An old man and his dog, a tale for a broken world: Ronnie Burkett’s Wonderful Joe premieres at Theatre Network

Posted on April 2, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Wonderful Joe by Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Photo suppied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The old man we meet in Wonderful Joe, the new Ronnie Burnett Theatre of Marionettes play getting its much anticipated world premiere Thursday at Theatre Network, has a magical gift (and a dog).

Call it vision. Joe can see life that no one else sees: people who are invisible, or maybe aren’t real — until Joe sees them. When he gets evicted, he and his dog Mister set forth on a grand adventure in the world, which is to say his urban neighbourhood. Which might explain why the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and Jesus, in their respective off-seasons, are hanging out in a gay bar. And why a troupe of homeless actors are performing a morality play in Joe’s  back alley.

Last week, Burkett, the tallest member of the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, was back in Alberta, and back at the Roxy, a home away from home for his productions since 1990. And the Toronto-based playwright/ actor/ director/ designer/ marionettiste, who grew up in Medicine Hat (and started touring puppet shows at age 14), was awaiting the arrival of his Wonderful Joe cast-mates. They were in transit, somewhere in the hinterland, reposing silently (possibly fretfully, since they’re highly strung) in their special crates, at the mercy of Canadian shipping.

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Their impressively large bi-level theatre, with painted graffiti panels, was already up on the Roxy mainstage. “It’s based on my mentor’s stage from the ‘40s,” says Burkett of the American puppeteer Martin Stevens. “Only we made it bigger. And the coolest part, that no one in the audience will ever see, is the bridge (where Burkett stands) and stage floor and ladders and supports all fold up into their own box.”

The competing divas of Little Willy, chanteuse Jolie Jolie and aging diva Esmé Massengill. The Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Photo supplied.

“That was our challenge, to make a set that would fit into a van,” says Burkett. Which, incidentally, was the lesson of Little Willy — in which the diminutive actors of the Daisy Cabaret “do” Shakespeare — the semi-improvised show Burkett brought to Theatre Network for a short run in February 2023. As he explains, the cargo costs to ship Little Willy back to Canada from its California dates, “just one way, on just one leg of a seven-city tour!,” were an unsustainably hefty $24,000.

Wonderful Joe, says Burkett, “has been in my mind for a long time. It’s taken forever to write, and I don’t know why that is. Maybe because I got used to creating stuff by improvising?” That’s how The Daisy Cabaret, the holiday spectacular Little Dickens, and Little Willy, all three of which Burkett continues to tour to sold-out houses (and could do forever since they’re updated nightly), came to be.

This new piece, which will play Stanford University and the Nimoy Theatre at UCLA after the Edmonton premiere run, was originally going to be Burkett’s emerge-from-the-pandemic moment. In those uncertain, isolating times, “when I didn’t know when theatre was going to open and how big it would be,” as he puts it, “I’d built a little hand puppet show, The Loony Bin, that’s really sweet and funny, and fits in a car so I could drive it, set it up, do the lights myself….. Like when I started in Alberta,” long before he would receive the 2023 Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for lifetime achievement.

A play that would be an heir to Burkett’s ground-breaking signatures, Tinka’s New Dress, Penny Plain, Happy among them: that was the plan. “But coming out of the pandemic presenters requested that instead of a sad show about an old man and his dog, could they have The Daisy Cabaret? And reluctantly I said yes, and did Little Willy. And they were right!” Burkett laughs his distinctively rumbling smoky laugh. “To get people back into the theatre it had to be silly and fun and fun, a room full of laughter. And it turned out to be this huge hit! Stupidly popular!”

But Joe and Mister stayed put in the Burkett mind. He calls Wonderful Joe “a small show,” with “only” 17 marionettes and six hand puppets. It isn’t as dense as Tinka or Penny Plain, says its creator. “It’s a simple, gentle story about Joe, and who he encounters.”

Face sculpting for Wonderful Joe, in Ronnie Burkett’s studio. Photo supplied.

So, back at the gay bar, Joe runs into the Tooth Fairy, “a little body-builder who’s built like a moose. In a tutu,” as Burkett describes. The off-season Santa “is in a too-short Hawaiian shirt and cut-off jeans.” And Jesus “isn’t the Sunday School Jesus”; for one thing he’s brown. And as for the troupe of homeless players in Joe’s back alley, they’re led by Minnie, “the directrice, who’s very old and louder than everyone, and swears, and is funny,” says Burkett.

The people who are real because Joe sees them are a multi-cultural  assortment of urban characters in a multi-colour multi-ethnic city like Toronto or Edmonton — “that’s the city now; you can’t do all-white and be of the city” — the disenfranchised, the lost, the outliers struggling to survive.

“We have an Indigenous character named Baby, a mixed-race trans sex worker, a South Asian guy named Sunny who’s funny, and delivers the news that Joe’s building is being torn down … a moody teenage girl named Getty (Serengeti Levin-Woo)…. They’re all there.”   

“The people Joe meets are invisible to society…. They’re all Joe’s neighbours.” And “we have flashbacks, because I always do, where we learn what happened to child Joe and teenage Joe.”

Mother Nature is in the show too, old and worse for wear, times being what they are. She’s naked (save for a feather boa made of garbage bags). And she’s “the only one in the show who has a song.” Look at Me Now, is a Weimar-flavoured number (“Piaf could have sung it.” says Burkett) by the jazz musician/composer/lyricist John Alcorn, Burkett’s real-life partner, whose original music underscores the show, with additional vocals by Coco Love Alcorn.   

“The band is back together!” says Burkett happily of the creative team, his obsessive perfectionist collaborators, many of whom have worked with him since Penny Plain and before. Lighting designer Kevin Humphrey, for example, and stage manager Crystal Salverda are back; so is Marcus Jamin, a high-precision stringing virtuoso.

shoe moulds for Wonderful Joe, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Photo supplied

“I made a character named Terri who looks like Terri,” (Terry Gillis, Burkett’s long-time production manager, says Burkett. Kim Crossley, who works at the Stratford Festival, is back to execute the exquisitely detailed costumes Burkett designs. And the shoes are by designer Camellia Koo, who’s actually made tiny jelly sandals for Minnie, perfect Blundstones, penny loafers with, wait for it, to-scale pennies. At a bar near the Burkett puppet studio, they found a kind of beer in a can with copper in the label. “Not a beer I’d care to drink. And we punched out a penny…. Now that’s commitment!” declares Burkett in delight.

Mister, Wonderful Joe, Ronnie Burkett Theatre o Marionettes. Photo supplied.

And back in his supervisory role as the company’s studio “Majordomo” (as credited in the program) is Robbie, the elderly canine member of the Burkett/Alcorn household. Mister, says Burkett, “isn’t physically based on Robbie, but absolutely on my relationship with him.”

“The tone is a sense of home, of loss, and the longing for home,” says Burkett of his newest play. And the through-line, he says, borrows its prevailing metaphor from kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by filling the cracks with gold. “When people are broken you don’t have to dispose of them, you can mend them with gold — be they old, be they street people, or outcasts. And that’s Joe’s magical ability…. He sees what he believes.”

PREVIEW

Wonderful Joe

Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes at Theatre Network

Created and performed by: Ronnie Burkett

Music composition and lyrics: John Alcorn

Where: Roxy Theatre, 10708 124 St.

Running: Thursday through April 21

Tickets: theatrenetwork.com

Warning: children under the age of 16 will not be admitted.   

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‘Let the whole world melt away!’ Nuova Vocal Arts goes to The Prom

Posted on April 1, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

The cast of The Prom, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Jacy Eberlein

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I just wanna dance with you/ Let the whole world melt away/ And dance with you/ Who cares what other people say?”  — The Prom

In The Prom, the double-sided Broadway musical comedy/ satire that opens Thursday at the Varscona Theatre, you’ll have fun of watching a bunch of narcissistic Broadway veterans (with Broadway-sized vanity) undertake a career rehab/ celebrity activism field trip.

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Their destination? the homophobic American heartland, small-town Indiana, where a 17-year-old lesbian has been barred from bringing a girl to the high school prom. And that side of the 2018 Broadway musical feels important and timely in our moment in time and space where history seems to be spinning backwards.

The NUOVA Vocal Arts production directed by Kim Mattice Wanat, the company’s 95th show, is perfectly placed to celebrates 25 years in the life of a theatre company that hasn’t so much changed its stripes in the last quarter of a century, but continually expanded its reach — in cabarets, in festivals, in site-specific re-inventions of the repertoire, in the repertoire itself.

As artistic director Mattice Wanat explains, the optic of the company she founded in 1998 was originally fixed on opera, “and bridging the gap between university training and the professional stage.” Opera NUOVA (as per its former name) was designed to train and showcase emerging opera professionals from across the country. “Over the part five years, “we’ve incorporated more musical theatre.” she says.

Witness this 25th anniversary season which culminates in a vocal arts festival (May 24 to June 23) in which musical theatre and opera rub shoulders, in intimate settings. It includes two contemporary American chamber operas, When The Sun Comes Out and As One at Concordia University’s Al and Trish Huehn Theatre. And Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music and Rossini’s Il barbiere di siviglia at the Capitol Theatre in Fort Edmonton Park. And the musical Titanic at The Robert Teller Hall at Concordia.

The Prom in rehearsal, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Mel Bahniuk

“We’re trying to extend our reach and build bridges into the community,” says Mattice Wanat of a season that’s already included Dear Edwina, a musical for the nine to 15 crowd and the multi-general Irving Berlin holiday musical White Christmas, which sold out seven shows at the Capitol Theatre in December.  “We want to embrace emerging artists, both young professionals and community artists…. And seeing the stage occuped by (both) has been an experience that’s really inspiring.”

With operas like When The Sun Comes Out and As One, with their gay and trans protagomnists, and now the musical The Prom (book by Bob Martin of The Drowsy Chaperone fame and Chad Beguelin, music by Matthew Shlar), Mattice Wanat hopes to attract the LGBTQ-plus community, both as artists and audiences.

Traditionally, as she points out, the opera audience is a quite specific demographic. “I wanted to change the face of how we were doing opera, in more intimate settings…. I went to the Freewill Shakespeare Festival in the park and thought “if they can do this with Shakespeare, why can’t we do it with opera? Way more access, more fun, more inclusive!”

The cast of The Prom, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Jacy Eberlein

The mixed professional/ community cast of 28 in The Prom “includes lots of generations,” says Mattice Wanat. “High school artists, MacEwan and U of A grads, folks that are like my age: 15-year-olds to a 56-year-old.”

She’s enlisted Brett Dahl, a queer actor/director and recent U of A Masters degree grad as assistant director. “I felt it was important to have someone from the queer community,” she says. Their goal is to attract both LGBTQ+ audiences, and audiences who are more ‘conservative’ — “to extend the narrative.”

The Prom, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Jacy Eberlein.

Dahl, fresh from directing his queer-focussed adaptation of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida as his MFA degree production, argues that The Prom “doesn’t target ‘the other side.” That would be the PTA in Edgewater, Indiana, led by the show “villain” Mrs. Green, who goes to extraordinary lengths to prevent infiltration of the prom by Emma and her girlfriend. It mocks the Broadway vets, narcissists whose save-the-world expedition is comically self-serving.”Both sides have flaws, and room to grow,” says Dahl, who will soon direct a production of Jordan Tannahill’s Is My Microphone On? for the Citadel’s Young Company. “Everyone is on a journey of acceptance.”

“The play sends a message of acceptance and joy; it tries to embrace everyone.”

Mattice Wanat echoes the thought. “The music is funky and fun! Dress up and have a party! The reprise of Dance With You says it all, Mattice Wanat thinks. “This time, is’s ‘dance with you in life’. Be out in the world. Live proudly as your true self! And that’s a beautiful thing.”

The Prom runs Thursday through Sunday at the Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave. Tickets: eventbrite.com. Full NUOVA Vocal Arts Festival schedule at nuovavocalarts.ca.

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The long weekend in a theatre town

Posted on March 29, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

The Adventure of Young Turtle, So.Glad Arts at Expanse Festival 2024. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What happens on a long weekend in a theatre town? For starters, a new indie puppet musical and a musical theatre classic, an insightful and captivating comedy about teenage girls, a musical revue, a new play festival.

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•The Adventure of Young Turtle, the new musical for kids (five-plus) and their grown-up friends that launches the 19th annual edition of Azimuth Theatre’s Expanse Festival, creates an imaginative undersea coral reef playground (designed by Even Gilchrist and lighted by Amberlin Hsu) for its cast of queer puppet characters. And they’re all fashioned, with considerable flair and ingenuity, from recycled castaway stuff — old hoses and juice containers, bottle caps and take-out containers, plastic cutlery, umbrellas, and an impressive quantity of bubblewrap.

The questing hero in the heartwarming queer coming-of-age story created by playwright S.E. Grummett, in a So.Glad Arts production directed by Jay Northcott, is a turtle, played by a human in a backpack shell and fins. Played by the endearing Logan Stefura, our youthful turtle is having an identity crisis. Bullied as a landlubber by the fantastical sea creatures in their world, they’re confused by all the ways they “feel different inside.” Try as they might to fit in, they’re an outsider, perpetually apprehensive in their own world: they’re just not like their big strong can-do bro or their helpful domesticated sis. Boy? Girl? None of the usual binary pronouns seem to be right.

In the course of their first migration, when they lose track of their family and find themself alone in the big wide ocean, Young Turtle has a series of encounters with strangers, who invariably turn out to be more than their appearance or our hero’s ingrained expectations. And they’re expressively manipulated and voiced by a team of performers — Ali Deregt, Émanuel Dubbeldam, Oli Guselle.

The fearsome-looking shark, for example, feels misunderstood too (“I am more than my last meal”), and regularly pretends to be a dolphin so others won’t flee.  The moray eel, an inspired creation who’s had a lifetime of repelling other creatures, with attendant anxiety issues, is habitually leery of meeting strangers. And they have helpful advice for Young Turtle about being brave, in a soulful ballad. “Maybe being brave is being true to yourself.” A drag-inspired cuttlefish with neon light-up moves, advises “don’t hide your colours tonight,” in a go-for-the-gusto disco number. The inventive score created by Rae Spoon and Ruaridh MacDonald is sung with varying degrees of success by the versatile performers.

It’s fun, it’s light, Grummett’s text is witty, the puppets are delightful. And the theatrical spirit-lifting message to marginalized kids that whoever they are they’ve got friends and don’t have to swim alone is important without being heavy-finned. Times being what they are in the prairies, where ever-escalating political grandstanding punishes trans and queer kids, the show is particularly welcome. Kudos to Expanse.

The Adventure of Young Turtle runs through April 4 at the Expanse Festival (various times). Check out 12thnight’s preview interview with theatre artist S.E. Grummett here. And 12thnight’s Expanse preview here. The full Expanse schedule of events, including Friday and Saturday’s curated dance: azimuththeatre.com. All tickets are pay-what-you-can. In advance: fringetheatre.ca.  

If you’ve been waiting for this long weekend to venture out to the theatre, it’s your last chance to …

Larissah Lashley, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie, Hayley Moorhouse in Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

… see Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre’s premiere production of the funny and touching Trevor Schmidt comedy about four junior high girls who join the science club to create a robot for an international competition. Its delights are many. For one thing, the cast, directed jointly by John Hudson and Lana Michelle Hughes, is one of the perfectly meshed ensembles of the season. Through Sunday at the Varscona Theatre. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org. Have a peek at 12thnight’s review here.

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

… see The Sound of Music at the Citadel, the only production in recent memory without Alp projections (those of us in the Shoctor seats are the mountains). The kids in Rachel Peake’s production are particularly delightful. The 12thnight review is here. Through Sunday. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

… catch Workshop West Playwrights Theatre’s Springboards New Play Festival. The staged readings are your chance to see what goes on behind the scenes, as plays at every stage of evolution get developed en route to full production and opening night. Friday night it’s Summer Solstice by Collin Doyle, Saturday it’s The Resurrection of Dottie Reed, and Sunday night’s finale, the Springboards cabaret, includes excerpts of new scripts from beginner playwrights and star veterans like George F. Walker. All tickets are pay-what-you-can. In advance at workshopwest.org. The 12thnight preview, with annotations by WWPT’s artistic producer Heather Inglis, is here.

… catch a dinner, drinks, and Elvis as the Mayfield wraps up the run of One Night With The King Sunday.  It’s now or never for Matt Cage’s performance, with the celebrated repertoire to match. Next up? Grease.  Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca.

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The Expanse Fest is back for a 19th annual edition, ‘re-framed’

Posted on March 28, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Mayumi Lashbrook in Fairly Becoming, Expanse Festival 2024. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Expanse, Azimuth Theatre’s 19-year-old movement arts festival, a “celebration of ALL bodies onstage,” is back, March 28 through April 4. And, says Azimuth’s co-artistic director Morgan Yamada, it’s been “re-framed” for the hard-edged realities of our post-pandemic moment in the arts.

The Adventure of Young Turtle, So.Glad Arts at Expanse Festival 2024. Photo supplied.

“How do we reframe our perspectives, with the resources we have?” That’s the question that confronted Yamada and Sue Goberdhan, who jointly steer the Azimuth course. And it’s the theme of this year’s edition of the festivities. The telling of body-based stories is the engine of the mainstage “performance series” that opens tonight with The Adventure of Young Turtle, a queer puppet musical for all ages (five and over) by S.E. Grummett of Saskatoon-based So.Glad Arts and an all-queer/trans/non-binary team of artist collaborators from across the prairies. Check out the 12thnight PREVIEW with Grummett here.

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The origins of the well-named Expanse festival are in dance; it’s constantly expanded the dance frontiers ever since. Reframe Perspective: Stories in Motion, Friday and Saturday on the Westbury stage, is a dance curation that includes a trio of offerings. In and out of dark is by Molly McDermott, the Edmonton-based recipient of Good Women Dance’s New Work Award. Its focus, as Yamada describes, is “how we look at fear,” a “playful exploration of darkness and nightmares” as billed. The collaborative piece is performed by McDermott, Max Hanic, Alida Kendell, Tia Kushniruk, and Will Scott, with live sound.

Shion Skye Carter in Residuals, Expanse Festival 2024. Photo by Lula-Belle Jedynak

Residuals (住み·墨), a memory piece by Vancouver-based dancer/choreographer Shion Skye Carter, channels the traditional art of Japanese calligraphy and sets childhood memory in motion in a contemporary journey of self-discovery.

And Fairly Becoming brings Toronto’s Mayumi Lashbrook of Aeris Körper to the festival in a solo show that, as Yamada describes, is a meditation on consumption and the climate crisis.

Between shows, the Lobbyists return with site-specific, immersive  collective movement creations, in spaces that aren’t the theatre — like the Westbury lobby.

And the grand finale is The Expanse Living Room Party April 4, its title a nod to Expanse’s first home. Yamada describes it as “a big cabaret party with cool new work from local artists” — music, dance, drag, spoken word, monologues, and more. The evening includes a music video premiere from Just Moe, and a performance from Juno-nominated Josh Sahunta.

Between mainstage performances, Expanse in its outreach mode includes mixers and workshops with many of the festival artists. S.E. Grummett, for example, will share their first-hand experience in How To Tour Your Work (and not go broke in the process).

Check out the full schedule, with more information, at azimuththeatre.com. Azimuth is big on accessibility: all tickets (available in advance at fringetheatre.ca) are pay-what-you-can.

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‘My love letter to queer and trans kids’: The Adventure of Young Turtle launches Expanse Festival 2024

Posted on March 28, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

The Adventure of Young Turtle, So.Glad Arts at Expanse Festival 2024. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

One morning this week, I went on an undersea excursion backstage at the Westbury Theatre, and I met an apprehensive moray eel.

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Their body was once an air compressor hose, their eyes Gatorade bottle lids, and their pointy teeth, plastic forks. They were hanging out with fellow sea creatures, including an oyster who opened like a takeaway food container to reveal a nice fat pearl inside. And a giant jellyfish who’d started life as a garden umbrella then developed shimmering bubblewrap tentacles.

They were getting into character for the “queer puppet musical for kids” that premieres Thursday to open the 2024 edition of Azimuth Theatre’s Expanse Festival. In the course of S.E. Grummett’s 60-minute The Adventure Of Young Turtle, our hero — the only character in the production from Saskatoon-based So.Glad Arts who isn’t a puppet but has a human body, with accoutrements like fins and a shell — will meet a butch shark, a gender-fluid clownfish, a cuttlefish with drag queen eyelashes to die for. “Different letters of the queer alphabet,” as Gummett (Grumms) puts it.

Logan Stefura, Émanuel Dubbeldam in rehearsal for The Adventure of Young Turtle. Photo supplied

“And they all teach Young Turtle lessons … about identity and being yourself, being able to embrace who you are and showing that to the world. Things about how to be brave outside rigid, masculine emotions. Things about the strength of community and found family.” They laugh. “A lot of creatures and an ocean of possibilities!”   

No bubble wrap is safe from the inventive zest (and hot glue gun) of Grummett (Grumms) and co. No rubber glove or scrubby, pool noodle, spare backpack, or old hula hoop. Empty juice bottles, beware: you could be on the brink of a transformational experience. And as for plastic cutlery … well, check out the disconcerting toothy grin on that big-mouth shark.

“Stylized trash,” declares the transgender non-binary artist cheerfully of the diverse cast of animal characters played by four performers (Ali Deregt, Émanuel Dubbeldam, Oli Gusell and Logan Stefura), one from Saskatoon, two from Edmonton, one from Calgary, in a rare example of “a cross-prairie queer collaboration.” Beyond virtuoso ingenuity with found objects, “we wanted to make everything so it looked re-purposed too. Part of the aesthetic!”

“I was the kid who who wrote a play for my class, then directed it, acted in it, designed a set cobbled together from everybody’s parents’ stuff,” says Grumms, who has a sunny sort of buoyancy about them in conversation. “I went to the University of Saskatchewan as an actor, then started making my own stuff, and doing the Fringe circuit….” For one thing “there wasn’t enough work to just be an actor. And there weren’t a lot of parts for trans folks like myself.” Besides, “I’m what my theatre mentor (playwright/director) Yvette Nolan calls ‘a theatre rat’. I like to get my hands in every little bit of the process, even the poster design.”

And that, they think, is the gravitational pull of Fringes: “you get to make every little piece of it!”  And those festivals have figured prominently in their work. Physical comedy and puppets, both Grumms signatures, were involved in Pack Animals, the show they and their So.Glad collaborator Holly Brinkman took on tour to nine Fringes (including Edmonton’s) in 2019. A woodpecker and a beaver get lost in the woods….

Grumms met their life partner on that tour, and the pair found themselves waiting out the pandemic in Australia. In Grumms’ absurdist physical comedy Something in the Water, inspired by their coming out as transgender, the audience watched the performer/creator turn into a giant squid, a monster outsider. It won the Best Theatre prize at the giant Adelaide Fringe in 2017, and has since sprouted a kids’ version, and played the Play The Fool Fest here.

Creepy Boys, the “little-c clown show” (“I don’t do noses”) comedy Grumms created with partner Sam Kruger, inspired by “growing older and how we feel about re-boots and re-makes of everything our childhood,” premiered at the Twin Cities Horror Festival. And it’s played Fringes in Australia and got raves at the very big one in Edinburgh.  

In 2016, “fresh out of theatre school,”  Grumms and Caitlin Zacharias had created SCUM: A Manifesto and taken it to the Saskatchewan Fringe. Playwright/dramaturg Vern Thiessen called it their “fuck-you play.” Grumms beams. “It was rage-filled and what I needed at he time.”    

“But as I developed my theatre voice I’ve come back to comedy, as a way of enlisting the audience, extending love to characters … as a way of making queer work very accessible to everyone. If we can laugh together, we build a community in theatre.”

“Comedy,” they muse, “can be a Trojan Horse for important themes and content.” They’ve found that a lot of the plays about trans people that aren’t written by trans artists “are rooted in trauma. And I’m less and less interested in telling those stories and more interested in telling stories that are full of joy and celebration, that are empowering to the trans community, not just putting our stories onstage to educate.”

Grumms and co-producer Mac Brock celebrate the fact that the cast and creative team of The Adventure of Young Turtle are entirely trans, queer, non-binary. And all the animals are queer too. There’s “a big win in this,” as Grumm says. Not least because it’s a moment in our history when anti-trans rhetoric and oppressive legislation threaten the human rights, health, safety, happiness of kids. After the Edmonton premiere run at Expanse,  a national tour in 2025 will launch at Saskatoon’s Persephone Theatre.

Logan Stefura, Ali DeRegt ih The Adventure of Young Turtle, So.Glad Arts. Photo supplied.

The Adventure of Young Turtle, which emerged from an original short story Grumms wrote before the pandemic, is So.Glad Arts’ first show specifically written with kids (the five-plus crowd) in mind. And it’s a musical (music by Rae Spoon and Ruaridh MacDonald): “I don’t write music, but the hero’s journey suited the musical form…. Every creature can have their song (the eel has two).”

Émanuel Dubbeldam, Ali DeRegt, Oli Guselle in rehearsal for The Adventure of Young Turtle. Photo supplied.

Puppets are big in GrummWorld. “I don’t fit into a lot of binary roles,” they say cheerfully. “I’m an odd duck onstage…. I‘d love to be cast as a leading man (laughter) but I don’t think that will happen any time soon…. I’m often cast as non-humans, robots, cyborgs, aliens, (more laughter) squid monsters.” For Grumms puppets were “a way of opening up what I was allowed to play onstage as a trans performer. I could play all kinds of genders, creatures, inanimate objects…. I got to use the whole of my creative practice.”

They’re tickled by the ‘trash into treasure’ aesthetic that’s an invitation to imagine — to “fall in love with a garbage bag or a little hunk of clay, or be captivated by a piece of wood.” Puppets are “so live … theatre magic that can’t be a movie or online. And you can see the fingerprints of the people that made it.”

Kid audiences buy in instantly; “with adults you have to tease it out a little more, do a little more warming up to get to that place.” Grumms loves performing for kids. “They tell you exactly how they about things … an audience who haven’t made up their minds about the world yet!”

The ocean is a meaningful setting for their new musical, Grumms figures. “We’ve only discovered 10 per cent of the ocean, and the ocean has been around forever. Like the ocean we’ve only discovered 10 per cent of gender expression and identities. And like the ocean queer and two-spirit people have been around forever. It’s not a new thing.”

“This is my love letter to queer and trans kids…. It feels much needed right now. I hope the kids who need to see it, find it.”

PREVIEW

The Adventure of Young Turtle

Theatre: So.Glad Arts at the Expanse Festival

Written by: S.E. Grummett, with music by Rae Spoon and Ruaridh McDonald

Directed by: Jay Northcott

Starring: Ali Deregt, Émanuel Dubbeldam, Oli Guselle, Logan Stefura

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

Running: March 28, 30, 31, April 3 and 4

Tickets: pay-what-you-can (suggested $25), tickets.fringetheatre.ca or at the door

 

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Back-combing the ’60s: Hairspray at the Jube, a review

Posted on March 27, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Caroline Eisman in Hairspray, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Jeremy Daniel.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Something has happened to the light-hold flexible Hairspray we’ve always known. It’s gone Ultra-Clutch.

In a world of chronic downsizing — of prospects, budgets, the polar ice cap … — there’s something reassuring, in theory, about the candy-coloured Broadway hit musical of 2003 that’s arrived with a big beehive of early ‘60s for the Jube stage. Hairspray is all about size large, in hair, in heart, in girth.

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I have to tell you that a sold-out opening night house Tuesday, who rose to their feet cheering, decisively will not agree with me here. But judging by this hard-driven, relentlessly brassy Broadway Across Canada production, the period piece musical (teased from the 1988 John Waters movie) that captivated us with its endearing bouffant combo of satirical and sweet, goofy and earnest, has lost something en route to 2023. Too much back-combing? Too much conditioner? Overheated blow dry? A dated ‘do?

For starters, the sound mix in Act I, at least on opening night, was so heavily band-forward it was pretty hard to figure out which character was singing onstage. Much less hear the Scott Wittman/ Marc Shaman lyrics, a shame since they’re cheeky and witty. The sound improved somewhat in Act II, but retained a nasty metallic sheen.

To look on the bright side, you can have no cavil about size. Size Large the production truly is, with a cast of nearly three dozen (and a band of six). The actors are a treat to look at, in William Ivey Long’s ‘60s costumes, all ice cream soda colours and argyle vests, re-created for the tour. And Jerry Mitchell’s choreography, reworked by Robbie Roby, reinvents the movement lexicon of the ‘60s, both its retro (white) comb-over and its capture of the forward-looking (Black) moves of the time. Which turns out to be a key narrative distinction.

“I got my own way of moving and I got my own voice,” as Seaweed (supple Josiah Rogers) and his sister Inez (Kaila Simone Crowder) tell us in the song Run and Tell. And plus-size radical Tracy Turnblad (Caroline Eiseman), up against the skinny white status quo, is the beneficiary of their example in her quest to be on TV and capture the fancy of heartthrob Link (Skyler Shields).

To return to the story, Tracy and her equally outsized mama Edna Turnblad, played by Greg Kalafatas (an actor of sturdy build, as per the tradition established by Divine and Harvey Fierstein), find themselves at a moment in history in Baltimore 1962 when social revolution is at hand. The local TV teen dance extravaganza, The Corny Collins Show, a take-off on Baltimore’s Buddy Deane Show, is looking for a replacement performer. Tracy pines to to be a Corny Collins dancer, and the secret of her success is her Black moves. So racial integration just makes perfect sense to her. And a mother-daughter team of outcasts-turned-ample activists is set in motion.

With some exceptions, guileless charm of the wide-eyed variety is in short supply in the well-lacquered production directed for the tour by Matt Lenz (Jack O’Brien was the original director). Performances are directed to dial up comic grimacing, double-takes, and mugging. And you’d be forgiven for wondering from time to time whether you might be watching a Hairspray parody.

Tracy, a repository of optimism, moves with a skip and a bounce — and here a certain tooth-gritting determination, as if her life (or at least her portfolio) depended on them. In this version she isn’t exactly the endearing, vulnerable heroine whose fortunes in romance and showbiz are a big part of your Hairspray investment.

Greg Kalafatas in Hairspray, Broadway Touring Production. Photo by Jeremy Daniel.

Edna, she of the “extra-large largesse,” tends to go directly for the laughs, winking at her own cross-gender casting. But Kalafatas’s performance did grow on me in the course of the evening. And Edna’s vaudevillian soft-shoe number with her husband Wilbur (the delightful Ralph Prentice Daniel), owner of the Har De Ha Hut joke shop, which dials back, or diverts, comic posturing in favour of a different kind of laughter, is a lot of fun, and something of a relief.

Josiah Rogers and Scarlett Jacques in Hairspray, Broadway Across Canada touring production. Photo by Jeremy Daniel.

There’s not much girl chemistry between Tracy and her nerdy BFF Penny (Scarlett Jacques). But the latter performance does land on comic moments without hammering them into the stage. Performances in smaller roles, like Penny’s bigoted mother or the school principal who doubles as the Corny Collins corporate sponsor, are grotesquely exaggerated, to remind us I guess that we’re watching a comedy in case we’ve blanked on that. The mother-daughter pair of villains “from the white side of the tracks,” Velma and Amber Von Tussle, are gamely played by Sarah Hayes and Caroline Portner.

Kudos to the Supremes-like trio who emerge from a poster mid-performance with sage advice — “doncha let nobody try to steal your fun/ ‘cause a little touch of lipstick never hurt no one” — and to Deidre Lang’s Motormouth Maybelle, who powerfully delivers the racial anthem I Know Where I’ve Been.

Speaking as we are of stealing your fun, You Can’t Stop The Beat, as the show’s signature number puts it (and Hairspray history has reinforced). But in this production, to me, the  the beat is a hammering.

REVIEW

Hairspray

Broadway Across Canada touring production

Created by: Marc Shaiman (music), Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (lyrics), Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan (book)

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca

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Springboards, Workshop West’s signature new play festival, is back

Posted on March 24, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Springboards is back this week. And with it, our annual backstage pass to the world of artistic creation, where new plays get born and develop.

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Workshop West Playwrights Theatre’s new play festival, which returned after a 10-year absence in 2022, is a signature event for a 46-year-old company devoted to the discovery and development, the honing, expansion and profile, of the Canadian repertoire. And in this edition, works-in-progress at every stage of their evolution by some 22 playwrights at every stage of their careers, from beginners to veteran Canadian stars like George F. Walker, will get staged readings of every size in a cabaret setting at the Gateway Theatre — with an audience (that’s us!).

As Workshop West’s artistic producer Heather Inglis has often reminded us, the first engagement of a new play with a live audience is a crucial part of its journey to the opening night mini-quiches — revealing for the playwright and exciting for us watchers. Springboards is all about that. And restoring it was a priority for Inglis when she got the Workshop West job just before COVID brought live theatre to a shuddering halt in 2020.   

In this year’s expanded festival, Monday through March 31, replete with staged readings of every size, workshops, talkbacks, cabarets, and panel discussions, there’s even a night (Tuesday) devoted to a “Workshop on Workshops,” that, as Inglis puts it, “pulls back the curtain on what happens when a play gets workshopped, the rules of engagement for a good workshop.” It’s led by actor/ director Trevor Ruegar, the Calgary-based executive director of the Alberta Playwrights Network.

And by way of launch, the opening night of Springboards 2024 is an evening in the company of an artist with “an encyclopedic knowledge of Edmonton theatre,” and an unfailing generosity of spirit in sharing it. Ask Jim stars Jim DeFelice, actor, director, teacher, mentor, an unparalleled resource for everyone who works in the field, and everyone who loves live theatre. “Cynical is not part of his DNA,” as Inglis says of the puckish Edmonton “theatre elder” now in his ‘80s.

Hosted by the star playwright Conni Massing, whose new comedy Dead Letter (part of last year’s Springboards) is the Workshop West season finale in May, the evening includes an onstage interview of DeFelice, and questions from the audience. Bring yours.

Both DeFelice and Massing have a long history with Workshop West. The former was on the WWPT board for 17 years, with a wealth of experience and connections in new play creation. Six of the latter’s plays have premiered at Workshop West.

Springboards 2023, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo supplied.

The full-length featured staged readings include new plays by award-winners Collin Doyle (Let The Light Of Day Through, Terry And The Dog, The Mighty Carlins) and Nicole Moeller (The Ballad of Peachtree Rose, An Almost Perfect Thing, The Preacher). Doyle’s Summer Solstice, set in 2002, takes a character back to her home town in northern Alberta for the funeral of her father, a man’s she’s removed from her life 30 years before. Inglis, who describes the playwright as “such a smart, careful, passionate writer,” directs Friday’s reading, with a cast that includes Beth Graham, Doug Mertz, and Marianne Copithorne.

Moeller’s The Resurrection of Dottie Reed, as Inglis describes, concerns a woman in her ‘60s, a victim of an internet scam, who has had enough,” and devises her revenge. With recent productions of Mob and Subscribe Or Like, Workshop West has stepped into the dangerously volatile online world in which we all at least partly live and struggle to retain our agency and identity. This time, a character fights back, “using a lifetime of experience.” Tracy Carroll directs Chris Bullough, Michele Fleiger, Kristin Johnston and Maureen Rooney in Saturday’s reading.        

EdmonTEN, the bright idea of Carroll and Conni Massing and now “an Edmonton tradition,” arrives back at Springboards Wednesday in partnership with The Alberta Playwrights’ Network. Five 10-minute plays, selected blindly from submissions, get a debut reading. And the playwrights run the gamut of experience. The evening includes Beth Graham’s Galloping Heart, Leslea Kroll’s Riverside, Shawn Marshall’s The Chart, Cat Walsh’s The Sun Sets In Apartment 506, and Alexandria Fortier’s Stuck With You.

The 10-minute play is a concentrated form that’s intensely difficult to craft, as Inglis points out. “It requires such a tight command of tension.” Amy DeFelice directs a cast of three: Trevor Rueger, Michelle Diaz, and Danielle LaRose.

All three of the artists, relative newcomers to the scene, who have contributed scripts to Thursday’s Wildside Cabaret are actors-turned-playwrights. Intriguingly two of their three high-contrast offerings — all directed by Ben Henderson (former Theatre Network artistic director and ex-city councillor) — involve animal characters. One of the queer couple in the third is played by a puppet.

Angus, the protagonist of Spencer Kells’s Sheep Play, is a sheep with big dreams and, in a post-human world, challenges to match. The cast of Lora Brovold, Brennan Campbell, Alex Dawkins, and Cody Porter take on sheep-ish assignments. Kole Durnford’s Horseplay chronicles the best-friends relationship between Jaques, a jockey, and Horse who is one. They’re up against the threat of separation if they don’t start winning races. Inglis calls it “a beautifully sad and hopeful coming of age play.”  Vince Forcier and Aran Wilson-McAnally step up to the gate. In Michael Watt’s Arthur and Titi (“whimsical and fun” as Inglis describes) we meet a couple, a man and a puppet, trying to make things work between them.

Sunday’s grand finale is the third annual Springboards Cabaret, curated by Darrin Hagen and directed by Jake Tkaczyk. It’s a mashup of excerpts from soon-to-be hot new plays, new music, special guests, billed as “an evening of adult fun.”

The playwright list for this cabaret, always a hot ticket, is wildly eclectic. As usual it’s attracted submissions from a mix of newcomers and experienced writers: Stephen Allred, Mikayla Boutin, Louise Casemore, Kijo Gatama, Seth Gilfillan, Katherine Koller, Emily Lizotte, Natalie Meisner, Kristine Nutting, Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, Andrew Torry, Jaquelin Walters, Lindsey Walker … and George F. Walker. The latter, one of the country’s celebrated veterans, has credits in the Workshop West archive. In the 1999-2000 season, the company produced two of Walker’s Suburban Motel plays. Bradley Moss directed Problem Child; David Mann The End of Civilization.

Inglis has discovered that “Jim DeFelice wrote the first article ever about Workshop West for the Canadian Theatre Review, in 1985…. It’s been fascinating to see what hasn’t changed — the struggle for (acknowledged) relevance of Canadian work.” Now, she says, “it’s still considered an incredible risk to put new Canadian plays onstage.” Inglis sighs, and laughs. “But that’s what we do! I love an underdog story!” And there’s nothing more heartening than an underdog celebration.

For more information, and the full detailed schedule, check workshopwest.org.

Springboards New Play Festival, 2024

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: Monday through March 31

Tickets: all pay-what-you-will at the door. In advance at showpass.com.

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An evening in the park with Sondheim and up-and-comers at MacEwan, and more

Posted on March 22, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk in Sunday In The Park With George, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Photo by Lindsey Tran, @understudystudio_. Set design Ross Nichol, costume design Deanna Finnman, lighting design Travis Hatt, video design Matt Schuurman

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Last night in a packed theatre I got a chance to see the only musical in the repertoire where the rhyme of “rapturous” and “capture us” floats through the air.

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Both apply to the experience of Jim Guedo’s MacEwan University production of Sunday In The Park With George, Stephen Sondheim’s groundbreaking, mysteriously emotional, 1984 masterwork. In the repertoire it is, of course. But Sunday in the Park With George is so rarely staged — its technical, theatrical, and musical challenges are particular, rarefied, and daunting — it’s a special occasion to see it. And the audience in the Triffo Theatre was full of people who know the music through and through, and whose eyes mist over at the first chord of the swelling ensemble anthem Sunday, but who’ve never seen a production live.

It’s inspired by a modernist painting, Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte. It captures, in Seurat’s signature pointillist style, well-dressed French suburbanites in a park on a sunny day off, just hanging out. There’s a kind of haunting stillness to it, and a shimmer that results from the points of colour applied, like dots, for the viewers to assemble in their minds. And Sondheim and playwright James Lapine, in this their first partnership, aim for a theatrical and musical equivalent. Wrap your mind around that.

It’s not a narrative per se, but the figures in the painting come to life, and criss-cross the “canvas” with things to say and to sing. And at the centre there’s the story of the artist, George, intensely immersed in his art, sketching and painting and neglecting his lover Dot, who’s modelling for him, and longing for something more than the artist gaze and exhortations to “concentrate.”

Cast of Sunday In The Park With George, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Photo by Lindsey Tran, @understudystudio_. Set design Ross Nichol, costume design Deanna Finnman, lighting design Travis Hatt, video design Matt Schuurman.

The optics are intricate. It starts with the blank canvas (the first word in the musical, spoken by George, is “white.” And the sophisticated design of Guedo’s production, the joint achievement of Ross Nichol (set), Travis Hatt (lighting), Matt Schuurman (video), is a matter of screens, and washes where the dots accumulate and assemble into scenery — trees, and grass, and people beautifully costumed by Deanna Finnman. It’s artistic creation in motion. “Composition. Balance, Light. And harmony.” And Act II, which happens a century later, reveals what happens when the search for something passionately new and original becomes co-opted by the marketplace — a struggle that has been part of Sondheim’s own life, as you read in his two-part memoir.

Eli Yaschuk as George in Sunday In The Park With George, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Photo by Lindsey Tran, @understudystudio_, Set design (Ross Nichol), costume design (Deanna Finnman), lighting design (Travis Hatt), video design (Matt Schuurman).

The cast of 17, student actors about to graduate from the theatre arts department, create vivid characters who emerge and retreat into the scenery in a captivating rhythm under Guedo’s direction, with choreography by Amber Borotsik. They’re led by wonderful performances from Eli Yaschuk as George, fierce and prickly in his intensity and focus, and Rain Matkin as Dot, lovestruck and knowing, quick-witted and chafing in frustration as she fantasizes about being a Follies girl.

Both are strong singers, with a feel for delivering a song. Remember their names; you’ll be seeing them soon in cast lists across Edmonton theatres. In fact Yaschuk and Matkin will star in Radiant Vermin, already announced in the upcoming season at Northern Light Theatre.

Rain Matkin as Dot in Sunday In The Park With George, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Photo by Lindsey Tran, @understudystudio_. Set designer Ross Nichol, costume designer Deanna Finnman, lighting designer Travis Hatt, video designer Matt Schuurman.

The music of Sunday in the Park is complicated and jagged, veering from the lyrical to the a-rhythmic and off-centre in its intervals, with silent moments of anticipation. The actors and an orchestra of six (who are non-student pros) negotiate the difficult score under the musical directors Steven Greenfield and Shannon Hiebert. And the sound design of David Bowden does it proud.

There is something moving about seeing young actors, on the brink of professional careers, tackle a musical that’s all about the magic, and the loneliness, of being an artist. “However you live, there’s a part of you always standing by, mapping out the sky finishing a hat, starting on a hat….”

Sunday In The Park With George runs through Sunday on MacEwan’s Triffo stage in Allard Hall. Tickets: tickets.macewan.ca.

MacEwan has just announced an upcoming season that launches with Tracey Power’s Glory, a Jazz Age hockey story directed by Amber Borotsik in the Tim Ryan Theatre Lab Oct. 30 to Nov. 3. Leigh Rivenbark directs Heathers The Musical in the Triffo Theatre Nov. 27 to Dec. 3. Jim Guedo’s Theatre Lab production of the highly original Dave Malloy musical Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 runs Feb. 12 to 16, 2025. And the season finale (March 26 to 30, 2025) is The Prom, directed by MacEwan alumnus Byron Martin, the artistic director of Grindstone Theatre. Subscriptions and tickets: tickets.macewan.ca or 780-497-4470.

•At the Fringe’s Backstage Theatre … tonight and Saturday, is a celebration of Indigenous “winter storytelling,” ᐋᒋᒧᐃᐧᐣ âcimowin. It’s led by Elder Jerry Saddleback, a venerable repository of ancestral wisdom, followed by performances from the distinguished  actor/playwright Sheldon Elter, and MC Red Cloud who weaves personal narrative and hip-hop in his storytelling. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.   

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Three musicals and a comedy: snow reason to stay home, the weekend onstage

Posted on March 21, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Vaches The Musical, Créations In Vivo at L’UniThéâtre. Photo by Marianne Duval.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Edmonton, you have choices on stage this weekend, including a delightful and insightful comedy that sees into the complicated lives of teenage girls, and three musicals that land miles apart on the musical theatre spectrum  — a classic, a groundbreaker inspired by a painting, and a musical comedy that has fun with the musical form itself. Snow is merely a hint: get yourself to the theatre.

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•L’UniThéâtre, Edmonton’s only professional francophone theatre, launches its season, for the first time in living memory, with a musical.  Vaches The Musical, a spirited, light, and funny original by Stéphane Guertin and Olivier Nadon, music by Brian St-Pierre, arrives from Ottawa’s Créations In Vivo. In French, with English subtitles, the five-actor production is “freely inspired” by a true story, the dramatic Quebec ice storm of 1998.

Full of running gags, and light of touch, it’s set in Casselman, a village in rural Ontario “37 minutes” outside Ottawa. And the farmer protagonist Jean is up against it — his daughter (who wants to move to Toront0, the greedy mayor, the military, and then the ice storm. Jean is valiantly determined to save his cows from destruction. It’s a test of the resilience of small communities, and the spirit of collaboration. And as the title suggests, there’s fun to be had in winking at the grandiloquent conventions of musicals.

It opens tonight at La Cité francophone’s Théatre Servus Credit Union (8627 rue Marie-Anne Gaboury) and runs through Saturday. Tickets: lunitheatre.ca.

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

•At the Citadel, The Sound of Music, the final collaboration of the most successful musical theatre partnership in history, Rodgers and Hammerstein, continues through March 31. And with this encouragement to take up mountain climbing, your chance to unleash a score that’s always simmering in your brain. Priya Narine as the high-spirited postulant and Charlie Gallant as the stern naval hero, and seven wonderful young actors (including Christina Nguyen as the oldest Liesl) as the kids, star in Rachel Peake’s Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production. Have a peek at the 12thnight review. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

Cast of Sunday In The Park With George, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Photo by Lindsey Tran, @understudystudio_. Set design Ross Nichol, costume design Deanna Finnman, lighting design Travis Hatt, video design Matt Schuurman.

•Jim Guedo’s production of Sunday in the Park With George at MacEwan University, running tonight through Sunday, is a rare chance to see the 1984 Stephen Sondheim masterwork. There’s something magical about this musical, which brings to life a pointillist painting, Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. And it’s all about art, and artists, and making art, and the sacrifices in relationships, in life, that are built into the life of the artist. It runs on the Triffo Theatre stage at MacEwan University (11110 104 Ave.). Check out the 12thnight.ca preview with director Guedo here. Tickets: tickets.macewan.ca.

Larissah Lashley, Hayley Moorhouse, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie in Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

•At Shadow Theatre, the premiere production of Trevor Schmidt’s captivating Robot Girls continues through March 31. A delightful cast of four — Jayce McKenzie, Abigail McDougall, Larissah Lashley, Hayley Moorhouse — are junior high girls who join the science club to build a robot for an international competition.  Funny, touching, landing lightly on the complications of a complicated time of life. Have a look at the 12thnight review. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

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A groundbreaking musical about making art: a rare chance to see Sondheim’s Sunday In The Park With George, at MacEwan

Posted on March 20, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Cast of Sunday In The Park With George, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Photo by Lindsey Tran, @understudystudio_. Set design Ross Nichol, costume design Deanna Finnman, lighting design Travis Hatt, video design Matt Schuurman.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“There’s a part of you always standing by, Mapping out the sky, Finishing a hat….”

Something rare and special is happening this week at MacEwan University: a production of Sunday In The Park With George.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

There is an elusive magic about Stephen Sondheim’s groundbreaking 1984 Pulitzer Prize winner. For one thing it’s a musical inspired by a painting, and a landmark modernist painting at that: Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, by the French pointillist painter Georges Seurat. For another, the musical, the first partnership between Sondheim and playwright/director James Lapine, is about art and the making of art, artists and the shimmering possibilities of what they see as they create.

“It’s a musical that speaks especially to artists, to musicians, to painters, to any discipline of creative artist,” says Jim Guedo, who directs the production of Sunday In The Park (17 actors and a live orchestra of six) that runs on the Triffo Theatre stage Thursday through Sunday. “It really resonates; if people invest in it, it’s a beautiful thing.”

Everything about Sunday In The Park is unusual in a musical. The lyrics, as Sondheim has put it, “are one long uninterrupted sentence, with a through line.” There’s no story; it captures the figures in the Seurat painting as characters, as well as Georges the artist painting them, in a sort of theatrical equivalent of pointillism, where separate points of colour add up in the viewer’s mind. Georges and his neglected lover Dot: theirs is, as Guedo puts it, “a love affair that finally gets resolved a century later in Act II, where the artist is an American sculptor, a great-great grandson of Seurat, creating multimedia pieces for the voracious commercial art marketplace, struggling to claim his own vision.

The musical gets a place of honour on Guedo’s bucket list, he says. Forty years ago Guedo saw the original Off-Broadway production of Sunday in the Park in New York. And since then “I’ve made it my goal in life to see every major production I could …” on both sides of the Atlantic. When people ask him, as they do, “what’s your favourite Sondheim?” his answer is “on a great day, it’s Sunday in the Park With George; if my mood is darker it’s Sweeney Todd. To me these are the two peaks of Sondheim.”

Sunday In The Park With George, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Photo by Lindsey Tran, @understuystudio_. Set design Ross Nichol, costume design Deanna Finnman, lighting design Travis Hatt, video design Matt Schuurman

With the exception of a 2005 Tim Ryan production at MacEwan in its pre-university college days, Sunday In The Park has never been done in Edmonton. “Now we actually have the space (the spanky new Triffo Theatre,” and the talent honed in the course of a four-year degree program, “we’re able to make this happen,” Guedo says.

His inspiration was the pared-down-to-essentials 2017 New York production starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford. “It was reverse engineering,” he says of the MacEwan production Edmonton audiences will see starting Thursday. “I had to find a staging that would be evocative but simple,” given constraints of budget and time. Under the monitorship of heavy-hitter working theatre professionals like videographer/projection specialist Matt Schuurman and costume designer Deanna Finnman, for example, students are both on- and backstage, in the cast and the crew.

After the flop of Merrily We Roll Along in 1981 (a flop that has been reversed by this year’s Broadway production), Sondheim had found himself at a low ebb. As Guedo points out, partnering with Lapine “kickstarted him…. When he looked back at everything before and after James Lapine, there was a seismic shift, a new frame of feeling. He started to dig more deeply, get more emotional, more vulnerable. He turned to family, to children, to art,” witness Into The Woods (1987) and Passion (1994).

There is something mysterious about the effect that Sunday In The Park has on audiences. I’ve been lucky enough to see it twice, once in London and once in New York. It is not a sad show but both times, the audience, myself included, cried almost all the way through. Why? We were never quite sure. Guedo thinks it’s the way the characters are “captured … in a perfect moment that’s just transcendental. A moment that captures the best versions of someone.”

“It’s what would ring through the minds of these characters if they knew they’d be in a work of art that would last forever . that they were part of something bigger.”

In the course of a 45-year (and counting) career, Guedo thinks “you can count on your hands the shows — you know the keepers — and the moments that will last forever, etched into your mind.” He thinks of Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman. Or “the moment of seeing Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou rising out of the pit in Sweeney Todd.”

“What we do (in theatre) is transitory. But when it hits and sticks….”  Sunday in the Park is like that, he thinks. “It’s about people trying to create something new.” And it’s about the cost of being an artist. “People don’t realize how hard it is,” says Guedo. “It’s about what you knowingly choose to give up, the collateral damage…. George knows what he’s sacrificing. There’s a cost to it.”

“A great show for the fourth-years to end on,” he says of his graduating theatre students. “A show that validates them, a show about making art.”

Guedo’s production of Sunday In The Park With George runs Thursday through Sunday in the Triffo Theatre in Allard Hall, at MacEwan University (11110 104 Ave.). Tickets: tickets.macewan.ca.

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