With Bells On! A new musical dons its gay apparel for the festive season, at Theatre Network. A review

Posted on December 8, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski and Thomas Jones in With Bells On, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, EPIC Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Ask not for whom the bells toll, my festive-seeking friends. They toll for thee in the spirited new holiday musical getting its premiere in an elevator at Theatre Network.

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The elevator, which has a Grinchian mind of its own in With Bells On!, is on the mainstage, stuck between Up and Down (literally and metaphorically) somewhere between the 14th floor and terra firma. And trapped inside is the unlikeliest of pairs: two strangers, urban high-rise neighbours with their own reasons for being fretful (and/or pissed off, furious,  red-alert panic-stricken) on Christmas Eve.

The new musical by Devanand Janki and Tommy Newman (book) with the latter’s music and lyrics, is based on a play: Darrin Hagen’s effervescent 2010 two-hander comedy, a seasonal fave that’s crossed the border and is currently running in Calgary at Lunchbox Theatre.

The characters are a study in contrasts, and in themselves a startling sight gag, as kitted out by designer Brianna Kolybaba (I defy you to see them together and not smile). Ted (Thomas Jones) is a sad-sack pipsqueak of an accountant, gray of mood and suit. Drag queen Natasha (Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, aka Lilith Fair) is a twinkling seven-foot tannenbaum, sparkling from head to toe, who has evidently taken the show title to heart. And she’s certainly got the donning of gay apparel down.

In Janki’s production the initial moment, when Ted looks up, up and way up, awestruck to see the light-up chandelier on Natasha’s head, lingers in the mind. Natasha, for her part, has to duck to enter her own apartment.

The play and now the musical are an homage to the time-honoured theatrical tradition of mismatched characters thrown together in a tight spot (think Sartre’s No Exit, if you’re determined to test the limits of festive good cheer) — until, as Natasha acknowledges sardonically, they can tell their stories and discover what they have in common.

It’s a scenario that lends itself to musical theatre, especially since one of the characters is in the performance biz. Hence, Newman’s musical theatre-flavoured songs, with their witty rhymes, in which those separate stories and contrasting motives are revealed, or intersect at right angles, or eventually join as duets. An expert four-piece band led by Ryan Sigurdson accompanies the 12-song score.

Natasha is on a strict Cinderella timetable: midnight’s her deadline to arrive at the Crystal Palace, or else she’ll lose her chance to be Christmas Queen. Ted, on the other hand, “has no place to be.” His marriage is kaput. When he’s foiled by a drag queen who’s pressed Down when he’s all about going Up, he’s drinking champagne from the bottle en route to the roof to leave Christmas behind permanently, if you take my meaning.

The progression from “Christmas is the saddest time of year,” an ode to the solitary life in the surprisingly jaunty show-opening solo (a musical theatre joke?), to the sprightly reprise “Christmas is the gayest time of year” later in the show, constitutes a narrative arc in itself.The double-meaning of “everything’s looking up” bookends With Bells On!.

Dramatically speaking, Jones turns in a convincing and even endearing performance as a man who’s a downer on legs. The actor is not, however a strong singer. This sells short a lovely Newman song about the smallness of his life (‘a bed that seems to be both too big and entirely too small”). And it’s a wee bit far-fetched to make the case that Ted is falling short in singing (and vocal stage presence) in the same way he has in staying married.

Intriguingly, to the charm of the piece, the character is neither shocked by nor hostile to his outsized elevator companion, and Jones captures that, too. He’s mild-mannered, apologetic, and seems genuinely curious. Which comes in contrast to Natasha, who owns a whole arsenal of sarcastic defences. “No funny stuff!” she snaps. What’s her perfume? “It’s by Dior; it’s called None Of Your Business.”

Parsons-Lozinski as the formidable Natasha Divine (“tailored for the gods,” as she puts it) is a commanding figure, especially when lit up — great pipes with a fulsome lower range, quick and sharp comic timing, a heightened acting style, stage presence for days. It’s a performance that makes full use of drag posing and clowning, and then smartly peels away some of the showbiz makeup to reveal surprise vulnerability beneath that prickly evergreen foliage. What you can see, she informs Ted tartly, “is real. Everything else is … architecture.” And, with some vaguer gesturing below, “landscaping.”

There is fun to be had in the new musical, on this first viewing. The writing is playful and funny, the touch light. And the accoutrements, from Kolybaba’s revolving (by hand) elevator to costumes, to the party lighting by Ami Farrow, are amusing. But where the show hasn’t fully coalesced yet is narratively, where it arrives in Ted’s story. With Bells On! starts to unravel when Ted arrives at something life-affirming — or a rapprochement with the idea of being a sight gag, maybe? — through showbiz. Or performing. Natasha tells him he’s “a natural” — huh? — and his life changes. She should be an agent. Or maybe a politician. The staging of the finale number, which strands Ted onstage with little to do, could use a re-think too, perhaps. It seems a bit scattered.

It’s all about bravery, I guess, and the thought that to have fun, you need to step (or sing) outside your comfort zone, with bells on, and take a leap of faith. Make new friends, people: it helps to have someone with you who shines in the dark. A Yuletide thought if ever there was.

Meet co-writer/director Devanand Janki in this 12thnight preview.

REVIEW

With Bells On! The Musical

Theatre: Theatre Network in association with Mary J. Davis and MBL Productions and Live & In Color

Written by: Devanand Janki and Tommy Newman (book) and Tommy Newman (music and lyrics), based on the play by Darrin Hagen

Directed by: Devanand Janki

Starring: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski and Thomas Jones

Where: The Roxy Theatre, 10708 124th St.

Running: through Dec. 23

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca

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A one-off Fringe Revue Friday at the Westbury

Posted on December 6, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Fringe goes vaudeville, in its own original way, Friday for a one-night revue.

Devised by Fringe artistic director Murray Utas, who has a vaudevillian streak in his theatrical DNA (and coiffure), witness the Late-Night Cabaret that’s invariably a festival hot ticket, this year’s edition of the Fringe Revue starts with the creative artists. Utas, a Fringe artist himself, has gathered a “writing team” of five with long-time Fringe cred, led by Nikki Hulowski of the sketch troupe Marv n’ Berry (head writer) and including Sheldon Elter, Sam Stralak, Kristen Welker, and Lindsey Walker.

And he let them loose for two weeks creating sketches — or as Utas has put it in a blog interview “bringing together a bunch of cool people and making something wild out of it.” In short, Friday’s one-off show is a collective creation in which the writer participants pitched sketches at each other. And then turned it over to a cast that includes Helen Belay, Todd Houseman, Sam Stralak, Kirsten Welker, and Lindsey Walker, who bring the sketches to life on the Westbury stage. The presence of Walker and Elter is a tip-off that musical numbers are involved, too.

Fringe Revue runs Friday only, 8 p.m., at Fringe Theatre’s Westbury Theatre, 10330 84 Ave. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

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A theatre story in a dark world, like ours: Indecent at Studio Theatre. A review

Posted on December 6, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

The company of Indecent, U of A Studio Theatre, Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“From ashes they rise…”

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Monday night I saw a memorable play on the Timm’s stage, that steps in and out of time to tell a theatre story, a real one. Not only does Indecent connect us to the highly charged historical and cultural currents of the last century, it speaks to us of the tragic arc emerging from our own. And it has something substantial to say about art and courage, love, tradition and freedom, censorship, the immigrant experience, cultural diversity.

As playwright Paula Vogel said in her program notes to the Broadway production of Indecent I saw in 2017, “I believe the purpose of theatre is to wound our memory so we can remember.” And in Benjamin W. Smith’s beautiful production at Studio Theatre, the route to memory is marked theatrically — in luminous stage imagery that steps out of shadows, in klezmer music played live, in song, in dance, in ingenious stagecraft, in a repeated projection that says “a blink in time.”

Blink. Led by tailor-turned-stage manager Lemml (the excellent Maxwell Vesely) — “we have a story we want to tell you” — we meet the troupe of actors who will bring Sholem Asch’s landmark 1907 Yiddish play The God of Vengeance, his first, from the capitals of Europe to America.

Dov Mickelson (centre) and from left Maxwell Vesely, Alexander Mahon, Kornel Wolak, Michael Brige, Aidan Kaudersmith in Indecent, Studio Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

The first reading of the play happens in the Warsaw salon of I.L. Peretz (Dov Mickelson), a Yiddish literature bigshot, and his wife (Elena Porter). As the parts get divvied up, controversy erupts about a lyrical love scene between two women. And here’s an inflammatory question: is the depiction of flawed Jewish characters “pouring petrol on the flames of anti-Semitism” as one participant argues?

In The God of Vengeance, the play that lives within the play, the daughter (Megan Holt) of a pious Jewish patriarch (Mickelson) who runs a brothel falls in love with one of the prostitutes (Jacquelin Walters) who lives in the establishment downstairs. The play creates a stir in Europe. And across the Atlantic, in Yiddish, it’s warmly received in the Greenwich Village of 1921, the first lesbian kiss on an American stage. But the move uptown to Broadway, in English, is disastrous. Even though the love scene, of which we catch glimpses from time to time, has been pre-emptively written out of the script, much to the cast’s dismay, it’s shut down by the vice squad. And the actors are prosecuted for obscenity. The playwright (Aidan Laudersmith), embittered, turns from theatre to other kinds of writing.

Later, under more ominous circumstances still, we’ll see the company fatally return to Europe. And, under Lemml who has never wavered in his belief in the genius of the play, they perform it, in heartbreaking weekly instalments, in an attic in the Lodz ghetto in Poland.

The very title, Indecent, flickers dramatically, luridly, tragically, in and out of shadows, in the course of the evening, as it follows Sholem Asch and his play through time, to the indecent viciousness of the McCarthyite era in America.

Indecent, U of A Studio Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang.

This is complex theatrical portraiture, the capture of dramatic snapshots over the course of half a century to conjure a powerful sense of art, and what it means, in times that are always dangerous. And it’s artfully assembled and set in motion seamlessly by director Smith and a committed 10-member ensemble in this his MFA production. Guido Tondino’s lighting is a striking participant in the weave of time and place that reverberates, onstage and off-, in the production. Brock Keeler’s design is dominated by a simple wooden stage that sits in the centre, surrounded by secret, dark spaces where the actors melt away between scenes. It locates a theatre story in a dark world. And that thought resonates through an evening in which the chief prop is a selection of battered suitcases.

That the story is true gives an added affirmation to Indecent. The local connection is a fascinating proximity: Sholem Asch’s son Moses (Moe) Asch was the founder in 1948 Greenwich Village of Folkways Records, an invaluable collection of American folk, roots and “world” music. And Moe’s son Michael Asch, for many years an anthropology prof at the U of A before retirement in Victoria, secured that archive for the university.

We are not far away from the story. Indeed, as our times continue to darken, and anti-Semitism and exclusionary forces gather dangerous strength, Indecent seems even more powerfully of this moment for us. “Please don’t let this be the end,” says a character in the play. It’s never the end.

REVIEW

Indecent

Theatre: U of A Studio Theatre

Written by: Paula Vogel

Directed by: Benjamin W. Smith

Starring: Michael Bridge, Megan Holt, Aidan Laudersmith, Alexander Mahon, Dov Mickelson, Elena Porter, Guillaume Tardif, Maxwell Vesely, Jacquelin Walters, Kornel Wolak

Where: Timms Centre for the Performing Arts, 87th Ave and 112th St.

Running: through Saturday, Thursday night’s performance is ASL assisted

Tickets: showpass.com, 780-492-2495

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With Bells On: and now it’s a musical, premiering at Theatre Network. A preview

Posted on December 5, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski in With Bells On, Theatre Network. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A new holiday musical gets it world premiere Thursday on the Theatre Network mainstage). And this is how it started. A decade ago, a New York director/choreographer/producer/artistic director, home for the holidays, took his folks to see a show at the old Roxy.

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With Bells On paired the unlikeliest of urban neighbours: a sad-eyed pipsqueak accountant and a seven-foot drag queen decked out like a giant tannenbaum — in a stuck elevator. Not only did Devanand Janki fall in love at first sight with the warm-hearted 2010 sparkler by Edmonton playwright (cum actor/ composer/ musician/ sound designer/ some time drag queen) Darrin Hagen, he remembers immediately thinking “this should be a musical!”   

“That’s how my brain works,” laughs Janki, who has always (possibly from infancy) been tuned to the musical theatre frequency. “I didn’t know Darrin; I knew of him, of course, and I’d admired his work for years…. Basically I internet-stalked him (more laughter): ‘you don’t know me but will you give me the rights to your play to make a musical?’”

The answer was an (instant and enthusiastic) affirmative. And so it began, With Bells On The Musical, co-written by Janki (who directs and choreographs) with his composer/lyricist collaborator Tommy Newman.

A lot has changed in the world and showbiz since 2013. Even the theatre itself isn’t the same: a new Roxy has risen from the ashes of the old, razed to the ground by a devastating fire in 2015. And there’s this: the pandemic has battered theatres, still struggling to regain audiences, and footing on the slippery financial terrain of 2023.

Devanand Janki, writer/ director/ choreographer. Photo supplied.

It posed a challenge for Janki and fellow New Yorker Newman, who’d first worked together on a “clever and fun” musical called The Yellow Brick Road (a bilingual Spanish/English version of The Wizard of Oz). They had to figure out a way to get With Bells On up and on its feet, singing its dozen songs, during the pandemic.

“We performed it outside, and we Zoom-ed Darrin in…. I was SO nervous; I didn’t know what he’d think!” Janki remembers. In the event, Hagen loved it. “He was weeping,” and paid the pair a compliment that Janki cherishes. “‘OMG, it’s seeing an old friend you don’t recognize, and then suddenly you do’.”

It was Hagen who connected Janki and Newman with Theatre Network’s Bradley Moss. And the result is that Janki, who visits his home town frequently to see his mom and dad, finds himself “super-excited to actually get to work here! It’s so meaningful to me because Edmonton shaped me, completely, as an artist…. I would love to do what I do, here! And that has evaded me, for many years.” The only time the busy theatre artist ever performed here, after his teen years, was in a Broadway touring production of Miss Saigon a couple of decades ago.

Janki grew up here in the ‘80s, “when it was the other oil boom. So many dance and theatre companies! As a young person (in the arts) it was brilliant, the best education you could imagine. ….” A graduate of Old Scona high school, he’d started out as a boy soprano in Edmonton Opera productions. “My teenage years were hard-core ballet — Ballet North, Alberta Ballet, the National Ballet, the Banff Centre.” And there was theatre too, shows at the Citadel and the Fringe. “I did so much when I was here it’s really kind of amazing I graduated from high school,” he laughs.

The allure of musical theatre for Janki was that “it put all the elements together; it was always magical to me, and made sense to me in my brain.” His introduction, “my entry drug,” was being in a production of West Side Story at SUB Theatre: “brown people who looked like me — dancing, singing, acting, all together.”

At 18 he packed up and left for New York (“without knowing anyone!”) and AMDA (the American Musical and Dramatic Academy). “I wanted to be on Broadway,” he says, a cheerful shrug in his voice. “I laugh because I was kind of realistic about it. I knew I had work to do…. My ultimate dream was to be a waiter in New York, paying my dues as a struggling actor! And actually, when I got there my first day job was as a singing waiter. On a cruise ship. The glamour of that lasted one day. It was horrible!”

Since then Janki has accumulated a crammed resumé that alights on every branch of the performing arts, in New York and elsewhere in the world: big Broadway musicals, concerts, benefits; off-centre Off-Broadway fare; regional theatre across the country. “I love working, and I’m so grateful to make my living doing what I love. That’s the jackpot, I know. I teach a lot (for a decade he was the director of the musical theatre division of the Stella Adler Studio for Acting in New York) and I know how hard that is.”

Ten years ago, he founded his own company, Live & In Color, to promote diversity and “develop new plays and musicals from under-represented communities — people of colour, women, queer folk, it’s different every year…. It’s the culmination of years of doing what I do, the struggles with being a person of colour, all the closed doors. And having a whole community of artists I don’t see getting opportunities.” In four months Live & In Color raised $40,000.

“We commission a new play from a woman every year,” says the company artistic director. “And for our musical we take open submissions from across the country, and select a piece to develop, workshop, and present to producers in New York…. There are so many brilliant artists who never get seen and heard. ” As a friend reminded him “my dream has always been to be able to show off all my talented friends. That’s really the heart of it.”

Mostly Live & In Color is into development, not producing. But Janki points out a couple of exceptions. One was the Lucille Lortel Award-winning Little Girl Blue: The Nina Simone Musical. And one is With Bells On.

What kind of music happens in a musical set in stuck elevator with a mismatched pair of strangers who happen to be live in the same building? As Janki describes, the dozen Tommy Newman songs — “he writes earworms!” — are in a variety of styles: “pop and musical theatre-based, disco, some Latin, some Broadway. Tommy has quoted every possible Christmas cliché. All things Christmas, everything you can imagine, musically and lyrically. Tongue in cheek, tip of the hat….”

“Part of why I loved With Bells On is that it’s really producible, a two-hander and one set,” says Janki. But that creates its own tricky challenge: “two male voices, one location, how do we give the music as much variety as we can? So the elevator talks! It has a voice and becomes a character.”

You’ll recognize the story of Ted and Natasha from Hagen’s play. But “there are little changes” besides the vocalizing elevator. The (dramatic) ante has been upped for Ted: when he presses Up in the elevator he’s going to the roof … to jump. “This gives him a drive, and makes the other character, Natasha (who’s pressed Down), have to work harder to connect.”

”It’s set in the present. But for me the show feels very nostalgic — all the things that are familiar to us that we can laugh about. And we’ve tried to lean into that,” says Janki. “We laughed the whole time, working on it.” And it’s a show, too, he thinks, for people who feel they just don’t fit into the season of festive jollity.

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski in With Bells On, Theatre Network. Photo supplied.

Janki’s cast, onstage the whole evening with a four-piece band led by Ryan Sigurdson, pairs two actors whose backgrounds aren’t conventional musical theatre: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski (aka drag queen Lilith Fair) and Vancouver-based Thomas Jones who has a background in clowning. “They’ve brought a new dimension, a new edge” to the piece, says their director appreciatively.

And where will Ted and Natasha find themselves next? Janki hopes With Bells On will have a future in theatres across the country “and become a perennial classic…. After all, you can only see Nutcracker so many times,” he laughs. “This is commercial. It’s going to bring in an audience. And (with two actors and a single set) it’s not going to break a theatre.”

Meanwhile, Janki feels “so lucky” to be making theatre here. “Growing up, the cool kids went to Theatre Network. And I feel like I’ve been let into the club!”

PREVIEW

With Bells On

Theatre: Theatre Network in association with Mary J. Davis and MBL Productions and Live & In Color

Written by: Devanand Janki and Tommy Newman (book) and Tommy Newman (music and lyrics), based on the play by Darrin Hagen

Directed by: Devanand Janki

Starring: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski and Thomas Jones

Where: The Roxy Theatre, 10708 124th St.

Running: Thursday through Dec. 23

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca

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And then Liza Minnelli showed up: The Blank Who Stole Christmas at Rapid Fire, a little review

Posted on December 3, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Of all the improbabilities attached to the festive season — home invasion by a fat guy via chimney, that stratospheric high note in O Holy Night, etc. — here’s a real corker.

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Rapid Fire Theatre, Edmonton’s deluxe improv comedy company, has created an original full-length Christmas musical — a script, characters, catchy songs, all fully rehearsed — in which the cast has no idea who their star will be, night to night. Mainly because the guest improviser arrives onstage, in costume and completely unrehearsed, as a character of their choice.

How can this be?

The Blank Who Stole Christmas, with a different villain every performance to fill in that blank, is an invitation to chaos. It’s back for the third time this December, the first at RFT’s new home in the Exchange Theatre in Strathcona (through Dec. 23). And as I can attest, having caught Friday’s opening night performance, there’s a mesmerizing kind of magic in the way that the cast and the star rise to this impossible spontaneity.

The gist of The Blank Who Stole Christmas is, of course, is the famously infamous Grinch, that die-hard enemy of everything Christmas. And Alana Rice’s set, all storybook cut-outs and wonky angles, is perfectly Seussian. As you settle in (drink in hand), you realize that the cast of five, spirited musical theatre performers in their jammies, are speaking and singing in the jaunty rhymes that are a specialty of the good Dr. S himself.

In the script by Gordie Lucius and Joleen Ballendine we’re in Woo-Hoo-ville, where the countdown to Christmas Eve is underway, much to the excitement of the villagers, a population that includes a fetching dog and a narrator (Abby Vandenberghe), a couple of unruly puppet twins, the Terrors (Katie Turner and Katie Yoner as “the meanest kids in school”), and Mr. Creature the teacher (Michael Vetsch). The Mayor (Lee Boyes), who’s an A+-type personality, is almost literally beside himself; he has to be carried offstage. His sweet offspring Honey Woo-Hoo (Marg Lawler), “wise beyond their years,” remains curious and wishful about the official village outsider, who never shows up for the festivities. “I remember, they’re the worst part of December,” the Mayor sings, in a patter song about the Blank that’s one of the apt, amusingly rhymed numbers by Erik Mortimer and Chris Borger.   

Lindsey Walker in the sequins, The Blank Who Stole Christmas, Rapid Fire Theatre. From their website.

More I cannot tell you. Except that on Friday night, up in a mountain stronghold, lo and behold, Liza Minnelli appeared, all lipsticked and sequin-ed up, in that classic showbiz pose with that classic showbiz voice, and the clenched high-beam smile that never wavers. Singer-songwriter Lindsey Walker, very funny and quick on the uptake, nailed it. And somehow the cast, who adapted seamlessly, made it seem that her arrival on the scene, with a phone that connects direct to Broadway and a natural tendency to tap-dance, was dramatically inevitable. “I was sad and confused. Now I’m happy and confused,” she reveals later in Act II.

Of all the Blanks who might steal Christmas, you have to admit that Liza Minnelli is, well, a challenge to the narrative setup. But then, apparently, on preview night, the Blank was Tiny Tim, Christmas emblem par excellence. Whaaat? And past Blanks, as per the archive, have included everyone from Mr. Burns to Dolly Parton to Darth Vader. Saturday night’s Blank was The Hamburglar.

The Rapid Fire Theatre mantra

The improv is so expert and unhesitating that you might wonder if the whole show was rehearsed. So to squelch wayward thoughts like that, the performers, led by Lawler, solicited cues from the audience:  “Has anyone heard a rumour?” On Friday night, these rumours about the villain included tax evasion and the killing of a cat. And these themes found their way into the dialogue and the songs for the entire evening.

The rhymed songs — “I’m going to do it/ Just like a Druid/ I will find what Christmas means” — are a hoot. These include the ear-worm musical theatre number I Wanna Tree (my new theme song this weekend).

This is fun, and funny, and crazy. Just the ticket for anyone feeling seasonally jaded by the relentless mall onslaught of Mariah Carey and other retail features. And you’ve got to be curious about who’s going to show up next; it’s a big bad world out there. There are three different versions of the show — “nice” matinees for kids, “naughty” for prime time, and late-night “nasty.”

REVIEW

The Blank Who Stole Christmas

Theatre: Rapid Fire Theatre

Directed by: Matt Schuurman

Starring: Abby Vandenberghe, Marg Lawler, Lee Boyes, Katie Turner and Katie Yoner, Michael Vetsch

Where: Rapid Fire Exchange Theatre, 10437 83 Ave.

Running: through Dec. 23

Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com

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Opening the door to human connection: thoughts on this year’s A Christmas Carol at the Citadel

Posted on December 1, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

John Ullyatt in A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price,

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The grand tradition of the Citadel’s A Christmas Carol (without which the “hap-happiest season of all” in these parts can’t really get off the ground), is up and running. And with it, in this the fifth iteration of David van Belle’s clever post-World War II adaptation, John Ullyatt returns to the role of the man who has closed every door to human connection.

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In his second year as Ebenezer Scrooge, you’ll be struck again by a splendid performance that has added real weight to Daryl Cloran’s big, handsome, music-filled, lavishly costumed production, with its cast of three dozen, its live band (led by Steven Greenfield), and its secular songbook. Compellingly, Ullyatt finds the startling juxtaposition of the frozen soul and the energetic fury that surrounds it. Watching again, you see the bruising, and the inner wince, that make the character so memorable as he’s flung back into his own past — a boyhood of poverty and neglect and a gradual hardening of the emotional arteries.

And the way this substantial performance excavates layers makes Scrooge’s discovery, his re-discovery, of a self long-immolated, makes the Christmas morning scenes particularly joyful and fun. He has a lifetime of using “consequences” as a weapon. After he comes to know the “consequences” in human misery of his brutal misanthropy, the concept has been re-invented in the happiest of ways.

A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Van Belle’s version of Dickens’ 1843 ghost story relocates the tale of last-minute redemption on Christmas Eve ahead a century and across the Atlantic, with music to match. Mr. Scrooge is the flinty proprietor of Marley’s department store, an immoveable devoté of the bottom line and career enemy to anything with a whiff of welfare about it. Needless to say the employees aren’t unionized, and there’s no such thing as health benefits. Stat holidays? Ha!

Patricia Zentilli, Elias Martin in A Christmas Carol. Photo by Nanc Price.

Mrs. Cratchit (Patricia Zentilli), the much put-upon store manager whose first name is never used by the boss, is a war widow and single mom working hard and struggling to make ends meet. And while the stakes aren’t life and death by starvation in same way as Dickens’ original attack on the viciousness of Victorian capitalism, the inequities do speak to our moment of souls lost in the ever-widening crevice between the haves and the have-nots. Zentilli sings the wistful “have yourself a merry little Christmas,” and the operative word is “little.” Elias Martin is, again, adorable as the youngest, at-risk, Cratchit.

In COVID-ian times, the lyrics to that song (“some day soon we all will be together, if the fates allow/ Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow”) especially spoke volumes. What stood out for me even more forcefully in 2023? The image of the two children that the Ghost of Christmas Present (Jesse Gervais) leaves with Scrooge. Want and Ignorance, are scarier than ever now, the offspring of affluence, not poverty, in van Belle’s adaptation.

Want, the girl, is a creature of infinite appetite for acquiring more, and more. Ignorance, the boy, is armed and vicious. As the Ghost says, he’s had “every advantage, except the knowledge of his responsibility to others.” More than ever the world had given us occasion to appreciate the apt wit of this thought in van Belle’s adaptation.

Ruth Alexander, Daniela Fernandez, Braden Dowler-Coltman, Julien Arnold, A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Performances from Braden Dowler-Coltman and Daniela Fernandez as the young Scrooge and his plucky fiancée Belle are again affectingly committed. “Be who you want to be,” the latter says to him, sadly, giving him back his ring and closing the door on their prospects together. The Fezziwigs, Julien Arnold (in an amusing red wig you’ll never get enough of) and Ruth Alexander, return to their roles in a delightful way. And so do Oscar Derkx and Patricia Cerra as effervescent Scrooge’s nephew Fred and his wife.

Among the changes in the cast this year, Gervais has made the role of the ebullient, showbiz-savvy Ghost of Christmas Present his own; his good nature is cut with something tart and knowing, an edge that is funny and sharp. “Wait’ll you get a load of this!”

Jesse Gervais and John Ullyatt, A Christmas Carol. Photo by Nanc Price.

Kudos again to Cory Sincennes’ set, dominated by the fateful clock, and the revolving door at Marley’s through which characters arrive and leave. And Leigh Ann Vardy’s lighting has huge dramatic impact in this indelible ghost story. What continues to go amiss is a sound mix, on behalf of the band, that’s rather obtrusively loud and forward; it’s not always easy to make out the lyrics.

There’s a very funny moment near the end when a small boy frustrated by his low-tech Christmas present, a hula hoop, discovers finally how to make it work, with a little bodily skill. The audience cheers. And Mr. Scrooge picks it up, and has a twirl or two as well. It’s nostalgic and forward-looking at the same time, a telling way to launch the festive season.

Just like this beautiful Citadel show itself.

REVIEW

A Christmas Carol

Theatre: Citadel

Adapted by: David van Belle from the Charles Dickens novella

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: John Ullyatt, Patricia Zentilli, Elias Martin, Emmy Richardson, Oscar Derkx, Patricia Cerra, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Daniela Fernandez, Maya Baker, Julien Arnold, Ruth Alexander, Jesse Gervais, Gianna Vacirca

Running: through Dec, 23

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

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Mirror mirror on the wall … the holiday panto is back. Snow White at the Capitol Theatre, a review

Posted on December 1, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Chris Bullough and Andy Northrup in Snow White – a pantomime, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Hello friends!” an extrovert fairy calls out to us, every time she arrives onstage. And every time we holler back, in unison as coached, “Best Fairy Ever!” Now there’s all-ages audience rapport for you.

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Yup, the Christmas panto is back in town, in the charming Capitol Theatre on 120th Street at Fort Edmonton Park, where pantos have made themselves at home, off and on, since 2014. For the occasion, writer/director Jennifer Krezlewicz of the new company Edmonton Repertory Theatre has ransacked the fairy tale Snow White, for a blithely oddball holiday song-and-dance musical comedy that does handsprings off the Grimm remains.

Will we help Cinabon (Debbie Plaquin) get her fairy bona fides, her GFL (graduated fairy licence)? She only has her Learner’s. By the immutable laws of the panto, a Brit export of time-honoured exuberance and eccentricity, we support our allies onstage. Loudly. And we boo their enemies, like the evil court magician Jasper (Chris Bullough) plotting to marry the beautiful princess S.W. (Asiah Holm) against her will. Loudly. And when we’re asked for our input — “I don’t know what I should do! Can you guide me?” — we offer sage advice. Loudly.

Snow White – a pantomime, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied

For Snow White Krezlewicz has assembled a classic panto mash-up of fairy tale riffs, topped up with local allusions, re-purposed pop songs, and dance breaks. And a personable talking Cat named Oregano (Francie Goodwin-Davies), along with other life-sized critters (exeunt pursued by a bear: hold that thought). Kid, a rare bird who works as a mascot for the Edmonton Riverhawks, wanders in and out of the action.

Kid from Edmonton Riverhawks, Snow White, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

Ah, and there’s the Dame, de rigueur in matters of pantomime. She’s  a formidably burly deep-voiced sort who looks remarkably, well, festive all dolled up like a cake in Cherie Howard’s costumes. Andy Northrup rises to the comic occasion as Dame Bumbo Bee, confectioner and up-stager extraordinaire — with an assortment of exasperated eye-rolls, winks, and come-hither looks. He’s a riot.

“Never date a hockey player,” the Dame advises, having been over that blue line a few times. And she dismisses shivs about her age like so much lint off a lapel: “I’m fresh as morning dew.”

What gives pantos their distinctive flavour and appeal to every age of kid and grown-up is the rarefied combination of silly and sly, vintage and updated references, generic and local. And Snow White is on it. The kids get the jokes on one level, grown-ups on another. Pantos love their entendres double.

Bullough’s Jasper rises (lowers?) to evil with manic glee. The actor has played Richard III in his time, and this is Tricky Dick on uppers, ricocheting around the stage, gloating over his bad-ness, waving his wand like a conductor. “I’m evil, I’m evil, so don’t mess around with me,” he sings, with an intensity Elvis never achieved.  Michelle Todd is droll as a vague Queen who’s on the brink of her “warmer years,” as per the song “feelin’ hot hot hot.”

And the premier Canadian kids’ entertainer Fred Penner is present as the voice of the Mirror (and in a song, Brave, he wrote especially for the show, in honour of a hero with self-esteem issues), a truth teller with melodic voice and a secret alter-ego, .

Capitol Theatre, Fort Edmonton Park

You’ll get a kick out of the hero-in-progress, played by Rogan Coffey, a self-effacing nebbish who’s afraid of everything, including his impressively A-type mama, the Dame. As a baker who’s been forced to pivot to court huntsman, he has a contemporary career problem. And so does S.W., a princess who’s at heart a biology nerd with a specialty in bug studies, and a preference for jodhpurs over gowns.

They meet by chance at the Christmas Market next door to the Capitol Theatre. And the show is salted and peppered with Edmonton references (the LRT and Stony Plain Road construction are now comic targets, along with the Oilers and premiers with no skills). And you’ve got to love a family show with a classic cake-in-the-face moment.

Anyhow, there is absolutely no use me telling you the story. Will everyone make it through the Slough of Death? Will the hero embrace a quest and discover bravery? Will the Mirror release his true identity? My lips are sealed. Suffice it to say you can take your entire family to Snow White, and hoot and holler and sing along to The Cat Came Back, and have a blast. And there’s holiday magic in that.

Meet writer/director Jennifer Krezlewicz in this 12thnight preview here.

REVIEW

Snow White – A Pantomime

Theatre: Edmonton Repertory Theatre and Wild Heart Collective, as part of Edmonton Christmas Market

Written and directed by: Jennifer Krezlewicz

Starring: Chris Bullough, Andy Northrup, Debbie Plaquin, Francie Goodwin-Davies, Michelle Todd, Asiah Holm, Rogan Coffey, Hanna Kate Skibin, Kevin Tokarsky, Sue Huff, Justin Deveau, Kid from Edmonton Riverhawks

Where: Capitol Theatre, Fort Edmonton Park

Running: through Dec. 17

Tickets: yegxmasmarket.com/capitol-theatre-events    

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The Blank Who Stole Christmas: Rapid Fire Theatre’s original Christmas musical is back, with a different villain every show

Posted on November 29, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“You’re a mean one, Mr. (Blank)… You’re as cuddly as a cactus/ You’re as charming as an eel….”

They’ve always wanted a holiday tradition to call their own, a special Christmas show that, as Matt Schuurman says, “is very Rapid Fire.”

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That was the Sugarplum Fairy that danced in the heads of Rapid Fire’s deluxe improvisers in 2018, says their artistic director, retracing the route to the return Thursday of RFT’s original Christmas musical The Blank Who Stole Christmas. 

Theatre companies regularly ‘Bah humbug!’ their way to fame and fortune every Christmas. Ballet companies have their dancing nutcrackers, sure, and symphonies their Hallelujah Choruses. But an improv comedy company? A theatre that specializes in the unpredictable, in not knowing exactly how everything will turn out, by definition?

Five years ago Schuurman was looking at “our show season and audience attendance trends,” he says. And he was pondering the mystery that while December was the busiest of months for Rapid Fire’s corporate gig arm, “our December audiences were some of the lightest of the year, historically.” Conclusion: “we need a Christmas show!”

The closest RFT had come to a show for the figgy pudding season, during the company’s eight-year residence in the Citadel’s Zeidler Hall, was to invite the actor playing Scrooge in the Citadel’s A Christmas Carol to an improv night. “He’d say all his lines, and we’d improvise around him.”

“We always love the match-up of script and improv,” says Schuurman. Enter Dr. Seuss and his famous anti-hero. Getting the Grinch rights would be impossible, of course, and “we wouldn’t want to do a straight-up version of that anyhow.”

The other inspiration for The Blank Who Stole Christmas was a hit holiday show (still up and running)  that a former RFT artistic director Kevin Gillese had created for Rapid Fire’s sibling improv company Dad’s Garage in Atlanta. Invasion Christmas Carol, as Schuurman describes, is a version of the Dickens tale, “with all the roles in place. Then at every performance an invader walks in — a member of the ensemble as any character they want in any costume — and crashes the show. And the cast, who have rehearsed the script have to adapt…. I loved the idea!”

So Schuurman and co set about creating “an homage, a love letter, to everything Rapid Fire. What’s all the stuff we can cram into one show? Like (the Citadel’s) A Christmas Carol, so full of theatre magic, effect, spectacle, and wonder. Let’s do that, all that fun and joy in one show — but in an improv way!”

The Blank Who Stole Christmas, Rapid Fire Theatre. Photo supplied.

Rapid Fire Theatre’s Christmas musical is “heavily based on the Grinch,” as you’ll glean from the title. Two RFT stars Gordie Lucius and Joleen Ballendine wrote the script. And Erik Mortimer and Chris Borger wrote the songs. “We’ve upped the ante with an actor’s nightmare (scenario),” says Schuurman. The lead actor, who arrives onstage as a character of their choice — a different guest star every performance — hasn’t been to a single rehearsal, much less learned any of their lines. “And the cast of five around them is trying to stay on script, but having to improvise to respond and adjust….”

Yes, the Blank is the ultimate agent of comic chaos. They’re the star of a uniquely dizzy showbiz adventure, different every performance. “The first couple of scenes, before the arrival of the Blank, are perfectly scripted, and then the pages get emptier and emptier,” Schuurman laughs.

And that happens with the songs, too, which start complete, and then get looser as they shove lyrics aside to make space for improv. “You have to sing, to Erik’s backing tracks. But sometimes there are no lyrics!” That kind of spontaneity is, well, terrifying. But then, that kind of brinkmanship is how Rapid Fire’s improvisers like their theatre, live in the most challenging way, fully charged, and in the moment.

a previous performance of The Blank Who Stole Christmas, Rapid Fire Theatre. Photo supplied.

No one except the guest star knows in advance who the Blank will be. Schuurman reports that in two runs, in 2019 and last season, “sometimes the character is very specific, a celebrity impression or a pop culture reference, sometimes more generic.” One performance, John McClane showed up as the Blank, an intriguing pairing of Die Hard and Dr. Seuss. One of the most eccentric choices belongs to RFT’s Paul Blinov, who arrived onstage as Charles Darwin engaged in a scientific study and “obsessed with earth worms.” A WEM mall cop was the Blank in one performance, which led to an outbreak of  local references. Even “the shirtless roller-blading guitar guy” who haunts Strathcona has been the Blank.

A previous performance of The Blank Who Stole Christmas, Rapid Fire Theatre. Photo supplied

The show exists in three different versions, one “nice’ (kids’ matinees), one “naughty” (for 8 p.m. evening shows that are “more South Park than Seuss” as Schuurman describes), and one “wicked” for the late-night crowd.

Schuurman’s daughter Alice, a showbiz veteran in her single-digit years, “has often given me notes,” he laughs. The performer playing the Blank is “a secret,” says Alice’s dad, who’s directing the show this year for the first time. “Only I have the list.” The element of surprise, after all, is part of the fun. But there’s an optional spoiler link on the RFT website, with “a very easy hint” about the actor for improv fans.

RFT’s holiday tradition, happening for the first time in their new ‘forever home’ at the Exchange Theatre, can never grow old. “Literally any character works … beloved or low-status. And the cool thing is that we will never run out of possibilities. We have a year’s worth of references to work with!”

PREVIEW

The Blank Who Stole Christmas

Theatre: Rapid Fire Theatre

Directed by: Matt Schuurman

Starring: Abby Vandenberghe, Marg Lawler, Lee Boyes, Katie Turner and Katie Yoner, Michael Vetsch

Where: Rapid Fire Exchange Theatre, 10437 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Dec. 23

Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com

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And so it begins, the holiday show season: a new company returns the panto to the Capitol Theatre at Fort Edmonton

Posted on November 27, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Snow White – a pantomime, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

People, lighten up. It’s a theatre town, my friends, and you are sliding inexorably into the season of the holiday show, of every stripe and persuasion.

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It launches officially this very week, with the return of the Citadel’s lavish production of A Christmas Carol, the return of Rapid Fire Theatre’s own holiday tradition The Blank Who Stole Christmas, the return of the giddy theatre-panto-podcast mash-up It’s A Wonderful Christmas Carol to Fort Edmonton’s Capitol Theatre. AND the return of a vintage all-ages entertainment to that vintage venue, thanks to a new Edmonton theatre company.

The panto, the high-spirited holiday tradition that might be Britain’s kookiest export ever — daffier than the shrimp crisp, Marmite, or the pronunciation of ‘slough’ — is to be found, come Wednesday, at the  elegant Capitol Theatre, a 1929 reproduction on 1920 St. in Fort Edmonton Park. Snow White is the calling card of the new Edmonton Repertory Theatre. And for the occasion artistic director Jennifer Krezlewicz has fashioned (and directs) an original eight-actor musical comedy — “my first full-length play” — from the Grimm fairy tale.

As she points out,  Snow White – a pantomime comes with all the classic panto ingredients: a cross-dressing Dame, a beautiful princess, an aspirational fairy, a princess, a status villain, an unexpected hero, a gilt-edged invitation to the audience to be rowdy…. And, yes (to anticipate your question) there’s a pantomime cat, Oregano by name (christened in honour of MLA Janis Irwin’s celebrity puss-in-boots).

Snow White – a pantomime, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo suppied

You can’t have a panto without slapstick, goofy jokes, dancing … and music. Krezlewicz reached out to the star kids’ entertainer Fred Penner, “and he agreed to be in the show!” Not only does Penner voice the Magic Mirror (you know, the one on the wall who answers the fateful question ‘who’s the fairest of them all?’) and the Good Fairy, but to Krezlewicz’s delight he wrote the company an original song, Brave. “I sent him the script, and he thought I did OK!” she says modestly.

Krezlewicz, who’s directed pantos before now but never written one, was an early panto convert as a kid: Ross Petty’s Cinderella (a Toronto panto tradition for many years), via “my parents’ Beta recording…. It was so funny, so geared to silly. That was the catalyst that (pushed) me into comedy.” And it was an experience she’s passed on to her own kids, four in number, ages seven to 15. As “super-funny people” themselves, they contribute to the comedy quality control. “Guys, is this funny?” Krezlewicz asks. And she’s prepared to hear ‘not really’, and adjust accordingly.

It’s all about fun, she says. “Kids don’t have to sit still; they don’t have to ‘behave’.” And “audience interaction” is built into the entertainment. The fourth wall vanishes into the ether. “We have two actors walk through the audience to get back onstage.”

“We’ve been workshopping as we go, on the fly,” she says of the production that runs as part of the Edmonton Christmas market at Fort Edmonton Park. “The cast are so flexible, consummate pros, and so funny! If the crew is laughing, this is good.”

“For me, quality family programming is lacking here, outside of festivals,” Krezlewicz thinks. It’s a contribution Edmonton Repertory Theatre can make, she says. “If you can engage a six-year-old.…”

Chris Bullough and Andy Northrup in Snow White – a pantomime, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

Edmonton Repertory Theatre (a re-branding of a theatre that disappeared in 2015) “was born out of the idea that the process of theatre needs to adapt,” to be more accessible to artists with kids and family responsibilities, for example. “Twenty people are involved in a show with a cast of eight,” says Krezlewicz. So if a cast member can’t make a matinee, there’s a replacement. Unusually, “all our rehearsals are in the evening, over an extended rehearsal period…. So people can pay their mortgages at the end of the day. We’re working on building a work-life balance.”

She describes it as “a hybrid model” for professional theatre, “a reinvention of what’s possible in the post-pandemic world.” And she’s pleased with this debut production: “when the actors show up, they’re really prepped and ready to work.

The core company of 10 has big plans, including a home venue where, as a rep company, they can do more than one show at a time. “There’s a lack of mid-sized venues with availability,” Krezlewicz says of their research into the venue scene city-wide. Currently, they’re studying the feasibility of reno-ing the Princess Theatre, with its 300-seat main house, its 120 seats downstairs, and its their floor rehearsal and event space.

Krezlewicz’s theatre history started with dance. And she was an actor until the early 2000’s, when she left theatre for eight years (“and desperately missed it”). “I fell into directing,” she says of a gravitation to being the artist who “controls the space and paints the pictures.”

A 2018 women director’s intensive course at the Banff Centre was a life-changer, she reports. And the mentorship of Carey Perloff of Seattle Rep, the long-time artistic director of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, has been seminal, as Krezlewicz describes.

Her vision for Edmonton Repertory Theatre includes “classic pieces (“I want to play in rich text”) with a blend of contemporary work.” Meanwhile, there’s an inaugural production, big and boisterous. “No grants,” she says. “It’s been a matter of begging, borrowing, calling in favours. An incredible journey.”

PREVIEW

Snow White – A Pantomime

Theatre: Edmonton Repertory Theatre and Wild Heart Collective, as part of Edmonton Christmas Market

Written and directed by: Jennifer Krezlewicz

Starring: Chris Bullough, Andy Northrup, Debbie Plaquin, Francie Goodwin-Davies, Michelle Todd, Asian Holm, Rogan Coffey, Hanna Kate Skibin, Kevin Tokarsky, Sue Huff, Justin Deveau, Kid from Edmonton Riverhawks

Where: Capitol Theatre, Fort Edmonton Park

Running: Wednesday through Dec. 17

Tickets: yegxmasmarket.com/capitol-theatre-events    

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‘Concert and vacation’: Teatro season-opener Far Away and Long A-Gogo! A review.

Posted on November 25, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Andrea House, Farren Timoteo and Kendra Connor in Far Away and ong A-Gogo!, Teatro Live!, photo by Stewart Lemoine.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Far Away And Long A-Gogo, the “concert and vacation” that launches the new Teatro Live season starts, quite hilariously, in the kind of impasse that showbiz is designed to trounce. It’s a medley, slowed to lugubrious slo-mo, of musical theatre songs about being stuck in one place, and feeling bad.

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Farren Timoteo drags his way through Bidin’ My Time from Gershwin’s Crazy For You. Cy Coleman’s “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This is Kendra Connor’s aspirational declaration. And the ne plus ultra of feeling low, the depression capper so to speak, is I Wish I Was Dead from the Bernstein/Comden/Green musical On The Town. Andrea House kills it.

After that, three Teatro faves, strikingly versatile actor/singers with great pipes (and a three-piece band led by musical director Cathy Derkach) deliver an unusually eclectic  ‘concert experience.’ It’s a musical invitation to consider travel and “a change of scene” in all its implications, literal and metaphorical, from every perspective including sideways, aerial view, comic underbelly, and dreamscape.

Andrea House, Farren Timoteo and Kendra Connor in Far Away an Long A-Gogo!, Teatro Live!. Photo by Stewart Lemoine.

There isn’t much by way of between-song commentary or theatrical trapping beyond three standing microphones, a chaise longue, a couple of bouquets — and a dexterous trio which includes Derkach on keyboard, Andreas Wegner on bass and Cooper Ray on drums. So there’s no travel agent, in effect, beyond the intriguingly wide-ranging selection of songs curated by Teatro resident playwright Stewart Lemoine, whose theatre, from the start, has always leaned imaginatively into the experience of music you might not know.

And, as gathered by Lemoine, they resonate in very different ways that pretty much leave the emotional itinerary to you — in travel to exotic destinations, including the uncharted terrain of love, for example, or transformational escapes from solitary terra firma like Strangers in Paradise (a tune by the Russian composer Alexander Borodin that found its way into the ‘50s Broadway musical Kismet).

Why do people travel? The puckish cynic Noel Coward is good on this; Connor sings, with appealing lightness, his Sail Away, a veritable manifesto to travelling light. “When you feel your song/ is orchestrated wrong/ Why should you  prolong your stay?” Which may be a warning against reliance on carry-on instead of checking, or chucking, your bag (discuss).

Fresh from a sold-out run of his solo show Made In Italy in Calgary (he’ll be at the Citadel in January), Timoteo, who has a powerhouse operatic voice, delivers the aria Il Mondo Era Vuoto (“the world was empty”) from the Adam Guettel musical Light in the Piazza. And at virtuoso tempo he nails the very funny patter song Tchaikovsky, a ferociously speedy rhyming list of Russian composers. It’s from the ‘40s musical Lady in the Dark, a collaboration between Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin and Moss Hart. And I’m now mightily curious to see it, if only to find out how on earth this song tucks into the story of a woman courted by two guys and unable to make up her mind.

There are songs about the journeying involved in falling in love. And there’s an outstanding Rodgers and Hart song, It Never Entered My Mind (beautifully sung by House) about the solitary aftermath of love. The jauntiest of the evening’s songs are about the fun, and the sense of possibility, built into New York — the concept and the city. Take Me Back to Manhattan from Anything Goes gets a spirited delivery by House. “The crazy skyline is right in my line….”

The Act I finale, the Tonight quintet from West Side Story, is an astonishing capture of  about the rush of feeling one’s life transform, in the very moment. And the cast of three is joined by a couple of other Teatro faves, on opening night Jenny McKillop and Rachel Bowron.    

Neither play nor revue nor cabaret, Far Away and Long A-Gogo!, is billed as a concert that’s a musical introduction, through the Lemoinian lens, to a Teatro season of comedies — including Pith!, The Oculist’s Holiday and Coward’s Private Lives — linked by ideas of travel, adventure, discovery. And in the end, it adds up to thoughts about change — in locale, in sense of self, in emotional landscape. Also there’s this: it’s for all of us who have ever felt the urgent need to have a holiday from ourselves.

The last word to Cole Porter, via one of his musicals that rarely gets produced, Nymph Errant. “Before you leave these portals/ To meet less fortunate mortals … ” House sings in Experiment, a droll but telling exhortation to be curious and try things out, just like scientists do. At the start of a theatre season, words to live by.

Did you have a peek at 12thnight’s PREVIEW chat with musical director Cathy Derkach? It’s here.

REVIEW

Far Away and Long A-Gogo!

Theatre: Teatro Live?

Curated by: Stewart Lemoine

Musical director: Cathy Derkach

Starring: Kendra Connor, Andrea House, Farren Timoteo

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Sunday, and Nov 30 to Dec. 3, eight performances only

Tickets: teatrolive.com, varsconatheatre.com

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