An activist crime caper? Nicole Moeller’s Wildcat at Workshop West, a review

Posted on October 31, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Michele Fleiger and Maralyn Ryan in Wildcat, Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Timeliness? Irony? The world provides, and sometimes theatre just nails it.

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There’s something downright uncanny about the arrival onstage of Wildcat in a week that will live in infamy in Alberta labour history. Workers’ rights, injustice, resistance and retaliation, the connection between people that ignites change … these motifs thread their way through the long set-up and many, sometimes confusing, complications of this new “crime caper” by Nicole Moeller, premiering in a Workshop West production directed by Heather Inglis.

Wildcat, which lives up to its name in several ways in the course of a couple of hours and two acts, is set, in recognizable detail, in Edmonton in 2025. It’s very likely the only play of the season where Kingsway and the old Gainers plant on 66th get mentioned. And it will almost certainly be the only play you’ll see this season you could call an activist crime caper. Moeller’s plays, never skimpy, notably live at the intersection of the intimate and the bigger world of socio-political engagement. And so it is with Wildcat.

In this Moeller experiment, we meet Dot (Michele Fleiger), a union negotiator and shop steward of old, an aging veteran of the anti-government rallies, protests, strikes on behalf of workers’ rights of the ‘80s and ‘90s, during the Klein era.

Thirty years on (and a stroke and bad knees later), “Dottie with the bullhorn” has gradually isolated herself from the world, and her own sense of social outrage. It’s Alberta, for god’s sake, so there’s more to protest than ever; Alberta Next and the health care fiasco instantly come up in Wildcat. But Dot feels past her best-before date, “alone, depleted,” exhausted by doing nothing. And Fleiger, brusque and sardonic, captures wonderfully the prickly fortifications and vulnerability of a character whose sense of absurdity is directed at her own life.

Barricaded in her own kitchen, alone and in full retreat, talking to her deceased houseplant (and to us, in temporary asides from first-person narration), Dot has somehow “lost the ability to leave the house,” as she puts it. And she’s highly resistant to taking calls and returning messages. So it’s a surprise when Pearl (Maralyn Ryan), an old friend and fellow relic from the glory years, makes contact. “I don’t really like to re-hash the old days,” Dot tells her. “I’m not that person any more.”

Memories of Dot’s adrenalized days as a resistance fighter, participating in marches 10,000 strong, handcuffing themselves to cop cars, barricading the gates at Gainers, making the front page in an era when there was real media covering real local news … these are as wispy as Pearl, who has a quavery sweetness and a certain intriguing vagueness in Ryan’s performance.

Dot is resentful about the ministrations of her daughter Gloria (Melissa Thingelstad), a busy but not-uncaring lawyer who squeezes in time she doesn’t have in order to be briskly parental about her aging mom. Gloria oversees Dot’s bills, taxes, passwords, groceries, medications, appointments — and encounters resistance at every turn for her pains. Grown-ups with parents who are hovering on the frontier of old age will recognize the syndrome.

Anyhow, things are not going well in the mother/daughter relationship. Dot hangs out somewhere on the spectrum from tetchy to surly; Gloria is exasperated. “If you don’t start talking to people, you’ll go insane,” she says to Dot. “Too late,” snaps her mother.

Capers and cons do have to be set up gradually, true; the concept of routine plausibility has to be floated, after all. But the setup of Wildcat presses its luck by taking an entire, rather lengthy, first act to let the self-imposed dullness and unexciting inertia of Dot’s life play out: the regular repetition of Dot’s deflections of Gloria, Dot half-heartedly and ineffectually making the acquaintance of Google, Dot’s reluctant exchanges with poor old Pearl. And I’m afraid you do feel its length; it’s something to be got through despite convincing performances from Fleiger, Ryan, and Thingelstad, and dialogue from Moeller that feels real. So surreptitious is Wildcat that Dot sticking a cig, unlit, into her mouth to fake-smoke a Marlboro, a kind of half-assed screw-you to Gloria, counts as an event.

A lot happens at intermission. By the time we’re back for Act II, the crime caper that ensues is an object lesson in how isolated older people become vulnerable to internet scams, for one thing. And how they could use their life experience, and an arsenal of skills no one (including themselves) realize they have in order to fight back. Honestly, I don’t quite understand the machinations of the seniors revenge plot, and I don’t want to tread into spoiler territory. But Act II is where there’s an adventure and Graham Mothersill enters, in full-throttle, as … well, you’ll have to see for yourself. Jason Kodie’s crime caper sound design is a tip-off.

Heather Inglis’s production happens with the audience wrapped around the stage. Ami Farrow’s design doesn’t really have much of a pay-off, except aisles for stage exits and a pack of Marlboros in close-up, in Act I. But it comes into its own with playful moving parts and mid-century kitchen chairs in Act II. Payal Jotania’s costumes, which have a lived-in look for Dot and Pearl (who seems to be wearing a whole closet of old clothes), leave us perplexed in the case of Gloria. The play (and the always terrific Thingelstad) says she’s a high-powered lawyer who travels the country. Her baggy clothes and plastic purse say she’s eccentric thrift shopper, huh?

Revenge is sweet, though, and the revenge of undervalued seniors even sweeter. And if you hang in, you’ll have the rare experience of seeing a play with a topical, even political, edge with enough chutzpah to get wacky. In these disheartening times, when it’s easy to slide into the slough of despond — authoritarians count on this — the old-fashioned Dot spirit of yore, that change is possible if we fight back, collectively, is pretty inspirational (yay, teachers!). Fighting back, collectively: that’s at the heart, in the end, of a messy, somewhat trying, two-part play that, like Dot herself, takes a while to get going.

“We can’t lose each other,” say mother and daughter late in Wildcat. And there it is, activism in a nutshell.

REVIEW

Wildcat

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Nicole Moeller

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Michele Fleiger, Maralyn Ryan, Melissa Thingelstad, Graham Mothersill

Where: The Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through Nov. 9

Tickets: workshopwest.org (all tickets are pay-what-you-will

 

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A week of bounty in Edmonton theatre, a 12thnight survey

Posted on October 29, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Simon Abbott, Cameron Kneteman, Mhairi Berg, Maureen Rooney in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a week of bounty in Edmonton theatre (your biggest problem is choice). Much-awaited new plays are premiering and so is a full-bodied multi-generational dance/theatre extravaganza. A gem of a new musical continues its run. Continuing too is an involving, heart-warming and funny show invites us to think about the stuff we just can’t throw away. A Canuck classic lands once more. And, hey, stories from our own dark history return from the grave, as cues in improv.

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The theatre, my friends, can be a magical place. And you should be there.

Michele Fleiger and Maralyn Ryan in Wildcat, Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre. Photo supplied.

•Wildcat, Nicole Moeller’s much-anticipated new crime caper (an intriguing pairing of playwright and genre in itself), finally opens at Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre.

The premiere at the Gateway Theatre comes after an eerie and mysterious chain of theatre technology breakdowns. Not only that, opening night happens in an appalling week in Alberta labour history. Which gives Moeller’s caper (lighter than usual for her, she tells 12thnight) an added edge, you’d think, since the protagonist Dot (Michele Fleiger) has a personal history in the labour movement, the strikes and protests of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

The heavy-hitter cast of Heather Inglis’s production is led by veteran theatre stars Fleiger and Maralyn Ryan, with Melissa Thingelstad and Graham Mothersill. Have a peek at the 12thnight interview with the playwright here. It runs through Nov. 9 at the Gateway (8529 Gateway Blvd), Tickets (all pay-what-you-will): workshopwest.org.

Cast of Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo supplied

•The ignition of Hayley Moorhouse’s new play Tough Guy, premiering in the Fringe Theatre season Thursday (a Persistent Myth production) is a tragedy: a shooting at a queer nightclub. In a world that’s tough and getting tougher all the time, it chronicles the lives of a circle of queer friends, and the amazing resilience of queer joy as they grapple with the emotional fallout. Brett Dahl’s production at the Backstage Theatre in the Fringe Arts Barns (10330 84 Ave.) runs Thursday through Nov. 8. Meet the playwright in a 12thnight preview here.

Elisa Marina-Sanchez, Ecos, Diaspora Diaries Productions. Photo supplied.

•It’s a big week for Common Ground Arts. Tough Guy was developed there, in the RISER initiative. And so was Ecos (formerly El Funeral), a journey from the Found Festivals of 2021 and 2023 to their new Prairie mainstage Series. It’s the work of Edmonton playwright Elisa Marina-Sánchez. The Diaspora Diaries Collective production directed, in both Spanish and English, by Andrés F. Moreno and Jenna Rogers, features a seven-artist cast of Latin-American heritage: Tatiana Duque, Victor Snaith Hernandez, Alexandra Lainfiesta, Ana Mulion, Phany Peña, Fernando Garcia Reyes, and Jason Romero. Ecos, a co-presentation of Common Ground and Mile Zero Dance, runs at the latter’s headquarters (9931 78 Ave.) Thursday through Nov. 9. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

Naomi Snieckus and Matt Baram in Big Stuff, Baram and Snieckus at Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

•Ever since I saw Big Stuff in the Citadel’s Rice Theatre I can’t stop thinking about it. The married comedy duo Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus with director/co-creator Kat Sandler have created something irresistibly funny and touching — and entirely original in the way the show wraps around their own unfolding love story and embraces, in a specially welcoming kind of improv with us, our own stories of people we’ve lost and the connections we value, through toasters we don’t need and oddball objets d’art … you know, stuff. Theatre is full of stories of people who arrive in relationships with “baggage.” Big Stuff, though, is about … stuff, the stuff we accumulate, the stuff, no matter how small and useless we can’t bear to part with because it’s embedded in memory and wrapped in emotional connection. What are we supposed to do with all our stuff? 

It’s a lovely show, funny, warm-hearted, insightful, and I loved it. Read the 12thnight review here. And 12thnight talked to the pair in a preview here. It continues through Nov. 9. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.

Mhairi Berg and Maureen Rooney in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

•There’s a “new Canadian Celtic musical” at Shadow Theatre. And if you haven’t seen Morningside Road yet, you really should. By Mhairi Berg with music by Simon Abbott, it takes a cast (and a live band) of three into a story about stories, and a kind of haunting. A Canadian girl (Berg) is fascinated by the romance of her grandmother’s stories about growing up in Edinburgh on that road, before, during, and after the war. And gradually, as Granny’s memory gets eroded by dementia the layers of her story multiply.

The ways the past inhabits the present, as remembered and as imagined, are intricate, and surprising. And Lana Michelle Hughes’ production, starring Berg, Maureen Rooney, and Cameron Kneteman, weaves a spell. The music by Berg and Abbott is terrific. The 12thnight review is here. And a preview interview with Mhairi Berg is here. Morningside Road runs through Sunday at the Varscona (10329 83 Ave.). Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.  

Steven Greenfield in Billy Bishop Goes To War, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

•A new company, Edmonton Repertory Theatre, launches its first season with a production of a Canadian classic, the 1978 two-hander musical Billy Bishop Goes To War, by John MacLachlan Gray in collaboration with actor Eric Peterson. Its wry view of what “hero” means in Canadian terms, is built into its chronicle of the young, self-deprecating, accident-prone underachiever who becomes a World War I flying ace, his quixotic relationship with his colonial masters across the sea, and his darkening views of what war is all about. Gerry Potter’s production, starring Steven Greenfield and Cathy Derkach, lands the musical at a moment when this country is under siege. Have a look at the 12thnight preview with the director here, and the review here. You’ll find the show at a newly discovered theatre, the Biederman, in the Lifestyles Options Retirement Community (17203 99 Ave.). Tickets: eventbrite.com.

•Speaking as we are of phantoms and the thin veil that separates us from the Great Beyond, it’s the last week (Thursday through Saturday) for Ha-Ha-Haunting. Rapid Fire Theatre’s highly original seasonal co-opting of horror stories from the dark vault of our own history (researched by Dead Centre of Town resident playwright Megan Dart) lets a crack cast of improvisers loose on them. A nefarious comic agenda, am I right?  Who would do that (unnecessary question of the week)? Opening night was riotous (read about it here). Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com.

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Tragedy and queer joy: Hayley Moorhouse’s Tough Guy, a preview

Posted on October 28, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Cast of Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Do you remember where you were when you heard …?

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There are moments in life when you know your answer will be instantly available in your memory, forever. Hayley Moorhouse, whose new play Tough Guy premieres Thursday in a Persistent Myth production directed by Brett Dahl (part of the Edmonton Fringe Theatre season), distinctly remembers driving to work one morning in 2016, listening to the radio. En route the news came on: a horrific mass shooting in Pulse, a queer nightclub in Orlando. “I’m not normally a big emotional kinda guy,” says Moorhouse, who indeed has a brisk, articulate sort of thoughtfulness and good humour in conversation. But they found themself “sobbing so hard I couldn’t see and had to pull over. It hit me so hard.”

“I didn’t start thinking about (writing Tough Guy) right there, but it stayed with me,” they say. “The impact of that nightclub shooting was really hard, for many people,” Moorhouse among them. “It stayed with me… But the seeds of the play were planted over many years, if I go way back as a queer person.” There’s been progress, yes, but “things are starting to feel different, scarier these days…. Queer people, trans people especially, are constantly de-humanized and threatened and oppressed, not only by people, but by government institutions in ways that are really quite frightening.”

The five characters in Tough Guy are 20-something friends, grappling to navigate the emotional fallout of a mass shooting in a queer club. And upping the ante is the arrival of another friend, an indie filmmaker back home to shoot a documentary about the fatal  incident.

As Moorhouse was developing the play, the image of a boxer lodged in their mind. “There’s something so visceral and sweaty and alive in that image … a cool way to talk about how we embody our experiences of trauma: we don’t just think them or talk about them, we really feel them in our bodies.” The action of Tough Guy happens in an urban garage, a hang-out space where the friends, including one character who’s a boxer, meet and party. And a punching bag has pride of place.

Playwright Hayley Moorhouse

Two years ago, Moorhouse enthusiastically signed up for RISER, Common Ground Arts’ program of mentorship for the crazily multi-faceted demands of being a theatre producer. “I wanted to produce my own work, things I want to say about the queer experience now. And people have been so supportive and gracious in the theatre community. Everyone I speak to is willing to offer advice or mentorship; the generosity and support are so great!”

A 2018 U of A theatre school acting grad — Edmonton audiences saw Moorhouse in Shadow Theatre’s Robot Girls, Stars on Her Shoulders at Workshop West, Little Women at the Citadel — they have been writing “pretty much my whole life, since I was a little kid,” they say. “I’ve been a writer way longer than I’ve been an actor. It was my first love.”

And Tough Guy, the winner of the 2025 Alberta Playwriting Competition and Westbury Family Fringe Theatre Award, isn’t the first time Moorhouse the writer has been drawn to explore the reverb from trauma. Suspension, which they produced at the 2019 Fringe — “a fly by the seat of your pants experiment” in producing and directing — and then, in a podcast version the following year for the Alberta Queer Calendar Project. They describe it as “a surreal absurdist play with two characters who meet each other in a deserted suburban backyard.” Above them is a plane crash about to happen; “the plane is frozen mid-air and they have time to figure out how to respond.”

Says Moorhouse “I’m very interested in my writing by how people respond when something horrible happens? And how do we tell the story of events like these?” The filmmaker character in Tough Guy wasn’t actually present at the violent event in the nightclub. “But they want their friends who were there to mine their emotions, go back, dig deep. And I’m interested in exploring the ethics, and the cost” of that re-creation.

“In theatre, we are storytellers. And sometimes we tell really hard stories.” It’s “the cost of the story vs what it gives us,” Moorhouse thinks. “Are we telling stories just because they’re sensational or shocking? Or is there something of value we get?”

These are questions that resonate particularly, and often, vis-à-vis “the tradition of telling queer stories that are really sad,” as Moorhouse puts it. “It’s the ‘bury-your-gaze’ trope”: how often does it happen in movies, TV, or plays that a queer character is introduced … “and then they die”?

“Hey, that’s not an accurate summation of the queer experience,” Moorhouse sighs. “Our lives aren’t only sad and only difficult…. I’m curious about finding that balance, really grappling with a story, really diving into it, and also seeing ‘what else is there?’. Making these characters’ lives as three-dimensional and as full and contradictory as possible.”

Jasmine Hopfe in Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo supplied

They’ve been at pains in Tough Guy to show characters “in the depths of the worst day of their lives, and also show them at their most exuberantly joyful.” So Moorhouse has the play “slip between different time lines. Half takes place in the days after the shooting when everything is really difficult. And half the scenes take place at a party six months prior when all the characters are together, being ridiculous, goofy, drunk, and joyful.”

Moorhouse’s five characters respond to trauma and grief in individual ways. “It’s human nature to avoid pain at all costs. When people go through something traumatic, they brush it off, they make jokes, they pretend it’s not happening. Or they deflect and focus on work or solutions….”

Is Moorhouse finding the full experience of queer-ness in the theatrical storytelling they see at the moment? They consider the question. “We see sparks of excellent theatre that grapples with all the realities of the queer experience. It’s not that it’s not out there; I just wish there was more.” Stories that reflect queer joy, “the silly ones that remind us how joyful it is to be queer,” are at a premium. It’s no accident that one of Moorhouse’s favourite theatre companies is the queer sketch comedy troupe I Hardly Know Them (their very funny TikTok videos revel in the ridiculous and the absurd). Queer comedy, they think, is “a rebellious act in its own way; I love that group so much!”

Michelle Diaz in Tough Guy, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo supplied.

“It’s really exciting to show queer people, and queer characters, in a kaleidoscopic way…. To have as many voices and textures and ideas as possible — all with a queer lens.”

As a queer artist Moorhouse admits to being “shocked by the political moment we’re in.  “Maybe I was naive. But 10 years ago I would never have seen it coming, the government making life unbearable for trans and gender-diverse kids,” they sigh. “It’s a frightening, heartbreaking moment. But we’re still here, and we’re still alive, still kicking, still fighting to create change and make things better….”

“I’m heartened by the Edmonton theatre community,” they say. “It’s all our job to be really loud!”

PREVIEW

Tough Guy

Theatre: Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre

Written and produced by: Hayley Moorhouse

Directed by: Brett Dahl

Starring: Mel Bahniuk, Michelle Diaz, Jasmine Hopfe, Marguerite Lawler, Autumn Strom

Where: Backstage Theatre, Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Nov. 8

Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca

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‘A life to live, a death confronted’: Billy Bishop Goes To War, a review

Posted on October 27, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Steven Greenfield and Cathy Derkach, Billy Bishop Goes To War, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Frequent flyers might think of the Toronto Island airport before the man. But the much-loved two-hander musical that Edmonton Repertory Theatre has chosen for its inaugural season returns to us another frequent flyer, a medal-bedecked World War I fighter pilot from Owen Sound, Ont., to tell his own story.

That it is the story of an underachiever and self-confessed screw-up — “on record the worst student ever at the Royal Military College,” as our hero says brightly — gives Billy Bishop Goes To War an appealing Canadian-ness.   

The 1978 two-hander musical, by John MacLachlan Gray in collaboration with the actor Eric Peterson (its original stars), is an original fusion of self-deprecating humour and satirical edge, spun from a real-life Canadian memoir. It’s travelled the country, crossed the pond to the West End, played New York on Broadway and off- in its heyday. Now it lands on a hitherto undiscovered theatrical airstrip, the Biederman Theatre on the third floor of a west end “retirement community,” starring Steven Greenfield and Cathy Derkach and directed by Gerry Potter, whose Workshop West production of the early ‘80s starring David LeReaney toured Canada.   

It’s one of those homegrown classics whose edge and sense of humour are honed by the times, and the particular strengths of two actors: one taking on some 17 characters; the other in support, musical and narrative, at the keyboard. Both are excellent.

Billy Bishop is part of an international theatre repertoire that’s not short on either anti-war satires or plays that address the glory of struggle and the high human cost of war. This new production, handsomely set forth (designer Jaimie Cooney, lighting by Nic Juba) on the shallow stage of the intimate low-ceilinged space, arrives at a particular moment when Canada is getting smacked around and bullied as a sovereign country. And given our situation, a land under siege, there’s a particularly cheering feistiness about reviving the story of a renegade colonial misfit who’s a natural subverter of another country’s military authority.

Steven Greenfield in Billy Bishop Goes To War, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

Like his countrymen, Billy is co-opted into a war effort a world away. And by an unlikely series of encounters and a random selection of his skills, he ends up in an elite airborne outfit, the suicide squad (average life span 11 days). Eventually, he chalks up a staggering number of “kills,” some 72, to his credit. Which will propel him into the absurd position of getting yanked from official fighter pilot duty because he’s too good (he threatens the record of a Brit war hero).

I haven’t seen it for many years, not I think since James MacDonald’s excellent 2010 Citadel production starring John Ullyatt and Ryan Sigurdson. I do remember seeing Peterson and Gray a couple of times as older characters looking back with a sort of nostalgia and ruefulness on their younger selves.

This new production isn’t like that. The appealing Greenfield is prime Billy, energetic, ebullient, amused and delighted by his own wayward improbability in rising to military stardom. Derkach, a rare example of a female actor in a Billy Bishop production and always a warm, engaging presence onstage, is already at the piano when Billy appears out of the darkness of the theatre without explanation and arrives onstage to sing “We were off to shoot the Hun, it looked like lots of fun….”

It’s a sassy, boisterous performance. And Potter’s production doesn’t bother with the theatrical trappings that would explain why exactly he’s onstage recounting his career arc to us. There they just are, Greenfield and Derkach, both actors with top-drawer musical skills, telling and singing a hero’s tale. It’s Canadian-style music hall with an underdog narrative.

Billy’s story puts you in mind of Groucho Marx’s celebrated declaration that he didn’t want to belong to any organization that would accept him as a member. The Brit military mucky-mucks and the war effort brain trust must be totally hooped, figures Billy, if a soldier like him, “a convicted liar and a cheat,” can rise through the ranks and be, first a cavalry officer, and then a pilot. “They were scraping the bottom of the barrel.” There’s something disarmingly Canadian about a self-deprecating hero. At critical early career junctures, explains Billy, “I get sick, I get injured, or I get into a lot of trouble.” And sure enough….

Steven Greenfield in Billy Bishop Goes To War, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

Greenfield presents with considerable  comic zest a gallery of grotesques, his superiors first in the cavalry and then in the airborne squadron. Lady Helier, or rather Billy’s re-creation of Lady Helier, the dragon blue-blood who’s his unexpected benefactor, is a riot. He didn’t have any qualifications to be a pilot, Billy admits. Or maybe he did, who knows?, since the authorities who are interviewing him don’t know what the qualifications are, anyhow.

In Greenfield’s performance, Billy is a great appreciator of the absurdity of the class system (he’s a “colonial dignitary”), and of every military decision, including the one to divest his plane of all guns to lighten the load so his plane could actually take off. “It’s hard to keep your confidence in war without a gun,” he smiles and rolls his eyes. It confirms all his worst suspicions.

There are key moments in Billy’s story, nailed with precision by Potter’s production.  When Billy looks up, from the cold mud of the trenches, and sees salvation and a future in the sky, his fortunes seem to levitate: that’s one. As captured by Greenfield, armed with miniature models of planes in various scales, Billy is giddy with delight in his initial solo departures from terra firma.

There’s a turning point, identified in Greenfield’s impressive performance, when Billy discovers he’s somehow acquired a lust for risk, an appetite for the kill. When he takes on a German aerodrome single-handedly in his pajamas, the dog fight, as acted out solo, is an adrenalin junkie’s hallucination. “I never had so much fun in my life!”

Gradually, in Act II, Billy’s relish for flying darkens into something more ruminative, an awareness of horror and the human price tag on military adventures (the young as cannon fodder for the old). The song In The Sky, beautifully sung by Greenfield and Derkach, memorably captures the strangely lyrical dance macabre of aerial warfare, “one the hunter one the hunted together in the sky.”

It’s an odd musical — the much-abused word “quirky” doesn’t go amiss — that demands heroic virtuosity and stamina from the actor who plays Billy and a dozen and a half other characters through Billy’s eyes. And, as you’ll see from this production, it’s still funny and affecting after nearly half a century. Gray’s score has an assortment of original period pieces: jaunty music hall ditties, military pastiches, G&S-type patter songs, a slinky Kurt Weill-esque number delivered by a French chanteuse as conjured by Greenfield, who drapes himself in a boa and an accent for the number. There’s a song that touches on the Canadian resistance to stardom. There’s an ode to the bright blue Canadian sky, for which Billy eventually longs. There’s even a rhymed spoken-word poem that pits glory against survival.

“The British like their heroes cold and dead,” he tells us. Well, we Canadians like our heroes lively and flawed. This Canuck classic couldn’t come at a better time. Start your engines, people.

REVIEW

Billy Bishop Goes To War

Theatre: Edmonton Repertory Theatre

Created by: John MacLachlan Gray in collaboration with Eric Peterson

Directed by: Gerry Potter

Starring: Steven Greenfield and Cathy Derkach

Where: Biederman Theatre, Lifestyles Options Retirement Community, 17203 99 Ave.

Running: through Nov. 8

Tickets and full schedule of performances: eventbrite.com

 

 

 

 

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The magic of … stuff and a lovable show about that: Big Stuff at the Citadel, a review

Posted on October 24, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Naomi Snieckus and Matt Baram in Big Stuff, Baram and Snieckus at Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s magic in … stuff. In the way it accumulates, for one thing. In the way it shrugs off mere utility like lint off a lapel. In the emotional alchemy that transforms junk — old pens, egg slicers, needlepoint portraits — into important treasures, according to a secret formula that’s a helluva lot closer to your heartbeat than any PIN.

And there’s magic in a show, now welcoming (and I use the word advisedly) audiences into the Citadel’s Rice Theatre, that’s all about that.

Big Stuff, by the married comedy duo Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus with director Kat Sandler, is an original kind of fantasia on our connection to people, moments, punch lines and human motifs we’ve lost — to the past, to memory. In a larger sense, it’s about where we find meaning, and human connection, in a world crucially short of both. You can’t help wondering if Vladimir and Estragon would have felt so unanchored to meaning in the world as they waited near a tree on a road, if only they’d had some stuff — a chipped mug, maybe, or an unravelling toque, or a lopsided bowl from an ill-fated ceramics course.

But wait, I’m thinking about myself. And that’s the other thing about the magic of Big Stuff: the way that Baram and Snieckus invite us into a play, part memoir part improv, where you can’t help doing that. Big Stuff is where your stories about your people can easily mingle with their stories about their people, without getting dressed up or putting on the dog.

‘Sharing’ in theatre is oft-referenced, seldom actually achieved. And somehow, this warm and funny pair is brave and relaxed enough to share, first, their affection for each other, their amusement, their frictions and idiosyncrasies. And then, to share their appreciation for us, our stories, and the oddball particularities of the stuff that comes attached to them.

Naomi Snieckus and Matt Baram, Baram and Snieckus at the Citadel Theatre, Photo by Nanc Price.

It starts when you enter the theatre: the stage is dominated by a wall, no a veritable altar, of cardboard boxes (design: Michelle Tracey). Between the cracks there’s stuff: lamps (the lighting sources of Emilie Trimbee’s design are a narrative track in themselves) , unidentifiable objets d’art, a toaster, a phonograph….

On every seat is a little card with an invitation to “write down an item you have at home that reminds you of someone close to you.” And then somehow, in the course of their story about a return road trip from L.A. back to Toronto with a U-Haul cube van full of their stuff, this expert pair of improvisers invites people to expand, if they’re feeling it, on their chosen item and explain the connection.

The lively dynamic between Baram and Snieckus established by the play is the tension between what to keep, what to toss. As stuff accumulates, the latter can’t bear to part with her grandmother’s crochet hook, for example, even though she does not, and will never, crochet. And question not the need, as Baram does, for six toasters just because they don’t eat bread. Baram, who’s evidently an appreciator of cosmic absurdity, argues for getting rid of his dad’s wildly original collage as moving on, not getting bogged down in grief even though he feels it. He lobbies for a culling of the stuff collection. Should they just leave a whole storage unit of stuff, collected in the course of five years in L.A.? Husband and wife do not agree.

Naomi Snieckus and Matt Baram in Big Stuff, Baram and Snieckus at Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Since the show is fuelled by the powerful way objects conjure memories of parents lost, the audience is bound to side most often with Snieckus, who asks questions like “what was she like, your mom?” when she’s talking to people who have contributed an item. On opening night, The People rose to the occasion in startlingly beautiful and funny ways, mainly I think because the atmosphere was so un-pressurized, so safe and fun and casual. Baram and Snieckus are delightful people to talk to and with. They don’t humour the audience;  so they/we are free to feel usefully part of the show.

This is, in short, a very unusual show. It is a play, and artfully constructed from personal stories about Baram and Snieckus, their lives now, their lives growing up, their parents. It’s also a play that’s partly improvised from cues, signals, and stories from the audience that recur as motifs. These are improvisers who listen, and remember. On the night I saw the show, a widow was asked to recall how she’d met her late husband. “On a farm,” she said. How is that possible? wondered Snieckus. The woman, naturally funny, recalled the circumstances, a happy memory shaded by loss, and, I would think, she really enjoyed the experience and our collective appreciation of her, led by the performers onstage. Someone else endeavoured to sing a song her dad had always sung to her, and we all spontaneously sang along.

In a long history of cringing in the back row of theatres, pretending to be short, as volunteers are pried from the audience for the participation bits, I can honestly tell you this was dramatically different. The rapport in the room was multi-dimensional and heart-warming; stories connect us. How often do you get to call a show “lovable”? You leave with tears in your eyes and a smile on your face.

Have a peek at 12thnight’s preview interview with Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus, here.

REVIEW

Big Stuff

Theatre: A Baram and Snieckus Production in the Citadel’s Highwire Series

Created by and starring: Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus

Co-created and directed by: Kat Sandler

Running: through Nov. 9

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

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‘A major breach of technical security at the theatre’ cancels opening weekend of Workshop West’s Wildcat

Posted on October 24, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If you’re excited to see the much-anticipated premiere of the new Nicole Moeller crime caper Wildcat at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, which was to have opened tonight, you’ll have to wait a bit longer. The production’s opening weekend at the Gateway Theatre has been cancelled, and opening night has been delayed till Wednesday.

A major breach of technical security at the theatre, unprecedented and as yet unexplained, has resulted in “malfunctions of all the technical equipment,” says Workshop West artistic producer Heather Inglis. Lighting, sound … all systems have been compromised in this “perplexing and mysterious” crisis, says Inglis.

“Plays are a lot of work; theatre equipment is expensive,” as Inglis says. “We’ve tried to outfit this space for the community to use, as well. To have a flexible black box theatre indie producers can work with…. I’ve been an indie producer myself. Now we’ve got to find the funds to replace gear.”

Meanwhile, as Inglis describes, the cast (Michele Fleiger, Maralyn Ryan, Melissa Thingelstad, Graham Mothersill) have rallied, and the technical team led by Jen Magel, the crew, and stage management have worked tirelessly to resolve the damaging issues and restore the technical functions needed to get Wildcat onto the stage in a few days. “We’ve been accessing the Edmonton technical theatre community. And they’ve been very generous with their expertise.”

“We’re working our way through it. And we will persevere!” says Inglis. “We’re looking forward to seeing everybody next week.”

Wildcat runs at the Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd. Oct. 29 through Nov. 9. Tickets (all pay-what-you-will): workshopwest.org.  Workshop West is individually contacting ticket-holders affected by cancelled weekend performances. Further information: 780-477-4944, workshopwest.org.

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A very Canadian kind of hero. Billy Bishop Goes To War: a theatre classic is back, with elbows up

Posted on October 22, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Steven Greenfield in Billy Bishop Goes To War, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Here’s a question that threads its way through our whole history, and feels especially up front, feet planted, elbows up, at the moment: What’s different about us Canadians anyhow?

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Billy Bishop Goes To War, the bona fide Canadian theatre classic that launches Edmonton Repertory Theatre first season Friday at the Biederman Theatre, wonders about that. For the last half century or so its quizzical perspectives on heroism and a distinctly Canadian cultural identity have alighted at moments that always seem like exactly The Right Moment.

The much produced 1978 two-hander musical by John MacLachlan Gray in collaboration with the actor Eric Peterson, its original performers, chronicles the unlikely career of the World War I fighter pilot from Owen Sound, Ont. to international star status. And the Edmonton Repertory Theatre production, starring Steven Greenfield (as Billy Bishop and 17 other characters) and Cathy Derkach at the keyboard), actor-musicians both, reunites this seminal piece with a distinguished director whose passion for getting Canadian voices onstage has been recognized across the country. Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre, the Edmonton company Gerry Potter started 47 seasons  ago when he emerged from the U of A directing program, is all about that, developing a distinctively Canadian repertoire and nurturing its creators.

Jennifer Kreziewicz, the artistic director of Edmonton Repertory Theatre, dedicated to creating theatre that’s “accessible for multi-generational audiences and artists” as she puts it, first saw Billy Bishop Goes To War in the ‘90s at the Citadel, she recalls. “And it really stuck with me as a young theatre-goer…. A fun show, and so impactful.” And she’s discovered a new venue, the 185-seat Biederman Theatre in the west end (in the Lifestyles Options Retirement Community, with parking!) in which to present the two-hander musical. “It’s our little nod to Elbows Up” she says of the Canadian-ness of the classic that launches the company’s first season, which will, if all goes well, include two more productions. “Maybe this is the year I’ll get my first grant!”

She picked a play that’s savvy about nationalism and the cost of war, and paired it with director Potter, who first directed it in 1983. His Workshop West production, starring David LeReaney and Jan Randall, toured around the West at the time. And he’s long thought about re-mounting it. So the invitation from Kreziewicz was welcome, he says.

Steven Greenfield and Cathy Derkach, Billy Bishop Goes To War, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

“When John and Eric (created) it in the ‘70s, it was a time of cultural nationalism — and not the kind of nationalism that Trump and cronies promote,” says Potter, reflecting on the positioning in time and place of a piece inspired by William Avery Bishop’s memoir Winged Warfare. The cultural nationalism of the time didn’t have anything to do with  right-wing populism; “it was protesting the war in Vietnam, a very anti-war time, a liberal leftist movement. And the thought that maybe we could get a few of our own voices onto stages. That was the movement that Workshop West came out of. And it was new at the time….”

Steven Greenfield in Billy Bishop Goes To War, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

As Potter says, the heroes of boyhood were American, and Disney-fied at that: Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone and their ilk. This country’s heroes were unknown to him, and to most Canadians. “And this seems like a good time to reflect on how we’re different and if we’re different.” He he points to Margaret Atwood’s 1972 survey of the Canadian cultural landscape, Survival: A Thematic Guide To Canadian Literature. “She looks at Billy Bishop as the product of a northern environment,” says Potter. The prevailing theme she discerned? “Survival, as distinct from the niceties of protocols, traditions, nice manners” that thread their way through the Brit repertoire.

And there were controversies at the time of the National Film Board film,” Potter recalls. The idea that Canada’s flying ace, who’d cheated at military college and inflated his own record to get ahead stuck in the craw of Senators. “Books were written; ‘the NFB should be cut off!’” Says Potter genially, “it’s an interesting issue…. John (John Gray) wanted to explore ‘what’s a Canadian hero?’”

Skepticism about heroism, war, and the co-opting of the colonies for participation on distant battlefields, pulse through the scenes of Billy Bishop. And, as Potter has been re-discovering in rehearsal, there’s a lot of humour in the piece. “The culture of the colonies” is treated in funny ways, Potter points out. Billy is a kind of renegade spirit. “He liked having fun; he doesn’t like to be told what to do by British officers.” How Canadian is that?

““This is not just a history lesson. There’s a bit of that. But mostly it’s a theatrical good time!”

PREVIEW

Billy Bishop Goes To War

Theatre: Edmonton Repertory Theatre

Created by: John MacLachlan Gray in collaboration with Eric Peterson

Directed by: Gerry Potter

Starring: Steven Greenfield and Cathy Derkach

Where: Biederman Theatre, Lifestyles Options Retirement Community, 17203 99 Ave.

Running: Friday through Nov. 8

Tickets and full schedule of performances: eventbrite.com

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Set now, in Edmonton, in the political landscape of Alberta: Wildcat, Nicole Moeller’s new crime caper at Workshop West

Posted on October 21, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Michele Fleiger and Maralyn Ryan in Wildcat, Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

FUN. In a world of anxiety and dread, it’s an elusive concept, but a seductive one, says playwright Nicole Moeller unspooling time back to her inspiration for Wildcat. Her new crime caper premieres Friday with a starry cast in the Heather Inglis production that launches the Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre season.

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Moeller, who’s thoughtful and self-deprecating in conversation, is thinking back. Five years ago, the pandemic was locking people into their homes and the separate configuration of their lives. And “after 10 years of back-to-back projects,” Moeller says, “I wanted to write something lighter, something I could have fun with, not knowing if it would ever be onstage.”

As Edmonton audiences know, a Moeller play, which tends to have a gestation period measured in years, is often wrested from the news, and at jagged, oblique, underbelly angles. The playwright, who came from the curious double optic of musical theatre at MacEwan (“such a blip in my background!” she laughs) and before that journalism, gravitates to the dark, shadowy end of the theatrical palette. She had turned into a playwright, as she describes, writing Without You in the course of a 24-hour playwriting competition. “At 3 in the morning I said to myself ‘Oh, I won’t be acting again; clearly. I liked writing so much more than I’d ever liked being onstage.”

playwright Nicole Moeller. Photo supplied

The news was a draw. And her journalist brain was drawn to use it theatrically, “the story behind the story and all that,” she says. ” I’ve often used those sensational topics as a hook, but I always try to go for the universal behind it.” Moeller’s break-out hit of 2011, An Almost Perfect Thing, for example, was inspired by a hair-raising news story about a young Austrian girl kidnapped at 10, who escaped from her captor after eight years locked in a basement prison.

The Mothers, the SkirtsAfire Festival mainstage production of 2015, explored the life of a mother whose kid took a gun to school and made tragic use of it. In 2019 the fulcrum of Moeller’s high-speed thriller The Ballad of Peachtree Rose, the grand finale of Vern Thiessen’s term as Workshop West artistic director, is the seduction of a street kid into a criminal network.

Bobbi Goddard, Alexandra Dawkins, Laura Raboud, in The Ballad of Peachtree Rose, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

And now … a crime caper. Is this new lighter tone pandemic-related? “For sure,” says Moeller. “And it’s also the way things are in the world…. Yes, my writing is lighter. For one thing (rueful laughter) you almost can’t go darker than things are today.” News junkies are in tough these days. And the news isn’t the magnet for Moeller that it used to be. “I’m having a hard time with it now. And I’m trying to fight against those feelings. The world should activate us, not overwhelm us….”

Wildcat, and the central character of Dot (the workshop title at the 2024 Springboards Festival was The Resurrection of Dottie Reed) “were inspired by a woman I was quite close with…. She’d been a strong union person, she’d been on strikes and protests in the ‘80s and ’90s, a staunch NDP-er. But when I knew her, in her ‘70s, she’d become isolated. It was interesting to me, the contrast between who she was, and what happens sometimes to older people.”

“Such an interesting woman,” Moeller says affectionately. “Tough as nails, but such a kind heart. I love that contrast in people who are outwardly one way, inwardly something else.”

At the heart of Wildcat is the relationship between 60-something former union organizer Dot (played by Michele Fleiger) and her daughter (Melissa Thingelstad). Since it’s a crime caper, there’s a lot for the playwright (and for me) to be mysterious about. Moeller divulges that “we see Dot at the beginning, in isolation…. A chance encounter with an old friend from her union days” (Maralyn Ryan as Pearl) changes all that. And they get to be on a wild adventure they hadn’t expected,” Moeller laughs. “This is me, so there’s always going to be heavier stuff. But this is a fun way to explore it. It’s a ride!”

“I was interested as well in that transition period, kind of awkward and muddy, between child and care-giver, parent and patient…. It’s difficult for people to talk about, that transition. We’re not where we were and we’re not where we will be; we’re in-between. And how do we navigate that?”

An inveterate re-writer (“I am very known for making changes,” she says modestly), Moeller spent the first two weeks attending Inglis’s rehearsals with the experienced cast of Fleiger, Thingelstad, Ryan, and Graham Mothersill (who plays all the characters the adventurers meet). And “it’s evolved a lot,” she says of the script. Moeller is a playwright unusually receptive to considering input from the director and the cast. “Heather is so fantastic at seeing the seed of something, and she’s quite direct, which I like…. And these actors are so incredibly smart,” she laughs. “When Maralyn Ryan gives you a suggestion, you’d want to consider it!”

Wildcat is Moeller’s first crack at writing for characters (and actors) substantially older than her. “It’s so bizarre,” she says. “There are lots of older people going to theatre. But we don’t often put them onstage, especially in big roles, having adventures.  Older people “don’t often see their own stories onstage.”

Though it’s not directly seeded by the news, Wildcat reveals Moeller’s interest, as she says, “in ‘80s labour history in Alberta, the nurses’ strike of 1986, protests against Klein in the ‘90s…. Because of the way the government is now, it’s important to remember when we’ve stood up and protested in the past.” Workshop West bills Wildcat as “a surefire antidote to the Alberta news cycle,” a cheering thought.

And its Edmonton setting  is by no means random or incidental. “If it ever went beyond this production, would I keep it in Edmonton or change the city?” Moeller has asked herself. “In my plays I like people to have a touchpoint in their real home.” But in the case of this one, with its resonances of labour history, protests, and feisty stand-up characters, she’s thinking ‘maybe leave it here, in Edmonton’. “If only so that people can see an Albertan who’s not (the Albertan) people see on the news…. We ARE diverse; our opinions ARE diverse. And I don’t know how much the country knows that.”

PREVIEW

Wildcat

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Nicole Moeller

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Michele Fleiger, Maralyn Ryan, Melissa Thingelstad, Graham Mothersill

Where: The Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: Friday through Nov. 9

Tickets: workshopwest.org (all tickets are pay-what-you-will

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Re-imagining your inheritance: Morningside Road, a beautiful new Canadian Celtic musical, at Shadow

Posted on October 17, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Mhairi Berg and Maureen Rooney in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

One of the haunting songs in Morningside Road, the “new Canadian Celtic musical” that blows open the Shadow Theatre season, wonders about the remarkable way the past is never black-and-white in memory.

How does it get colourized, so to speak? “In memories you share,” sings Girl (Mhairi Berg) who slides in and out of the present and into the past to become Elaine, the younger version of her Scottish Granny (Maureen Rooney), “there are voices of the people you knew.” And in  the premiere production directed by Shadow’s artistic director designate Lana Michelle Hughes, those strong voices have a live band too onstage with them: three musicians in shadows behind a screen in a tilted frame, who seem to float, in the mind, ever ready to join in on celebratory occasions.

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In a graceful way, that song “There Is Colour” is what this gem of a new musical, by Berg with music by Berg and Simon Abbott, is all about. The dimensions of Morningside Road are small (as small as a family), but its heart is big; its sense of time is complicated. And as a story about stories and the memories that colour, shape, and populate them, the musical actually gains narrative heft, intricacy, and emotional resonance from having a small cast: three actors, three musicians.

A place that’s home “is built of stories we call our own,” as another of Morning Side Road‘s songs has it. And that’s how we meet Granny and Girl, drinking tea and doing crosswords together, connected by Granny’s stories of growing up on Morningside Road in Edinburgh, in the 30s, in war-time and beyond. As Granny, Rooney, too rarely seen on our stages, is a sassy kind of Gaelic sage, anti-sentimental, reductive in her wit. In matters of romantic love, she advises her granddaughter, don’t settle for nice, or reliable. “I just don’t want to see your fire burn out,” Granny declares. “The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else.”

In Rooney’s performance it is genuinely heart-wrenching to see what happens gradually, in Act II, as Granny’s own fire is dimmed by dementia, and cracks begin to appear in her memory and oft-repeated stories. They aren’t time-proof in their details, much to Girl’s dismay. But there may be other stories to unearth; maybe we are all archaeological sites.   

Under Hughes’ direction Granny and Elaine, her younger Edinburgh self played by Berg, are unmistakably the same feisty person over time. And quick wit and crackling responsiveness, and the same love of words, are recognizable in Girl, Granny’s Canadian granddaughter, too. She’s also played by Berg, who is a luminous and magnetic performer onstage, with a supple, multi-angled voice.

What you inherit, what you imagine, and the uses you make of that domestic legacy of stories, are woven delicately and artfully into the fabric of Berg’s script. Are truth and fact interchangeable? Morningside Road wonders about that, and has its doubts. In harmony with that thought, Daniel VanHeyst’s set has a realistic kitchen table sitting solidly in a world with other possibilities: empty frames, free-floating hints of old-country wallpaper and yellowed old-school lino. Like Granny and Girl, we are haunted, suggests the play and its design (lighted by Lieke Den Bakker).

Mhairi Berg and Cameron Kneteman in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

There’s a third actor, too, and since there are mysteries attached to Lad I can’t tell you too much more than that. Lad appears; he vanishes. While he’s onstage, in captivating little scenes with the firecracker Elaine, he’s a wry, playful, thoroughly corporeal presence in Kneteman’s performance — “I’m the kind of lad who’d lead a lamb astray,” as he sings. But, intriguingly, he doesn’t stay put. He floats in and out of scenes, part memory part dream, in Berg’s play and Hughes’ staging.

The music by Berg and Abbott (a first-rate piano player who’s part of the onstage band himself) is soulfully — and playfully!— Celtic in flavour. There are both “traditional” and rocking folk ballads. There’s a jazzy Christmas morning number. There are love songs that make you fish for your Kleenex. There’s a dance party with a rousing drinking song to match. The score has made beautiful use of the gorgeous “Wild Love,” originally written by Abbott and Cassie Muise for The Trial of Patrick Whelan.

Simon Abbott, Cameron Kneteman, Mhairi Berg, Maureen Rooney in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Morningside Road co-creator Abbott (also the music director), Curtis Den Otter (percussion) and Viktoria Grynenko (violin) are superb musicians. And Hughes’ sound mix is impeccable. Strange and telling how the violin can turn lyrical into wistful; it’s the sound of memory and romance.

Some ghosts cannot be banished, no matter how hard we try to re-imagine them. And the gorgeous finale song Morningside Road, delivered by Rooney with wrenching simplicity, will make your eyes water. An impressive new homegrown musical, Shadow’s first musical, poignant and funny, with a great score and a story about storytelling, has joined the Canadian theatre repertoire. Don’t miss your chance.

12thnight interviewed Mhairi Berg for a preview, here.

REVIEW

Morningside Road

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Mhairi Berg (book)

Music and lyrics by: Mhairi Berg and Simon Abbott

Directed by: Lana Michelle Hughes

Starring: Mhairi Berg, Cameron Kneteman, Maureen Rooney

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Nov. 2

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

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To keep or not to keep, that is the question: Baram and Snieckus bring Big Stuff to the Citadel, a preview

Posted on October 16, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus in Big Stuff, photo by Dahlia Katz.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You go through life accumulating stuff, you know you do. Stuff that looks as innocuous as a tea cup or a broken toaster but comes wrapped in emotional ribbon. Stuff that connects you to people or moments, or selves, you’ve lost.

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What are you supposed to do with all the stuff?

To toss or not to toss. Big Stuff, officially opening in the Citadel’s Highwire Series next week, is all about that. An original combination of storytelling, memoir, and improv interaction with the audience, it’s the bright idea of the Toronto-based married Canadian comedy duo Naomi Snieckus and Matt Baram (who’s from Edmonton), along with director Kat Sandler, a playwright herself. They arrive in Baram’s home town trailing raves from a premiere run, twice held over, of Big Stuff a year ago in Toronto, and three weeks at the Segal Centre in Montreal.   

The theme that comes up right away, and lands lightly in conversation with this funny and thoughtful pair, is loss. Zooming in from New York (and a two-night showcase for potential producers), Snieckus and Baram trace the inspiration for Big Stuff to the loss of the last of their parents four years ago. “We became a really tight family in the pandemic,” says Baram, whose parents had been gone for many years before that. “We quarantined together at our little cottage up north, and became really reliant on each other…. In some ways for me, losing (Naomi’s dad) Vic was a harder loss than my own father, hard as it is to admit…. When he passed we were left with a lot of responsibility to take care of their stuff.”   

“I already had my parents’ stuff, which I couldn’t throw away because Naomi wouldn’t let me,” says Baram. “Naomi had her grandmother’s stuff. There was our stuff, a truck full, from L.A. and the five years we lived there going back and forth to Toronto…. I wanted to leave it there; Naomi disagreed.”

Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus in Big Stuff. Photo by Dahlia Katz

They’re award-winners for sketch comedy and improv who regularly work in TV and film, who met at Second City in Toronto. Edmonton audiences have seen them in action (with Ron Pederson) when The National Theatre of the World has touched down here: in Impromptu Splendour, they improvise an entire play, the one a celebrated playwright like Ibsen or Tennessee Williams somehow forgot to write. For a couple of graduate theatre school actors (U of A for Baram and the former Ryerson now TMU for Snieckus), couples’ friction about stuff, and what stays vs what goes, pointed to live theatre — of a particularly interactive kind.

“Universal!” says Baram, “what to do with the stuff that’s left behind.” And “everybody’s got their stuff — in a basement, a closet, a drawer…” says Snieckus with a sympathetic shrug. Improv is here and now, “ephemeral” in Baram’s word. “We don’t have kids; what are we going to do with all our stuff?” says Snieckus puckishly. “Who’s going to inherit this play?” There’s a flurry of brainstorming; they can imagine Mark Meer and Belinda Cornish having a go at it….

Naomi Snieckus and Matt Baram in Big Stuff. Photo by Dahlia Katz.

Anyhow, the universality of stuff and its emotional hold on us is how we get to be involved in Big Stuff. “It’s the collaboration with the audience that’s important to us,” says Snieckus of their unusual blend of storytelling and improv. When we enter the theatre, there’s a card on every chair. “We’re asking people for an object that reminds them of someone or something of importance to them…. And it’s part of the storytelling. Through the show we find ways of integrating those objects into the play.” You can join in by contributing stories about your stuff. Or not.

There’s no template for building a theatre piece like Big Stuff, as they describe. “We made jokes, we did stand-up together. And we started writing a lot,” says Baram. And writing, for them, usually starts in improvising. As Snieckus describes, “we’d record scenes on our phones and transcribe. We’d send audio from the cottage to Kat,” who was busy in Stratford working on her hit version of Anne of Green Gables. “Sometimes we’d write monologues about our folks, and bring them back together and read them.”   

“Saving marriages,” he says, joking about Sandler’s multiple contributions to the production. “That ‘other voice’ is so key when working with a couple. So we don’t have to have those conversations with each other about what stays what goes…. It’s so close to us, to our parents. What story can really incorporate a person?”

What stays what goes…. ah, there’s a question that applies in an uncanny way both to writing plays and to the subject at the heart of Big Stuff. Snieckus, whose own Firecracker Department podcast series interviews female and non-binary artists across the continent, says that in the end, she and Baram “chose objects that were relevant to the show,” as the first priority. Your dad’s jacket didn’t make it into the show, even though it’s (signature) him,” she says to Baram. “Or my dad’s pen holster…. A fine line between finding objects that fed the story but also represent the people. (The objects) had to serve two masters!”

“And it had to be equal,” says Baram. “We couldn’t have an hour and a half on (his dad) Harvey and just touch on (Snieckus’s mom) Anne….” Snieckus smiles. Right. Each of our parents actually deserves their own hour and a half.”

As described by Baram and Snieckus, I’d say the double family dynamic has TV series potential, too. Baram senior was “a showman himself,” says his son, whose Edmonton genealogy is blue-chip. Harvey’s Corned Beef Palace, off Whyte, was his dad’s first deli. “And together my parents ran my grandparents’ burlesque club, Blue Danube, across from the Strath. “They were carneys; for years they had The Snackery on the midway at K-Days.” Baram’s brothers went into the biz, “but I just didn’t have it in me.”

And how’s this for historical antecedents? One of Baram’s early gigs was stocking the shelves at his mom’s smoke shop in Webber Motors on the Calgary Trail, right across from Allard Way where SCTV got shot. “That’s where John Candy, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin got their smokes.”

“The wild trajectory of life” that returns Baram to Edmonton for a run of Big Stuff at the Citadel has another bonus. “I am going to see the Oilers play,” he declares emphatically. “I grew up in the Glory Years; I’m part of that generation desperately trying to relive their childhood.”

Snieckus, who left home in Kitchener-Waterloo at 17 for theatre school in Toronto, is a first-generation immigrant. Her mom was a Brit; her dad, an organic chemist prof at Queen’s, was Lithuanian. “Both my parents loved Second City. So when I started doing shows there they were ‘aah, NOW we get it!’”

“Acting as a goal of improv is important to Matt and I,” says Snieckus. “We always called it ‘grown-up improv’ because we didn’t want to be bar-provisers. We wanted to do theatre work that just happened to be improvised.” Says Baram, “our whole intention as a company is to bring those two worlds (improv and theatre) together. And it’s happening more and more,” as we know in Edmonton, an improv-crazy town where the top improvisers are stage actors.

“People,” Snieckus thinks, “want their theatre to be more spontaneous, more interactive. And that’s what we’ve tried to do with Big Stuff…. It’s not us presenting; it’s us and the DNA of the day.”

Says Baram, “we tell them our stories; we listen to their stories. It’s a conversation…. There really isn’t a better way to meet a community, to learn about them.” And the live-ness of it all makes Big Stuff  “A.I. proof,” as Snieckus put it, “every step of the way…. And in a world where so much isn’t hopeful, this is a hopeful thing.”

PREVIEW

Big Stuff

Theatre: A Baram and Snieckus Production at the Citadel

Created by and starring: Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus

Co-created and directed by: Kat Sandler

Running: Oct. 18 through Nov. 9

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

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