The art of the thriller and what not to tell you about Mob, opening the Workshop West season. Meet star Kristin Johnston

Posted on October 26, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Kristin Johnston in Mob, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Dave DeGagné

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There are many things you can’t, mustn’t, know in advance about Mob. For your own good. So many, in fact, that it’s tricky for Kristin Johnston to talk about the hit Quebec thriller that opens the Workshop West Playwrights Theatre season Friday.

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So here’s an uncontentious backstory I can tell you. Mob (La Meute), which premiered at Montreal’s Théâtre La Licorne in 2018 (and was remounted twice there), is by the Quebec film and TV star-turned-playwright Catherine-Anne Toupin. The English language premiere (it’s translated by Chris Campbell, a former literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre in London) was at the Centaur Theatre in 2020.

And the Heather Inglis production in which Johnston appears, along with Graham Mothersill and Davina Stewart, is the first time Mob has been west. Johnston, whose tall, willowy presence, deep voice, and ace comic timing have increasingly been part of the Edmonton theatre scene of late, plays Sophie. And by way of set-up, this I can tell you: Sophie has lost her job; she arrives at a remote out-of-town B&B, in a remote corner of the Eastern Townships, for a respite from this enraging, humiliating setback.

Johnston, who’s funny and quick on the uptake in conversation, is on the phone last week from home where, like her cast-mates and the Mob creative team, she’s been rebounding from COVID (which explains why the Workshop West opening was delayed till Nov. 3). “I’ll tell you what happened when I read it for the first time. On the very first page, I was ‘what is happening? Is this character the victim? The villain? Am I going to kill somebody?’ I had no idea where this is going.”

“As I kept turning the pages I was Oh no, WHAAT?, Oh no, and kept turning…. It was very exciting!”  She laughs. Which is a veritable hands-on definition of a well-made thriller, Johnston agrees. “The playwright has done a great job.” As Toupin has acknowledged in interviews, the touchstone is Hitchcock. And the B&B set-up, in which Sophie meets the odd inhabitants, has an unmistakeable Psycho reverb.

And this ups the ante: “it was written at a time, unlike Hitchcock’s, when the internet was in play. It’s a big part of Mob,” Johnston says. Ah, a sinister thought, worthy of a thriller, creeps in: the internet as the invisible web in which we are caught, playing with identities. “And the anonymity you can feel, that emboldens people to behave in ways they would never normally behave if they weren’t hidden behind this cloak of online….”

Edmonton audiences first met Johnston in a decisively off-centre comic role in Rebecca Merkley’s 2017 Fringe sleeper hit The Unsyncables. It’s an underdog comedy about a ragtag synchronized swim team (the cast never took their bathing caps off) up against a snooty fancy shmancy swim “club”. And there we saw Johnston as a somewhat perplexed eastern European import who couldn’t swim, wore water wings, and treated us to a reprise of her showstopper in a school production of Grease.

It was a tip-off that the graduate of Victoria’s Canadian College of Performing Arts, who grew up in Stettler, would flourish in roles, often boldly comic, always far from the pastel end of the spectrum where ingenues live and breathe. In Merkley’s Rivercity The Musical, spun from the Archie comics, Johnson bent her long frame not around Betty or Veronica, but the character of Reggie.

She arrived in those Dammitammy productions pretty directly from the domestic front, she says. “I was mostly parenting and doing community theatre…. I still wanted to be in theatre, but we had made the conscious decision to always have a full-time parent with the kids.” Community theatre was perfect: “I could pop out in the evening when Ash (Johnston’s husband) could be with the kids.”

She loved it. “Community theatre is great: everybody’s doing it for the love of theatre, nobody’s jaded, nobody’s ‘it’s just a job’…. That enthusiasm is just so admirable!”

Origin of the Species, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photograph

And then, suddenly, Johnstone was a Northern Light leading lady. Her first role with the company couldn’t have been a stranger debut for a continuing theatre relationship. In a demanding and weird assignment, she played a four million year-old woman discovered by an elderly archaeologist on a dig in Trevor Schmidt’s 2018 production of Bryony Lavery’s Origin of the Species.

Kristin Johnston in Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Johnston’s is a story with oddball segues. “One night Trevor came backstage and asked ‘do you play the piano?’ Well, yes. ‘Do you play the accordion?’ Well, no. ‘But you could learn, right?’” And so she did. And it came to pass that Johnstone found herself strapping on that instrument, to star as a sultry gothic cabaret artiste obsessed with red blood and the blood supply in NLT’s delicious Baroness Bianca’s Bloodsongs. “Everybody has got a leetle addiction.”

And there was another full-throttle challenge, this one multi-character, in Schmidt’s solo gothic thriller We Had A Girl Before You — yes, a solo thriller — in which Johnston dexterously populated the world and, in a compelling virtuoso performance, made us wonder just how unreliable the narrator of the tale really is.

Kristin Johnston in We Had A Girl Before You. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Thrillers are a special challenge, as Johnston says. “You know what your character’s intentions are. But you have to play cards very close”: what to reveal, what to hold back. Mob, she says, “is very precise; every word is carefully chosen…. Because the playwright is an actor she understands the beats, the pauses. There’s lots to work with!”

Now that her kids are older, with lives of their own (she’s even appeared with one of them in the Citadel’s A Christmas Carol), Johnston is returning to theatre in a full way. And she’s much in demand.

Most recently at NLT, we saw Johnston as half a pair of flight attendants disturbed about earthly developments 30,000 feet below them in Enough. And, in a comic performance that stole the show, a love-struck assistant to the villain, “kind of a villain herself,” in 9 to 5 at the Citadel.

“I don’t usually get to play gentle characters,” she laughs, thinking of the rather self-effacing soul she played in her Teatro Live debut, the thriller-within-a-thriller Deathtrap, last season. And there’s a plum Teatro role coming up, a melancholy-soaked widow rescued from grief by an imaginary journey in the company’s revival of Stewart Lemoine’s Pith!.

Director Inglis has called Mob “dark and challenging.” And Johnston echoes the thought. “It’s a really interesting story. Exciting because it will make people talk.” It’s not one of those theatrical excursions, she says, “where you leave the theatre and (shrug) ‘well, that was fun’. This will spark discussion…. I wish I could leave with the audience and hear them discussing.”

PREVIEW

Mob

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Catherine-Anne Toupin

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Kristin Johnston, Graham Mothersill, Davina Stewart

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd

Running: Nov. 2 (in preview) through Nov. 12

Tickets: workshopwest.org

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The collision of worlds and mythologies: Makram Ayache brings The Hooves Belonged To The Deer home to Edmonton

Posted on October 23, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

The Hooves Belonged To The Deer, In Arms Collective at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo of Tarragon Theatre production by Cylla von Tiedemann

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Five years ago Edmonton audiences saw an explosive new play about an immigrant kid, Arab and gay, negotiating the conflicting calls of cultures and generations, trying to find his way into a new life.

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That was how we met Makram Ayache, a young theatre artist in the U of A’s Bachelor of Fine Arts acting program. For his play Harun, theatrically striking and tense with ideas, memories, thoughts, arguments, Ayache had mined the complications of his own experience as the child of Lebanese immigrants.

Since 2018 Ayache, who divides his time between Toronto and Edmonton, has become one of the country’s hot up-and-coming theatre artists. Witness the development arc of his challenging, grandly epic play The Hooves Belonged To The Deer, which opens Friday on the Westbury stage in an indie production directed by Peter Hinton-Davis. I heard it first in podcast form in 2021, commissioned as part of the Alberta Queer Calendar Project. A year later, as an audio play, it was part of Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times streamed series Queer, Far, Wherever You Are. And last April The Hooves Belonged To The Deer premiered on the mainstage of Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, directed by Hinton-Davis.

And now, it’s come home. Back home to Edmonton, where Ayache says he “came of age” as an artist, where “so much transformed and took root…. Edmonton will always be home.” And back to Alberta where much of his play happens in a small prairie town — the parts, that is, that don’t take us to an ancient world, and a new creation mythology in the Garden of Eden.

12thnight.ca caught up with the playwright/ actor/ producer/ theatre-maker by email last week, to find out more about the seeds of his play, his theatrical vision — and the inspiration for Izzy, the queer Muslim teenage protagonist of The Hooves Belonged To The Deer.     

What is your play about? “The Hooves Belonged to the Deer is about how religion is weaponized against queer people. When Izzy’s family immigrates to small-town Canada, the young queer Middle Eastern boy becomes the salvation pet project of the Christian Youth Pastor Isaac. In his attempt to reconcile his sexuality and conflicting faiths, he invents an imaginary Garden of Eden where Aadam and Hawa (Eve in Arabic) have their lives turned upside down by the arrival of Steve, a white-skinned Northerner.”

Eric Wigston and Makram Ayache in The Hooves Belonged To The Deer, In Arms Collective at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo from Tarragon Theatre production by Cylla von Tiedemann

A certain (maybe quintessentially Canadian) improbability attaches to your own immigrant story…. “My parents left Lebanon at the end of a 15-year civil war in the early ‘90s. Before I was eight years old I had lived in Abu Dhabi, Los Angeles, Edmonton, and then finally Oyen, where I stayed until I graduated high school in 2008.”

playwright Makram Ayache. Photo supplied.

Could you talk a bit about your experience growing up in conservative, white, Christian, small-town southern Alberta as a child of Muslim immigrants? “Oyen was a peculiar place to grow up in. On the one hand, there were people that really championed my artistic desires – particularly a teacher, Mrs. White, who introduced me to theatre very early after we moved there. And I had a great group of friends who, in high school, I was able to safely and privately come out to. This was diametrically in opposition to the other face of this town, one that was full of what I can now recognize as white supremacist, nationalist ideals.

“The September 11 terrorist attacks took place a year after we moved to Oyen, and Arabs became a negative focal point of media.  So I certainly had people who would tell me things like ‘your uncle looks like Osama Bin Laden’. That happened a lot in my childhood. Then in my teenagehood, I was outed in school and that became a really scary moment. Not in any sensational way; people weren’t violent or overtly cruel, to be perfectly clear. But there was bullying, teasing, snickering, and ostracism that caused a lot of psychological stress in those days.”

The Hooves Belonged To The Deer, In Arms Collective, Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo of Tarragon Theatre production by Cylla von Tiedemann

That high-stress environment sounds like a veritable collision of multiple worlds — culturally, religiously, at home, at school.… “It all happened concentrically and kaleidoscopically, so many worlds blending into worlds. At home I was Arab and I grew up in a family who loved being Arab, especially my dad. Politics was a regular conversation in our home. I was also deeply closeted and terrified of my parents ever finding out. At school I was Canadianized, an English-speaking, pop star-loving, book-reading, geeky artist-type with a group of strong friends whom I was able to be my truest of selves with.”

And does the Pastor of your play have a real-life prototype in the prairie life of the teenage Makram? “There was the Christian youth church I became part of from 12 to 18 years old. The pastor was a charming and generously spirited man who offered me a space of deep introspection…. But his motive was Christian conversion. By the time I was 15, he was the first person I ever came out to — but of course his belief was that I was demonically possessed. Wild. In retrospect, it is surreal to think I ever believed him. But in the moment, and really well into my early 20s I had to undo a lot of the misinformation and lies he espoused about how I was made….”

Was your entry point into “showbiz” as an actor? Were you already a writer? “In 2015 I graduated with a bachelor or education in drama. I taught for one year and I remember watching my theatre students with a sense of … envy…. I needed to try theatre and the artistic pursuit for myself.”

During my time in the BFA, I kept having a feeling of returning to my child self, the one that would scribble stories and draw pictures for hours on end. I felt a release and an ecstatic expression of joy. By the end of that year I’d written Harun and was welcomed into the Alberta Playwrights’ Network’s mentorship program where Kim McCaw helped shape so much of my formative playwriting knowledge.”

Is the optic of the outsider crucial to your work? “In so many ways I am an outsider, and in so many other ways I am absolutely centred. I’m extroverted, able-bodied, masculine-presenting, a cis-man, and I’m high functioning. These are all qualities centred in patriarchy and capitalism; I can’t ignore the reality of how those have served me. And in other ways I have spent so much of my life watching from the outside, particularly in childhood. An Arab in white Canada and a gay boy in a straight family and town really sculpted my views.”

Yours is a bi-city (or maybe cross-country) theatre career. Is this a deliberate complication? It’s a lot of work to do an indie production; you’re making the effort to ensure Edmonton gets to see The Hooves Belonged To The Deer. “Right now I feel being between two cities is right. I love the theatre community in Edmonton and I love creating and sharing work here. There is a rich sense of integrity for theatre. And Toronto challenges me and changes me in ways that I so welcome….

The Hooves Belonged To The Deer is an extremely Alberta story. It did well in Toronto; people really responded because a rural Canadian experience can be felt across this land. But I was able to build upon the dramaturgical and theatrical successes and learning of the Tarragon production, and refine, sharpen, strengthen, and focus the script. It feels like it’s all led to this production and I’m so excited to share it!”

Is there another Ayache play underway, in formative stages? The most immediate is Small Gods (At The Start of the World), which has a world premiere in Toronto next fall. It’s a huge, bombastic, queer comedy that follows the lives of five teens as they work in a mall and prepare to graduate high school. I love this play! It’s a big love letter to my younger self and a love letter to young and old queer people today. It’s a look at queer celebration, joy, and creativity. And it’s a comedy, which is new and exciting for me! I’m hoping to bring Small Gods to Alberta as well…. Truthfully, the mall they work at is definitely inspired by West Edmonton Mall.

I’m also working on a graphic novel that’s full of fantasy, magic, and queer Middle Eastern mythology. It’s been a huge labour of love and a great joy to explore storytelling through the medium of graphic novel writing and drawing!”

PREVIEW

The Hooves Belonged To The Deer

Theatre: In Arms Theatre Collective, with Edmonton Fringe Theatre

Written by: Makram Ayache

Directed by: Peter Hinton-Davis

Starring: Makram Ayache, Eric Wigston, Brett Dahl, Adrian Pavone, Bahareh Yaraghi, David Ley

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

Running: Friday through Nov. 4

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

  

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Finding harmony: stories from inside the choir. Crescendo! at Shadow Theatre, a review

Posted on October 21, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Crescendo!, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What exactly is it about singing, and especially singing with other people, that lures people into choirs to make music together?

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That’s the question at the heart of Sandy Paddick’s Crescendo!. And not only is it demonstrated in a heartfelt way, it gets asked again and again, simply and explicitly, in this engaging new Canadian musical, the first musical Shadow Theatre has ever done in 30 seasons. The answers are as varied as the characters who step up to explain, in close-up or fleeting cameos, in Kate Ryan’s production.

Underwriting the play-with-music is the mysterious and universal magnetism of music itself — possibly visceral, certainly beyond rational explanation. Creating sound, acquiring a voice beyond words: much has been written about that phenomenon. And when Ryan’s cast sings together, it gives you a thrill to understand. But as the musical’s assortment of women who meet on Thursday nights for community choir practice attest — in both fragmentary and more extended form — motivations to join a choir, as opposed to a chess club or a curling team, reach into daily life and personal back stories.

These are the fabric — er, the ground bass — of Crescendo! Some of the characters are in the Crescendos as a respite from the routines, pressures, and multiple connections of their lives; some are there to acquire all of the above. For some, choir is an antidote; for others it’s a pick-me-up.

Bobby (Colleen Tillotson), who has a church bent, and Darla (Michelle Diaz), who decisively doesn’t, are temporary roommates: they’re in rehab. The former, struggling with an eating disorder, just loves to sing; the latter, who’s hostile and sardonic in Diaz’s amusing performance, is in tow for drugs, and needs something to do. Natalie (Jenny McKillop), who has seven kids and is a professional babysitter of unshakeable cheeriness, is there to have a world outside child-minding. She arrives invariably late, apologetic, and breathless, pushing a pram. May (Kirstin Piehl) is socially challenged, and she’s at choir to practice making connections and conversation. Her fallback in every moment of stress and hostility is to appeal to routine and organization.

And then, at the centre  there’s Pat (Cathy Derkach), the fierce, stern conductor who has a past that includes a shot at an opera career. Flashbacks that reveal what happened to that youthful dream include a comic audition scene with warring judges. Piehl, a gifted singer, plays the young Pat, torn between conflicting commands to reinterpret the Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute.

“Count! Breathe!” commands Pat, leading a warm-up before the Thursday night practice begins, in the early moments of Crescendo!. In a new wrinkle she’s exhorting her charges to pair sound and colour. “Think blue. Paint the wall blue with your air…. Now try orange.” May is good on “count!”,  and baffled by the colour of sound.   

Between scenes and fourth-wall breakouts of the principal characters there are little glimpses of other choir members, with assorted reasons for joining the choir you might not expect. “I’m Jody, “a professor. With tenure. Choir is an excellent mental challenge.”  Amanda explains that she can arrive at choir practice feeling low and “when I leave I feel like I won the Lotto.” One mother says she joined to have an activity that would distract her from trying to run her kids’ lives. “A win-win for everyone.” One daughter joined the choir to keep her mom company; another as a tribute to her late father.

Crescendo by Sandy Paddick, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The cast steps up to create tiny individual portraits. And the reasons for singing with each other evidently have enough gravitational pull on their lives to overcome the stresses and indignities set forth in Crescendo!. How strong? Strong enough to lead people to sing Christmas songs in crowded shopping malls whilst wearing Santa hats. Strong enough to put up with the tightly wound Pat, who’s stern and fierce, and says things like “let’s come to a place of readiness.” It’s enough to send you reeling towards the Civil War Re-enactment Club … until the cast starts singing, that is.

Crescendo! doesn’t operate as a crescendo, narratively speaking. It’s more scattered and kaleidoscopic than that, reflected in a glowing colours of the set design by Lieke Den Bakker. In the end, the way the multiple stories are tied together narratively feels a little perfunctory, or convenient, to me. But it’s definitely not one of those musicals where your mind drifts to wondering why the people onstage are bursting into song. The songs and the singing have to be there: Crescendo! is a musical about making music, after all.

And there’s a selection of original songs composed by Jen McMillan, along with her arrangements of choral favourites. Her pastiche number Baby Jesus is particularly amusing, especially when accompanied by Pat’s ferocious exhortations to really feel it, as a battle cry. “Baby Jesus shakes his rattle as a sword….” Composer McMillan is a superb pianist, who leads the music from the onstage grand piano.

Cathy Derkach and Kirstin Piehl in Crescendo!, Shadow theatre. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

Since this is a play about sound and making sound, the design by Lana Michelle Hughes, with its echo effects and amplifications and diverse aural distances, bridges the gap between art and life — between the music inside one head and the remarkable way choral music is more than the sum of its individual parts. That’s the transcendence part of this choir story, the rush you get from joining other voices to create one big, resonant, enlivening voice.

REVIEW

Crescendo!

Shadow Theatre

Written by: Sandy Paddick with music by Jennifer McMillan

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Cathy Derkach, Michelle Diaz, Jenny McKillop, Kirstin Piehl, Colleen Tillotson

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Nov. 5

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org

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The dark glitter of a dream cruise on the River Styx: Pochsy IV. A new Karen Hines satire at Theatre Network. A review

Posted on October 20, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Karen Hines, Pochsy IV, Keep Frozen Productions at Theatre Network. Photo by Gary Mulcahey.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s an unnerving glitter and queasy hilarity to the satire that launches the season at Theatre Network.

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“I dreamed you, I manifested you,” proposes the figure who appears before us — a tarnished angel? a wicked fairy? — out of the darkness at the start of Pochsy IV. Yes, that “you” would be Us, in our “save-the-planet Patagonia vests and super-lightweight eyeglass frames,”  as Pochsy sweetly suggests.

Pochsy, we’ve missed you. As the world glides, slides, drifts into oblivion, the poisoned and poisonous kewpie created and performed by Karen Hines has returned, ageless after many years, to her people. And in this newest show from a fearlessly witty and original artist (directed by another fearlessly witty and original artist, Michael Kennard of the horror clown duo Mump and Smoot), Pochsy wraps us in her toxic embrace. She’s a fount of capitalist sloganeering, consumerist clichés, pop-culture truisms, market-driven mantras, cultural pieties, religious blandishments, self-help enlightenment….  Hot topics like AI and gender identity have been added to the Pochsy cosmology. And Pochsy, a star-gazer who actually assigns star ratings to stars, packs it fulsomely, with her signature mixture of malice and good cheer.

Karen Hines in Pochsy IV, Theatre Network. Photo from Theatre Network website

You’d call the show an hallucination if hallucinations were as expertly constructed as Pochsy IV. Or maybe a nightmare if nightmares were as funny. Pochsy IV (Pochsy 4 or Pochsy IV as in IV pole) exfoliates especially when it’s at its most sugar-coated; it loops a noose of flirtatious charm around us.

Pochsy arrives onstage on a sort of raised bandstand with a ramp (set design by Sandi Somers). Instead of an IV pole she has a microphone stand. And in breathless amplified voice,  Pochsy sings pointed and prickly songs (composition and sound design by Chantal Vitalis) that complement the lyricism of her flights of fancy. Feel free to sing along, she invites us. Or sing along more quietly. Or better yet just stop singing along. “We don’t need everyone (pause). We’ve never needed everyone.”

She’s packed her own gummies; when you’re “pondering nothingness,” you may need something for “um, mild anxiety.”

Since last we met, in Citizen Pochsy and O Baby, Pochy has lost her “super-safe” job at Mercury Packers (a subsidiary of LeadWorld), where she packs mercury, first in shipping, then in receiving. They’ve moved their operations off-shore, where “inhuman hours” become “human,” because of the time zone. And she’s been replaced by a robot (her severance package includes a LeadWorld ball cap and a $20 Sephora gift card). She has, she confesses, been having trouble “pivoting.”

Where are we? With Pochsy on a cruise into, hmm, the modern apocalypse? The afterlife? And she even gets a couple of upgrades. We’re sailing on a sort of contemporary River Styx — or possibly Pochsy has already arrived on that deathly far shore. “There is no pinkness from the blood behind my skin,” she says, as she unlocks for us a climactic vision of cosmic chaos. There’s a lethal euphoria about Pochsy’s travelogue.

Karen Hines, Pochsy IV, Keep Frozen Productions at Theatre Network. Photo by Gary Mulcahey

A tiny acid-tipped Tevye, Pochsy has called on God before to step up. In Pochsy’s Lips, for example, she accuses him of an attitude problem. This time Pochsy, who identifies as “a neo-revolutionary foundationalist,” is looking for a sign, something to shed light on the mysterious state of the world, including “neo-banking.” And if she makes allowances this time — “just sending good vibes to you!” — maybe it’s because God is wearing “a splendid hoodie over an awesome T-shirt.” Like many celebrities, she tells us, “he looks different in the flesh.”

Pochsy’s prayers are, in themselves, a narcissist’s sound score. “Forgive me for appropriating trauma,” she says to God. “Help me to find a way to blame others.”

Hines’s dark comic muse works, high-speed, on juxtapositions — as very funny clusters of “trigger” words or AI prompts demonstrate. It’s a distinctive satirical expertise in bringing a character’s logic to absurdity and an intricate barrage of non sequiturs. And it’s assisted materially, indispensably, by the timing and sweet vitriol of Hines’s stage presence and delivery.

Pochsy, like her creator, is a born performer. And the sentimental and romantic clichés that attach to theatre, or babies, or scallops on toothpicks disintegrate in the acid of her pixie presence. Pochsy IV is a funny, tough-minded exploration of modern anxiety about everything from dating apps to what atoms know, and what you hear in the world, from your financial consultant and from yourself. Laugh, and wince, my friends.

“I am. I can. I will.” If as Pochsy claims, the future is now (OK, a terrible thought if you parse it too much), see Pochsy IV immediately. Get yourself a ticket; you don’t have a moment to lose. Pochsy is magic.

REVIEW

Pochsy IV

Theatre: Keep Frozen presented by Theatre Network

Created by and starring: Karen Hines

Directed by: Michael Kennard

Where: Theatre Network at the Roxy, 10708 124 St.

Running: opening Thursday through Nov. 5

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca

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Couch dwellers arise! It’s a crazy week in Edmonton theatre

Posted on October 18, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Tenaj Williams in Little Shop of Horrors. Photo by Moonrider Productions for Vancouver Arts Club Theatre

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a week in Edmonton theatre that’s crazy with possibilities. Which is to say this is no time to be thinking of staying home, much less renewing your dibs on the couch.

Two Edmonton theatres launch their seasons this week. At Edmonton’s biggest playhouse, a small-scale retro cult fave goes into preview on the weekend. The trio of smarties who are Edmonton’s hottest sketch troupe launches an eight-performance series. An unusual vintage rom-com (in verse!) finishes its run on the weekend. There’s a highly unusual play by one of America’s hottest young playwrights. An original “performance piece” about a difficult and urgent cultural tension is on a workshop tour alighting here.

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•Suddenly Seymour…. At the Citadel, Little Shop of Horrors, a perennially popular1 1982 Off-Broadway “sci-fi comedy musical” with a very catchy ‘60s rock score by Alan Menken (and book by Howard Ashman), starts previews Saturday. Based on the Roger Corman B-flick of 1960, it concerns the fortunes of a nebbish florist’s assistant, labouring away in a failing Skid Row shop, who inadvertently cultivates a potted plant that feeds on human blood. The Citadel-Vancouver Arts Club co-production directed by Ashlie Corcoran stars Tenaj Williams as the hapless horticulturalist Seymour and Synthia Yusuf as sweet Audrey, his fellow employee (and crush) at Mr. Mushnik’s flower shop. It runs at the Citadel Oct. 21 through Nov. 19. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

Crescendo!, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

•Shadow Theatre’s 30th anniversary season starts with a new homegrown Canadian musical, original in conception. Sandy Paddick’s Crescendo! (music by Jennifer McMillan) is a musical that’s all about the urge to make music. It takes us into the world of a women’s community choir, to shed light on the multiple responses to the question of why it makes us feel good to sing, and really good to sing together, Meet the playwright in this 12thnight PREVIEW. The show, directed by the Plain Janes’ Kate Ryan, runs through Nov. 5 at the Varscona. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

Karen Hines, Pochsy IV, Keep Frozen Productions at Theatre Network. Photo by Gary Mulcahey

•To start their 49th season Theatre Network celebrates the return of Pochsy, Karen Hines’s memorable bouffon character we first met in 1992, in whose veins courses a toxic mixture of the sweet and the vitriolic. Pochsy IV is the latest from this distinguished Canadian theatre artist (All The Little Animals I Have Eaten), who directs the horror clowns Mump and Smoot. In fact, it’s Mump, aka Michael Kennard, who directs this production, whose title says either “4” or IV, as in pole, and maybe both. 12thnight had the fun of talking to Hines and Kennard in a PREVIEW. Pochsy IV runs Thursday through Nov. 5. Tickets: theatre network.ca.

Alyson Dicey, Ellie Heath, Caley Suliak of Girl Brain. Photo supplied.

•Three of the most agile, inventive comic brains in town are back at the Roxy this week as part of Theatre Network’s alternative Phoenix Series in the Lorne Cardinal black box theatre. That trio would be Girl Brain, Alyson Dicey, Ellie Heath, and Caley Suliak. They’re back with a new show running two weekends — wknds, yes, in the expansive sense of Thursday through Sunday.

The absurdities of everyday life and its everyday crises, from the female perspective, are meat and drink to the comic exuberance of Girl Brain. And naturally the Halloween season (and its costuming possibilities) is inspirational. The Filipina-Canadian pop musician HAIDEE is a Girl Brain guest for five of the eight shows; the burlesque star LeTabby Lexington of House of Hush and Send in the Girls joins the trio for the other three performances. And there are Taro readings by RoRo at intermission and after the Friday and Saturday night shows. Girl Brain runs Thursday through Sunday and Oct. 26 to 29. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.

•Consider the intriguing perms and combs of casting in the highly unusual play happening at the U of A’s Studio Theatre through Saturday. Everybody by the young and much-awarded American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate, Gloria). Everybody is inspired by the late 15th century morality play Everyman, author unknown, that shows up on every English Lit survey course at universities everywhere. It sets up a human pilgrimage toward salvation in encounters with allegorical characters.

Everybody is a contemporary dark comedy set in a theatrical world, in which the title character is figuring out what it means to be alive. The characters they meet include Friendship and Stuff, Kinship, and Death. And the casting at every performance is determined by lottery. Liz Hobbs, a versatile 2021 MFA grad, returns to her alma mater to direct the Studio Theatre production. Tickets: showpass.com or 780-492-2495.

Tanya Kalmanovitch in Tar Sands Songbook. Photo supplied.

• A unique theatrical experience that takes up the challenge of crossing contemporary cultural frontiers comes to Edmonton for a free workshop performance Saturday at the Brighton Block (9666 Jasper Ave.). Tar Sands Songbook is “written, performed, composed, produced” by Tanya Kalmanovitch, a Brooklyn-based artist/researcher who was born in Fort McMurray. As the title suggests, the multi-disciplinary show, currently on a fall workshop tour, is fashioned from tensions between high-contrast worlds and sensibilities — oil-based economy and ancient ties to the land. And Kalmanovitch has personal ties to both. See tarsandssongbook.com for further details.

Ellen Chorley and Brennan Campbell, A Phoenix Too Frequent, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

•It’s your last chance to catch Northern Light’s production of A Phoenix Too Frequent this weekend, through Sunday. You will have fun with Christopher Fry’s odd and humorous 1946 rom-com, in blank verse, based on a story from Petronius’s Satyricon. A Phoenix Too Frequent is not frequently produced anywhere these days; it was last onstage at NLT in 1978.

Have a peek at 12thnight’s review here, and an interview with Ellen Chorley, one of the three players in Trevor Schmidt’s cast, in this preview. Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com.

Lisa MacDougall in Rock The Canyon, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

Continuing at the Mayfield Dinner Theatre through Nov. 5, Musicians Gone Wild: Rock The Canyon. Laurel, that is, reverberating with “California sound.” The music-rich, highly enjoyable show is the opening gambit in their projected series of shows featuring music from seminal eras. Check out the 12thnight review. Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca.

   

  

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Crescendo!, Shadow Theatre’s first-ever musical, opens the 30th anniversary season

Posted on October 16, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Crescendo by Sandy Paddick, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the last three decades Shadow Theatre has produced plays of every size, shape, tone, and sensibility, often contemporary but not always. Shakespeare, Chekhov, Noel Coward have Shadow credits; so do American big-shots like Paula Vogel, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard.

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And the company co-founded by John Hudson and Shaun Johnston has done its share of new Canadian plays, too, premieres by such notable Edmonton playwrights as Belinda Cornish (Little Elephants), Jocelyn Ahlf (The Liars), Conni Massing (Fresh Hell) among them. In fact, Shadow’s official history, now 110 productions long, began in 1992 with a new Canadian play, Johnston’s own gritty inner city drama Catching the Train.

Crescendo!, which opens Shadow’s 30th anniversary season Thursday, is Shadow’s first-ever musical.

And music is built right into the premise. Crescendo! follows the diverse motives and fortunes of a diverse group of women who come together weekly to sing in a women’s community choir. Edmonton actor/playwright Sandy Paddick, who’s collaborated with composer Jennifer McMillan on Crescendo!, found the seed of the “play with music” in the people she met when she joined a choir. “Why had they joined?” That was the question that intrigued her.

Paddick’s own reasons had something to do with the gravitational pull of music in her own life. “Yup, I was the kid who sang all the time!” laughs the Grant MacEwan musical theatre grad. But they had something to do with timing, too. By 2015 “my kids were teenagers and I was too involved in their lives,” she says cheerfully. “I needed something else to focus on.” Yes, my friends, pickleball is not the universal solution to the problem of human connectivity.

“You get really close to the people sitting right beside you in choir,” Paddick says. “I just started to ask people why they’d joined. And I got such interesting answers.” To Paddick, the disparities constituted a gilt-edged incentive to write a play.

playwright Sandy Paddick. Photo supplied.

Crescendo! was by no means her first. Night Without Stars was inspired by the angst of her first professional gig out of theatre school, in a Robin Phillips production. “He had a perfection bell he’d ring. I wrote the play for therapy —  about a queen who had a perfection bell, and ordered the kingdom to bring her the most beautiful thing they owned, and nothing was good enough.” She wrote Back Pocket Lennie (about intergenerational abuse) and Naked Lies (about teen sexuality) for Azimuth Theatre’s high school audiences. Enchantment was based on Christina Rossetti’s long narrative poem Goblin Market. Dark, traumatizing subjects all, she agrees. Crescendo! by contrast has a certain affirming lightness.

“This is not verbatim theatre,” she hastens to add. “I didn’t interview the women. This is a play ‘inspired by’ their stories.” Natural ad hoc curiosity elicited some “wild reasons,” Paddick says. “A huge variety…. There was addiction; there was grief. There were people just wanting to join a community. There were people who want to sing in a choir because that’s who they are, through their whole lives. Sometimes there were people new to the country who wanted to feel connected. There was a woman with autism….”

Cathy Derkach and Kirstin Piehl in Crescendo!, Shadow theatre. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

“A lot of it is purposeful,” she says of the weekly encounters. “You’re there to learn the music. So there’s not a pressure to socialize; it just happens. It’s not enforced.” And that has its advantages. Paddick, a U of A BFA acting grad after her Grant MacEwan years, went back to school again. She has a career as a professional speech pathologist, often working with kids on the spectrum. And there’s a kind of natural continuity with the music and storytelling that underwrites the characters in Crescendo!

“You go there to sing; you don’t have to talk. So it’s a good place to practice your social skills if you need to,” she says. “And the science is fascinating!” When you’re singing in a choir, brain waves tend to synchronize, apparently. “It releases a ‘special agent’ in the brain, because you’re deep breathing,” a happy-making social side effect. Speech pathologists are highly tuned to the connection between thought and language.

Paddick, who’s married to Shadow artistic director John Hudson, says another motivation for writing Crescendo!, which found its first audience at the 2019 Fringe, was that “I just don’t see tons of stories of older women. And (she laughs) quite honestly, we’re the ones who go to theatre. Statistically. Where are our stories? They’re not out there.”

Cathy Derkach and Jenny McKillop in Crescendo!, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Crescendo! she says, “is about (our hunger for) connection. What brings a community of women together in a positive way? How do we manage our lives in terms of balance, work, home, kids? There really was a woman who brought her baby to rehearsal,” she says of the inspiration for one of her characters. “That happened!”

The playlist for the community choir that Paddick joined was widely varied — seasonal music, Broadway show tunes, some classical numbers, pop music, ABBA.… And Crescendo!, which was always planned as a musical, embraces that experience. “Jen (composer Jennifer McMillan) has actually written for choirs!” Paddick says she can pick out who in the audience has been in a choir by the knowing laughter that accompanies some of McMillan’s unerring parodies.

For all their harmonizing, choirs (like theatre) have a complement of backstage friction too. “You’ve gotta have conflict in theatre, or what’s the point?” Paddick points to “competition with other choirs,” or “times when certain people might be pointed out for doing a really good job, and sometimes that can be a little awkward.” Or “I didn’t get a solo this time; I wonder why.”

The main character evolved from exploring the question “when music is your life, what happens when you can’t do it any more? When your voice, your song, your reason for standing leave you? How does that resonate?”

In figuring out how disparate stories could be interwoven into a play, Paddick looked at the structure of the unusual musical Come From Away, inspired by the real-life story of how the little Newfoundland town of Gander hosted thousands of travellers displaced by the terrible events of 9-11. The creators “drop in a variety of stories. And you don’t necessarily get the end of the story (or the beginning for that matter). Maybe a snippet.”    

Crescendo!, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

And speaking of connections, the Shadow production we’ll see is a veritable reunion of long-time friends. Paddick, who was at Grant McEwan with cast member Colleen Tillotson, remembers the “super-fun” of that musical theatre program, “an idyllic magical kingdom” And the two were in the same BFA class as director Ryan. Cathy Derkach wrote music for Paddick’s Back Pocket Lennie.

“I’ve always wanted to write,” says Paddick, with a comic sigh. “And it’s been a pain in the butt! There I am working, loving my life, and then the nagging voice goes ‘you’d better start writing’! It was quite strong after I’d joined the choir.” She tried a new approach. “I told people I was actually going to write it, to see what would happen. And they were ‘so, when’s the play coming?’”

There’s nothing like affectionate peer group pressure. Crescendo! is coming now.

PREVIEW

Crescendo!

Shadow Theatre

Written by: Sandy Paddick with music by Jennifer McMillan

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Cathy Derkach, Michelle Diaz, Jenny McKillop, Kirstin Piehl, Colleen Tillotson

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Nov. 5

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org

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She’s back! Karen Hines’s toxic pixie returns in Pochsy IV, to launch the Theatre Network season

Posted on October 14, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Karen Hines, Pochsy IV, Keep Frozen Productions at Theatre Network. Photo by Gary Mulcahey

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

She’s back.

We met Pochsy at the Fringe in 1992, a smudgy-eyed chalky-faced kewpie with a lethal mixture of charm and vitriol coursing through her veins — and that sweet Clara Bow smile. In Pochsy’s Lip she was attached to an IV drip; we never quite recovered.

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Since that unforgettable sighting, we’ve seen Pochsy convalescing on a “dream vacation” at The Last Resort (Oh, Baby: Pochsy’s Adventures By The Sea). We’ve seen the employee of Mercury Packers (“I pack mercury”) summoned by the government for an audit, meditating on modern life (Citizen Pochsy: Head Movements of a Long-Haired Girl). And then, in 2007, the macabre sugar-coated satirist vanished into thin (toxic) air.

After 15 years we meet Karen Hines’s unforgettable creation once more come Thursday, at Theatre Network, in Pochsy IV. If, like me, you blithely read the title as Pochsy 4, think again. Hines and her director Michael Kennard of the horror clown duo Mump and Smoot (he’s Mump; Hines is Mump and Smoot‘s director) think of the title as IV as in pole — as I discovered this past week at the Roxy. “How many titles did we go through?” Kennard asks Hines. They lost count.

“A lot had happened,” says Calgary-based Hines of the year that Pochsy exited the stage, in the “cabaret compilation” Pochsy Unplugged. The nightmare in Toronto real estate that would inspire her play Crawlspace had happened. Hines had moved to Calgary from her home town Toronto. “Then I just started to see the world going in a way that felt too fragmented — the internet, social media … — to encapsulate a room” the way Pochsy does. Hines began to write “bigger pieces,” Crawlspace for one, Drama: Pilot Episode and All The Little Animals I Have Eaten (Shadow Theatre produced it last season).

But during the pandemic lockdown, “I began to feel that Pochsy had to say something…. Pochsy “is the only thing I’ve written that can address certain things in a certain way,” Hines says of the distinctive sting of the sweetness and acid, charm and sickness in the make-up of that diminutive repository of pop-culture sentiment, glib capitalist truisms, self-help slogans and lethally breezy observations of the state of the world. “When I was writing for other actors I couldn’t write biting for them the way I could write biting for Pochsy…. But it’s been scary.”

Kennard grins. “What gives the best stakes in theatre? Death…. With our work, we’re constantly exploring that, and coming at it from different places. With all our shows we give ourselves the opportunity of different locations — same character, same circumstances, different locations.”

“How many times have Mump and Smoot died? We’re constantly diving off a cliff, and reinventing ourselves! With our shows and Karen’s shows, you could put them in any order and they’d make sense.” They’re like cartoons in that respect.

Karen Hines, Pochsy IV, Keep Frozen Productions at Theatre Network. Photo by Gary Mulcahey

Pochsy IV “is a sliver of Pochsy’s life,” the fleeting moment between the top of the cliff and the ground where your life flashes before your eyes. “Seventy-five minutes of show, an actual 30 seconds in life,” says Kennard. “That’s the model we’re working with.”

Three original artists, expert clowns all who’ve ignored any conventional boundaries of that art form, Hines met the future Mump and Smoot, Kennard and John Turner, in the late ‘80s at Second City in Toronto. “They were already working together on gibberish scenes,” she says of those halcyon days when the term ‘horror clown’ wasn’t in the Canadian showbiz lexicon. “We just gravitated toward each other…. I held the camera for them when when they were trying to make little videos to send to comedy contests. We didn’t call it directing then. We called it being friends and hanging around.”

Kennard and Turner had studied with clown guru Richard Pochinko, and Hines gave that celebrated approach a shot — mainly to be able direct her pals in their new clown incarnations. For her, the Pachinko route into clowning just didn’t take. “I was a terrible clown,” Hines says. “Saccharine! I didn’t like my own performance.” She demonstrates the kind of clown she didn’t want to be, sweetly supplicating and needy.

Studying bouffon in Paris with the celebrated Philipe Gaulier was a much better fit. “So dark, so satirical, so (invested in) ‘points of attack’. That broke me open; I knew what to do, using affliction as a tool.” The medieval bent of Gaulier’s bouffon style, though, didn’t quite suit her. “I looked for a way to modernize it…. Who are the outcasts now? What’s the affliction? What parodies would I use?”

The ‘90s, far from tranquil, coughed up their share of parallels. “We had friends die of AIDS. There was a sense of plague, a feeling of precarity,” as Hines says. “An understanding of environmental and nuclear threats…. I grew up with that, more than the average bear. My parents were scientists, and they and their friends would talk at the dinner table, in an era when people didn’t worry about protecting children. So I got some ears-full.”

It was an era, too, of “intensification of capitalism,” as she puts it, “the idea of corporations as entities to make money for shareholders, not something for employees, their well-being, their health….The separation of rich and poor grew wider.” These are ideas on which Hines’s satire sharpened its edge, and they found their way into Pochsy, “a microcosm of American consumerist culture.”

Karen Hines, Pochsy IV, Keep Frozen Productions at Theatre Network. Photo by Gary Mulcahey.

Another inspiration for a character in whom charm and affliction are inextricably entwined came from “watching people in my own life,” Hines says. “My grandmother had dementia, but she was hilarious. And we still use things she said and did…. She was very flirtatious, very charming.”

And then, as Kennard points out, Second City “really prepped you for satire.” Hines was in the touring company. But to be on the mainstage, you had to write your own material. So she did.

“Basically they hauled me across the country for their 1992 Fringe tour,” says Hines of her two horror clown colleagues. “Back when you could get into the Fringe by being organized and getting your stuff in on time.” In Edmonton, Kennard and Turner insisted on camping, a decision of legendary eccentricity in Fringe annals. Hines lasted one night, before repairing to a hotel. “It snowed. In Alberta. In August.”

Pochsy’s Lips had premiered at the new Orland Fringe in 1992. Hines’s debut audience was three people, a trio of guys “who didn’t know each other and didn’t sit together…. It was fantastic. I could just talk to them.” In fact, that direct, eye-to-eye conversation was pretty much de rigueur. “It gave me a real grounding in speaking to the audience. You have to look at every single person.”

The next night? An audience of six. “It doubled every show.” (laughter). In Edmonton, which followed Fringes in Montreal and Saskatoon, “we really blossomed,” says Kennard, who eventually moved from Ontario and is now a U of A drama prof. “Edmonton feels like our home town, creatively.” Mump and Smoot sold out every show. Hines remembers seeing a long queue outside Walterdale, her venue, four hours before showtime. And she was amazed to discover that they were waiting to see Pochsy’s Lips.

The lives of “three striving Toronto artists” (as Kennard puts it) changed in Edmonton. “We’d all started out just wanting to be actors,” he says. “If my acting career had had gone better I’d never have made Pochsy,” says Hines. “I wanted to be Meryl Streep but I was no good at that…. I really wanted to perform; it was just a question of how.”

Now, Pochsy IV, which premiered at the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary last January. “We had 12 to 15 times as much material as you’ll see in the show,” says Hines. At first she was hyper-tuned to “people’s sensitivities. I’m way less afraid now!”

“The world gives us our playlist,” says Kennard.” Since January, “the world has changed again, even in eight months,” says Hines. She and Kennard estimate that 20 percent of Pochsy IV is new for the Theatre Network run. AI is a hot-button issue, e.g.  “Will the absence of a soul be telling in the long run?” Hines is thinking about things like that in her new show.

“Clown and bouffon is such a powerful thing.” And the world, let’s face it, is generous about providing material that cries out to be parodied, weaponized by a sharp-eyed satirist with a blade.  “I think there’s a time when we need to come out and play,” says Kennard, whose directorial advice is always to up the venom content. “It’s our job!” says Hines with a smile.

PREVIEW

Pochsy IV

Theatre: Keep Frozen presented by Theatre Network

Created by and starring: Karen Hines

Directed by: Michael Kennard

Where: Theatre Network at the Roxy, 10708 124 St.

Running: opening Thursday through Nov. 5

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca

   

   

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Fun (really!) with Hamlet: The Play’s The Thing, an inspired Theatre Yes 2-night production

Posted on October 8, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Augustus Williams as Horatio in Catalyst Theatre’s take on Hamlet Act I scene 1, The Play’s The Thing, Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson

Freewill Shakespeare Festival does a scene from Hamlet. The Play’s The Thing, Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Well, THAT was fun!. A word that is only rarely (I need hardly remind you) applied to productions of Hamlet.

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The first night of The Play’s The Thing, Theatre Yes’s two-night production of Shakespeare’s longest, most mysteriously alluring play, had 10 Edmonton stage companies each do a scene, from Act I, i through Act III, iv — each in their own signature style. To call it a riotous, original deconstruction would be entirely accurate. But beyond that, what an inspiring way to remind us, at the start of the theatre season, of the remarkable breadth of Edmonton’s performance scene. The sketch troupe Marv N’ Berry, who graciously shared some of the slings and arrows of their Shakespearean research with the crowd, presided; they are the souls of affability.

Catalyst Theatre, home of original, boldly physical reinventions of the musical form with poetic texts, delivered a great opener, elbowing iambic pentameter aside for their own kind of rhymed verse. The theatre kids from Vic, some 20 of them, stepped up, led by Hamlet’s BFF Horatio (“don’t get me wrong, I love the guy…”), an ironic and thoughtful sort with questions about ghosts — and a suspicion that Elsinore was haunted, even before the ghost of Act I, scene i. Once you realize admit the possibility of change, there’s no going back. Yup, four more tumultuous and violent Acts are bound to follow, with momentum as they go.

Photo by Mat Simpson

A couple of bouffon rodents (from Batrabbit Collective, whose Rat Academy was a hit at the Fringe) delivered a very funny version of the farewell scene in which Laertes, who like his dad Polonius is full of pompous advice, announces to his meek, somewhat dim sister Ophelia he’s off to France. There was rambunctious improv from Rapid Fire Theatre, led by artistic director Matt Schuurman; they dallied with Hamlet, gave Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the classic improv craziness of speaking in unison,  and flirted outrageously with the audience. Hello Denmark!

Photo by Mat Simpson

Intriguingly, Hamlet’s great ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy of Act III scene i landed in the scene assigned (randomly, out of a hat) to L’UniThéâtre. How fascinating to hear it in French. Thou Art Here, the site-sympathetic company that has taken The Man to The People in all manner of locales, did the play-with-in-a-play scene with wild give-‘er puppets, and an overlay of advice from a hyperkinetic concept director à la Hamlet, with an eye on getting held over. A theatre critic with (possibly dubious) blonde hair got to have her first and only and fleeting crack at playing Ophelia, with a Mousetrap audience that included the King and Queen of the Fringe, Murray and Megan.

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski as Hamlet’s mama in Guys in Disguise’s scene in The Play’s The Thing, Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson

Another queen, Hamlet’s mom Gertrude, played in high style by Guys in Disguise’s Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, did a memorable phone-acting scene with Ophelia, taking her cue from Polonius and trying to ferret out the goods on her wayward son’s activities — with whom and how many?

Workshop West does Hamlet, a scene from The Play’s The Thing, Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson

Workshop West, Ready Go, Freewill Shakespeare Festival, and Shadow Theatre stepped up too.

So, 10 high-contrast scenes and 10 different companies who had a blast showing off their stuff. We all had a terrific time. And there are 10 more to come tonight, at the Westbury. How does it all turn out for the Melancholy Dane anyhow? Tickets: fringetheatre.ca. All proceeds to the Food Bank.

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A matter of death (and life): a quirky rom-com en route to the Underworld: A Phoenix Too Frequent at Northern Light, a review

Posted on October 7, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Brenna Campbell, Julia van Damme, Ellen Chorley in A Phoenix Too Frequent, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

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Multi-faceted theatre artist Ellen Chorley returns to the stage in A Phoenix Too Frequent, the Northern Light season-opener

Posted on October 4, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Julia van Dam, Ellen Chorley, Brennan Campbell in A Phoenix Too Frequent, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The production that launches the Northern Light Theatre season Friday, returns a company known for its edgy contemporary choices to a play — a vintage post-war romantic comedy, in verse — it produced 45 years ago. And Christopher Fry’s A Phoenix Too Frequent is another kind of special occasion too.

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Trevor Schmidt’s production marks the return to the stage of a startlingly multi-faceted theatre artist — playwright, actor, director, festival director artistic director, teacher, mentor — whose 18-year history with Northern Light includes being artistic associate, running the box office, publicity, fund-raising, volunteer coordination. In 2020 Ellen Chorley even wrote NLT a play; the funny, insightful Everybody Loves Robbie premiered on the mainstage.

A Phoenix Too Frequent is Ellen Chorley’s first-ever appearance at Northern Light as an actor. She plays Doto, the droll and earthy maidservant/ companion of a grieving widow (Julia van Dam) determined to join her recently deceased husband Virilius in the underworld. In the story, borrowed from Petronius, the pair are in hubby’s tomb, and Doto is along for the ride across the River Styx to Hades. That’s when a particularly appealing soldier (Brennan Campbell) arrives, curious about the light coming from the tomb. Will his attractions, and the life force, prevail over the widow’s death-centric determination?

Playwright Ellen Chorley with cast of Everybody Loves Robbie, Jayce McKenzie left and Richard Lee Hsi. 2020 photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

“Isn’t Doto fantastic?” declares Chorley, a sunny exuberant sort with a buoyant effect on her human surroundings (as the hundreds of emerging artists at Nextfest, the festival she runs, can attest). “She’s so funny! I love her! It’s just a blast to walk around in her shoes.”

Verse dramas are not thick upon the ground, to be sure. The play, a rarely produced one-act by the author of (the much better known) The Lady’s Not For Burning, is “definitely dense, with incredibly stylized language,” as Chorley says. “Also, it’s a lot fun.” And in the devastated post-war landscape “it seems so ahead of its time, in its thoughts about grief and hope, moving on from grief. Somehow it seems very progressive for 1947.”

Delia Barnett and Ellen Chorley in Soiled Doves, Send In The Girls Burlesque. 2019 photo by db photographics.

Writing, running Nextfest, founding theatre companies like Promise Productions, nurturing the theatre careers of new generations of artists … Chorley’s theatre career is multi-limbed. She herself hasn’t been onstage herself since January 2019, in a play she wrote for the burlesque company she co-founded, Send in the Girls. Soiled Doves was a tribute to the female stars of the Wild West. “A very different experience than doing this language-rich play, of course,” she laughs, thinking of the challenges of Fry’s exuberant, often lush, poetry. “Before that, along with play readings and workshops here and there, it was a 2017 Trunk Theatre production of Caryl Churchill’s Fen.”

The Fry play is a challenging way to return to acting. “Fun and exciting to stretch those acting muscles again; I haven’t used them as much lately…. That’s the great thing about acting training: it’s a tool kit of how to approach different projects, and I was able to (dip into) that.” Comedy, as Chorley points out, “is so technical in a lot of ways. It’s about speed, about timing, about pitch…. I had to rely on those technical elements to start figuring out how the performance comes together.”

Ellen Chorley and Brennan Campbell, A Phoenix Too Frequent, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

“In rehearsal, with Trevor’s vision, we’re figuring out where this play lives in style … ancient myth, yes, but written in 1947, and we’re doing it in 2023. All this grief and sadness, yes, and it takes place in a crypt. But there’s also so much life in the play.” It’s what Chorley likes best, she says, “peeling back the layers.”

And speaking of layers, the production we’ll see, Chorley explains, is “classical-looking. We’re all in togas, and the soldier is in a gladiator uniform.” But there’s the playful feeling, as she describes, of “the early ‘50s doing an ancient story.” Schmidt’s design, down to the wigs and the earrings, nods to Cleopatra, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments — “all colourful and gauzy and beautiful. Fun!” To get in the groove “we all watched Anne Baxter in The Ten Commandments.”

Chorley and Northern Light: a relationship forged 18 years ago when “the new little musical theatre grad from Grant MacEwan” did a group audition with a cluster of the small theatres. “I just started going to see plays a lot,” she remembers. “I always tell young actors to do that. And I really liked what Northern Light was doing — interesting scripts, challenging work, productions that would make me think.”

She was (and is) an indefatigable volunteer. ” Northern Light always did A LOT of bingos.” And one thing led to another. “When you love a company you just want to keep showing up for them!” And “truly at Northern Light I’ve learned so much about my whole career as an artist …. Trevor (Northern Light artistic director Trevor Schmidt) has been so generous in letting me in to see his artistic process; his mentorship has been so valuable.”

Northern Light’s 2020 commission to write Everybody Loves Robbie, a love letter to first relationships and high school theatre, was “a life changer,” says Chorley. “A big leap in my writing career! Before that I was mostly producing my own work. To be produced by a professional company allowed me to join the Playwrights Guild of Canada, become a full member of the Alberta Playwrights Network … to operate on a more professional basis as a writer. A Big Step. I was over-the-moon thankful for the opportunity.”

Chorley grew up in an arts-oriented household. The importance of children’s theatre is one of her favourite subjects and she’s eloquent in its defence. It led, in 2006, to her own kids’ theatre company Promise Productions  (her trilogy of amusingly sassy, genre-bent feminist Cinderella plays were a hit at the Fringe).

And high school theatre was crucial, thinks Chorley. At Ross Sheppard, not much known as “an arts school” at the time, theatre was “a scrappy DIY” affair. “It was ‘we don’t have any money but we’re not going to get in trouble trying things. You can be an actor but you should know how to build a flat, do some lighting, figure out stage management, sew costumes.’ And writing and creating our own work was valued! That was a big part of the culture there. And it was really important to the artist I’ve become!” Conversation with Chorley, as you’ll glean, comes with its own built-in exclamation points.

“We were empowered to figure things out for ourselves! And it’s made me a bit bold in my own writing and producing work.”

The teenage Chorley and her theatre pals took a cabaret play they’d created to Nextfest, the multi-disciplinary festival of emerging artists she’d later head. And her first play Bohemian Perso ran there. Her first Nextfest gig was curating the festival’s high school theatre offerings. An it was at the 2010 edition she tried burlesque for the first time. Send in the Girls, and the burlesque/theatre hybrid Tudor Queens that she wrote for the new troupe, were at the Fringe the next summer. And their productions, have found full-house audiences ever since.

What was the attraction of that art form? “I liked what it had to say about body positive image,” Chorley thinks. “I liked the relationship with audience. And I liked the style, the glamour, the glitz.” She laughs. “You may have a costume designer. But you’re the one sitting for seven hours gluing on the rhinestones. There’s a DIY quality to burlesque!”

And now, with A Phoenix Too Frequent, Chorley returns to Northern Light, and to acting, her original entry point into theatre as a kid (“I wanted to be a Shakespearean actor”), with a skill set that extends to every aspect of “making art.” And she returns with her usual gusto. “I’m so excited, and maybe a little nervous. But experience just makes you stronger!”

PREVIEW

A Phoenix Too Frequent

Theatre: Northern Light

Written by: Christopher Fry

Directed and designed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Julia van Dam, Brennan Campbell, Ellen Chorley

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

Running: Friday through Oct. 21

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

  

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