O for a muse of ice! Kenneth Brown explores the bond between art, life, and puck in Life After Life After Hockey, a Fringe review

Posted on August 25, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Kenneth Brown in Life After Life After Hockey, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective

Life After Life After Hockey (Stage 13, La Cité francophone)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“O for a muse of fire!” as Rink Rat Brown did not say under a prairie winter night sky in Life After Hockey.

No, as Rink Rat’s creator Kenneth Brown discovered at the Edmonton Fringe in his hit play of 1985 — and confirmed in the course of playing him more than 1,200 times in the next 17 years — it was a muse of ice. And Rink Rat didn’t have to ask for it, or invoke it. In this country, there is nothing more inspirational, more euphoric, more culturally intrinsic than the bond between ice and man. Especially if man is outside, holding a stick and shooting a puck.

In his new creation Life After Life After Life, directed by Sean Quigley, playwright/actor Brown arrives back onstage in his hockey jersey once more to reflect on life and theatre, and the Fringe, and the weirdly unplanned links between the three.  He has an appealingly self-deprecating charm onstage, as he conjures a boyhood self who spent hours playing shinny at the community league rink with his pals. “Garneau kids didn’t live through winter; we lived in winter.”

To a soundtrack invented spontaneously and played live by singer-songwriter Dana Wylie,  Brown, like his famous protagonist, apostrophizes, in poetry, the NLF idols who occupied his dreams. And when the hockey gods were in the front row enjoying Life After Hockey, and Gordie Howe was telling him “that was perfect!” Brown conjures for us the wonder of it all, and the theatre career that erupted from it.

A hit hockey play: that hadn’t been his goal when he arrived back in Edmonton from theatre school.  “I was going to make a theatre of protest,” he says with a hint of amused affection for his younger self. “A theatre based on the spoken word.” Enter THEATrePUBLIC.

It’s nostalgia of a particular kind that fuels Life After Life After Hockey. It’s nostalgia with regret on the flip side, since success and the grind of touring exact a heavy price on relationships and happiness. Brown is knowing and rueful, and that colours the show.

Kenneth Brown in Life After Life After Hockey, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective

Like so many of his experiments at the Fringe, this new piece has its own original shape. It’s more an illustrated memoir than a play, and more a variety performance piece than a memoir. There are original songs with Wylie, an ode to Edmonton by poet Pierrette Requier, and appearances by younger actors, like Candice Fiorentino (Anatolia Speaks), with whom he’s worked.

And above all, it’s a love letter to the enabling, transforming presence of the mighty Fringe Festival, that changed a city and its artists.

There’s an arc. Names of hockey stars, the Great One, Glen Sather, and the rest, are dropped in the first part of Life After Life After Hockey. Gradually, the name-dropping changes. As an acting teacher and mentor to young talent, he tells us of his new generation of theatre collaborators: Jon Paterson of RibbitRePublic, Caley Suliak, Bob Rasko….  They’re names the Fringe has taught us to know. What has spooled backwards in time, now spools forward.

As Brown promises at the outset, he will reveal the secret of happiness. As Rink Rat probably said in the play that defined him, “puckin’ A.”

.

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Rockin’ around the Christmas tree: the dark hilarity of Krampus: A New Musical, a Fringe review

Posted on August 24, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Krampus: A New Musical (Stage 13, La Cité francophone)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There is something quintessentially Fringe about the midsummer madness of watching a packed house watching a macabre new Christmas musical comedy. At noon. In August. It’s a sight that would send Santa into deadline anxiety, and the Grinch into therapy.   

Christmas is, of course, a perennial top draw for connoisseurs of family dysfunction. And it seems to bring out the best in the wicked Straight Edge Theatre team of Stephen Allred and Seth Gilfillan.

With Conjoined, their original rock musical of last year, they twisted a classic coming-of-age/ sibling rivalry story into a macabre and hilarious new shape. In Krampus, they take on the classic Christmas heartwarmers — togetherness, hospitality, family bonhommie — and cuts right through them (Straight Edge, right?) to the insight that the heart of the season is the lethal spirit of competition. Allred’s direction (and choreography) goes for the grotesque in style and weight, and the production is a lot fun.

The songs are spirited musical theatre numbers, cleverly rhymed, with amusing goth barbs (musical director/arranger Michael Clark). The opening number is a riot of one-upmanship in the household of the “perfectly perfect” family. Their Christmas lights are brighter, the Jesus in their Nativity is hotter…. It’s a vision led and enforced by the perky authoritarian who runs things: matriarch Rhonette, in a fierce and funny performance by Amanda Neufeld. Her perfect flip of a ‘do bounces murderously whenever she’s crossed in any way.

And mild-mannered Dad — Jacob Holloway makes excellent comic work of nerdiness — knows better than to try. His mantra? “Don’t talk back to your mother,” he says constantly to the two kids. “If your mother says Grandma is a judgmental bitch Grandma’s a judgmental bitch.”

The sibling interplay is delightful. Billy (Damon Pitcher), the starchier one, presses his luck with objections, but in the event of getting caught out in a kid misdemeanour favours subversion. His song Just Lie is a spirited ode to the solution. His sister Tilly (Victoria Suen), a dimbulb kewpie always a beat or three behind proceedings, has showbiz aspirations. She’s perpetually ready to rehearse her number for the Winter Pageant.

Something sinister is happening, it being Christmas Eve and all. C’mon that’s not the Amazon Prime delivery guy knocking at the door. Could it be a giant Christmas demon, impressively scary? The one Nanny Verla (Nicole English), has been warning everyone about in a spooky foreign accent? Yes, this is a family riddled with dark secrets and built on lies.

Crisp direction, smart funny songs sung by a cast who can sing, a band from the Edmonton Pops Orchestra (with a French horn!)…. and, holly jolly, the seasonal repertoire has a new Christmas musical.

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Into the woods, where longing takes shape: Lia & Dor, a Fringe review

Posted on August 24, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Cristina Tudor and Alexander Forsyth in Lia & Dor, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Lia & Dor (Stage 3 (Nordic Studio Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Dreams and memories, not fairies, are caught in the web of “once upon a time” spun by Lia & Dor.

In Cristina Tudor’s artful tale, inspired by Romanian folklore, the world is a fantastical place of journeys without destination, where animals speak, the generations mingle, and longing takes shape. But it’s also strangely familiar, like a flower between your lips, the taste of a mint leaf, basil under your pillow, the route through the village into the misty forest.

Lia (Tudor) is a young girl yearning for love, and footing in the world, and she’s contains all the generations before her, her mother, her grandmother, her auntie. And Keltie Forsyth’s production tucks into this particularly theatrical (and small cast) form of enchantment: the world and the people and animals in it are conjured by two actors.

Tudor plays Lia, and Lia contains all the generations before her — mother, grandmother, great aunties…. A lot of relatives, says Lia’s user-friendly stage companion, demanding on our behalf an annotated list of the characters to forestall confusion.

To Alexander Forsyth falls the exotic task of playing Dor, Lia’s Dor, invisible to others, but very tangible and wry in the person of the actor. Lia’s grandmother explains that everyone has a Dor, the embodiment of the elusive but somehow visceral sense of yearning and wanderlust, that indefinable mingling of aspiration, love, sorrow. In three letters, Romanian nails something that gets away from the English language. The Welsh title of Belinda Cornish’s Hiraeth, which premiered a season ago, has something of that wispy force, missing something you’ve never yet had.

Like dreams and the oddity of remembering the future, Dor goes forward and back in time, pretty much interchangeably. He (they?) waits, but not forever. And the journey into the forest Lia undertakes, at the centre of the show, ingenious in its simplicity, is to release Dor from a curse. Nature is full of dangers: a wounded wolf (an exquisite mask donned by Forsyth), a very attractive giant snake with a killer smile. Their voices are a blend of two voices. And there’s music: haunting songs in Romanian are a cappella as if they come direct from memory.

Like so many fairy tales, including the kind with fairies, Lia & Dor is a love story. And it’s haunted by the generations of love stories that have come before. This charming production sets them all in motion on a bare stage. And there’s magic in that.

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On the intricate loop of time: The Approach, a Fringe review

Posted on August 23, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

The Approach, Trunk Theatre. Photo supplied.

The Approach (Stage 8, Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

This unsettling, mysteriously intricate play by the Irish playwright/screenwriter Mark O’Rowe, is brought to the Fringe by Trunk Theatre, an Edmonton indie with an archive full of distinguished choices from the international repertoire on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Approach happens entirely at a cafe table: two chairs, two cups of coffee. A third chair hangs over the stage. We meet three women, but only two at a time, in shifting permutations and alliances, in scenes separated by years. Two of them are sisters; all three were roommates in their younger years.

Each scene is an ebb and flow: banal small talk that surges and subsides, bits of memory, gossip, the daily minutiae, the presence or absence of men in their lives. It has the convincing texture and rhythm of real-life coffee conversation in Amy DeFelice’s production, starring the excellent Twilla McLeod, Kendra Connor and Julie Golosky. But, OK, there’s conversational sotto voce and then, (for those of us sitting near the back, at least) downright inaudible. Try to sit close.

And each scene ends with the promise of getting together soon, meet-ups that we feel sure will never happen, as confirmed in the time lapses between scenes.

What emerges, as the scenes unfold, in the tapestry of friendship and love, are betrayals, disappointments, treachery, evasions, lies, grievances (especially a crucial estrangement between the sisters, pivoting on a certain man). Happiness comes and leaks away.  There are inconsistencies and contradictions; there are changes of mind, and nostalgia for what’s been lost. And, disturbingly, their memories start to bleed into each other and mingle. Are all the women somehow on the same loop? Are they somehow co-opting each other’s memories?

This is a play you’ll want to discuss.

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Under the skin and into the bone: Anatomica, a Fringe review

Posted on August 23, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Amica Hunter in Anatomica, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied.

Anatomica: A Comedy about Meat, Bones & The Skin You’re In (Stage 22, Holy Trinity Anglican Church)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At a pinch you could call Anatomica standup. Maybe. In their weirdly captivating solo comedy, Portland’s Amica Hunter seems to invite that thought in their easeful, funny, disarming way with the audience. Literally dis-arming, actually, since Anatomica peels away skin after skin, limb after limb, in an evolutionally exploratory downward spiral through bone and nerve, claw and pincher, till it arrives at the worm’s eye view of the world.

Standup? Well, in the off-centre entrance scene of the Fringe, the star of the show does arrive onstage sitting, scooching backwards actually, self-propelled — legs only, no arms —  on a chair. This bearded person communicates to us by whispering in the ear of individual audience members with a long tube, and they pass it along.

Anatomica is a comedy masquerading as performance art masquerading as standup. The question Hunter asks us at the outset, as they strip off layer after layer to the skeleton suit level, and past, is “are we comfortable?” On the unforgiving chairs in a Fringe venue, unlikely. In our own skin, possibly unlikelier still. “Any pain today?”

And what ensues, is partly a confessional, humorous and good-humoured, of a life lived in a body with chronic pain, and the elaborate preparations it takes for that body to achieve repose. And partly Anatomica is the weird, seductive pursuit of “a wild question, a freak- person question” we might never have asked ourselves. There are three types of skeletons, we learn — exo- (crawfish) endo- (our human type), and “hydrostatic” (the kind worms have). What’s the best kind in which to exist?

Needless to say, this thought has all kinds of metaphorical, not say existential, resonances. Hunter, who’s the farthest thing from ponderous, leaves them with us, and so will I. But it’s also a science learning experience (if science lessons ever stepped outside their own comfort zone and had empathetic charm and a sense of humour).

Hunter’s muse works in original similes. The directionless scuttle of her aquatic pet, a coconut crab, is “like a cheap pick-up truck with no shocks.” Its mouth was “like you cracked open a grandfather clock.” And they’re ready to demonstrate life forms accordingly.

There’s a funny sort of category-resistant brilliance about this strange, reflective piece.

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The siren call of a thriller, built inside a comedy: The Cabin on Bald Dune, a Fringe review

Posted on August 23, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

The Cabin on Bald Dune (Stage 11, Varscona Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In this adept new thriller by Jezec Sanders, the set-up is comedy, with a slight undertow of mystery and a ripple of unease that play under its surfaces.

Two old friends meet up in an isolated cabin on an island for “some conceptualizing” about their new business venture, a restaurant. Clara (Jenny McKillop), who runs one herself, arrives first, rehearsing her thank you’s in advance. Jeannie (Kristi Hansen), who’s dressed for the boardroom, sweeps in and takes charge, a tidal wave of A-type charm and playfulness. “You look aaah-mazing!”

In April Banigan’s production, the two expert actors take charge of the comedy of the moment, in ways that are absolutely convincing (and funny). And the dynamic between the characters gradually leans outside the bounds of the comic set-up. “What’s new with you?” trills Jeannie, with that recognizable high-beam of attentiveness. Clara is slightly taken aback. “For the last 20 years?

The Cabin on Bald Dune plays with our expectations, in ways so subtle we might barely notice, moment by moment, and can easily dismiss if we do. Sanders’ dexterous script gives us that option, which we share with McKillop’s wary but willing Clara. There’s  something not quite right, an effect enhanced by a growing sense, calibrated for the unease factor, that the inhabited island might not be. Uninhabited, that is. Hansen’s Jeannie, energetic and persuasive, seems oddly unconcerned.

“Risk is the key to success…. Who said that?” says Jeannie brightly “Was it you?” ventures Clara. “Technically Zuckerberg….  But I said something similar.”

Sanders is a witty writer, with a sharp ear for funny dialogue. His script is skilfully underwritten, far from word-choked. Which is fun for two actors with first-rate comic timing, and for director Banigan, who knows the value of pauses and silence. As for the story, it’s built on the unsettling question of why the characters are there in the first place. Is it the siren call of profit? The lure of adventure? Redemption? Like Clara, we’re called upon to reassess at every moment.

Thrillers have a delicate, teeter-y architecture, as rigorously challenging in their way as farces. And, my fringer friends, there are so many things I can’t tell you, for your own good, about this one, built layer upon layer.  Suffice it to say that every time a wave of oceanic fear threatens to wash over the island, the play dangles you a paddle board, so to speak, and tells you not to worry. Ha.

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Feeling better in a time of feeling bad: This Won’t Hurt, I Promise You. A Fringe review

Posted on August 22, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Elena Belyea in This Won’t Hurt, I Promise, Tiny Bear Jaws, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

This Won’t Hurt, I Promise (Stage 8, Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre)

By Liz Nicholls. 12thnight.ca

“I’m sorry about, you know…. says Elena Belyea, trailing off and gesturing vaguely towards, well, everything. “There is a lot to be mad about.” And be anxious about, and sleepless about.

We all feel it, a world gone unrecognizably toxic and mean (especially if you’re LGBTQ+).  The feeling of end times upon us has gone into our bones. Getting mad has tired us out and frayed our human edges.

In her new solo show This Won’t Hurt, I Promise, billed as “a standup hybrid,” the playwright/actor’s goal is, she says, to give us “something special …  the best 60 minutes of (our) lives” as an antidote. The setup is stand-up (and she’s a natural); the arc of the show nudges it out of that territory. This is a show where the audience gets presents; I won’t say more.   

Belyea, who has a welcoming warmth about her, has funny stories, personal ones with the ring of authenticity, to talk to us about anxiety. She’s written about anxiety before now, in plays like Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable or I Don’t Even Miss You. Post-pandemic, when she tells us about anxiety-generators — like advice from a financial banker (hey, you just need to make more money), or bedbugs, or entertainment choices that rule out anything that’s gonna hurt — it’s her appreciation of the absurdity built into the everyday that makes her smile and us laugh.

As a wordsmith (we know this from the crackling dialogue in her plays), she likes to talk things through fast, and loop back, adjusting a turn of phrase, editing thoughts on the fly. As applied to stand-up, it’s an appealing delivery.   

The show starts in the small — her own 4’11” frame for example and teeny feet — and extrapolates. And if you figure, as I did at the outset, that the title is ironic — it sounds like the fake-soothing, let-your-guard-down advice from, say, a dentist just about to jab a sabre into your cheek — you’d be wrong. It’s not like that at all.

This is all about feeling better in a time of feeling bad. And Belyea gradually takes the show into her own professional world of theatre, complaints about over-sensitive audiences, and the rise of anti-queer legislation. “What can I do with my anger?” she wonders.

This show, as you’ll find out, is one possibility. It’s built on empathy.

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‘It was a fine night for murder’. The FAMILY CROW: A Murder Mystery. A Fringe review

Posted on August 22, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Adam Proulx and Horatio P. Corvus in The FAMILY CROW: A Murder Mystery, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo by Dahlia Katz.

The FAMILY CROW: A Murder Mystery (Stage 14)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Think about it: there’s a certain improbable ambition about any solo murder mystery onstage: the narration, the detective, the suspects, the planting of clues, the withholding of clues, the diverting of clues…. The demands are beyond human.

Well, exactly. The weird, cuckoo brilliance of this funny show by Toronto’s Adam Proulx, is that one large crow, the impressively feathered Horatio P. Corvus (“sorter outer of murders” by trade) is in charge of the investigation. And he isn’t just some fly-by-night narrator. Horatio plays all the characters, an all-crow cast list of suspects. Which makes The FAMILY CROW a bona fide theatrical caws célèbre.

Ah, and by the way, Horatio, a crow with a formidable beak, a resonant delivery, and a manic glitter in his eye, is attached to virtuoso puppeteer/playwright Proulx, an artist of many voices and an apparently limitless supply of puns. So, a tale of “horror, mystery, betrayal, murder” and puns: it is an unusual delicacy. And in Byron Laviolette’s production it happens on a shadowy stage lit, ingeniously, by five gooseneck desk lamps, with assistance in feather-ruffling from an audience member armed with a fan.    

The deceased, laid out in the family room chez Crow, is eldest son and heir Russell Crow, a military hero and “a bird of exceptional talons.” And since his murder, “under their very beaks,” seems to be an inside job, the family members, starting with right-wing patriarch Edgar Allan Crow, are prime suspects.

All the trappings are there: interviews with each suspect, denials, the analysis of alibis, and in the grand “Agatha Crowstie” tradition a pièce de résistance group confrontation in the drawing room.

The plot is a clever high-flier, and the writing is a stylish delight. And what fun it is to see such verbal and physical cross-species dexterity onstage.

If you miss this one, it’s your funeral.

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In this comic gem, meet the ultimate outsiders: Rat Academy, a Fringe review

Posted on August 22, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner in Rat Academy, Batrabbit Productions. Pghoto supplied.

Rat Academy (Stage 23, Holy Trinity Anglican Church)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Face it, cats have had their day (and night and decades) onstage, ingratiating themselves with the public. What of the rat, the ultimate outsider, marginalized, up against a hostile world for their very survival, especially in Alberta? Everyday’s an existential crisis when you’re a rat.

In Rat Academy, a captivating, wonderfully imagined clown show from the duo of Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Toner, we meet two, in an alley. Ever seen a rat shrug? Fingers (Hoffman), the scrappier, more street savvy of the pair, glares suspiciously at us: “why are they in my house?.” Let’s just say it’s not his (pronouns up for grabs) first block party.

Rat Academy, Batrabbit Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023

Shrimp (Yoner) is white, a bit fluffy, rabbity (to mix our species metaphors), dazed, a veritable Candide of a rodent — an escapee from the lab out in the world and (dangerously) ready to make friends among us.

Fingers will have none of it. He undertakes his pal’s worldly education, with props at hand in the garbage can and pilfered cheese “for special occasions.” Forget self-esteem therapy; this isn’t rodent Beckett, for god’s sake. This is practical paws-on pedagogy from the street (er, the alley)I , with lessons like How 2 Steal (a comic classic, from the Three Stooges tradition), How 2 Sniff, How 2 Fight.

The worldly vs. innocent dynamic is very funny, expertly established and sustained (along with rat voices). And so is the way the characters interact with the audience. Shrimp is a distractible student, who keeps flunking every night school course at the academy, and we laugh sympathetically. Fingers, the fierce one, on a short fuse getting ever shorter, is increasingly exasperated with his protegé — and with us, for our reactions. The more he hears the Awww of cuteness, the more he rolls his eyes. “O my god. Come on!”

Both Hoffmann and Toner are responsive; these rats are light on their feet, and quick on the uptake. There’s rat shit, true, but nobody sings Memory. The interview section, in which our rodents venture into the audience with a magic 8-ball, is a riot.

I know you’ll have questions, about friction in the teacher-student relationship, etc. In a world that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about outsiders, can the rat demi-monde transcend personality conflict? C’mon, see the show. It’s a masterly little comic gem.

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Is there such a thing as feminist porn? Lady Porn, a Fringe review

Posted on August 22, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Kristin Johnston in Lady Porn, Whizgiggling Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Lady Porn (Stage 2, Backstage Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Is there such a thing as feminist porn? That’s a tricky question put to us by Lady Porn.

And here’s a couple of soft lobs that Trevor Schmidt’s new play for Whizgiggling Productions slams into the back court. Does porn count as feminist if there’s an all-female cast and crew? Is the born-again Christian in the cast off the hook if she’s just doing it for the cash and her husband is in favour of it? Do you score any feminist cred if you call a movie a film?

The characters are a trio of former porn stars. Jill (Kristin Johnston) is producing and directing what she insists will be “female-centric,” an “art film” with, OK, “some hard-core elements” to nail the funding.

Cheryl Jameson in Lady Porn, Whizgiggling Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Bonnie (Cheryl Jameson), whose stage name was Bunny Velvet, left the biz when she married a guy she met in a porn cast. They found the Lord, gave up “depravity and sin,” and now Kevin’s a pastor with a ministry. Bonnie is back in the biz, only temporarily of course, because their double-garage needs a new roof and plumbing is expensive. Kevin says that God says it’s OK.   

This slow-moving play opens, curiously, with long, explanatory, self-justifying monologues from Jill and Bonnie, the former revealing a certain evasiveness on all details (the backers want to remain anonymous) and the latter exuding pieties. They seem to be well-established positions.

Michelle Todd in Lady Porn, Whizgiggling Productions. Photo supplied

It’s no accident the most appealing character is veteran porn star Denyse (Michelle Todd), with 4,000 titles in her resumé. She’s the most honest for one thing, and also the most succinct. No big monologues for Denyse. She just says breezily “I’m up for anything!” from time to time.

The performances in Schmidt’s production are vivid from all three actors. And the script is not without its witty lines as you might expect. But once the characters have declared their positions, at length in the case of Jill and Bonnie, there’s not much room for dramatic development. They can only repeat them, with variations.

Lady Porn has a built-in hypocrisy detector, whether the pieties are feminist or Christian. Only Denyse, the business woman who declares freely that porn is a business, comes off clean.

 

 

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