Theatre magic: with Tiger Lady, the Dead Rabbits return to the Fringe. A Fringe review

Posted on August 19, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Tiger Lady, Dead Rabbits Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied.

Tiger Lady (Stage 1, Westbury Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The story is fascinating, snatched from the archives of circus history by the English company Dead Rabbits Theatre (The Dragon, My Love Lies Frozen in the Ice).

In Tiger Lady, we meet Mabel Stark, the circus world’s first-ever female tiger tamer. In the early years of the 20th century, the heyday of the Ringling Brothers, a Kentucky orphan escaped the harsh bonds of her unpromising life, and ran away with the circus. And a star was born.

It’s an exotic story, to be sure. And how a nimble cast of six create something rich and strange (a love story, a comedy with tragic dimensions, a tragedy with comic dimensions) from it is the particular achievement of Tiger Lady. That they create an atmospheric world using three ladders, a sheet, a door, parachute silk, and music is magic. Theatre magic, the kind that happens before your very eyes.    

Tiger Lady, Dead Rabbits Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Somehow — you won’t quite believe it yourself — you’ll find yourself captivated by the ingenious and playful theatricality that turns a story of crazy courage and ambition born of desperation into … a love story. It happens on the spot; the Dead Rabbits are not about exposition. “It’s funny how the world turns on the smallest of things.”

Mabel (Natisha Williams-Samuels) leaves a world where “the circus is the devil’s work” and discovers a world where love can exist, albeit with a high-risk factor. She falls in love with a tiger, her special tiger Rajah, her baby (puppeteer Eddie Breckinridge). Yes, you will feel fear and awe as Rajah gets bigger and bigger. Yes, your heart will be warmed by the attraction between Mabel and an empathetic human (Abayomi Oniyide). The audience participation in a show about showbiz is fun and unforced.

Tiger Lady, Dead Rabbits Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied.

The ensemble populate the circus, including the animal division, with comic gusto: the mouthy and conniving ringmaster Al (Antonio Victoria ) forever holding bankruptcy at bay, along with his much put-upon animal trainer and enabler Louis (James Parker) and his jaded dancer (Chloe Waddilove) who needs the job. Ferdinand the elephant has a particularly memorable entrance.

And then, from time to time, the ensemble pick up instruments — trombone, banjo, washboard, a drum that’s a box — and flesh out the narrative with jaunty jug-band tunes.

It’s a measure of the theatrical expertise at work here that you hold your breath every time that free-standing door opens, a theatrical variation of The Lady, or the Tiger?. As in circuses everywhere, we’re attracted by the allure of danger, the possibility of a fall, a maul, the outcome that can never fully be predicted. It’s only human.

And so is the way a high-spirited comedy is haunted by the thought that the deepest scars are the ones you can’t see. Mesmerizing.

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Let’s play ‘who’s the deviant?’. The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties, a Fringe review

Posted on August 19, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo suppliedall

The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties (Stage 8, Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If the Andrews Sisters had sung about masturbation or genital warts, they might have ended up with a musical like The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties.

“Are you sex deprived?” One of the trio of the bright, disarming young women onstage asks us at the start of of this sprightly boogie-woogie musical by Marion Poli, Aniqa Charania, and Charlotte Szabo. In an audience pretty much equally divided between men and women, one lone guy in a nearly full house bravely puts up his hand. And we are full of admiration for him.

It’s one thing to sidle up to sex obliquely, via characters or metaphors or allegories. But there’s probably no subject in the world more fraught, alarming, anxiety-producing when it’s addressed directly, personally, in public, with strangers. And no subject that kills the confessional instinct, or can make you feel lonelier or more uncertain when you suspect you’re an outlier.

Is it just me? It’s a universal question. And the spirit of this inclusive show, devised by three actors when they met at musical theatre school in Glasgow, is reassuring. When it comes to sex, if everyone is weird, no one’s weird. What can rules mean under the circumstances?

In the Victorian period (when, as they point out, the vibrator was invented), women talking about sex, much less keen to have it, were labelled “hysterical.” So, as latter day “hysterical ladies” this trio have licence to share stories (and songs) about everything from their own sexual awakening, their first time, their fears about under-performing or over-performing, to condoms and niche questions like “can you get tetanus from braces?”   

They’re funny and candid, and their show has lightness to it, not least because it relies on the musical theatre stagecraft of director Kate Ryan of Plain Jane Theatre. The performers are in constant motion, grouping and regrouping as they consult a big impressively antique-looking volume, a bible of blasphemy as one says, from chapter to chapter.

There are cultural differences in sexual attitudes to be explored: Szabo is from England, Poli is from France, Charania from France, with ethnic variations too. And their choice of musical style for original songs by Patrice Peyrieras — they’re strong singers — has a kooky charm to it: Andrews Sisters’ tight harmonies, with choreography to match.

What drives this playful show is sparkle, chemistry, and the musical chops of the likeable performers, who sing songs, and share stories, and feel free to disagree the way women friends do over coffee. It starts to unravel a bit three-quarters of the way through its 75-minute duration; perhaps the show casts its net a little too wide, once the actors start addressing motherhood, the biological clock, careers…. Until then, it’s a bold original.

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An eccentric musical about an eccentric real-life character from Canadian history: Amor de Cosmos. A Fringe review

Posted on August 18, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Cody Porter in Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical, Joe Clark Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical (Stage 8, Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Start with this, and hold the thought: there is a new musical in the theatre repertoire about a Canadian provincial premier.   

That would be William Alexander Smith, an earnest loon of a 19th century guy who (to radically foreshorten his resumé), re-christened himself Amor de Cosmos, became the second premier of B.C., became an MP, became appallingly right-wing, and went insane. You know, the usual.

And, a century and a half after his salad days, he has been lured out of the mists of historical obscurity by attracting the attention of writer Richard Kemick (evidently a diligent and inspired researcher) and singer-songwriter Lindsey Walker, who is the quintessence of musical versatility.

Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical is crowded with incident. And politicos. And characters (assorted friends and relatives and employers). And elections, and editorials from the newspaper he started, and lawsuits…. In 60 minutes. What heightens a wildly scrambling caper of a true-life story to near frenzy is that the cast size is one: the game, crazily busy Cody Porter armed with two hats that enable him to do dialogues, with assistance from composer Walker at the keyboard.

Cody Porter in Amor de Cosmos: a delusional musical, Joe Clark Productions, Edmonton Fringe. Photo supplied.

I have to admit that I had  trouble following what is undoubtedly a fascinating story, with cautionary reverb in these parlous right-sliding times. Partly this was because of the condensation of its narrative intricacies from the 90-minute original. Partly it’s because the text, written entirely in iambic pentameter, tended, like Walker’s lyrics, to fade into the iffy acoustics of Stage 8. Alas, a mic, a mic, his kingdom for a mic.

A shame since Porter is a fine comic actor, and his essentially light singing voice could use a boost. I did hear enough to know that Kemick’s book is witty, smart, with epigrammatic turns of phrase and lots of puns (“Rielpolitik”).  And his insights about a well-meaning reformer who turned into a crackpot and went into politics make for an arc that is undoubtedly worth the hearing. “A good job is a bad thing” or “I’ve seen the writing on the wallpaper.” How many musicals have you seen lately that open with a thought about “the art of any filibuster …”?

This is an eccentric musical about an eccentric character from Canadian history, and it definitely has a future. Like Amor de Cosmos himself it’s a real original, which is what the Fringe is for. It’s just that it cries out for most hospitable technical circumstances for its cleverness. After all, Walker’s hook song, “you must be unforgettable” has found a forgotten figure who’s potentially just that — on the plus and on the negative side.

“Every day’s a struggle with the world. Not to own it. Just to know it,” says our hero in his pre-anti-hero days. Which is also true of musicals.

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Dreams into nightmares: The Coldharts are back with Edgar Perry, the eerie finale of their Poe trilogy. A Fringe review

Posted on August 18, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Edgar Perry, The Coldharts, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Edgar Perry (Stage 4, Walterdale Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I presume that everyone present has heard of me,” says the tense little swaggerer with the carnivorous smile who stands before us.

Yes, actually, we have. With Edgar Perry, the Brooklyn duo The Coldharts, Katie Hartman and Nick Ryan) bring the Fringe the final instalment of their gothic trilogy devoted to the eerie interface between the strange haunted life of horrormeister Edgar Allan Poe and his strange haunted stories.

The premise on which all three “minimalist musicals”get their shivers is double-ness, dark and light, pursuit by a relentless doppelganger. Poe’s unnerving story William Wilson is the inspiration. In Edgar Allan, precocious young Edgar discovers, on his first day at boarding school, that his plans for group domination are thwarted by a rival — a boy with the same name and equally formidable gifts. In Eddie Poe, the teenage Edgar is off to the University of Virginia, lured by his double — or is it the other way around? — into ruinous dissolution.

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And now, in Edgar Perry, the minimalist weirdness continues. Booted out by his rich guardian, facing destitution and devastated by the loss of his only friend (a Burmese orangutan named Berenice, shades of The Murders in the Rue Morgue), Edgar undertakes a self-reinvention. He’s still haunted by his mysterious hoarse-voiced rival, who cannot save him from his worst impulses. He enlists in the American army, home of a lot of people’s worst impulses, a renamed super-being anticipating a meteoric rise to the top. And he sings a song of context that starts with the Trojan War.    

Edgar retains his manic not to say mad glitter in Katie Hartman’s performance. He snatches up a ukulele from time to time to sing very odd, un-metred, songs of mental disturbance. Edgar’s dreams apparently do not include leading roles in pop musicals.

Despite the routines of the military world and the tug-of-war with his double, played gravely by Nick Ryan (who also takes on a variety of roles in the story), Edgar continues to slide into sinister friction with his world. A macabre incarnation as an engineer-cum- landscape gardener is a sort of hallucination turned into a nightmare. Murderous struggles in the dark ensue. And the bare-stage theatricality of the production on a dark empty stage, with shadow-play behind a curtain (that’s where we meet Berenice) and hand-held lights, adds to the creepiness.

Asking a show about galloping madness to cohere has its contradictions, I realize. But with its multiple characters, expository annotations, and scattered activity onstage, I find Edgar Perry unravels in a way that doesn’t quite command attention and galvanize unease the way the first two shows do. But having said that, it’s a pleasure to welcome the Coldharts and their distinctive vision and theatrical ingenuity back to the Fringe. They are in a class of their own.

 

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Take that, Henry. Girl power-pop is the best revenge: the new Canadian production of Six the Musical, at the Citadel, a review

Posted on August 18, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Maggie Lacasse, Elysia Cruz, Jaz Robinson, Julia Pulo, Krystal Hernández, Lauren Mariasoosa in Six, the Canadian production. Photo by Joan Marcus.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“History’s about to get overthrown!” sing six Tudor queens who come charging out of the 16th century “live in consort,”in their hot opening  number in Six The Musical. Greensleeves and lutes don’t stand a chance.

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“Tonight we’re gonna do our ourselves justice/ ‘cause we’re taking you to court.” In the slick and sassy 80-minute musical fashioned by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss (a couple of clever young Cambridge students who took it to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017), the six ex’s of Henry VIII, English history’s most (in)famous serial husband, are reimagined as girl-power pop stars. And now in a cross-century remix, backed by a live all-female (all-Canadian) band, The Ladies-in-Waiting, they’re onstage to air their grievances. First prize to the one got dealt the worst hand.

And they have to lot to work with. “Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived (as the Brit History 101 mnemonic goes). But, hey, Edmonton, “just for you tonight we’re Divorced. Beheaded. Live!”

We’ve met the wronged wives, “now, ex-wives!\,” before. In 2019 the Citadel was the only Canadian stop for Six en route from the West End to  Broadway big-time. The pandemic put a hold on that, and its Tony Award-studded sold-out Broadway run, still in progress, didn’t open till 2021. This time the Citadel is where a new Canadian touring production gets launched before it goes to the Royal Alex in Toronto in September.

The creative team, led by co-directors Moss and Jamie Armitage, remains in place of course. Six is great fun to look at, and listen to. The visuals that play on Emma Bailey’s set with its light-up Tudor arches and rock show proscenium are a knockout. The production looks and sounds like the splashy high-end arena rock concert that’s also its premise. Gabriella Spade’s sparkly costumes have witty Tudor top notes (fishnets meet ruffs). Tim Deiling’s razzle-dazzle rock concert lighting, a barrage of flashing lights, cross-beams, a blinding proscenium, is matched by Carrie-Anne Ingrouille’s rock star choreography.

Maggie Lacasse, Elysia Cruz, Jaz Robinson, Julia Pulo, Krystal Hernánd
ez, Lauren Mariasoosay, the Canadian cast of Six. Photo by Joan Marcus.

What’s new is the cast, all but one Canadian. They’re all dexterous pop singers, and in ensemble numbers and as each other’s backup singers, they’ve got the moves too, some more than others (which the show itself makes fun of, in its meta way). And each queen gets a showcase song that nods to signature styles of pop divas like Avril Lavigne, Adele, Ariana Grande…. Marlow and Moss are top-drawer purveyors of witty pastiche; they know their pop music, and they write the real thing.

Jaz Robinson is a tall, fierce Catherine of Aragon, the Spanish princess who had religious grounds for defiance of Henry the career philanderer. She nails the Beyoncé-esque No Way, “no no no no no no no way.”

The scene stealer is the pert French-educated Anne Boleyn, in a very funny performance by Julia Pulo. Her song Don’t Lose Ur Head has a hip-hop flavour, with lyrics in text-speak. “Tried to elope but the pope said nope…. everybody chill it’s totes god’s will.”

Sincere Jane Seymour (Maggie Lacasse), the queen who died after giving birth, gets the power ballad Heart of Stone à la Adele. “What hurts more than a broken heart?” she asks, trying to make a case for herself in the victim contest. “A severed head?” offers Anne Boleyn.

All You Wanna Do, in one way the catchiest bubble gum of the songs and in another the most reflective under the glitter, belongs to the other decapitated queen. In it, Katherine Howard (Elysia Cruz) shrugs that her fate is a natural outcome of a lifetime of getting pawed by guys.

Six has a witty way with anachronisms. Online dating disappointments have a poster girl in Anne of Cleves (Krystal Hernández), who got rejected by The Man when she didn’t live up to her Hans Holbein portrait. She makes a good case for pre-nups. Palace living, with loads of cash, is a better outcome for victims of the patriarchy than, say, beheading. Just sayin.

It’s Catherine Parr (Lauren Mariasoosay), the sole survivor of Henry’s marital rampage, who plants the seeds of the snazzy finale in I Don’t Need Your Love (“I’ll never belong to you”). The queens put aside their differences, powered by the thought that “a pair doesn’t beat a royal flush.” And they come together as history’s snazziest girl-pop group.

Six works itself up to a point about empowerment, kind of in reverse (via a contest to determine who took the most abuse), but doesn’t mope, to say the least. The lack of female agency, to turn a feminist phrase, has never been more fun. Or had zingier rhymes or cheekier anachronisms. OK, yeah, there have been a couple of divorces and beheadings and abandonments in their group history. But showbiz is the best revenge. I mean, is Henry up there singing and dancing in something that makes the crowd go crazy?

REVIEW

Six The Musical

Theatre: Citadel Theatre and Mirvish Productions in association with Chicago Shakespeare Theater

Created by: Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss

Directed by: Lucy Moss and Jamie Armitage

Starring: Jaz Robinson, Julia Pulo, Maggie Lacasse, Krystal Hernández, Elysia Cruz, Lauren Mariasoosay

Running: through Sept. 14

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com

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Finding the light and losing it: the unmissable Sea Wall, a Fringe review

Posted on August 17, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Jamie Cavanagh in Sea Wall, Bright Young Things, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied.

Sea Wall (Stage 34, Roots on Whyte Community Building

Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s entirely possible you won’t see anything at the Fringe to touch the combination of delicacy and shattering power in Sea Wall, an exquisite 40-minute solo portrait of a man by the British playwright Simon Stephens. And in this Bright Young Things production directed by Belinda Cornish it gets a performance to match from Jamie Cavanagh.

Why?, the ultimate, terrible, elusive existential question, hangs over Sea Wall and suffuses it in a way that takes grief, loss, and love into a vast uncharted dimensions of human existence. In half-articulated fragments that seem to be coming direct from memory in Cavanagh’s performance, Alex is reflecting on a story as he tells it (now there’s a subtle distinction), in tiny shards, self-interruptions, annotations, asides. It’s about a trip with his wife and little daughter to the south of France, where his father-in-law has a house.

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What emerges, in Stephens’ beautifully calibrated writing and Alex’s telling — the pauses really count, in this conversation with himself — is a man struggling to capture now and in retrospect the exhilarating mystery of pure love, the sense of fully inhabiting it within and without. And then … its loss.

The production happens without theatrical lighting. As a photographer Alex is fascinated by light — how it can capture the human dimension, how it can vanish. And the production happens without theatrical lighting, on purpose. The bed of the sea, as he learns first-hand, isn’t a gradual slope. The sea wall is precipitous. It falls off into dark fathomless depths. The implications for human happiness, poised as it is on a fragile moment in time, are the quintessence of that why? question.

The only prop at Cavanagh’s disposal is a kettle, and a cup (which he never touches after setting them up). Ah, and Stephens’ marvellous writing. And his performance as a man grappling to understand the unthinkable thinks between the lines. Language keeps leaving off. I can’t tell you more than this: you mustn’t miss Sea Wall. It stops me in my tracks as I’m writing this.

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A strange and seductive vision: Undiscovered Country, a Fringe review

Posted on August 17, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Chris Bullough in Undiscovered Country, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Undiscovered Country (Chianti Yardbird Suite, Stage 7, replacing four of Neurotic Erotica’s time slots)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A man in a hat, a guitar, a vision of country (the music and the place)….

Tyler Wainwright, the “90s country rock legend” we meet in Chris Bullough’s hypnotic solo show seems to be gazing inward. What does his mind’s eye see? Does he know he’s onstage?

The opening song from Tyler Wainwright’s “forthcoming independent release” is a soliloquy of sorts, almost whispered. Apparently meandering, at a pace that lulls you into a false sense of security, it charts a course from the macro to the micro — an image of “a desert somewhere with a saloon in it” — past the piano, and the bird’s nest in it, past molecules to electrons, and “a song that will save us all.”

Undiscovered Country is what happens when you let an actor/playwright/ songwriter — an artist with a sense of outrage and a sense of humour — loose on the blighted urban landscape and a world grown toxic. You get the long shots and the close-ups, and imagery that sticks, from a character who’s grizzled and slow-talking in the classic ways in Bullough’s performance.

“Thought I’d treat myself to a new truck,” he tells us, as he recounts meeting a stranger with advice for him on that very subject. What ensues is a long, slow-moving escalation of a story — the pace is kind of mesmerizing — into a fantastical vision and an ecstatic connection with its own dark comedy about it. There’s more of Sam Shepard than Ian Tyson in Undiscovered Country.

The pace is seductive, and the tone is introspective. Till it’s not. The  songs reference the great country tropes: they start in nostalgia that sidles up to you, they tap a sense of betrayal, and they nudge them a little off-centre, in rhyme and images. “Put your moon boots on the ground now,” Slow Down tells us. “You’ve gotta let it go, turn it around….”

In a city, ours, our man finds changed, he “can hear the cracks in the concrete.” In the countryside, he rhymes “polluted and looted.” The mode is lyrical, the melody lovely, and the lyrics linger. “Hide me away in a clear-cut forest,” he sings in a country ballad. “Float me away on a river polluted.”

Strange, original, powerful.

Undiscovered Country isn’t in the printed program; it replaces four of Neurotic Erotica‘s performances at Stage 7, starting Friday at 11:30 p.m.  Check fringetheatre.ca updates for times.

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From historical footnote to new musical: Amor de Cosmos, and the race to opening night at the Fringe

Posted on August 17, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Cody Porter in Amor de Cosmos: a delusional musical, Joe Clark Productions, Edmonton Fringe. Photo cupplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

New musical theatre at the Fringe —  and there’s lots of it — has a certain wild but valiant improbability about it. So many bits and pieces, so little time. And it’s a big country.

This is the story of a one-person Fringe musical in which the sheer unlikeliness of the real-life character we meet — unlikely in life, unlikely for a musical — is matched by the sheer unlikeliness that we’d be seeing Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical in Edmonton at all, a last-minute replacement at the continent’s biggest Fringe. Composer and singer-songwriter Lindsey Walker is on the phone to tell the tale.

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Amor de Cosmos chronicles the peculiar story of the nutbar 19th century Canadian politician who became B.C.’s own personal Father of Confederation, the province’s second premier — until he slid from leftie reformer mode to the reaches of the Right, and was declared legally insane. A cautionary tale for Alberta perhaps? Amor de Cosmos (the self-appointed moniker of William Alexander Smith) was an historical footnote, till writer Richard Kemick snatched his bizarre career from Canadian history obscurity. “There’s a lot of good and a lot of bad in him,” as Walker describes the character at the heart of their musical.

Musical theatre isn’t the usual showbiz terrain for either Walker or Kemick. The former is  is a busy folk-rocker singer-songwriter. The latter is a writer of short stories, poetry, non-fiction, not (until now) plays. They’d met and hit it off  working together at WordsWorth (a Calgary writing camp for young artists). And a phone call during the pandemic sealed the deal. They did what artists in experimental mode do: they decided to take their new creation to the Fringe.

They didn’t get into the Edmonton Fringe with their musical, but they got a Toronto Fringe slot. “We did a Canada-wide casting call,” says Walker, a singer-songwriter who entered the world of musical theatre last season with ren & the wake (book by Megan Dart). “We found a young Toronto actor (Anton Gillis-Adelman) who was en route to theatre school in the U.S.” And since he was in Toronto,  writer Remick was in Rossland, B.C. and Walker and director Cody Porter were in Edmonton, rehearsals were online.

“In the end, Toronto was a satisfying experience,” Walker says,. “A tricky sell there, though, even when you get good press and good reviews (which they did).” Toronto, after all, has a lot of big summer theatre options, including the Mirvish theatres, and the Shaw and Stratford Festivals.

“I wish we could go to Edmonton,” Walker remembers saying, wistfully. “And, lo and beyond, my wish was granted!” with Fringe director Murray Utas standing in for the fairy godmother.

A last-minute Edmonton slot opened up when Ruby Rocket Returns! dropped out. By then Amor de Cosmos was at the Hamilton Fringe, which ended July 30. “The set and costumes were with Richard there. The lead actor couldn’t do Edmonton. And I was on my way out of town, getting ready for concerts on the weekend.” Ah, and Amor de Cosmos was a 90 minute musical, squeezing into a 60-minute time slot.

Cody Porter in Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical, Joe Clark Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Funny how theatre people, and not just improvisers, are apt to say ‘Yes’ instead of ‘what? you have GOT to be kidding’ to propositions from which the cautious among us would turn and run like hell. Walker said Yes to writing songs and lyrics for Kemick’s pandemic idea of a multi-character solo musical based on a bizarre 19th century politico. Then director Cody, a notable Edmonton actor who’s a different age from Gillis-Adelman, said Yes to the last-minute challenge of learning a big role that takes the lead character from early adulthood to twilight years — in a solo musical written entirely in iambic pentameter. Writer Kemick will be here to stage manage; he could hardly say No.   

And the team set about making Amor de Cosmos fit all the hour-long time slots at the Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre. Two weeks and a bit later, the musical is ready to open at the Edmonton Fringe. And Walker, who’d thought she’d be spending a relaxing August seeing shows and going to folk festivals, her natural musical habitat, has a certain sense of wonder about the whole crazy process.

“It’s been a bit of a blur. But a fun challenge to write through the voice of each character,” says Walker. “We’re telling the guy’s story, not celebrating him.”

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

    

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Stick-handling success: Kenneth Brown looks back in Life After Life After Hockey, at the Fringe

Posted on August 16, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

He couldn’t have realized it at the time. But In 1985 at the three-year-old Edmonton Fringe,  Kenneth Brown created something that would turn his life upside down (and put its stamp on Edmonton’s summer theatre extravaganza too).

The play was Life After Hockey, a lyrical ode to the mystical, quintessentially Canadian, bond between man and ice and puck. It was an instant hit. A life-changer for the young playwright/actor/director. Thirty-eight years later, Life After Life After Hockey, Brown’s new show (directed by Sean Quigley), premiering at the 42nd annual Edmonton Fringe this week, is all about that, an original theatrical reflection (complete with music by singer-songwriter Dana Wylie and guests) on remarkable success and where it leads.

In the next 17 years Brown would play Rink Rat Brown, a hockey-obsessed Canuck prairie kid more than 1,200 times. He criss-crossed the country; he played in every region, Yellowknife to Port Harvey, east to west and back again. “Every place in Canada big enough to have a theatre,” he laughs. “I exaggerate, but only slightly.” From 1986 to 1988, the show went on three different national tours — “big, $200,000 tours” — and one international tour, too. How many Canadian theatre artists star in their own work at the Helsinki Festival. On skates?

“The year we toured Europe, the (Tom Radford) film of Life After Hockey played the Fringe.” And Wayne Gretzky himself did the voiceover of the hockey god from on high, responding direct from the celestial spheres, “Dear No Backhand,” to Rink Rat’s humble fan question, “Dear 99….” This, incidentally, got me my first and only sports interview, in which the Great One expressed the view that hockey and theatre were very much alike: “it’s ‘practice practice practice’.”

After Brown himself hung up his stage (roller)skates, Life After Hockey has played four countries in three languages, in an assortment of productions. And there are still two or three productions a year. “Completely out of the blue,” as Brown says, amused, “I got an offer from New York to make Life After Baseball. Really.”

“I think of it as only tangentially about hockey,” he now thinks. “It’s really about our culture. What we remember, preserve, and adore about this country.” And as for the character himself, Brown, a National Theatre School grad, says he’d “originally thought of Rink Rat Brown as “a Commedia character.” He’d been trained in masks at the National Theatre School. “And I aimed to create the Canadian Arlecchino.”

Kenneth Brown as Rink Rat Brown in Life After Hockey. Photo supplied.

Our Arlecchino turned out to be an indelible hockey aspirant dreaming of the big time under the starry prairie sky. “My big mistake,” sighs Brown, “was to name him Kenny Rink Rat Brown…. I hate the name Kenny; I used to beat up my older brothers when they called me that. And for years afterwards, people would phone and ask for Kenny Rink Rat Brown.”

Life After Hockey in 1985 wasn’t Brown’s first encounter with the Edmonton Fringe. He’d been “an observer,” he says of “dropping in on Edmonton” in 1981 on his way back west from the National Theatre School in Montreal with his first wife Heather Redfern (a theatre artist too and now the artistic director of The Cultch in Vancouver).

He and Redfern loved what they saw. “We were in hog heaven,” he says of living in a co-op a block away from the Fringe in Old Strathcona. The Fringe was steps away. In 1983 he played guitar in a George Rideout Fringe show. In 1984, he wrote and starred in Floundering, a stage adaptation of Günter Grass’s doorstopper novel The Flounder, a measure of Fringe elasticity if ever there was one. He took Dickens, Fielding, Shakespeare in hand in original chamber adaptations. He wrote experimental solo fantasias; he wrote a trilogy of plays (Spiral Dive) that followed a young Canadian pilot through World War II. The Brown archive is four dozen-plus plays long.

A theatre-maker who, he says, “was never going to be a leading man” in Canadian theatre he says (“too short, too weird”), “the Fringe phenomenon” was an ideal playground. “It was the perfect opportunity for Edmonton (artists) who wanted to create new theatre … a definitive event really.” And that’s the spirit he carried into his job teaching in the new Grant MacEwan theatre program Tim Ryan had started.

An inspiring teacher and mentor by all accounts then and since, Brown was all about urging, by example and by pedagogy, his theatre students to create and perform their own work (Sheldon Elter’s Métis Mutt is a striking example). And there was a festival for it, in Old Strathcona. It was a striking synchronicity, and for 40 years Edmonton audiences have been the beneficiaries.

And then came the 1985 Fringe, and the hockey hit that would, on the plus side, give him a theatre career with a national profile, a theatre company (with a budget),THEATrePUBLIC, a young company spin-off (RIBBITrePUBLIC) — not to mention the chance to play shinny with Rocket Richard. But there was a price in life, as Brown addresses in Life After Life After Hockey.

“It’s about “that meteoric rise, in profile and financial fortune. And how hard it was…. I went from being a young, hopeful optimistic guy,” he says ruefully of his younger self, and the trap of success. “It was a runaway train. I wouldn’t see my daughter for weeks.…” It cost him two marriages. “And I do blame the play.”

“And all that time I kept writing Fringe plays,” says Brown. He wrote, acted, directed, dramaturged, produced at the Fringe, “sometimes as many as five and often three or four shows”  a summer for the last 40. It’s an amazing, exhausting record.

And it could be coming to a grand finale at The Answer Is Fringe. “It’s me looking backward,” says Brown cheerfully of Life After Life After Hockey. “Dana Wylie and I are doing tunes. There’s a surprise appearance by one of my ex-wives. There’s poetry by Pierrette (his life partner and a former Edmonton poet laureate Pierrette Requier). A celebration of wonderful creative people…. This is not just me mall-walking”

“I’ve always been fascinated by flying,” says Brown, as his Spiral Dive trilogy and Letters From Wartime attest.  His new “hobby” (his word), flying gliders, is drawing his attention away from 10-hour rehearsal days. There are metaphorical implications for a theatre artist. “The act of staying airborne as long as you can, there’s poetry in that,” he says.

Brown isn’t saying he won’t be back at the Fringe. But “next year: a lot more flying and a lot less learning lines.”

Life After Life After Hockey runs at the Edmonton Fringe, La Cité francophone (Stage 13) Friday through August 27. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

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The zigzag story of a Fringe artist: for Dammitammy Productions the answer to every question has been Fringe

Posted on August 16, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

SCOOBIE DOOSICAL, Dammitammy Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo by BB Collective

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Seven summers ago, Fringe audiences up for a word-of-mouth gamble (and who isn’t?) found themselves at a show smiling at characters who never took off their bathing caps, start to finish.

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The Unsyncables turned out to be a sleeper hit, a funny underdog comedy with its own kooky sense of humour. We saw a ragtag, aspirational amateur synchronized swim team up against a snobby well-heeled swim club with their own fancy pool to rehearse in. There was choreography, of course, in this off-centre theatrical ode to friendship; there was pop music.   

What we didn’t realize at the time, if I may speak for my fellow audience members, is that we were watching an original theatre talent at work, who did what musician/ composer/singer-songwriter turned playwright and director people do in this town. She gravitated to the Fringe.

The Unsyncables, Dammitammy Productions, Fringe 2016. Photo by BB Collective

That would be Rebecca Merkley. And The Unsyncables was our first sighting of her company, Dammitammy Productions. There is something quintessentially Fringe about Dammitammy (starting with its name, Merkley’s amusing penance for exhorting her high school friend Tammy,  to try harder at badminton, dammit Tammy!).

What’s followed that Fringe debut has been a non-stop series of strikingly varied theatrical experiments — musicals, plays, revues, cabarets, circus/cabarets, category-resistant entertainments — a series that even the pandemic couldn’t stop. Witness Letters to No One of 2021 (cold readings by actors from each others’ stash of the letters they didn’t send, to people who pissed them off, or wounded them, or they didn’t get a chance to say sorry to). Or a Nativity radio play (They Wanted To Do Chekhov).

Merk du Solapocalypse was looney and spontaneous showbiz free-association — old-school vaudeville, satire of stand-up comedy, circus acts that end before they start — as a way to capture the insanity of 2021, and re-connect with a shell-shocked audience it could hardly be equalled, the meta of meta.

At The Answer Is Fringe, which might well be the mantra under which Merkley operates, Dammitammy has two shows. The inspiration for SCOOBIE DOOSICAL dates from the Before Times, says Merkley of her new “musical spoof.” Spun from the wacky late-‘60s cartoon, with its teenage characters and talking Great Dane, it’s “an homage to my pandemic buddy, my dog,” she says sadly of the late Smalls. “There are a lot of Scooby Doo parodies. A lot of fan fiction. Lots of plays. But I don’t think anyone’s done a musical.…”

“I loved the cartoon. This is my brand of comedy: so dumb. I love the tackiness of it!” Merkley says. “Silly and ridiculous suits my brain.” And then she sets about exploring (or creating) depth from that springboard.

SCOOBIE DOOSICAL isn’t the first time Merkley has spun a musical from that sort of bouncing ball. Rivercity the Musical in 2017 lifted the  characters from the Archie comics, who never seem to graduate. She gave four inventive comic actors 10 characters, a classic triangle of romantic entanglements, goals, musical theatre songs from wistful ballads through patter songs, choreography.

As for Scoob et al, the cartoon itself invites “California surf music,” says Merkley. “I totally strayed from that,” she says of a score she describes as “musical theatre with a contemporary level of pop and rock…. I love Sondheim. And one song in particular, Lights By A Cat is an intentional soft rip-off of Into The Woods.” In fact, she figures that “the whole thing is a soft parody” of that Sondheim fairy tale for adults musical.

Merkley’s cast, who play “trees, squirrels and ghosts” as well as assorted humans, is led by Bella King (last seen in Teatro Live’s Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s) as Shag the dog. The characters are “real people. We nod and wink, and there are full cartoon gags, but then we leave the cartoon…. I wanted more from the characters, more depth and a back story.”

Merkley the director has been having the actors write diary entries as their characters. “And then we check in with them; it’s almost a therapy session,” she laughs. “How their day was, all that…. It’s just for us.”

Rebecca Merkley, creator and star of Jesus Teaches Us Things, Dammitammy Productions. Photo supplied.

And Jesus is back for the Fringe. In Jesus Teaches Us Things, a cross (so to speak) between stand-up, improv, and musical theatre which premiered in 2022, he’s the substitute teacher in our grade 2 class at Christian Bible Academy. And in Merkley’s exuberant, very funny performance, he’s a showbiz veteran, a charismatic big-hair old-school rocker who knows how to make an entrance (“we will we will save you!”).

The interactions with the audience are hilarious and largely improvised; Merkley is quick on the uptake. “I’m actually a shy person,” she says. “But as a character I’m so safe. So for me it’s really rewarding…. Acting is hard but it’s it’s also simple; it’s not getting in the way of (the character).”

Both SCOOBIE DOOSICAL and Jesus Teaches Us Things have roots in the hair-pin turns of Merkley’s own narrative. Theatre officially happened the moment she auditioned for a Grande Prairie community production of Oklahoma! on a friend’s nudge, and landed the character role of Ado Annie. “I’m a Dodger, I’m the funny side-kick character. Ingenue? Boring!”

She starting writing songs early (“at five, I wrote my first song in pencil crayon. Pretty cute! Embarrassing, but I still have it! And I got better.” Piano lessons didn’t take (“I’m an ear person). Guitar was a much better fit, for performing and composing. Adding stories was a natural.

There’s major gospel music content in her Creston B.C. childhood, in a Christian family near the very locale where her play Bountiful, about the polygamous Mormon fundamentalist encampment nearby, is set. The route to Edmonton and Grant MacEwan’s musical theatre program, includes bible college, a youth ministry, and a falling out with the church. So, hey, she brings a lot of background knowledge to playing a stand-up Jesus who sings Journey songs and is stuck in the ‘80s musically speaking. She credits the enhanced musical content to Christine Lesiak of Small Matters Production (For Science!).

In the show she plays with the audience in a good-natured warm-hearted way (Jesus even takes questions). Hecklers? No problem. At one late-night performance, getting static from someone drunk, she flipped a “hey, Judas, it’s been a while” at him, and the crowd roared. “It’s all about connection, community,” she says.

Which brings us to the Fringe. Merkley’s first Fringe experience was watching, she says. Then she acted in a couple of Fringe shows, Coraline the Musical and Jessy Ardern’s Harold and Vivian Entertain Guests. And now, the winner of this year’s Gerald Osborn Playwriting Award, she’s creating, producing, directing Fringe shows herself.

“For me, the Fringe has been huge. And some of the best theatre I’ve seen has been there. Theatre that doesn’t rely on big sets, big budget, that’s that’s non-pretentious…. Even if I had a lot of money, I’d be doing the Fringe.”

SCOOBIE DOOSICAL runs Aug; 19 to 26 at Walterdale Theatre, Fringe stage 4. Jesus Teaches Us Things runs Aug. 18 to 27 at La Cité Auditorium, Fringe stage 14. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

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