year in close collaboration with Loiselle and general manager Brianne Jang.

“It’s been a great anchor this past year,” the ebullient Goldberg says of her new gig. ‘Founder syndrome’, the potential difficulty of re-steering an organization indelibly associated with the dream of one person, “just hasn’t happened,” she says happily.  “Annette has been so gracious and supportive…. Just a best-case scenario.”

“It’s been a great fit … it’s definitely a company where I see my values mirrored to me. A company I would have built myself!” “A great learning experience, and a great team…. So much potential! I want to do so many things. And it’s finally being in a position where you actually can’t do it all; you pick some things and strive for those.”

What’s happening at this year’s festival? Goldberg explains. For one thing, the opening ceremony and SkirtsAfire’s annual A-Line Variety Show are happening at a new venue, Walterdale Theatre. The Feb. 29 show is curated, says Goldberg, “so you can have a little taste of everything you can see at the festival.”

Expect to clap eyes on clowns of diverse stripe, for example, as part of Comedy Night (March 9). There are movement pieces that expand the definition of dance — “from Euro-centric classical ballet to South Asian dance, to aerial to acrobatic,” all part of SkirtsAfire’s Embodyment program (March 8 and 9, Théâtre Servus Credit Union at La Cité francophone).

Off The Page “is our way of supporting new work every year … basically theatre plays “two more immersive projects, This Is Canada created by Elsa Robinson and The Lost Sock Society created and performed by Louise Casemore and Christine Lesiak. Goldberg is particularly pumped about La Vieja Astronauta by Alexandra Contreras. “An old woman wants to spend her last few days of life in space,” as Goldberg describes. “All done through movement and projections. The March 7 program at La Cité francophone also includes new theatre work by up-and-comers Amanda Samuelson, Lita Pater, April MacDonald Killins.

The Shoe Project

SkirtsAfire’s partnership with Workshop West in presenting The Shoe Project continues this year. The Edmonton branch of a national initiative of a dozen years ago,  it gathers the stories of immigrant and refugee women. And, following the truism that to understand someone you must walk a mile in their shoes,  we learn of their journeys to Canada, and their struggles to adapt to a new country, a new language, a new identity — through a pair of shoes. Mentored by the notable Canadian playwright Conni Massing, the writers share their own stories in performance March 2 and 3 at Walterdale Theatre.

New this year? A collaboration with another expansive festival, SOUND OFF, “Canada’s national festival dedicated to the Deaf performing arts,” in its eighth annual incarnation. In Speaking Vibrations (March 6 and 7), a multi-disciplinary performance collective from Ottawa, we meet four women discovering their own stories — through dance, song, spoken word, ASL with “creative captioning,” and using the innovative vibrotactile technology Edmonton audiences experienced, in Carbon Movements, at last year’s SOUND OFF.

SkirtsAfire’s traditional partnership with the Old Strathcona Business AssocIation takes a new form, in its annual goal of drawing people to Whyte Avenue. Found Poetry, an interactive installation of blackout poetry, happens at assorted locations. “We print poems on sandwich boards around Whyte,” as Goldberg explains, “and invite people to black out what they want (or change the previous black-out)” and thereby create their own poetry, on the spot. “A beautiful idea, an experiment in connecting with audiences, in seeing what people will actually do…. And we’ve wanted to incorporate more literary arts!”

“It’ll be fun. Hopefully, it’ll start a conversation.”

In Nehiyaw Nikamowina ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐤ, conversation with the audience happens in Cree. It’s an immersive and celebratory Cree language song and dance concert by and starring the mother-daughter duo of Cikwes and and Cheyenne Rain LaGrande (March 5 and 6, Walterdale Theatre).

Music and workshops are on the SkirtsAfire roster, too. Check out skirtsafire.com for the full schedule, and tickets.

The experience of a tough year for the theatre industry year has had its revelations for Goldberg: some of her ideas are “big-eyed, bushy-tailed and unrealistic,” as she acknowledges. “But some are valuable, and I don’t want to discard them….” The ex-Montrealer arrived here with degrees in both acting and theatre creation, and the founding of an indie theatre (We Are One), on her resumé. And she added a U of A master’s degree in directing in 2022.         

In her four years here, there have been some disappointments, she says. Among them — and Loiselle is a striking exception — is that “I don’t feel I’ve connected to women leaders in the industry … mainly because not many of them exist.” And mentorship, along with multi-disciplinary collaboration, is one of Goldberg’s principle themes in leading the festival. “I do want to show the next generation of theatre artists there is opportunity for them and we can move the pendulum together!”

“So much potential. So much I want to do, and it’s finally being in a position where you can’t do it all,” she says cheerfully. “It’s pick some things, and strive for those.” In her three-year plan Goldberg hopes to break out of the budgetary model in which SkirtsAfire alternates producing and presenting theatre, every second year. “My goal is to produce,” she says. “We want to focus on local artists, and to have a hand in creating and developing the work in Edmonton.”

And then, to propel that work farther afield. “I’d love for SkirtAfire to have the national recognition it deserves,” by way of productions that venture forth beyond Edmonton. “Extending the life of a show in multiple provinces” is, she thinks, “the way forward for our industry … a bigger resources network.”

She’s already thinking about a possible mainstage production for the 2025 festival, a fusion of dance and theatre about a group of 13-year-old competitive dancers, in which the ensemble, as prescribed by the playwright, should consist of performers from ages 17 to 75. “A multi-generational perspective of girlhood, so exciting!” she says. “It’s so rare to see women of all ages getting to work together.”

Eventually, she says, SkirtsAfire should have “some kind of new work development process…. We shouldn’t just be taking submissions; we need to support playwrights through the development process as well.” Ah, and the festival should aim for “a bit more year-long visibility,” she thinks.

“I want to see this city succeed. And I want to be part of that!”

Have you checked out Behind the scenes at Mermaid Legs? 12thnight’s PREVIEW of Beth Graham’ new ‘surreal theatre dance fantasia’, the mainstage production at SkirtsAfire, is here.

SkirtsAfire 2024

Where: Gateway Theatre, Walterdale Theatre, Westbury Theatre, La Cité francophone, Chianti Cafe and Restaurant

Running: February 29 to March 10, full schedule at skirtsafire.com.

Tickets: skirtsafire.com

 

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Behind the scenes at Mermaid Legs, the theatrical centrepiece of this year’s SkirtsAfire Festival

Posted on February 23, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Noori Gill, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Mel Bahniuk in Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire Festival 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang

Dayna Lea Hoffman (aloft) in Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The new Beth Graham play premiering Feb. 29 as the mainstage centrepiece of this year’s SkirtsAfire Festival, has the best, most evocative, most intriguing, title of the season.

Mermaid Legs, commissioned by the theatre and multi-disciplinary festival devoted to celebrating the work of women, woman-identifying, and non-binary artists, lands on its toes Friday at the Gateway Theatre, directed by Annette Loiselle. And, as Graham explains, the play, subtitled “a surreal theatre dance fantasia,” sends a cast of three actors and four dancers onto the stage to tell a story of three sisters in crisis.

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One has vanished, leaving an apartment in disarray and a mysterious note. The other two are at a loss, struggling to understand, excavating and piecing together a history that includes mental illness. Graham describes Mermaid Legs as an experiment in marrying “movement and text,” dance and theatre — her first foray in an award-studded career. “I’m really excited about what we’re discovering,” she says of rehearsals that include theatrical collaborators at the top of their game: director Loiselle, an actor herself,  choreographer Ainsley Hillyard, and a design team that includes Narda McCarroll (set design), Binaifer Kapadia (music composition), Aaron Macri (sound design), Whittyn Jason (lighting design), and Rebecca Cypher (costume design).

“It moves around in memory and time; some scenes are abstract and repeat…. I tried to write a lot of images. And I had a lot of fun with stage directions — metaphors … that would inspire movement instead of being literal. Playwriting can be quite literal (laughter). That was a challenge!”

playwright Beth Graham

Any new play by Graham (Pretty Goblins, Weasel, The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble), who’s adventurous about trying something new every time out, is a theatre event, to be sure. And the special occasion of Mermaid Legs is enhanced by the fact that the production is  directed by the outgoing SkirtsAfire artistic director Annette Loiselle, her finale and au revoir after this 12th edition of the ever-expanding annual festivities she started in 2012. It turned out to be a bright idea that grew and grew.

Graham credits the origin of Mermaid Legs to Loiselle, and her proposition: “the idea of writing a play with movement, and also the idea of exploring mental illness…. We did a lot of interviews of people living with it, people who cared for them, loved them, were close to them.”

“The original impetus,” says Loiselle, one of the founders of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, was doubled-headed. In 2021, she was struck by a live-streamed Ballet Edmonton performance choreographed by artistic director Wen Wei Wang. “I had not done well watching live theatre on video,” a COVID staple, she says. “Some people got it and I never could…. And yet, this one reached through the screen and grabbed my heart!”

SkirtsAfire’s outgoing artistic director Annette Loiselle. Photo supplied

A close relative had just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And the image that spoke to Loiselle most eloquently was “a clump of dancers, and one who didn’t fit in but couldn’t quite get out. Heartbreaking….” It was a direct route to what she was feeling. “It put me right there.”

“I wanted to do a show that centres on mental illness … there was so much of it happening all around us” as we struggled to emerge from the pandemic. “And dance had to be a big part of the storytelling, in some way, shape, or form.”

In thinking about the right playwright to approach, Graham was always the one, says Loiselle, a great admirer of her writing. It was only after Graham was enlisted that she discovered the playwright had done dramaturgical work with choreographers Brian Webb and Laura Krewski.

“We had no idea what it would look like,” Loiselle says of the play-in-progress, for which Hillyard, an experimenter herself in theatre/dance fusions, collaborated on puzzling out the movement-scape and its theatrical and narrative implications.

“It was hard to imagine till we got it up on its feet in rehearsal,” agrees Graham. “The workshops were really inspiring.…’OK, I can see how this works’. And that changed my writing quite a bit.”

“It’s still very much a play, and a story, with characters. People are talking, there’s dialogues, and scenes. A story certainly. But there was space for movement in telling it.” And the movement wasn’t just an illustration of what’s already happened.”

Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire. Photo by Brianne Jang

Both Graham and Loiselle found that the subject matter, a story exploring mental illness, lent itself in apt and exciting ways to movement. “A lot of things that can’t be described, or defined in words, the interior life of the characters, can be brought to life through movement,” Graham says. “And that bumps up the tension:  you’re watching what’s happening and what’s happening underneath.”

“The other challenge” of Mermaid Legs, she’s found was “how do we keep up the mystery…. One sister, Billie, has disappeared, and the where, the why and the ‘what’s happened’ is an exploration by the other two.”  The play, she says, “travels around in time. At times they know Billie’s diagnosis and at times they’re discovering it…. And they don’t fully understand the impact or the extent of it until Billie takes off.”

The stigma attached to mental illness comes from fear, Loiselle thinks. “It’s all around us, somewhere in the room. And we still don’t talk about it; Billie could be my sister, my employee, my friend…. And there’s been a lot of it in the performing industries,” generated in the punishing pandemic years.

“I started writing it as a play, with the idea of movement in mind,” says Graham. “And once we got into the (rehearsal) room with dancers, the sparks really started to fly….”

It’s been a lesson in artistic creation as she describes. “It’s fun to see how different brains work. And it makes me think differently.” Graham laughs. While actors are sitting around asking questions about their character’s motivation and back stories, “dancers are ‘let’s just get on our feet and try something’.”

Dancers, she proposes, “tend think in more abstract forms; they attach themselves to images or emotions…. They’re almost like visual artists that way. And Ainsley choreographs in a way that leaves a lot of space for the individual dancer to move the way their body moves, and make offers.”

Dayna Lea Hoffmann (centre), Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianna Jang

Dancers often solve the dramaturgical problems of a memory play just by being there, Loiselle has found. “Movement makes you feel something immediately…. Ainsley and I worked side by side building movement as we went along.”

Graham and Vlaskalic, whose theatre partnership includes Mules, Comrades and Dora Maar: The Wicked One, are working on a new play, inspired by the Greeks. And Graham returns to acting to star in Teatro Live’s next production, a revival of Stewart Lemoine’s 2015 comedy The Oculist’s Holiday in June. Loiselle is returning to her actor’s roots, too, and in a female-centric show. From June to September you’ll find her in Rosebud AB as Aunt March in Little Women the musical.

Creating new work is exhilarating, says Loiselle, who has the resumé to prove it. “But there’s something nice about not being in charge!”

Find out what else is on at SkirtsAfire 2024, in a companion 12thnight piece where you’ll meet the festival’s incoming artistic producer Amanda Goldberg. 

PREVIEW

Mermaid Legs

Theatre: SkirtsAfire Festival 2024

Written by: Beth Graham

Directed and dramaturged by: Annette Loiselle

Starring: Noori Gill, Mel Bahniuk. Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Mpoe Mogale, Alida Kendell, Max Hanic, Tia Ashley Kushniruk

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: Feb. 29 to March 10

Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca

    

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Revelling in the make-believe of theatre: Pith! at Teatro Live, a review

Posted on February 11, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Kristin Johnston, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Jana O’Connor in Pith! Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The pith helmet has returned to Edmonton. And with it, playwright Stewart Lemoine’s invitation, in a well-travelled 1997 comedy both charming and riotous, to have an exotic, liberating adventure in the theatre, along with its three characters.

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Pith!, named for both the adventure headgear and “the heart of the matter,” was last onstage here more than a decade ago. And if you’ve forgotten how irresistible it can be to see comedy fashioned in both broad and minimalist strokes, revelling in the make-believe of theatre, get yourself to the Varscona for a re-discovery.

The fun of Pith! is that it’s stage-managed right in front of you. It’s audacious that way. And its theatrical means cut directly to the conjuring, transforming power of the imagination, and deliberately bypass a big set and special lighting. The stage is bare, except for three actors, four chairs, a rug, a phonograph (and the delish period costumes of Leona Brausen and occasionally the voice of legendary soprano Rosa Ponselle, who gets a credit in the program). That bare stage actually is the premise of Pith!, and an expansive and fulsome one at that as it turns out.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith in Pith!, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The instigator is a vagabond seaman Jack Vail (Andrew MacDonald) who finds himself in Providence, R.I. in 1931. “You’ve heard of Jack who was every inch a sailor. Well that’s not me,” he tells us at the outset. He’s starting his “providential existence” in the local Presbyterian church, as he puts it wryly in the cadence of the period.  MacDonald-Smith, reprising his role in the 2012 Pith! revival, negotiates the graceful circumlocutions and witticisms of Lemoine’s language with breezy skill.

Jack stays for the Sunday pie social. That’s how he meets Nancy Kimble (Jana O’Connor), the perky paid companion of one Mrs. Virginia Tilford (Kristin Johnston), dissolving in tears over her slice of bumbleberry pie. The formidably encased Mrs. Tilford has lived a gloomy half-life for the last 10 years, imprisoned not by widowhood but by the meagre hope that her vanished husband might still be alive. Uncertainty is sucking the life out of her, and it’s not doing much for Nancy’s job either.

“I can be pithy when the occasion demands,” says Jack. He undertakes the rescue of the adamantine Mrs. Tilford from the prison of her own making — by improvising for her, in her own living room, a wild life-restoring adventure into the South American jungle, where her husband has disappeared.

Kristin Johnston, Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Jana O’Connor in Pith!, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

He creates a kind of theatre for Virginia and Nancy by re-arranging the furniture, and playing every outrageously accented character they meet on a route that takes them by land, sea, and river: sleazy Southern businessman, oily Russian gigolo, irritating Swedish geologist among them…. MacDonald-Smith, an expert like his cast-mates in Lemoine’s intricately articulate ‘30s idiom, has a fine time with this outrageous gallery via instant transformations in accent, body language, facial adjustment.

Ah, and the laughter starts with very funny physical acrobatics involved in his introductory improv gambit . He claims to be a government adjustor who’s come to the door to adjust the furniture, on behalf of the ions (“the commercial travellers of the particulate world”) whizzing through the room, Yup, go bold or go home. Even Nancy, a delightful creation in O’Connor’s performance, eager to say yes to every suggestion as a supporting player, is taken aback, awestruck by the sheer brazen wackiness of the invention.

There’s a double question in this. Will the resolutely skeptical Mrs. Tilford buy in? Johnston, a relative Teatro newcomer who has a way like her two stage companions with Lemoine’s intricate syntax, delivers a withering glare that could congeal olive oil at 100 paces. Will we the audience buy in?

The fun of Pith! is that we do, Mrs. Tilford, Nancy, and us. Mrs. Tilford, a test case for the power of the imagination, not only joins in, the only way to travel in imaginary adventures, she takes charge of the fantasy, ups the ante at crucial points, and escalates the comic scramble. The nimble Jack is at the service, speaking theatrically, of his own invention.

It’s a strange and sparkly sort of comedy that tests its own theatrical premise over and over. I doubt that Rosa Ponselle, in her illustrious career, has ever shared the stage with high-speed pratfall comedy and a script with a droll dry wit of its own, an original combination. “Cry all you want; who’s to notice out here in the rain forest?”

“I’m inclined to want to get to the heart of things quickly,” says Jack early in Pith!. At heart, in these isolating times, this is a comedy that’s all about unlocking the world, sadness and all, and leaving the key with us. It’s a good feeling.

REVIEW

Pith!

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Kristin Johnston, Jana O’Connor

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Feb. 25

Tickets: teatrolive.com

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Andrea Menard’s Rubaboo, a Métis cabaret: songs, stories, and an emotional jouney to open your heart

Posted on February 10, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The title of the “cabaret” that opens Thursday on the Citadel’s Maclab stage borrows the Michif word for a multi-ingredient stew.

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 In Rubaboo, Andrea Menard — the acclaimed Métis singer-songwriter/ actor/ playwright/ teacher/ founder of the Sacred Feminine Learning Lodge — has fashioned an original stage cabaret that embraces music (co-written with long-time collaborator Robert Walsh), dance, ceremony, stories.

As the exuberant Vancouver-based artist explains on the phone, her rubaboo ‘recipe’ comes from traditional Métis culture, and the “four sacred elements, fire, water, earth, and wind.” And “the three worlds” that structure the show start with “a band onstage.  We have microphones, we have instruments….” That band includes Menard, Walsh (Menard’s song-writing partner of 25 years, guitarist/musical director), and Karen Shepherd and Nathen Aswell on fiddle and Chapman stick, respectively.

At first Menard and Edmonton-based Walsh imagined the show as a compilation, culled from their extensive archive that includes five recorded (and six or seven unrecorded) albums and two symphonies. And then, as the structure of the piece emerged, in  consultation with Menard’s “grandmothers,” as she calls her “spiritual helpers from the other side,” it became clear where other original songs were needed. “There’s a hole here; OK, we need a song there; I knew I wanted some prayer songs in Michif….” Six songs in the show are from Menard’s give-away album (check out andreamenard.com).

So, on one level Rubaboo lives as a concert experience. “Then there’s an in-between place where we’re creating a ceremonial rubaboo,” says Menard of “the engine of the show. Then we enter the spirit realm where I tell a creation story, from a much higher perspective.… So, it’s a cabaret because there’s lots of elements and lots of music. But it’s such a beautiful theatrical feast too, an experience that only theatre can give.” She points to Kimberly Purtell’s lighting and Cimmeron Meyer’s set, based on the artwork of Métis visual artist Leah Dorion (“the co-creator of my deck of wisdom cards”).

Menard credits Dennis Garnhum, then the artistic director of the Grand Theatre in London Ont. (where Rubaboo premiered last year in a Vancouver Arts Club co-production) with “calling the show forth,” as she puts it. The fateful phone call came during COVID. “He asked me ‘do you have a show?’ I called Robert, my collaborator, and we made something happen! But if Dennis hadn’t called….”

Andrea Menard in Rubaboo, in performance at the Grand Theatre. Photo by Dahlia Katz.

“In many ways that has happened a lot in my career!” declares Menard, who has a kind of sunny, humourous exclamation-point energy in conversation. She re-located to Vancouver 13 years ago after 35 years in Saskatoon. “It was a spirit call,” she says of the move, “honestly, not for work or a relationship…. I started taking the inward-seeking path, which I’d always done, but on on a bigger scale.” And she has taken her work as a teacher online, as you can see by opportunities for workshops, courses and circles on her website.

It was as an actor the Menard, “a Métis kid living all over the prairie provinces in small towns and the bush,” made her start. “Two or three lead roles in TV series…. And then my first play The Velvet Devil had a big life — as a radio play, a CD, then a made-for-TV CBC movie. All that happened in Saskatoon.”

“My dad was the king of the kitchen party…. I didn’t know this (the life of an actor/playwright/musician) was an option for making a living. And I almost would have followed in his footsteps if it can’t been for people like Angie Tysseland,” a Saskatoon musician/ composer/ choir director.

“She and I started a band together,” says Menard. “I was 19 or 20, very late to the whole scene. We had a jazz and blues-y little duo.” And life got very busy. “I’d never be doing all the things I’m doing now — film and TV, theatre, music — if I hadn’t been given so many opportunities and help in those different genres…. The arts scene in Saskatchewan helped pull me in those directions, one at a time.”

As she describes, the heroine of The Velvet Devil “was a Métis girl from Batoche, who dreamed bigger than her community and wanted to be a big star onstage….” She’d heard jazz on the radio “and wanted to be those singers. And she ran away to the big city, turned her back on her mother and her people, and did become a big star. The play takes place when she has a vision her mother has passed, and she comes home and has to make amends for her decision.”

It’s a powerful story line and it’s all about identity, she says,. “What the world expects you to be and what you yourself are, and you just have to find a way to make those match. And here I am 25 years later. And Rubaboo is the essence of me now!”

As for so many artists, the fallow years of COVID were a time of re-assessment for Menard. “I honestly thought maybe I’m done with performing…. What I did instead was go online as a teacher, a messenger, helping people with my circles and courses. But I would never have had the courage if I didn’t feel the world so needed help…. I literally gave away my career; I thought maybe this is who I am now.”

Menard laughs. “Cut to the next scene, and I’m doing a new show, a new TV series (Sullivan’s Crossing), a new album! The four quadrants of my life just seemed to blast open!”

She thinks of Rubaboo as “my way of incorporating the teacher in me, the one who wants to help people heal…. I just want people to find their way back to their best selves. It’s always mattered to me. But now I’m in my ‘50s, (I see) it’s just crucial. People are struggling so hard!”

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

Reconciliation and “the way so many Canadians are feeling it’s not their responsibility” was a big motivator. “I want people to be excited to step into their role in reconciliation,” she says, “to be their best selves in this time of change and struggle…. I wanted to create a show that helps people fall in love with Métis people. to re-jig the narrative that’s out there.”

“Facing it in love is the only way I can do it!” says Menard. “The warrior way is needed but I’m not necessarily that person. People forget that love is an individual thing…. So if this show can do its part opening people’s hearts, that’s my goal!”

“We’re choosing to fall in love with the audience every night.” Menard laughs, “it’s not always easy. But that’s my goal! My team up on onstage, that’s our vow…. I take you on an emotional journey.”

PREVIEW

Rubaboo

Theatre: Citadel Theatre

Created by: Andrea Menard

Music by: Andrea Menard and Robert Walsh

Directed by: Alanis King

Starring: Andrea Menard, Robert Walsh, Nathen Aswell, Karen Shepherd

Running: through March 3

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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Salute the range of E-town theatre this week, a 12thnight survey

Posted on February 9, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Vástáus Eana/ The Answer Is Land, Edmonton Fringe Theatre and Mile Zero Dancel Photo by Antero Hein.

Andrea Menard in Rubaboo, in performance at the Grand Theatre. Photo by Dahlia Katz.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

We salute the startling range of Edmonton theatre. It’s a week when …

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… Métis singer-songwriter/actor/playwright Andrea Menard takes to the Citadel MainStage with Rubaboo (the Michif word for a rich stew), an original song and story cycle (with music by Menard and Edmonton’s Robert Walsh). It starts previews on Saturday; stay tuned for a 12thnight interview of this engaging artist. Rubaboo runs through March 3. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.

Kristin Johnston, Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Jana O’Connor in Pith!, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

… you can catch the Teatro Live! revival of Stewart Lemoine’s 1997 comedy Pith!, one of the company’s most popular plays ever — a bare-stage adventure that’s veritable “love letter to theatre,” and a tribute to the power of the imagination, as it’s often been described.  Check out the 12thnight PREVIEW with Jana O’Connor, who’s in Lemoine’s cast along with the company artistic director Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Kristin Johnston. It runs Friday through Feb. 25. Tickets: teatroq.com.

… you can meet a new Edmonton theatre company. Paper Crown Theatre takes to the Gateway Theatre stage starting Tuesday with a 12-actor adaptation of a vintage 1922 murder mystery by John Willard. The Cat and the Canary comes with shivery Agatha Christie trimmings like a deserted mansion at midnight, the the reading of a will, a sanity caveat that threatens the sole heir. The Paper Crown production directed by Lauren Tamke features a different ending every night of the run, Feb. 13 to 18. Tickets: showpass.com.

… you have a rare chance to see Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, in a production adapted and directed by Brett Dahl. It’s at the U of A’s Studio Theatre opening Friday. Viciously satirical in its treatment of both war and love, scathing about the hypocrisies that rage through both, you could make a case for Troilus and Cressida being Shakespeare’s most cynical and anti-heroic play. Its characters are morally ambiguous when they’re not actively sleazy; it plays along the palette of disillusionment, in both the private and public spheres. How contemporary is that?

Troilus and Cressida, Jaquelin Walters (centre), U of A Studio Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

Dahl, whom audiences saw this past summer in the Freewill Shakespeare’s Festival’s alternating Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night, takes this up. They argue in their director’s notes that Troilus and Cressida is “one of Shakespeare’s most experimental and modern plays.” And they opt in this thesis production to see it “through a modern queer lens” as part of an approach they term “queering the classical canon.”

Troilus and Cressida runs through Feb. 17 on the Timms Centre For the Performing Arts stage. Tickets: 780-492-2495, showpass.com.

playwright Grace Fitzgerald. Her play Carter and the Train is at Nextfest Playwrights Weekend.

… you can catch Nextfest’s next bright idea. The 29th annual edition of the multidisciplinary 11-day festival of emerging artists that got dreamed up at Theatre Network in 1996, doesn’t happen till the end of May. But creative potential doesn’t stay put on any calendar. And neither does your chance to see what the next generation of artists is up to, and hear new voices gathered by the indefatigable Nextfest team led by Ellen Chorley.

This weekend at the Roxy we get a sneak peek of five new plays by five new and aspiring playwrights, four of them created by participants in a Nextfest initiative called My First Play. When the first-ever six-week program was launched in October, 22 (!) new playwrights signed up to learn about the craft of fashioning a script. And in this debut edition of Nextfest Playwrights Weekend, Friday through Sunday, 15 actors will breathe life into the new plays.

Friday night (7 p.m.) audiences will see Ghostbox by Scott Muyser and DMV by Logan Stefura. Saturday (7 p.m.), it’s Televangelists by Mika Boutin and S. Botson: a six hour revolution by Sage Milnthorp. And the Sunday matinee 2 p.m. slot is reserved for Grace Fitzgerald’s Carter and the Train, which will premiere at Nextfest 2024 and then be presented by the festival at this summer’s Fringe.

After each show, there’s a talk back so the up-and-coming playwrights can gather feedback. And the bar is open. Tickets: at the door or in advance at theatrenetwork.ca.

Vástádus Eana/ The Answer Is Land. Photo by Knut Aaserud.

… you can experience a uniquely unclassifiable performance steeped in traditional Sámi culture. Vástádus Eana/ The Answer Is Land started with a poem,  eight lines of poetry placed along the border between Norway and Finland, part of a sign project called The Kiss From The Border. “Land is the question, the answer is land.” The notable Norwegian Sámi choreographer and muse Elle Sofe Sara was struck by the unusual form and energy of that the project, “political and activist art that is driven by love instead of anger,” as she says in her program notes. The result was , an award-winning performance piece inspired by Sámi spiritual rituals, traditional polyphonic Sámi yoik songs, and the movement vocabulary of Sámi formation dance.

“Is it dance, is it a performance concert, theatre or what? In my opinion there is no need to define,” says Sara.

An exploration of community, the sense of what it means to be home, and the bond between humanity and nature, this is the piece that Edmonton Fringe Theatre and Mile Zero Dance have partnered to bring to the city for a single night Feb. 18. Dress warmly, advises the Fringe. The audience gathers in the Westbury lobby, moves outdoors as the performance begins, and then moves into the theatre.

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

Jeff Halaby in Gatsby’s Cabaret, Spotlight Cabaret. Photo supplied

… you can have fun and feel decadent at an original cabaret that is, as billed, a champagne-soaked mash-up of The Great Gatsby and Cabaret. Gatsby’s Cabaret, the latest musical comedy satire from the Spotlight Cabaret team of Jeff Halaby and Aimée Beaudoin, fresh from their sold-out run of Alison Wunderland, is set in pre-war Berlin. A showgirl and a playboy find themselves in a jazz club, thrown together in a tango. And, you know, one joke leads to another. John Hudson’s cast includes Halaby, David Anderson, Donna-Leny Hansen, and Gillian Moon. Comedy with a lavish four-course dinner, it opens this weekend at Spotlight Cabaret (8217 104 St.) and runs through April 28. Tickets: spotlightcabaret.ca.

 

… you can revel in the Elvis songbook. A Night With The King, starring the notable Elvis tribute artist Matt Cage, premieres at the Mayfield Theatre this weekend and runs through March 31. Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca. Check out their upcoming 50th anniversary lineup here.

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Pith! The return of a signature Teatro comedy and Jana O’Connor’s ‘dream role’

Posted on February 8, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Kristin Johnston, Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Jana O’Connor in Pith!, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls 12thnight.ca

Jana O’Connor has been hearing stories in the rehearsal room. Stories which live on in the Teatro Live! archives, of the memorably frantic, complicated journeys to opening nights of Teatro’s most travelled, most often revived, arguably most popular, play ever.

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Three actors, four chairs, a rug, a phonograph…. Since its 1997 premiere at the Fringe, Stewart Lemoine’s Pith! — in itself the story of “a journey of epic proportions through the simplest possible means,” as the playwright’s stage directions prescribe — has travelled widely. It’s been on the Varscona stage in three revivals. It’s played cities across Canada. It’s been in New York no fewer than three separate times, including an Off-Broadway run.

Starting Friday, Pith! is back onstage at the Varscona, directed by Lemoine, with a cast that includes O’Connor, Kristin Johnston, and Andrew MacDonald-Smith, the company’s current artistic director. Which is why the multi-talented O’Connor, a long-time Teatro fave, a playwright herself, a star improviser and the executive director of Edmonton’s LitFest, who’s in Pith! for the first time, is hearing “the great history” of a signature play from the assembled raconteurs of the Teatro ensemble.

Two days before the New York opening of 2006, the Pith! props and costumes still hadn’t arrived. “If that’s going to happen, your best-case scenario is that you have Leona Brausen with you,” O’Connor says of Teatro’s resident costume designer who has a special touch in vintage. Brausen, who originated the role of Nancy, the appealing character O’Connor has inherited in the current production, immediately went shopping at Macy’s, buoyed by their flexible return policy. Gigantic as it is, Macy’s, however, does not carry pith helmets, you may not be surprised to learn. These were brought to ground at a 42nd Street army surplus.

Pith helmets? MacDonald-Smith returns to the role he last played in 2012, in Teatro’s 30th anniversary season: Jack Vail, a mysterious itinerant seaman who arrives at a Providence, R.I. pie social in 1931. In improvising a bare-stage imaginary adventure into the heart of the South American jungle for a woman who’s been imprisoned for 10 years in the fortress of her own grief, Jack gives Mrs. Virginia Tilford (Johnston) back her life. Along with Jack, Virginia and Nancy, her warm-hearted wise-cracking sidekick (O’Connor) never leave the room.

Jana O’Connor

O’Connor, delighted, reports that “when you tell people you’ll be in Pith! they go Ohhhhh. Such a big reaction! It is so loved.” Not only is it a tribute to the life-changing power of the imagination, and of theatre, “to me it’s a showcase of all the best things about Stewart’s writing: it’s absolutely hilarious, but also has such a beautiful heart at the core.”

As the director of a literary festival —  and books are of course another way to have exotic journeys without leaving the room — she appreciates the Lemoinian language. “So challenging and beautiful and unexpected…. Some of the monologues and sentences are journeys in themselves! Sentences with some heft. And you can really relish them, and go on a journey with the character as they express that thought.”

“I’ve ended up at this point in my career,” O’Connor says, “having the amazing opportunity to bring together two of my greatest loves as an artist. Improv and Teatro!” She laughs. “Improv! My family and I (she’s married to actor/director Chris Bullough, with kids) live our lives madly scrambling to re-arrange the furniture … and wearing funny hats!”

O’Connor’s entry point into theatre and performance came right after high school via the impulse of a friend to take a Rapid Fire Theatre improv workshop. “It wasn’t even my idea.” A talent was revealed. Then came an invitation to play Theatresports, and a berth on RFT’s monthly sketch comedy 11:02 Show. Teatro founder Lemoine and leading man Jeff Haslam both directed editions of 11:02, and discovered a droll and quick-witted performer there, perfect for Teatro. “And that was my introduction to them, to the Varscona, to the opportunity to be part of that community…. Such strange little choices that can lead to such amazing career-changing opportunities.”

“Everything I’ve learned about theatre is from that world,” she says of Teatro and the Varscona.

Mathew Hulshof and Jana O’Conner in The Margin of the Sky, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux, 2022

O’Connor’s introduction was Teatro’s contribution to a Catalyst Theatre initiative, Fusion, an invitation to writers and companies to bring short pieces to a particular set. “Josh Dean and I were on separate staircases .. in a quick, fun, back and forth kind of (Lemoine) piece.” She stage-managed the original 2003 production of Lemoine’s The Margin of the Sky, 20 years before she inherited Brausen’s role in the play in a 2022 revival.

Her first performances with the company came with the Lemoine comedy A Rocky Night For His Nibs (possibly the only play in Canadian theatre in which the Prince of Wales Hotel in Waterton figures prominently) and Haslam’s Citizen Plate. And there have been many Teatro roles since, some of them — as per Lemoinian practice — written with her particular comic talents in mind.

The route from improv to playwriting is by no means an outlandish detour into the outback, as this theatre town’s roster of actor/playwright/improvisers demonstrates over and over. In a way, O’Connor thinks, in improvising,” you’re writing the play as you go, in your head,” creating scenes and, in long-form improv, creating a dramatic arc.

On the O’Connor resumé is sketch comedy (for CBC Radio’s The Irrelevant Show and Caution: May Contain Nuts) and a short piece inspired by Jane Austen for Panties Productions. And then came Lonely Hearts, a play inspired by a chance meeting with Famous Last Words, a book from the novelty rack at the U of A Bookstore where she worked at the time. “I came across (serial killer) Martha Beck,” says O’Connor. “I’d never heard of her…. But I found it so compelling that here was a woman who’d murdered all these people, but her biggest sin was being a larger woman.” Bullough directed a Fringe production starring Belinda Cornish.

“A gratifying experience,” she says, and laughs. “Not the voice people would expect from me — creepy, freaky, darkly comic. Enjoy!” That’s the beauty of the Fringe.

playwright Jana O’Connor and the cast of Going, Going, Gone!, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo supplied.

Going, Going, Gone!, a comedy she calls a “screwbelle” in honour of its female protagonist, was a more likely O’Connor play, and “a natural extension of (Teatro World).” Intricate hilarity is triggered “when someone grabs someone else’s luggage at the train station.” She wrote with particular actors in mind, and the Teatro production starred MacDonald-Smith, Rachel Bowron, with the protean Mark Meer in seven or eight roles.

In addition to returning to Teatro, at a well-timed period between annual October editions of LitFest, O’Connor has returned to Rapid Fire improv this past year. Kidprovisers was “a treat … performing for my kids on my birthday!.” For the last performance of The Blank Who Stole Christmas, RFT’s ingenious holiday comedy — a fusion of scripted and improvised with a different Blank every night — she picked Mrs. Claus.

Now there’s a subversive, cheeky choice, she acknowledges. “Mrs. Claus was against the patriarch, ready to bring it all down,” O’Connor laughs. “Christmas was her idea and her husband took it over…. Really fun! A full circle to get a chance to be part of an improv family.”

Meanwhile, there’s “a dream role” in a uniquely theatrical play from ta company dedicated to exploring the elastic frontiers of comedy. For women with kids and diverse pursuits and jobs, it’s tricky to find stability “without letting go of opportunities to have your voice heard,” as O’Connor puts it. “Teatro has always provided incredible opportunities for women to shine.”

PREVIEW

Pith!

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Kristin Johnston, Jana O’Connor

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday through Feb. 25

Tickets: teatrolive.com

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