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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Finding a home at the Fringe: part 2, Dead Rabbits Theatre

Posted on August 15, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Creating (way) outside the mainstream, and finding a place, a home, an audience, and inspiration in Canada at the Fringe: a story of two original pond-crossing theatre artists. Part 2: Dead Rabbits Theatre (“Tiger Lady”). 

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Before we get to the lady and the tiger, here’s a Fringe story. It hinges on one of those unpredictable moments that turn out, in retrospect, to seem prophetic and pivotal. “Listen, there is this amazing festival in Edmonton…. You must go there.”

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That’s what the Polish-born English theatre artist Kasia Zaremba-Byrne, the head of the acting program at St. Mary’s University in London, heard in 2016 from an English company that had been touring, and won awards, on the American Fringe circuit. So she started a company. And, to shorten these origin story segués even further, the London-based international touring company Dead Rabbits Theatre got themselves “a funny poster,” and set forth across the Atlantic.

The company was born at the Edmonton Fringe that year, with “the first show we ever made.” Playful, tragi-comic, theatrically ingenious, The Dragon was based on an anti-Stalinist 1943 folk tale/satire. “We didn’t know anyone,” then word got out. “ It was a fantastic experience for us. We were ecstatic!”

My Love Lies Frozen In The Ice, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied.

“We went again to Edmonton in 2017,” Zaremba-Byrne says, with  My Love Lies Frozen, created from the true story of a 19th century expedition, male of course, to the North Pole — told from the perspective of the woman they left behind at home. And again, the Dead Rabbits had a wonderful time. “We loved the volunteers; we loved speaking to people there. Everyone was really kind.”

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

COVID has been cruel, to say the least, to international touring companies. So Tiger Lady was two years in the making before its Edinburgh Fringe debut of 2022 (which came with a Fringe First citation). It’s based on the true story of a young Kentucky orphan girl in 1913. As Zaremba-Byrne describes, Mabel Stark, the world’s first female tiger-tamer, escaped through her aunt’s window at night, joined the circus, “and fell in love with a tiger.”  She discovered the story, by accident in a book, and was struck by “a wonderful life that suggests life turns on the smallest of things and how strange and unpredictable it is.”

Quirky name notwithstanding, the company began in “a quest to make theatre that connects people through play, through music, through movement, through the joy of life,” says the Dead Rabbits artistic director and founder. “And to share stories of the way of the underdog….”

Not coincidentally, “quite a few are from the woman’s perspective.” says Zaremba-Byrne, who often finds her inspiration in true stories. “True stories hold quite a lot of magic moments…. Life, as they say, is stranger than fiction.”

As a professor of acting, she’s well-connected to young talent, and keeps in touch long after they graduate, she says. “The shows are made partly from the stories, and partly from (the actors’) ownership of the characters.” The roles are custom-made. And the question “so are you the playwright?” is “complicated,” she laughs.

“It’s a collaboration. I like to say the company is the playwright…. We work a lot through play, through finding pleasure, finding fun.” And the signature Dead Rabbits mingling of dark and light, comedy and tragedy in the shows “reflects life, because life is chaotic. We try to find the play between them, to find the cares of life inside.”

Zaremba-Byrne herself “works a lot in movement” (she trained with the French theatre artist Philippe Collier). “And a lot of my work is driven by the visual, by music…. Sometimes I get enchanted….” Her husband Alex Byrne, who has a theatre company, too — the much-travelled NIE (New International Company) with offices across Europe — “sometimes helps with the writing.” Though her English is excellent and expressive, Zaremba-Byrne’s first language is Polish.

In The Dragon we saw what inventive theatre artists could do with a clothesline, ladders, sheets and atmospheric music and lighting. Ditto My Love Lies Frozen in the Ice. That kind of bare-stage theatricality, says Zaremba-Byrne, speaks to “the principle of being simple…. It’s a way of connecting with the audience,” inviting them to participate imaginatively in the storytelling.

“It’s part of the magic.” And that kind of theatrical magic is pure Fringe.

Did you see Part 1, Cameryn Moore (“muse: an experiment in storytelling and life drawing”)? It’s here.

Tiger Lady runs Friday through Aug. 27 at the Fringe (Stage 1, ATB Westbury Theatre). Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

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Finding a home outside the mainstream (at the Fringe): part 1, Cameryn Moore

Posted on August 15, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Creating (way) outside the mainstream, and finding a place, a home, an audience, and inspiration in Canada at the Fringe: a story of two original pond-crossing theatre artists. Part 1: Cameryn Moore, “muse: an experiment in storytelling and life drawing”. Part 2: Dead Rabbits Theatre, “Tiger Lady”

Cameryn Moore, muse: an experiment in storytelling and life drawing, Little Black Book Productions. Photo by Hassan Ghoncheh

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Part 1

For Cameryn Moore, life and art have a complicated mutual-support relationship. And the Fringe is its enabler.

If Moore hadn’t discovered the Fringe, in Montreal, would she still be a phone sex worker? Or a stand-up? A journalist writing ‘creative non-fiction’ or an artist’s life-drawing studio model?

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Would she ever have discovered herself as a theatre-maker, a playwright, a solo performance artist/creator with seven solo shows in her artistic inventory? Ah, or the creator of muse: an experiment in storytelling and life drawing? That unique artistic “event” (as she describes it) invites audiences to use (or bring) art supplies, draw her in a variety of nude poses, watch and listen, ask her questions. It’s at the the Edmonton Fringe starting Aug. 19 (Stage 5, Acacia Hall).

Cameryn Moore, “muse,” Little Black Book Productions. Photo by Hassan Ghoncheh.

“Ah, people are writing, and doing, their own plays!” That was the sense of possibility Moore unlocked in 2009, “my entry point to solo performing.” True, she’d taken dance in college in California, and as a director and choreographer started a dance company for plus-size dancers in San Francisco and Boston. “Everything after that was me saying ‘I want to try this’ or ‘I’ve heard abut this’ or ‘I went to the Fringe and saw this!’.”

Life provided the raw material, as Moore (an exuberant conversationalist, with one of those great multi-angled showbiz voices) describes. “In 2008, when everything crashed, I got laid off from my job as a marketing assistant in a (Boston) publishing house, and a friend said ‘you should do phone sex; you have a great voice.” So she did, and thought: “wow, there’s so much more to this than anyone knows…. Performance seemed like the natural way for me to explore and share it.” Six months into that seven-year gig (“grocery money, and my only income from 2009 to 2016)”), she’d turned those real-life experiences into Phone Whore, which toured the Canadian fringe circuit. In the show “I got four phone calls from clients, pretty challenging calls, and the audience eavesdropped on them.”

“Traditional theatre” Phone Whore may be, at least in structure, as Moore argues. “Nonetheless it engages with the audience in a very active sort of way … It asks them to sit with what’s happening onstage, a one-hour slice of life, and have their own feelings.”  By all accounts, audiences and critics found it a powerful, raw, mind-blowing experience.

Nerdfucker, too, a tense and surprising heartbreaker of a play which came to the Edmonton Fringe in 2016, engaged with its audiences in an unusually direct, active way. Moore doesn’t seem to be a four-wall kind of theatre-builder. It opened in a striking way, with the half-dressed character startled to see us, as she waits with us for her “genius” lover to arrive. And we realize she’s been cruelly used by him for a new gaming concept, which makes us complicit.

“Nerdfucker and Phone Whore are my best plays so far, traditional format, definitely with the most impact. And they’re the ones I love the most,” declares Moore who has taken her plays, including Slut Revolution, to the Edinburgh Fringe, and won “risk-taker” awards there.

Moore moved to Europe in 2017 from the U.S. when Trump was elected, and has continued her work (as noted puckishly on her website) of “global sexification and outreach.” And since moving to the U.K. didn’t work out (“they’re as xenophobic as any other country; they just have a nicer accent”), she picked Berlin because it was “more friendly to English-speaking immigrants.”

On the Fringe circuit and in Europe she subsidizes her theatre income (“who makes money doing theatre?”) by doing Smut Slams, an open-mic experience in which people are invited to come up onstage and tell their own sex stories.

 “A performer/performance artist is quite different than a playwright/performer,” Moore says. In muse she is neither. “And I am not a (visual) artist. Nope. No visual arts experience at all. My only experience is as a live model. I started when I moved to Berlin “and needed grocery money, very motivating.”

Muse: an experiment in storytelling and life drawing, Cameryn Moore. Photo supplied

Muse isn’t a play. It’s not scripted. And Moore doesn’t play a character. Since the audience can ask her questions (or not) as they draw her (or not), the shows are more like conversations, and they’re not repeatable. “The only thing that happens the same is the same time marks for the poses: five poses for one minute each, three poses for three minutes each, and a six, seven, eight and 10 minute pose.” And Moore says “I have stories in my (laughter) non-existent pocket I tell to kickstart the conversation…. I talk a bit; it’s stream-of-consciousness.”

“I will say, that muse, arguably, is the fringiest show on the Fringe.”

And in the end, “audiences walk out so surprised — with themselves,” Moore says happily. “My production crew in Winnipeg started listening to what people said when they came in, a non-scientific sample.” When they’re invited to take drawing materials and asked ‘would you like to draw today?’, “80 per cent of them will say something like ‘I’m no good at this. I’ve never done this, I haven’t done this since second grade’. They talk down on themselves….”

“When they leave they talk about how they feel. People feel differently about themselves. It’s just beautiful.” And this, Moore says, “is the over-arching sense of what I do: creating safe places for people to explore something, to be vulnerable. We are told that telling stories is for performers and making art is for artists. I’m making space where that’s not so. And the results are joyful and fascinating and wonderful.”

And in its way that gets to the heart of the Fringe.

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More to think about at The Answer Is Fringe

Posted on August 15, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Answer Is Fringe, as Edmonton has known for 42 summers, even before we knew we knew that. Here are some further thoughts on what you might see at The Answer Is Fringe. Don’t be daunted by the wealth of possibilities; be curious!

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Hold that thought (or how I got haunted, and came back for more): You know the Fringe has its own special reverb and continuity when you see instalments of a trilogy, years apart. With Edgar Perry, Brooklyn’s duo Coldharts, specialists in American gothic, return to their continuing fascination with the eerie stories and haunted life of horror meister Edgar Allan Poe. The tie that binds the three shivery plays is William Wilson, Poe’s unnerving story of a boy pursued by his own doppelganger.

Says Katie Hartman, “ten years ago when we set out to make the first piece, Edgar Allan, both Nick (Ryan, her Coldharts partner) and I wanted to play Edgar Allan Poe. Our solution was to take that idea and run with it: we had the opportunity to create a world in which there are two Edgar’s on stage, embodying different aspects of the historical character’s personalities, which were also heightened aspects of our own personalities.

Each instalment, Edgar Allan, Eddie Poe, and now Edgar Perry, “is  structured around a distinct period of Poe’s life when he was attending an educational institution. Each piece also highlights a different aspect of his canon…. In Edgar Perry, the setting is Fort Moultrie where Poe was first an enlisted soldier and then at West Point Military Academy where Poe’s studies in engineering and mathematics would greatly influence his works of proto-science fiction.”

He shoots he scores: In Life After Life After Hockey, the playwright/ actor/ director/ producer Kenneth Brown, the seminal artist who’s been part of 40 Fringes and the careers of generations of theatre artists, loops us back to his definitive prairie hockey play, a bona fide Canadian theatre hit, and the indelible character Rinkrat Brown — and the price tag in life (and love) of success. There’s music, too, played live by singer-songwriter Dana Wylie, and special guests. 12thnight had the fun to talking to him, as you’ll see in an upcoming 12thnight post.

Emerging playwright/ all-star veteran cast (a natural Fringe pairing): Jezec Sanders’s new thriller The Cabin on Bald Dune happens in an isolated cabin on an island (send a shiver?), where two women have repaired to  plan a business venture. April Banigan directs Kristi Hansen and Jenny McKillop in the DogHeart Theatre production.

All-star veteran playwright/ young cast (also a natural Fringe pairing): The Canadian playwright is Stephen Massicotte of Mary’s Wedding and The Emperor of Atlantis fame. The play is his much-awarded 2010 The Clockmaker, never staged (I think) in Edmonton till now. It starts with the Kafka-esque proposition that the mild-mannered title character is brought in for a crime he has committed — possibly in the future. The young indie company Shattered Glass Theatre is producing it. Sarah Van Tassell directs.

Multi-Vs, Honor, Affair of Honor and Magpie Theatre. Photp supplied

En garde in the multiverse: Affair of Honor, a Vancouver company devoted to “stunning fight and movement-based theatre,” affords you a rare (“very rare,” says producer April Killins) view of all-female stage combat in theatre. In Multi-Vs (a collaboration with Magpie Theatre), two strangers Nathania Bernabe and Jackie T. Hanlin are hurling themselves through time and space, (and an “infinite slew of universes.”

Ay Candela, Cuban Movements Dance Academy. Photo supplied.

Set in motion: In Ay Candela, the ever-adventurous Cuban Movements Dance Academy, whose dance-theatre productions are a fusion of powerful, dramatic movement and Cuban cultural history (Power of the Drum),  reimagines Chicago —the 1926 Maurine Dallas Watkins play that Kander and Ebb adapted for their musical — in dance, against the backdrop of tense racial relations in pre-revolutionary Havana.

From the top, a-five, six, seven, eight: The repertoire has its fair share of aspirational musicals, about stage-struck ingenues dreaming for the big time. The Noteworthy Life of Howard Barnes takes the opposite tack. Howard is an average bloke who discovers, to his dismay, that his life has become a musical. How can he exit stage left? And so begins Howard’s quest through the musical theatre repertoire. The Canadian premiere of this affectionate send-up of the American musical arrives at the Fringe courtesy of an Edmonton indie company, Light in the Dark Theatre.

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

Jesus H! He’s back, and you can forget those soulful gazes into the mid-distance. This is showbiz baby. Jesus headlines not one but two Fringe shows this year. In Randy Brososky’s Sweet Jesus – The Gospel According to Felt, he’s returned as a googly-eyed wiseacre puppet from beyond the grave to check up on the world. In Rebecca Merkley’s Jesus Teaches Us Things, which premiered last year, put your hands together for the big-hair dude who’s the Sunday school substitute teacher at the Christian Bible Assembly, rockin’ out to Journey and Queen.

Saluting the next generation: The cast of NextGen Theatre’s revival tof he wrenching 1998 Trevor Schmidt play Tales From The Hospital includes two of the original actors (Elizabeth Allison-Jorde and Linda Grass), along with two young artists (Janelle Jorde and Sophie May Healey). And over at Theatre Network, the young artists of the Summer Academy have taken Shakespeare’s prankish comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor in their youthful hands, an interesting match of ages since the original tilts towards middle-aged married people and a randy aging knight. The inspiration of Ellen Chorley’s cast is to imagine Falstaff as a faded ex-boy band star angling for a spot on a Merry Wives tour.

For annotated show listings, schedules, and tickets check fringetheatre.ca

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A hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy: what to see at The Answer Is Fringe

Posted on August 14, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Deanna Fleysher and Brooke Sciacca in The Method Prix. Photo by Sulai Lopez

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Starting Thursday you can take ownership of The Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Yes, in an amazing summer telescoping of time, the Fringe is back in Old Strathcona, with the 42nd annual edition of Edmonton’s 11-day-and-night theatre bash.

The Answer Is Fringe. Design by Pete Nguyen.

The 185-show Fringe universe of 2023 is yours to explore. What looks intriguing? Artists are taking a chance at the Fringe, and so should you. You never really know in advance what you’ll discover. After all this theatre town is where “fringe” was reborn as a verb. But just to get you started on your travels through the Fringe galaxy, here’s a preliminary trail mix of shows that caught my eye —whether for the premise, the play, the cast, the company, the playwright, the director, the form, the general unlikeliness and over-all weirdness…. I haven’t seen them either; we’ll be hitchhiking together. Stand by, 12thnight companion pieces, and more suggestions, are coming.

The Method Prix. Nearly a dozen Fringes ago we caught a brilliant original taking big risks in Butt Kapinski. A jaded, smudgy-eyed private dick, snarling in classic idiom, mingling with the assorted burnouts and sad cases in the seedy part of town (that would be us, the audience) to shoot a film noir. A “drag clown” of apparently unlimited fearlessness, L.A.’s Deanna Fleysher is back with a new show, billed mysteriously as “an interactive drag comedy special.” In The Method Prix, the legendary director Vincent Prix is shooting a movie starring a “Hollywood wild child” *(Brooke Sciacca) and needs a co-star: that would be us. It could be our big break.

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

Tiger Lady. The London-based Dead Rabbits Theatre, who revealed wonderful theatrical ingenuity in My Love Lies Frozen in the Ice and The Dragon, are back for the Edmonton Fringe where, amazingly, they made their start. Their new show, for a cast of six, is spun from the true tale of circus star Mabel Stark, the first-ever female tiger-tamer in 1920s. Find out more about the Dead Rabbits in an upcoming 12thnight post.

Sea Wall. Bright Young Things, an Edmonton indie theatre that leans into the classic mid-20th century repertoire — Coward, Rattigan, Ionesco, and one year, Sartre (not normally a summer party guy)—is back at the Fringe. And, surprisingly, it’s with a beautifully formed one-man play by star Brit playwright Simon Stephens (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) specially written for the Fleabag hot priest actor Andrew Scott, about the way our lives and happiness are poised delicately, treacherously, on a point. “It was written specifically to have no set, and to be performed in natural light where possible,” says director Belinda Cornish, “which is really rather perfect for the Fringe.” Her production stars the exceptional ex-Edmontonian actor Jamie Cavanagh (East of Berlin, Armstrong’s War,Venus in Fur).

Forest of Truth, Theatre Group GUMBO, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Forest of Truth: Searching for something entirely kooky, possibly weird, quintessentially fringe-y, maybe even hallucinatory? I didn’t see Osaka’s Theatre Group GUMBO the last time they were here, Are You Lovin’ It? in 2019 (but heard reports of awestruck bafflement). Judging by the preview at the Fringe launch this week, this could be the one that embraces your perplexity. It’s billed as “a fantastically distorted love comedy.” And the costumes look fabulous. OK, I’m in.

Cameryn Moore, “muse,” Little Black Book Productions. Photo by Hassan Ghoncheh.

muse: an experiment in storytelling and life drawing: It isn’t a play. It’s not scripted. It’s a conversation between a nude model, Berlin-based theatre artist Cameryn Moore (Nerdfucker), and the audience. We’re invited to draw her (some art materials are available, or you can bring your own) and ask her questions. Or not. Look for the 12thnight interview with this risk-taker in an upcoming post.

Ingrid Hansen and Stéphanie Mori-Roberts in The Merkin Sisters: Deux, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

The Merkin Sisters: Deux. The last time they were here, this duo of unusually hairy sibling performance artistes (Ingrid Hansen and Stéphanie Morin-Robert) ricocheted hilariously through the rarefied self-important world of the artsiest High Art with every kind of lunatic “theatrical” device. These fearlessly playful subversives are back with Deux, a new pièce de résistance (with original music from their recently released “dark-pop comedy album” in which they collaborated with Canadian comedy songstress Shirley Gnome). .

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

The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties. Billed as a playground for musical theatre, cabaret, burlesque, stand-up, sketch and spoken word poetry — all about sex from the womanly perspective — this new theatre piece is by the three artists, from three different countries (the U.K., Canada, and France), who perform it. Aniqa Charania, Marion Poli, Charlotte Szabo, the winners of the Fringe’s Mowat Diversity Award this year, met at the Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow. The original music leans into the ‘40s three-part harmony swing/boogie-woogie style of the Andrew Sisters. And Kate Ryan of Plain Jane Theatre, a theatre that specializes in off-centre musicals, directs.

Rat Academy, Batrabbit Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023

Rat Academy. Dayna Lea Hoffmann’s season included two juicy starring roles, in the satire All The Little Animals I Have Eaten at Shadow and the coming-of age story A Hundred Words For Snow at Northern Light Theatre. How can you not be intrigued to see this terrific multi-faceted actor in cross-species clown mode? In Rat Academy with Katie Yoner she’s a rodent, in tough in a rat-free province, survival coach to a lab rat escapee.

What Was Is All: With this new folk-rock musical, Nextfest returns to its cross-festival initiative of last summer, by producing shows at the Fringe. One is this new “folk-rock/ country-bluegrass” musical by the team of Jacquelin Walters and Michael Watt. It started life in 2022 as a 45-minute song cycle /concert; it played Theatre Network’s debut Another F!#@$G Festival. And now it’s full-fledged musical theatre, with 20 songs, a live band, an un-Fringe-y sized cast and a mysterious book about six townsfolk, alive and dead, and a stranger — with a whiff of the supernatural. Billed as “a darkly comic tragedy.”

Bathsheba and the Books. The premise of this David Ellis Heyman comedy is pretty irresistible: comedy based on the Old Testament, which historically just hasn’t been a laughter magnet. Did you know that it was put together by the biblical hottie of the title? Director Davina Stewart has assembled a top-drawer four-actor cast led by Aimée Beaudoin as the woman of the hour, er, the millennia.

Chris Cook in Fiji, Shatter Glass Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied.

Fiji. “This is the type of show where it’s hard to know how much to reveal beforehand,” says Michelle Robb. A playwright herself (Tell Us What Happened), she turns producer with Gavin Dyer for the Fringe. By a London-based trio of playwrights, it’s billed, intriguingly, as “a true crime-inspired love story” that starts online; the producers call “a dark funny gem.” This North American premiere marks the the directing debut of the fine actor Lora Brovold. And they’ve attracted a starry bunch of theatre pros, including actors Vance Avery and Chris Cook, sound designer Dave Clark and designer Tessa Stamp. One of the secrets of the success of the Edmonton Fringe is the way Edmonton’s seasoned theatre pros are drawn to be there. 

The Approach. The Edmonton indie Trunk Theatre has consistently opened up our theatre to the contemporary repertoire across the border and the pond. The Approach, a 2021 play of exquisite nuance by Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe, has three women, estranged friends and former roommates, reconnecting, in a variety of perms and combs, over coffee. Amy DeFelice directs a strong Edmonton cast: Kendra Connor, Julie Golosky, Twilla McLeod.   

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

Amor de Cosmos: a delusional musical. Everything about this new musical sounds loopy and appealing. How can you not be attracted to the prospect of a one-actor musical with original music by  singer-songwriter Lindsey Walker (ren & the wake)? And a book by Richard Kelly Kemick written in iambic pentameter? About the bizarre career, and implosion of a real-life Canadian politico, in fact the second B.C. premier, who in a couple of years veered wildly from left to right wing and was declared legally insane? Actually the story of how Amor de Cosmos came to be at the Edmonton Fringe, a last minute addition, with a much shorter time slot and a different actor (the game Cody Porter), is pretty crazy too. Stay tuned for an upcoming 12thnight interview with the engaging Walker. She calls it “good mayhem.”

Scoobie Doosical.  Zoinks. A new musical from the presiding muse of Dammitammy Productions Rebecca Merkley, who writes, composes, directs. It isn’t the first time she’s written a musical based on a cartoon: Rivercity the Musical is spun from the Archie comics. The Scoobie characters are based on the goofy cartoon, but that’s just the start. Meet Merkley in an upcoming 12thnight post.

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

This won’t hurt I promise. The unceasing, ever-morphing anxieties of the modern age have always been meat and drink to Tiny Bear Jaws, witness plays like Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable, multi-disciplinary ‘musicals’  like I Don’t Even Miss You, or the sketch comedy of Gender? I Hardly Know Them. Elena Belyea is a a true original, and a witty writer. This new piece is billed as “a standup hybrid.” I don’t know what to expect, which makes it irresistible. Geoffrey Simon Brown directs.

The Fringe annotated listings, schedule, and tickets: fringetheatre.ca

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Fast and furious: Romeo and Juliet in a spiegeltent at the Freewill Shakespeare Festival. A review

Posted on August 13, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Jessy Ardern and Christina Nguyen in Romeo and Juliet, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewiecz

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Crazy kids. Access to lethal drugs. No hobbies except hanging out, mixing it up, getting into brawls (and turning iambic pentameter into actual speaking).

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That’s downtown Verona for you, in David Horak’s indeterminately contemporary, very speedy Romeo and Juliet. It’s the second of the two productions the Freewill Shakespeare Festival has brought to the beautiful, vintage Cristal Palace Spiegeltent at Edmonton EXPO Centre. And it moves along at a clip that, especially up close in a 220-seat spiegeltent, feels dangerous — an experience enhanced by Matthew Skopyk’s sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll original score with its ominous industrial shudders and sheen.

They may not have summer festivals with green onion cakes.  But one thing they do have in fair Verona is a distinctive civic culture, marked by “canker’d hate,” a lethal feud between a couple of haut-bourgeois families. That “ancient grudge” between the Montagues and the Capulets is so long-standing it counts as a bona fide tradition — some things never get old — and so flammable it can erupt into violence when someone says “I bite my thumb at you.” It’s the Veronese F-you! apparently. Hey, it’s only fun taunting people till someone loses an eye, or a cousin Tybalt.

The circumstances set forth dramatically in the first scene by Horak’s agile 10-actor cast, constantly in motion on and off the stage, let you stop wondering why Romeo and Juliet don’t try dating before they, you know, get married. And that’s just a matter of minutes (I exaggerate only slightly) after they meet, a compression in the story of the star-cross’d lovers that’s a keynote of Horak’s adaptation, which favours action over speech. The world from which they impulsively try to carve a little place for themselves (as per that song in West Side Story) is too dangerous, fraught, stressful for them to have a relationship first.

The parental generation, in both families, is more of a back story than a presence in this Romeo and Juliet. It’s conflated mainly into the figure of Lady Capulet, a formidable cold-eyed authoritarian in Brett Dahl’s performance, who strides in and out of rooms like a hot knife through butter. Even indoors, nobody just saunters in Verona; it must be something in the water.

Jessy Ardern and Christina Nguyen in Romeo and Juliet, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

The lovers (Jessy Ardern and Christina Nguyen) do have youthful chemistry. They fall for each other instantly at the Capulet’s big masquerade bash (fanciful choreography by Glenda Stirling) that the Montague lads have crashed on a gang dare. And you do get the attraction in this production. Both Ardern and Nguyen have the same light, contemporary cadence and timbre in delivering the verse, for one thing.

In the performance by the resourceful Ardern (Maria on alternate nights in Twelfth Night), gender isn’t bold-faced. Romeo is played as a boy, but the actor doesn’t lean into macho signals in voice or posture.  Nguyen’s performance as Juliet isn’t of the wistful, poetical femininity lineage either. The impulses of the pair work the same way at the same speed.

The “yoke of inauspicious stars” is worn quite lightly. The so-called “balcony scene” is playful; R and J are having fun with the luscious poetry of it. And so, more unexpectedly, is the production’s original way with the scene when Romeo leaves Juliet for his banishment after their night in bed. The stakes are high: death if Romeo doesn’t get out of town pronto. As he reacts to Juliet’s exhortation to stay longer, “come death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so!”, they’re both laughing.

No one has told them they’re in a tragedy; till then it’s a hot adventure. Nguyen’s quick-witted Juliet doesn’t really dig into the verse till the prospect of spending the night in the Capulet family tomb, “this palace of dim night,” hits home.

The more dimensional relationships in Horak’s production are between the lads, Romeo and his pals. Scott Shpeley (Orsino in Twelfth Night) is a volatile, dangerously excitable Mercutio, in a performance that’s charismatic, both verbally and physically. He doesn’t even get to linger on the famously weird and fantastical Queen Mab speech, shortened in this adaptation. And after the fatal fracas with Tybalt, and Romeo’s inept intervention, his furious exit line, “a plague on both your houses,” burns through the play like a brand.

Nadien Chu in Romeo and Juliet, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

Kris Unruh (a frolicsome Olivia in Twelfth Night) is the conciliatory, more reasonable follower Benvolio. Peace-makers, including Friar Laurence (Troy O’Donnell), don’t get much traction in Verona.

The casting in a two-play rep season, in which Romeo and Juliet shares its cast with Twelfth Night, is intriguing and resonant. The wonderfully nutty comic gravity of Shpeley’s performance as Orsino in the comedy alternates with the lethally manic Mercutio, who brings it in Romeo and Juliet. Alternating with wry, sly Feste in the comedy, Dean Stockdale is an unhinged and violent Tybalt. And Nadien Chu, sensationally funny as the extrovert boozehound Lady Toby in Twelfth Night, is the warm-hearted chatterbox of a Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, the only parental figure who counts in the Veronese landscape.

In the end, this Romeo and Juliet doesn’t really have much tragic impact, exciting though it is to watch, especially up close. It’s not what you’d call heartbreaking; it’s too schematic for that. But it feels explosive in the intimate setting of the spiegeltent. The fighting (choreographed by Janine Waddell) is visceral and sweaty in a way that the romance doesn’t get into, in this streamlined, intelligible adaptation of a story with an ending we know in advance. It’s all about capturing what it feels like to be young and in the moment.

Read the 12thnight review of Twelfth Night here. 

REVIEW

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Romeo and Juliet (running in rep with Twelfth Night

Directed by: David Horak

Starring: Jessy Ardern, Christina Nguyen, Brett Dahl, Scott Shpeley, Kris Unruh, Dean Stockdale, Graham Mothersill, Nadien Chu, Troy O’Donnell, Yassine El Fassi El Fihri

Where: Cristal Palace Spiegeltent at Edmonton EXPO Centre, 7515 118 Ave.

Running:  through Sept. 3, Romeo and Juliet on all odd nights and even matinees, Twelfth Night on all even nights and odd matinees. Check out freewillshakespeare.com for a full schedule of extra pre- and post-show events.

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com

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You’ve got the music in you: a joyful new Twelfth Night at Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Posted on August 12, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Kris Unruh as Lady Olivia in Twelfth Night, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“O spirit of love! How quick and fresh art thou,” declares a love-struck Duke, glancing heavenward in the early moments of Twelfth Night, the first of the two alternating plays (along with Romeo and Juliet) in this the 34th annual edition of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival.

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And, yes, the draped canvas big top ceiling of the Cristal Palace Spiegeltent does seem to be alive and breathing in response. Is it empathy for the humans below slipping and sliding through the mysteries of love in this open-ended cross-dressed, strangely multi-toned comedy?

Shakespeare has taken up residence for the summer in a “high fantastical” tent that (yay!) isn’t really like camping at all. The Cristal Palace Spiegeltent is a vintage hand-made “theatre” lined with precious wood, stained glass, bevelled mirrors. Outside it, Freewill has fashioned an urban garden (a nod to their al fresco roots), where Malachite Theatre plays with you en route to the show. And inside this magical space, in Twelfth Night (a fave of mine, as you might guess from the name of this theatre site), people will don disguises and unlace alter-egos they didn’t know they had; they’ll suddenly fall in love, bewilder themselves, confuse everyone around them.

Kris Unruh and Christina Nguyen in Twelfth Night, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz.

Amanda Goldberg’s high-spirited production leans into the light side of Shakespeare’s bewitching gender-fluid dark/light comedy. It puts on its party clothes on the beautiful wood keyhole stage (designer: Stephanie Bahniuk) that we get to surround on three sides — at close range since there are only 220 seats. And it sings and dances, borrowing its fulsome supply of music, played live by the characters, from the pop repertoire of REM, Radiohead, the Police (sound designer: Aaron Macri) — instead of the famously melancholy songs of the court minstrel Feste which tend to philosophical ruminations about the wind and the rain.

Speaking of which, “the rain that raineth every day,” the spiegeltent triumphantly shrugged off opening night’s downpours (it’s gale-proof). It was the characters inside who caroused up a storm.

The stage is dominated at one end by a silvered smudgy almost-mirror almost-window that neither reflects nor reveals, but captures shadows. Characters look towards it and, tellingly, fail to see or recognize themselves. Or they appear and disappear above it, in hiding or surveillance mode. All part of a story that starts with a tragic shipwreck, theatrically set forth in Goldberg’s inventive stagecraft.

Dean Stockdale and Troy O’Donnell as Feste and Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

Feste the musical Fool played with mischievous amusement by Dean Stockdale (they/them) is there from the start. They’re a wayward spear-carrier (so to speak) with a mandolin instead of a spear, who shows up everywhere. You know from their repertoire of wry glances and knowing grins that they’re street experts in human folly, and the assumptions we feed ourselves.

Viola, the inadvertent instigator — a wide-eyed explorer in Christina Nguyen’s performance — washes up on shore bereft at the loss in the storm of her twin bro (Yassine El Fassi El Fihri). Amusingly, the actors look nothing alike. In Viola’s decision to put grief on hold and don boy clothes to get a job at the court of Duke Orsino (Scott Shpeley), nothing will ever be the same in Illyria.

Cesario, Viola’s new self-creation, gets sent by the persistent Orsino to woo the implacably resistant Lady Olivia on his behalf. Viola falls in love with the Duke; Olivia falls for Viola in disguise as Cesario….

It is a measure of the decisively comic tilt of this Twelfth Night that Olivia, supposedly mired in grief, seems pretty well primed for romance from the start, and ready to party in Kris Unruh’s funny drama queen performance. No mourning black for her. The platform heels and feather-trimmed hot pink party dress are a tip-off that Olivia doesn’t exactly have to be pried from melancholy. She’s fun, but I wonder if this choice doesn’t detract a bit from the disconcerting sense of self-discovery and transformation that’s in Twelfth Night.

Orsino gets a genuinely original comic performance, impeccably timed, from Scott Shpeley. His fierce unsmiling focus, occasionally paused by distracting glimmers of thought about the attractions of his young page, is a portrait of obsession that gradually gets frayed around the edges. A highlight moment is watching him stride briskly through an aisle, all business, wielding a double bass the way other people carry purses. He’s en route to the stage — and a musical number in which REM gets to share an insight with Shakespeare: “O no I’ve said too much/ I haven’t said enough” seems particularly tuned to a production that emphasizes the perplexing nature of gender, love, delusion and self-knowledge.

Brett Dahl and Nadien Chu in Twelfth Night, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

Olivia’s rambunctious household is dominated by the exuberant dissolute Sir Toby Belch, here in a gender switch played as Lady Toby by the entirely riotous Nadien Chu. She arrives in every scene, glass first, clutching booze in a different fanciful vessel. The sight of Chu in a pink helmet attached to two beers will not be soon forgotten. Ditto her trotting gait on high heels which tips her forward (presumably to avoid potential spillage).

Chez Olivia there’s another suitor for the mistress of the house. That would be the lanky dimbulb knight Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Lady Toby’s drinking companion. A beat behind every conversation, he seems, in Brett Dahl’s comical performance, perpetually hung over, possibly stoned, getting increasingly sulky by his lack of success, dimly aware from time to time he’s getting fleeced in his marital venture.

The smartest person in the room is invariably Olivia’s pert maid Maria, as played with delightful crunchy skepticism by Jessy Ardern. It’s Maria who devises “a sport royale” to take down Olivia’s pompous, brisk, self-important martinet of a steward Malvolio, by feeding his secret fantasy that his boss fancies him.

Troy O’Donnell is excellent: Malvolio is ripe for a fall. You want him to receive his comeuppance, but you’re taken aback by the cruelty of his punishment and the cheery non-concern of his tormentors. O’Donnell has played Malvolio at Freewill before, but never I think in quite the startling condition of yellow-stockinged undress that leaves Olivia, along with all of us, aghast. Comedy can be so cruel.

The scene in which Maria’s trick is executed is particularly hilarious since there’s really no way for its perpetrators to hide for purposes of voyeurism. O’Donnell makes a meal of Malvolio’s monologue in which he deduces his way into utter delusion. And Goldberg’s staging makes lively use of the aisles and wooden pillars of the spiegeltent as the trap is sprung.   

The Act I finale of the production has the entire cast dancing solo to the wisdom of Radiohead: “I wish I was special. You’re so fucking special.” But by the end of the production,  there’s been a group pairing off. Twelfth Night productions in modern times have often wondered about a romantic spark between the sea captain Antonio and Sebastian. It says something about the comic drive of this Freewill production that even the goofball Sir Andrew will not be going home alone. Lady Toby and Maria leave together, arms linked, martinis in hand.

As the finale ensemble has it, citing the New Radicals, “you’ve got the music in you. Don’t let go.” This new Twelfth Night is a joyful, all-inclusive way to hang on, be your true self, or find a new one. “Nothing that is so is so,” says Feste at a point of maximum comic chaos. Words to live by in a world weighed down by “it is what it is.”

Read the 12thnight Romeo and Juliet review here.

REVIEW

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Twelfth Night (running in rep with Romeo and Juliet)

Directed by: Amanda Goldberg

Starring: Jessy Ardern, Christina Nguyen, Brett Dahl, Scott Shpeley, Kris Unruh, Dean Stockdale, Graham Mothersill, Nadien Chu, Troy O’Donnell, Yassine El Fassi El Fihri

Where: Cristal Palace Spiegeltent at Edmonton EXPO Centre, 7515 118 Ave.

Running:  through Sept. 3, Romeo and Juliet on all odd nights and even matinees, Twelfth Night on all even nights and odd matinees. Check out freewillshakespeare.com for a full schedule of extra pre- and post-show events.

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com

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To all of your questions, The Answer is Fringe: tickets go on sale today at noon

Posted on August 9, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

The Answer Is Fringe. Design by Pete Nguyen.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You are now perfectly positioned to answer for yourself the Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. And unlike Deep Thought (in Douglas Adams’ trippy and comical Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy), it won’t take you 7.5 million years. The Answer is Fringe. And tickets go on sale today at noon for this 42nd annual edition of Edmonton’s international summer theatre extravaganza, the continent’s biggest and oldest Fringe.

The Great Question of Fringe tickets (and passes) has several answers. They’re online at fringetheatre.ca; by phone (780-409-1910); in person at Fringe Theatre headquarters in the Arts Barns box office (and during the festival at any festival box office), or the Edmonton Arts Council Shop & Services downtown (formerly TIX on the Square). After many years in a holding pattern, the top ticket price is up by $2 this summer. Fringe artists set their own price, to a $15 max, up from last year’s $13 (100 per cent theirs to keep), and the Fringe adds a $3 service fee. So you’ll be paying $18 tops to see a show.

The best deal for the bargain hitchhiker is the Frequent Fringer pass, ($140 for 10 tickets) and the Double Fringer pass ($280 for 20), maximum of two tickets to any performance per pass. These get snapped up in a hurry. And there are daily discounts, too, determined by Fringe artists (only in-person sales).

For your galactic interstellar travels, you have 185 Fringe shows (at last count) to choose from, in 35 venues, eight of them programmed by lottery and 27 BYOVs (bring-your-own-venues) acquired and outfitted by artists themselves. This counts not as a wild surge from last year’s 162 shows but “incremental growth” (as Fringe Theatre’s executive director Megan Dart puts it).

As you’ll see in the hefty high-gloss $12 hitchhiker’s guide to the Fringe galaxy, a couple of the usual venues are temporarily missing for Fringe #42. But new BYOVs have stepped up, including Rapid Fire Theatre’s new air-conditioned Exchange Theatre (Stage 12), Mile Zero Dance (Stage 32), Boxer Bar (Stage 35), The Rooster Kitchen (Stage 36).

You can find Fringe shows in actual theatres, like the Varscona, the Gateway, the Westbury, the Backstage, and the Studio Theatre in the Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, Theatre Network’s Roxy, La Cité francophone. But many of the Fringe BYOVs have other lives — as bars, cafes, dance studios, night clubs — ah, and in the case of 221B Baker Street (Stage 37), the Fringe garbage container just on the north side of the Fringe Theatre Arts Barn. That’s where  Los Angeles company, The Best Medicine Productions, gives Fringe sleuths a secret map and sets them forth on a quest (à la Found Fest) for clues around the festival grounds in The Sherlock Holmes Experience.

And for your star travels, it’s worthy of note that in honour of the summer festivities the Fringe has installed A/C in Workshop West’s sizzling Gateway Theatre (Stage 6), regarded by most veterans as the hottest venue.

Festival director Murray Utas points out that international artists who haven’t been at the Edmonton Fringe in many a year — Cameryn Moore, the Dead Rabbits, the Coldharts, Australian storyteller Jon Bennett among them —  are back for The Answer Is Fringe. It’s an auspicious sign that the COVIDian imperatives have waned and the Fringe has regained its mojo. “And it speaks to our own community,” he says. “Audiences unafraid to take a creative risk with them,” says Dart, “are part of the Fringe culture.”

Utas has reduced the number of shows in each of the eight lotteried venues from 10 to nine, “a more human-centric policy … so the technician (a pair, that come with the venue) can actually have a dinner break.” The BYOVs are “all artist-driven,” but Utas, a Fringe artist himself, has played match-maker on many occasions by connecting newcomer artists who are “an unknown quantity” with veterans and possible venues. When Anita Charania, Marion Poli and Charlotte Szabo, winners of the Fringe’s Mowat Diversity Award, needed a director for their new musical The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties, for example, Utas contacted the Plain Janes’ Kate Ryan on their behalf. Voilà, a new relationship. The production happens at the Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre (Stage 8).

Most BYOVs, at Utas’s urging, urging are “anchored” by a local. And sometimes it’s the venues themselves who reach out and want to be part of things. Utas always asks them why. “The best answer is ‘I want to support the Fringe’.”

The KidsFringe is back at Light Horse Park (10325 84 Ave.) starting Friday Aug. 18, 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with a lineup of activities and shows curated by Alyson Dicey of Girl Brain, all free, for the under-12 set and their grown-up companions. There’s music on the ATB Outdoor Stage in the park both Fringe weekends, at 9 and 10 p.m., curated by the indie folk/rocker (and musical theatre composer) Lindsey Walker.

And check out the mural wall on 85th Ave., with DJs and emcees, all powered by young street artists, painters, musicians, textile wizards, storytellers. “We believe in the importance of storytelling,” says Dart of the festival, “that can exist in many different forms…. We’re planting the seeds for future generations, of artists and audiences, in ways we don’t even know yet.”

Which brings us to the other Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything Fringe: what to see at the 42nd annual edition of our mighty summer festival. 12thnight.ca can help with that. Stay tuned to this site for encouragement, suggestions, features, and reviews.

And if you’re finding the theatre coverage on my free (so far), independent site 12thnight.ca worthwhile and entertaining, I really hope you’ll be able to chip in to my ongoing Patreon campaign — with a monthly amount to support its continuation. Click here.

We’ll set forth on our explorations in a week.

Posted in Fringe 2023, News/Views | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on To all of your questions, The Answer is Fringe: tickets go on sale today at noon

‘I had to find my own way in’: Amanda Goldberg directs Twelfth Night at the Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Posted on August 4, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

The Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by 12thnight.ca

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What country, friends, is this? (I, ii, Twelfth Night)

Like Viola, the heroine of the Shakespeare comedy in this year’s Freewill Shakespeare Festival, who steps onto the shore of a strange new world, director Amanda Goldberg has arrived in the topsy-turvy Illyria that is Twelfth Night.

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“There are a lot of firsts for me,” says the former Montrealer, who moved west with degrees in both acting and theatre creation to get a master’s in directing at the U of A (she graduated in 2022). “My first time adapting a Shakespeare. My first time directing a Shakespeare. My first professional directing contract in Edmonton. My first time directing a comedy. My first time staging for a tent (and an intimate one at that, a vintage 220-seat 1947 Belgian spiegeltent at the Edmonton EXPO Centre). My first time working in rep, so only 12 days rehearsal to dig in.…”

Twelfth Night shares a 10-actor cast, and alternates dates for both rehearsals and performances, with David Horak’s production of Romeo and Juliet for this 34th annual edition of Edmonton’s much-loved summer festival.

Amanda Goldberg, who directs Twelfth Night at this year’s Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo supplied.

“It’s an understatement to say it’s been a challenge. But a welcome one and an exciting surprise!” declares Goldberg, the freelance director who’s just come off a season as Shadow Theatre’s artistic director fellowship holder to land the artistic producer gig at the SkirtsAfire Festival. So much for the original Goldberg plan to move back east in August.

Like Goldberg herself, the festival has “had a gear change,” as she puts it. The Cristal Palace Spiegeltent, the small cast size, the addition of new accessibility elements (like ASL interpretation) — not to mention acquiring an emerging director who’s directing Shakespeare for the first time, as she points out. “I think the company has taken risks upon risks. They should be acknowledged, and I hope they will be rewarded…. I’m really grateful to be part of any risks that are taken in this city,” she says.

Goldberg says she didn’t have “an instinctual connection” to Twelfth Night at the outset. “It wasn’t my go-to play…. I had to find my own way in.” And in adapting the play for 10 actors in an intimate space with quirks and oddities (the tent is almost another character, she says, echoing Horak), she found that way in via questions about sexuality, gender, and identity — and the actors themselves.

Many talented non-binary artists showed up to audition, with Viola’s famous ‘I left no ring with her’ monologue. Viola, disguised as the boy Cesario, is sent on a courtship mission from her love-struck boss Duke Orsino to his ever-resistant beloved. And she suddenly realizes Olivia has fallen in love with the messenger instead.

“Not surprisingly a lot of the artists had this natural connection to Viola and her story. And one thing that resonated with me was someone being able to dress in a certain way, and say ‘this is who I am’ and no one questions it; everyone accepts it … a joyful acknowledgement of gender expression.”

“Do I feel Viola is a queer character? No I don’t. But what she experiences is not too far from what queer people experience, the instinct to hide yourself, to get lost in a role you’re playing,” says Goldberg. “She’s a catalyst for other characters in the show to be able to grapple with their own identities. She comes, and she changes everyone’s world.”

“That’s where I dive into gender dynamic: Illyria is a place where people are stuck playing the roles they were dealt; a lot of them are held captive by grief or loss.…. Viola comes in, challenges expectations, and her presence forces the people of Illyria, most notably Olive and Orsino,, to confront what they think of as their deepest desires.”

Three of Goldberg’s actors are non-binary, and half are queer. “And asking these questions, and (seeing the play) through a more queer-focused lens does let us ask questions that will honour this community, I hope. She says “the search for love, trying to change yourself for love….” is at the heart oftTwelfth Night.

Goldberg grew up watching Shakespeare in parks in Montreal, loving the touring tradition that took plays to people where they were. “Shakespeare is a rite of passage for every director, but I’ve never really gravitated to it because I’ve never really seen myself represented in his plays,” she says. “Through adaptation, we’re reclaiming stories with representation from artists of today.”

The casting,  done jointly with Horak for the two productions, wasn’t so much looking for the perfect Orsino or Viola, Goldberg says, but this line of thought: “you’re an amazing artist; how can we fit you into this ensemble?”

In the challenge of adapting a big comedy for a small cast, Goldberg says she found the opportunity to expand characters who show up only once in a while. The servants are “much more present in this world,” notably Feste (Dean Stockdale), the “wise fool.” In the Twelfth Night we’ll see Feste with particular prominence, involved in the courts of both Olivia and Orsino, “always a spy on the wall” and “the only character who knows that Viola is actually Viola, a secret no one else knows.”

The biggest challenge in staging a spiegeltent Twelfth Night? The live music, says Goldberg. “There’s a lot of music, and it’s something embedded into the play, part of the world, part of what characters use to reflect on their heartbreak or grief…. So, getting the music to a place where it fits with this space.”

Goldberg echoes Horak in thinking of the tent as another character. And it won’t be till the show gets its first audiences that the directors will be able to think “what else we can do to incorporate the audience into the show, to allow them to feel part of its secrets?”

Meanwhile, Goldberg’s original plans continue to be de-railed in exciting ways, as she says happily. The perfect job is standing by. With its mandate to showcase, nurture, and enhance the profile of women in the arts, SkirtsAfire is almost eerily in alignment with We Are One, the indie company Goldberg had started in Montreal before she left. It was “really focused on giving the women the opportunity to play challenging roles” and weigh in against the punishing sexual inequality revealed by theatre statistics in that regard. Stay tuned for her plans.    

But first, Shakespeare. “In this city, artists are hungry for something new. It shows other companies and other producers it’s worth it to trust emerging artists to try things they’ve never done before.” And in a way, as Goldberg points out, “that’s why Freewill started. They saw something lacking in the theatre community, they took a swing. And here we are!”

Check out the 12thnight PREVIEW of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival speigeltent summer (and interview with artistic director David Horak) here.

PREVIEW

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night

Directed by: David Horak and Amanda Goldberg

Starring: Jessy Ardern, Christina Nguyen, Brett Dahl, Scott Shpeley, Kris Unruh, Dean Stockdale, Graham Mothersill, Nadien Chu, Troy O’Donnell, Yassine El Fassi El Fihri

Where: Cristal Palace Spiegeltent at Edmonton EXPO Centre, 7515 118 Ave.

Running:  Aug. 8 to Sept. 3, Romeo and Juliet on all odd nights and even matinees, Twelfth Night on all even nights and odd matinees

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com

   

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Ready for your close-up Mr. Shakespeare? The Freewill Shakespeare Festival in a vintage spiegeltent this summer

Posted on August 3, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Christina Nguyen and Jessy Ardern as Romeo and Juliet, Freewill Shakespeare Festival at the Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz Photography

Freewill Shakespeare Festival artistic director David Horak, who directs Romeo and Juliet in the Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

This summer, when lovestruck Romeo says “what light from yonder window breaks?” the light will break from stained glass windows and bounce off bevelled mirrors.

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Starting this week at the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, as announced on the Bard’s birthday, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night will alternate in a beautiful hand-made 1947 Belgian spiegeltent in the parking lot of the Edmonton EXPO Centre (7515 118 Ave.). David Horak directs the tragedy; up-and-comer Amanda Goldberg, soon to be the artistic producer of SkirtsAfire, directs the comedy (you can meet her in a companion 12thnight post).

Freewill has always known how to make big, bold, contemporary choices for their resident playwright in the great outdoors (hey ho the wind and the rain, etc.). And in COVIDian times they learned to be fast and light on their feet. They touched down in parks, community centres, people’s backyards; they even went to the Fringe, with a five-actor Much Ado About Nothing and a three-actor Macbeth in 2021.

Last summer’s edition (A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Measure For Measure) was a finale huzzah in the Heritage Amphitheatre (Hawrelak Park is now shut down for three YEARS) where it all began as a bright idea 34 years ago.

This past winter Freewill was preparing to return to the touring life. The plays were chosen. And, says artistic director Dave Horak, “we were talking to Repercussion in Montreal” about their touring model whereby the company “pops into a park, builds a set in the morning, and stays for a couple of days.”

The Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by 12thnight.ca

That’s when the unexpected offer from Explore Edmonton came: why not Shakespeare in the Cristal Palace Spiegeltgent, after its K-Days trapeze artists, magicians, and improvisers have exited stage left? “If you’re not going to be out in a park, you will be in an interesting space,” as Horak says of the two 10-actor Freewill productions in the close-up environment of a 220-seat spiegeltent. “In the tent, you’re so close; you’re seeing the other people. You’re in a different world, and an old world at that. I’m excited!” As Goldberg says, “we’re adding an experience we don’t normally get in Shakespeare: intimacy.”

Doing a pair of Shakespeares almost in the round and up-close at the Cristal Palace Spiegeltent comes with its own challenges, to be sure. “Comedies tend to need more stuff,” as Horak puts it, “more props, more places to hide and listen in.” And Twelfth Night, a wonderfully strange, sexually adventurous, open-ended comedy, is full of cross-dressing, tricks, misidentifications, subplots set up by characters spying on each other.  The space, says Goldberg, “is another character to play with…. We’re leaning into the silliness of trying to hide there, in plain sight.”

And as for Romeo and Juliet in a tent, well, there’s the famous business of the balcony. Not happening in a tent.  Horak admits this crossed his mind, “but nowhere (in the text) does it actually say ‘balcony’,” he smiles. “Window, yes. Balcony, no. It’s only a convention. When you don’t have one, you have to be more theatrical. The text is so great. And being in a smaller space gives us a chance to really play that text!”

As summer festival mates, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night are an intriguing high-contrast pair. “Two different versions of love,” says Horak. Romeo and Juliet, last seen at Freewill in 2016, starts as a comedy and ends up as a tragedy; Twelfth Night (last at Freewill in 2011) starts as a tragedy and ends up as a comedy.”

“I’m trying to keep the first part of Romeo and Juliet lively and fun for as long as possible; that first scene is full of posturing, male bravado that quickly goes too far.”

Amanda Goldberg, who directs Twelfth Night at this year’s Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo supplied.

With her interest in gender identity and the view through the queer lens, director Goldberg and Twelfth Night seemed an ideal match, says Horak. “What’s the tone going to be? Where’s it going to sit?” They’re questions every Twelfth Night director plays with. And the intimate setting of the spiegeltent is a perfect place to do that. His own strength, Horak feels, is in “intimate, smaller, indie kind of productions.”  

“Everyone comes to Romeo and Juliet with some sort of expectation,” he says of the early Shakespeare that returns at regular intervals in the festival rotation. “I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the play…. My dad was an English teacher, and he always complained about teaching it: Romeo is such a dummy. I think I inherited that.”

Ten years ago, though, teaching R&J (with Mieko Ouchi) at ArtsTrek, the venerable Alberta summer theatre camp, Horak’s view changed, dramatically and unexpectedly. “Having teenagers read it out loud was so interesting…. They really understood these ‘stupid’ teenagers; they really understood the plot, the mopey multi-emo depression, they got it! How quick it all happens: it felt real to them. And I started to hear those scenes in a very different way. I warmed to it.” And the chance to direct it for the first time — and for the first time in Freewill history to pair it with Twelfth Night — grabbed him.

Jessy Ardern and Christina Nguyen in Romeo and Juliet, Freewill Shakespeare Festival in the Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz Photography

The cast of 10 he and Goldberg have assembled is generously endowed with non-binary and gender-fluid talent. And, inspired by that, Goldberg says she found her entry point into Twelfth Night, with “questions about sexuality and gender.” Horak says “I wasn’t hard and fast about it, but I was open to doing something different with Romeo, to having a female-presenting actor in the role.” His production stars Jessy Ardern and Christina Nguyen as the star-cross’d lovers.

“Romeo is a hard part; he’s often presented as a bit of a simp, less interesting than Juliet.” Ardern plays Romeo as a male, “but there’s something about her being female … when Romeo and Juliet see each other, it’s so immediate. There’s something they recognize; in a way they know each other, see each other reflected in each other. I’m hoping that helps us buy that they connect in such a different, fast way,” says Horak.

He was struck by the “sharp timeline” of the play, and he’s been leaning into that. “It all takes place over four days. It’s so compressed; it just shoots like a bullet…. For me, this play is a lot about the compression of time. Shakespeare is making the point that that’s the point: everything happens too fast. Nobody’s thinking.”

In the original, Juliet is 13, even younger than Shakespeare’s source for the play as Horak points out (he’s taken out that age reference). But “even to an Elizabethan audience” that would have been pushing it. Shakespeare’s point, Horak argues, is that the lovers are “too young, operating on impulse….. Everything is too fast; everyone’s making choices way too quick that aren’t thought out.”

Shakespeare is amply supplied with characters who scheme, long-term, like Richard III, or Hamlet who takes ages, thinking, re-thinking, possibly over-thinking, everything. Romeo and Juliet are, decisively, not like that. “They’re ‘I’m in the moment; I’m just moving’,” as Horak puts it. “It’s sometimes a knock on the play; I’m thinking of it more of a feature…. And in the tent, unlike the park, there are no long walks to exit or enter. It’ll happen, Boom!, right before you.”

“The only thing that’s been going on for a long time is the feud (the “ancient grudge” between the Montagues and the Capulets), so long that the original reason is long gone.…”

Matthew Skopyk’s original score reflects speed-up urgency, says Horak. He describes it as “contemporary, grunge-y kind of rock, music that drives things, totally quick, a pulse, a heartbeat!” And as for the setting, designed along with costumes, by Stephanie Bahniuk, “these are contemporary people. With just a touch, a nod, to Europe in the 1800s, not too on the nose, a turbulence in the scene, warring countries, inspired a bit by Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812.” The look has “a kind of elegance that fits the tent.”

As per the first line of the play, “two households both alike in dignity,” Horak says there will be no colour-coding of the Montagues and Capulets in the Romeo and Juliet we’ll see. “The two families have the same social status; they look the same; everything about them is the same. That is the tragedy; they’re the same damn family.”

And, as for the fighting in the close confines of the tent, swords are out (no imminent decapitations of first-row fans). Knives are in. “It’s fast and it’s nasty,” says Horak. “That’s why accidents happen.”

The fun of seeing actors take on different roles on alternating nights is at the heart of Freewill’s rep season. We’ll see Ardern as Romeo one night and the saucy clever Maria in Twelfth Night the next. Scott Schpeley is Mercutio (and Paris) in Romeo and Juliet one night, Orsino, the love-sick count of Twelfth Night (“if music be the food of love, play on),” the next. It’s a great stretch for actors, “a real theatre gym,” says Horak who has first-hand experience as a Freewill actor himself (though by coincidence never in either of this summer’s offerings).

The festive entertainment is enhanced by an assortment of pre-show events, including Malachite Theatre’s interactive introductions to the two plays. There are talks (by Mipre-show for kids and their grown-up companions before matinee performances (you get to spin the wheel of scenes. Matthew Morgan, the Vegas-based clown who’s been production manager of the spiegeltent shows for K-Days, will do his late-night clown drinking game comedy version of Macbeth, Shotspeare. The House of Hush is bringing a Shakespeare-themed burlesque.

There are discussions about Freewill’s celebrated playwright-in-residence. And because Freewill overlaps the Fringe, there’s cross-festival collaboration. On the Tuesday of the Fringe, the signature Late Night Cabaret will cross the river to the spiegeltent. And Aug. 18 to 20, so will the Fringe’s annual Free-For-All (of Fringe show excerpts). And did I mention the food trucks? See freewillshakespeare.com for the full schedule and details.

There is, of course, a risk in opting to “draw people to a different location,” as Horak says. “People have been consuming so much stuff online. But I do think live experiences are going to draw people again…. If people have seen these plays before they’re be intrigued and delighted by these new takes, I hope,” he grins. “If they haven’t seen the plays, they’re still getting Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night.

PREVIEW

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night

Directed by: David Horak and Amanda Goldberg

Starring: Jessy Ardern, Christina Nguyen, Brett Dahl, Scott Shpeley, Kris Unruh, Dean Stockdale, Graham Motherwill, Nadien Chu, Troy O’Donnell, Yassine El Fassi El Fihri

Where: Cristal Palace Spiegeltent at EXPO Centre, 7515 118 Ave.

Running:  Aug. 8 to Sept. 3, Romeo and Juliet on all odd nights and even matinees, Twelfth Night on all even nights and odd matinees

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com

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