The ‘bad bitches who bought the palace’: The Spinsters, a little review

Posted on January 27, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis in The Spinsters, Small Matters Productions. Photo by Ian Walker

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

I’m late to the ball, but in the nick of time — it ends today — I caught The Spinsters. And I want to tell you about this highly unusual dark off-centre comedy (for the +14 crowd only).

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The stars of The Spinsters, the latest from the subversives at Small Matters Theatre, hail from the fairy tale repertoire. And they emerge from the wings of one its most durable stories of unregenerate upstaging, Cinderella.

As the title tips us, the siblings we meet in this kooky original created and performed by Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis did not get the handsome, eminently eligible Prince. Or even a minor small-p prince, or maybe a count or duke. Nope. And it’s not like the Prince had impossible standards, fixated as the guy was pretty much exclusively on shoe size. Not only that, the Ugly Stepsisters didn’t even get billing as top-drawer villains — much less back stories or voices, or even names.

Think about it: jealous, vain gold-digger stepmothers, rotten to the core, are everywhere in fairy tales. It does cross your mind, from time to time, that fairy tale fathers have terrible taste in women, but I digress. Snow White’s homicidal stepmother, for example, tormented by toxic vanity, tries to poison her in inventive ways. She’s memorable.

Tara Travis and Christine Lesiak in The Spinsters, Small Matters Productions. Photo supplied.

As for the daughters of vicious stepmothers? Nope. Cinderella’s Ugly Stepsisters are remembered exclusively for being unaccountably mean, the meanest siblings ever, to an annoyingly humble, hard-working, uncomplaining victim. The latter, who has occasionally raised feminist ire for being such a passive ninny, is a paragon who gets the handsome, eminently eligible Prince because she acquires a fancy ballgown (courtesy of a fairy godmother), and has small feet. How exasperating is that kind of cosmic unfairness? And what does it say about the Prince anyhow, come to that?

The fun of The Spinsters, both in the writing and the theatrical execution of Jan Selman’s production, is that it’s payback time. And, after an amusingly annotated shadow puppet theatre intro (directed by Jen Cassady), with a more official version of Cinderella — the step-sisters appear, anonymous no longer.

Tormentia (Lesia) and Atrocia (Travis) know how to make an entrance. They sail across the stage, spinning in magical eddies, in show-stopper gowns that seem, in the astonishing design by fairy godmothers Adam Dickson and Ian Walker, to have a showbiz life of their own. The step-sisters are like outsized figures in a high-glam music box, with jointed arms and moveable torsos, and a mysterious rolling mechanism (by Ian Walker) instead of legs under those elaborately tiered shirts. Who needs glass slippers anyhow? You feel sure this pair could glide up the palace walls, or into the audience to flatten skeptics, a veritable armada in party frocks. The witty choreography, hinged in the middle and full of snarky noblesse oblige arm gestures, is by Ainsley Hillyard.

Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis in The Spinsters, Small Matters Productions. Photo by Ian Walker.

Atop  these giant moveable wedding cake sisters are sculpted hairdos that swirl magnificently like icing (design by Dusty Hagerüd with Steven Snider). The limelight has been a long time coming: they are a sight to behold, and they know it. And they’re here, in middle age, to rub it in, reclaim the story that shunted them aside, dish the dirt on the little weasel who has upstaged them. They’re the underdogs of the feminist can-do narrative, the demi-mondaines of the sisterhood, so to speak.

We’ve been invited to a ball at their palace (yup, they bought it), for an evening of “spectacular spectacle” and “glamorous glamour” at “the ball to end all balls.”

“We’re thrilled you could make it,” they say, trying half-heartedly to conceal the gloat. “You’ve been here before, but not since we moved in…. We’re the bad bitches who bought the palace!” And “don’t you love what we’ve done with the place!”

The performances have the dynamic of a clown duo. And both artists are terrific comic performers, at ease interacting with the audience. Lesiak’s Tormentia, the elder of the two and the boss, is snarkier and more calculating about image and damage control. She’s made a name for herself in the field of “fantasy non-fiction.” Travis’s dimbulb Atrocia, a noted scrunchie designer, is scattier, more impulsive and digressive.  

And what emerges from the playful theatricality of the piece (the list of contributing theatre artisans is impressively long), their joint hosting squabbles, and a need for recognition that has gone unsatisfied for centuries, is a surprise I wouldn’t dream of revealing. Suffice it to say the surprise even surprises the characters, as their grand ball at the palace gets away from them in an unexpected way.

The show, which takes on Cinderella from an unusual angle, is ingenious, kooky, and fun. You have two chances today to catch it.

REVIEW

The Spinsters

Theatre: Small Matters Productions and Edmonton Fringe Theatre

Created by and starring: Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis

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

Running: through Jan. 27

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

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Why is Donna so angry? Trevor Schmidt talks about Northern Light Theatre’s Donna Orbits The Moon, a preview

Posted on January 18, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Patricia Darbasie in Donna Orbits The Moon, Northernm Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Something weird is happening to the woman we meet in the solo play that opens Friday at Northern Light Theatre, starring Patricia Darbasie. What’s going on with Donna, loving wife, mother, and bake sale celeb?

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With Donna Orbits The Moon, a 2010 comedy/drama by the American playwright Ian August, Trevor Schmidt, NLT’s indefatigable deep-dive theatre researcher artistic director, adds another distinctive woman’s story to the company’s very considerable archive. Says Schmidt, who directs and designs the production, it lobs “a little psychological mystery our way.” And Donna herself is mystified.

Donna is  “likeable and funny” (which sounds a bit like a pocket description of actor/director Darbasie herself, as Schmidt points out). But the character has been having “incidents of inexplicable rage,” as he describes. “Why is she behaving in ways that are very out of character for her?”

Patricia Darbasie, star of Donna Orbits The Moon, Northern Light Theatre. Photo supplied,

Her episodes of bad behaviour not only perplex the people around her — “her husband, her daughter, her friends are all completely confused” — they baffle Donna too. What’s fuelling this unexpected, out-of-character rage? She’s deeply in denial about what’s motivating these episodes.” Schmidt points to theory that anger isn’t a primary emotion, like love or fear. It’s an offshoot, a reaction, a funnel from other things.

“Public appearance and reputation are very important to Donna … appearing a certain way, formality, discretion, conservatism, And lot of church. She’s ‘what would people think if they knew? How could I face them again?’”

“Religion isn’t a major part of this show, but the church is,” says Schmidt. “It’s never about what God would think of me for doing this. It’s what would the other church members think of me…. When she starts hearing a voice it’s not God, it’s Buzz Aldrin.”

The tone reminds Schmidt of The Pink Unicorn, a surprisingly humorous solo play by the American writer Elise Forier Edie about a Christian widow who has to choose sides in her conservative Texas when her teenage daughter announces she’s gender queer. It was an Sterling Award-winner and hit for Northern Light in the 2014-2015 season. As in the case of that protagonist, Donna is “very specific, very likeable, and we care about her emotional dilemma.”

Patricia Darbasie in Donna Orbits The Moon, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

“It’s quite whimsical, I think. And also a mystery you have to slowly piece together, with clues along the way. You have to discover it as she discovers it…. Once you get to the end it all makes sense.”

Cued by the way Donna “finds herself in Outer Space,” Schmidt’s design is inspired, he says, “by the image of a living room floating in space”

Solo shows are, of course, a particular challenge to the actor who has to populate the play, or create a world, single-handedly onstage, in charge of all the words in the play. Darbasie herself wrote and appeared in one: Ribbon, an exploration of Alberta’s Amber Valley, at Studio Theatre. And they’re something of a specialty at Northern Light. The company has a long and varied history with solo shows, like Colm Toíbín’s The Testament of Mary, Schmidt’s multi-character thriller We Had A Girl Before You, the cabaret Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs, and more recently the memorably queasy horror story Squeamish. Schmidt himself has performed a few, including Nick Green’s Coffee Dad, Chicken Mom and the Fabulous Buddha Boi.

“I literally thought I might have a heart attack I was so anxious backstage,” he admits. Only the “astute and insightful advice of a sympathetic director” quelled his nerves. She told him “people have come because they like you; they’ve come to support you…. you love the three characters and you’re here to share them.” First-hand experience has made Schmidt empathetic to actor daunted by sole possession of the stage.

“By now we can track where people are at,” he says. He and his frequent stage-manager Liz Alllison-Jorde, an actor/director herself, refers to the second Thursday of the rehearsal period as Crying Day. For the record Darbasie, who directs The Mountaintop at the Citadel later this season, didn’t succumb, says Schmidt cheerfully. And rehearsals for a solo play are shaped by the performer’s own way of working. “It’s not your job to work my way; it’s my job to figure out how you work….”

Patricia Darbasie in Something Unspoken, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Epic Photography

Darbasie is an adventurous theatre artist.  In the Northern Light production of Tennessee Williams’ rarely produced two-hander Something Unspoken two seasons ago, she played the long-time secretary to a wealthy white spinster in the South of the ‘50s. That she is an actor of colour, a departure in the scant history of that play, was an experiment, as Darbasie told 12thnight at the time. It upped the ante, adding dimensions to the subtle homoerotic tensions of the employer-employee relationship that thread through the play. The mysteries of Donna orbiting the moon solo and looking for a stable landing are well within her compass.

Meanwhile, two new Schmidt plays get their premieres in the second half of the season. Robot Girls, about four teenage girls in a science club struggling to build a robot for a competition, opens at Shadow Theatre (directed by John Hudson) in March. “I have to actually build a robot,” says Schmidt the designer. “There will be a couple of days of Googling for that!” he laughs. In April, Candy & The Beast, his “new multi-disciplinary murder mystery/ thriller,” is the finale of the Northern Light season. It has the ring of prairie goth about it: a girl and her little brother set forth from their trailer court to track down a serial killer in the small town of Black Falls.

“It will be weird,” says Schmidt. “That’s my promise!”

PREVIEW

Donna Orbits The Moon

Theatre: Northern Light

Written by: Ian August

Directed and designed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Patricia Darbasie

Where: Studio Theatre, Fringe Theatre Arts Barns

Running: Friday through Feb. 3

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

   

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Meet Paul-Ford Manguelle, the multi-talented newcomer who joins two veterans in The Drawer Boy at Shadow Theatre

Posted on January 14, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Reed McColm, Paul-Ford Manguelle and Glenn Nelson in The Drawer Boy, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“We’re here to get your history and give it back to you.” — The Drawer Boy

Paul-Ford Manguelle. Photo supplied.

In Michael Healey’s 1999 play The Drawer Boy, a naive young actor from a Toronto theatre company ventures into rural Ontario to research farm life on location for a new collective creation. In the course of Miles’s stay with two elderly bachelor farmers, art and real life collide with memory and identity in intricate and mysterious ways that confirm the power of stories and storytelling.

A bona fide Canadian classic, with a history that includes the landmark collective The Farm Show that came out of the hinterland adventure, The Drawer Boy arrives in Shadow Theatre’s 30th anniversary season Thursday. John Hudson’s production, the first Drawer Boy to be seen here for two decades or so, stars two theatre veterans Glenn Nelson and Reed McColm. And the young urban actor, who arrives on location figuring to write about the rich inner lives of cows, is played by … a young urban actor, a relative newcomer to the scene who seems to have arrived, a fully formed triple-threat with startling natural gifts for comedy, at ease in the acrobatic reaches of dance and song.

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“Miles is a lot like me,” says Paul-Ford Manguelle cheerfully of his Drawer Boy assignment, his first professional gig in a straight play. “Just about my age (he’s 21), and hasn’t been on a farm, or done (that kind of) labour.” So, an innocent out in the countryside? “100 per cent.”

Glenn Nelson, Reed McColm in The Drawer
Boy, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

If you saw Die Harsh, Grindstone Theatre’s clever and very funny holiday musical mash-up of that action thriller and A Christmas Carol, you won’t have forgotten Manguelle’s multiple contributions or his comic dexterity in negotiating them. Among his 13 or 14 roles (and precision high-speed quick-changes of voice, gesture, and hat to match) were a cop and a code-breaker, not to mention a rapping limo driver who delivers one of Simon Abbott’s most memorable songs (Let’s Take A Ride), and his own favourite character, Mary the pregnant hostage. “I workshopped her at the time,” he says. “It was funny and I was proud of her.”

Paul-Ford Manguelle, Mhairi Berg, David Findlay, Evan Dowling, Mark Sinongco in Die Harsh The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

Paul-Ford Manguelle, Mhairi Berg, David Findlay, Evan Dowling, Mark Sinongco in Die Harsh The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

“It’s a sprint,” he laughs, looking for a descriptive for this kind of crazy stage (and backstage) busy-ness. “It’s daunting at first, but after a few runs at it, it does get easier,” he says. “And you feel you have a lot more time.”

I heard “who is that guy?” a lot from admiring fellow audience members on opening night. Manguelle’s own story criss-crosses art and life in highly unusual ways. He arrived in Canada in 2011 with his family from Cameroon in West Africa, at age eight a francophone  without any English. And after eight months in Quebec, the Manguelles moved to Edmonton, “more opportunities for my parents,” as he says of their government jobs. “A little accent pops up some times,” laughs Manguelle, who speaks French at home with his parents and idiomatic, perfectly unaccented English the rest of the time.

He wasn’t a theatre kid. Did he grow up singing? “No, absolutely not!” he says definitively. Soccer was his jam. “I wanted to play professional soccer; I had family in Europe,” Manguelle says. “My professor in high school — he was the only reason there was drama there in the first place — was pushing kids to try it….”

Paul-Ford Manguelle. Photo supplied

“At some point I’d seen Hairspray.” Seaweed’s solo (Run And Tell) struck a chord. What impressed him was “somebody that sort of looks like me, and is doing (acting) professionally…. So from that point I was looking at it as something not so far-fetched. It was there a little spark happened.” He laughs. “I had to get my friends to also do it (laughter); I wasn’t going to do it by myself.” ”

“From my background, if you tell people you want to be an actor they say ‘what? what do you actually mean’? Manguelle feels “very lucky; my parents are the most supportive people in the world!”

By Grade 11 at J.H, Picard, the francophone high school, he was smitten by theatre. “My first show was West Side Story … then a small part in (Brecht’s) The Life of Galileo.” Then he tried out for Anything Goes. “Billy Crocker was the part I wanted to go for. And I was ‘OK, I don’t have such a bad voice; I may have something here’. And from then on, people told me ‘hey Paul you have a good voice! You do have some talent; you should try it!’ External approval is a big thing, right? It was a catalyst.”

“My parents raised me to believe nothing was out of my reach if I worked at it….” Theatre was, he says, “something new. And in high school you know what the pressure is like: Oh, this guy’s weird or whatever. But I was gonna try. And it was a great decision I made.”

Encouraged by Grindstone’s resident musical director/composer Abbott to audition for “this thing we’re doing at Grindstone,” he didn’t even ask what it was. He just said “Hey sure!” And so it came to pass that a 17-year-old kid “with no dance background at all” landed a starring dance part as the perpetual motion blue cat Panthro in the Byron Martin/Abbott Cats parody ThunderCats in 2022. “When Byron told me what it entailed I told him ‘I don’t think I’m good enough for any of this’. It was a lot. Ballet, too.” In the event, he took to the show’s most strenuous role with remarkable ease.

Meanwhile as the gigs accumulate, Manguelle is “undergoing” as he puts it, a business degree “I’m very business-savvy. It’s a field I’m interested in. And super-necessary if you want to be an actor, or performer of any kind.” So the schedule in fall and winter is “class in the morning, other classes and work, then rehearsal, then (at the end of the night) studying. “I’m so young and I have so much energy now,  I’m better doing the the most difficult things right now rather than later.” His mom is the schedule-keeper. “I’m not doing this alone!” he says.

Manguelle’s last show in high school was Cyrano de Bergerac. He occupied the title role as the man equally adept with word and sword. And he’s slated to take sword in hand again, in the season finale Citadel production of The Three Musketeers, understudying D’Artagnon, and also Porthos and Buckingham, as well as playing in the ensemble. The country’s foremost fight instructor J.P. Fournier, one of his high school instructors, assisted Manguelle in preparing his fight audition.

“It’s huge for me! I’m, super-excited. There’s a lot for me to learn, personally and professionally!”

Paul-Ford Manguelle and Glenn Nelson in The Drawer Boy, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

And there’s a lot to learn, as he says humbly, from his cast-mates Nelson and McColm in The Drawer Boy. “I look at them as veterans. They’ve done so much. And they’ve been so kind. And so funny. Rehearsals are the smoothest chillest process ever.”

There’s a mystery in The Drawer Boy, and a tribute to storytelling, sacrifice, and friendship. “It’s a beautiful show…. And Miles’s arc, as the catalyst, is amazing,” says Manguelle. “He essentially learns that as artists, it’s not our right to tell people’s stories if they don’t want us to, As creatives we’re looking for material all the time. And sometimes, are we intruding on people’s personal experiences? By the end of the play he realizes this is not my story to tell….”

“Beautiful.”

PREVIEW

The Drawer Boy

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Michael Healey

Starring: Reed McColm, Glenn Nelson, Paul-Ford Manguelle

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Feb. 4

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org

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Heart and hilarity: Made In Italy at the Citadel, a review

Posted on January 12, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Farren Timoteo in Made In Italy, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There has to be a big table.

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That’s what Salvatore, the eminently hospitable patriarch of the Mantini clan, tells us at the outset of Made In Italy. And that’s what its creator and star Farren Timoteo will confirm, theatrically, in a display of virtuoso physical comedy in the course of this funny, touching, insightful many-character solo show.

In scenes that gather momentum, at speed in Daryl Cloran’s production, Timoteo will create an entire Italian family of vivid characters around it, single-handedly and with great precision — hypochrondriac aunties, quirky uncles, smarty-pants cousins, assorted sidekicks in both the Old and New Worlds. It’s his stage. He will sing and dance on it, lift weights on it, do push-ups on it, leap off and onto it in a high-speed profusion of guises. And in the course of a play based on Timoteo’s own immigrant family experiences and structured as courses of an Italian dinner, he’ll bring to it the traditional succession of dishes, from the aperitivo to the dolce. At one point, amazingly, he will populate an entire dinner party — molto vivace and with great clarity.

Farren Timoteo in Made In Italy, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Which is a way of saying that the handsome centrepiece of Cory Sincennes’ atmospheric dining room set, the one essential piece of furniture as Salvatore insists (“the heartbeat” of family life), is built to last. It takes a beating, in a good way, in Made In Italy.

And lasted it has. Since its premiere up seven years ago up close in a studio space at Kamloops Western Canada Theatre and then Citadel’s smallest house the Rice after that, Made In Italy has toured. Sold-out and repeat engagements in theatres of every size and shape —  mainstages across the country these days — are in its history. And there is something just right, of course, about the return of this homegrown hit to Edmonton and the Shoctor stage, in the biggest playhouse in Timoteo’s home town. There is also something challenging about a solo show on a vast stage.

Farren Timoteo in Made In Italy, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Sincennes’ set, backed by a wall of glowing multicoloured stained glass ‘windows’ and (real-life) Timoteo family photos, lands like a bright idea (lighting by Conor Moore and Celeste English) far back in the darkness of that stage. What you lose is the sense of raising a glass with Salvatore in his dining room. What you gain is a certain presentational pizzaz. After all, our joint protagonists are father and son, who share a coming-of-age story driven by the tensions built into the immigrant experience. And Salvatore’s teenage kid Francesco is a singer, an aspiring band leader who breaks out of the family expectations … by performing.    

There is something pretty irresistible about a culture that gravitates to music and art, celebrates its history and traditions, finds its consolations and its particular flavours, together — in all-ages gatherings over great food and wine. But it’s no picnic to be the only Italians in Jasper, Alberta in the 1970s. That’s where Salvatore, inspired by Timoteo’s grandfather, arrived from Abruzzo in the ‘50s to seek out “a better life.”

The moment of truth, for Francesco at six, is a sort of revelation of his outsider status in this alleged “better life.” His eyes are suddenly opened to the sight of sausages hanging from the family porch, wine stains on the driveway, bocce balls all over the lawn. It was, remembers his teenage self, “the single worst day of my life.” So much for Canadian complacency about welcoming multi-cultural divergence. In small-town Alberta the disaffected Italian teenager, a fictionalized version of Timoteo’s dad, is an outsider. He’s bullied constantly, targeted by awful ethnic slurs.

While Salvatore, the transplanted Italian is extolling the beautiful differences of his culture (and, arghhh, making his kid wear a suit to school), Francesco’s goal is to belong, to fit in, to be unremarkable unto invisible in generic Canadian-ness. “What can I doooooo?” he laments.

Francesco starts getting into trouble at school, much to the dismay of his dad. “How come I take the boat across the ocean?” Salvatore says accusingly, in a very funny escalating self-dramatization of his immigration story. “This is why I risk my life to come to Canada? Wazza wrong with you head?”

Farren Timoteo in Made in Italy, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

What turns it around for Francesco is the inspiration of an Italian underdog-turned-hero, one Rocky Balboa, the Italian stallion. Francesco’s preparations for a new life chapter as a warrior occasion some of show’s most hilarious sequences, as he undertakes a riotous campaign of self-improvement. What one extraordinarily gifted physical actor/dancer can do in a comic pas de deux with weights is a showstopper (choreography by Laura Krewski). Ditto the hilarious Act II opening scene, as Francesco tells, and shows, us that time spent on good hair is never wasted, especially in the disco era.

Timoteo is a actor and dancer of acrobatic physical and verbal dexterity, and the impressive physical comedy of the show is such a major contributor to the fun of the evening. The cameos of fellow contestants in an Alberta’s Got Talent-type competition in Act II do seem peripheral to the story-telling in a two-hour show, in truth, funny as they are. But, hey, Timoteo is always fun to watch.

I’d forgotten how skilled he is at aging in the course of the show. Francesco seems to viscerally thickens as he coarsens musically, in expert pastiches of lounge-y songs (Timoteo is the most versatile of singers). What I did remember from previous experiences at the show was the blend, beautifully judged, of comedy and heartbreak in a coming-of-age story about the strains between first- and second-generation immigrants in this country of transplants — the expectations, the pressures, the guilt. Made In Italy has such a warm and affectionate embrace of its characters of all ages. You feel it as a generous squeeze in the theatre. And there’s dessert. Saluti.

Have you read the 12thnight PREVIEW interview with Farren Timoteo. It’s here.

REVIEW

Made In Italy

Theatre: Citadel

Created by and starring: Farren Timoteo

Running: Thursday through Jan. 28

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 7890-425-1820

 

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Did Cinderella’s Ugly Stepsisters get a bum rap? They’re out to prove history wrong in The Spinsters

Posted on January 11, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis in The Spinsters, Small Matters Productions. Photo by Ian Walker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“It’s all about The Dress.”

Birth of a show. It’s 2017, and a man walks six feet behind two strong, tall (funny) women as the three theatre artists stumble home from the Winnipeg Fringe beer tent at the end of a summer night.  An image comes to the man. He imagines the women, “seven feet tall, formidable figures, gliding in elegant dresses.”

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The man is Ian Walker, mechanical engineer turned theatre designer. The women are Christine Lesiak (FOR SCIENCE!, The Space Between Stars) and Tara Travis (Til Death: The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Who Killed Gertrude Crump?), star theatre creators both.

“Great!” says Lesiak, like Travis intrigued by the image conjured by Walker (Lesiak’s real-life partner). “So …  what’s the story?”

Ah, that was the question. And it took a while to answer. Six years and a pandemic later, we’re about to find out, when The Spinsters opens on the Westbury stage Jan. 19, in a Small Matters production that is far from small, except perhaps in cast size.

Lesiak and Travis, veterans of original performance theatre on the cross-country Fringe circuit, one Edmonton- and the other Vancouver-based, had known each other for a decade or more. “We always admired each other and each other’s work — and looked for an excuse to work together,” says Lesiak, a space physicist-turned-theatre artist whose show FOR SCIENCE! combines science and clowning. “A cross-province creation,” says Travis, who’ll  be back at the Edmonton Fringe this summer for the first time since 2016 in a new Monster Theatre production.

Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis in The Spinsters, Small Matters Productions. Photo by Ian Walker

A “giant magical dress show” (with footwear and big hair) had its origin image, but  but got its narrative legs, so to speak, in “isolation times,” as Travis puts it. “When we were allowed, we decided to bubble up in a cabin, on a lake.” Half-way between Vancouver and Edmonton, in the Rockies, “ducks swimming; how did we stand all that tranquility?”

“We shared experiences growing up tall and feeling awkward, bonding over our awkward youths, having bad posture, trouble finding clothes that felt right. And one of us said something like ‘I always felt more like an ugly stepsister than Cinderella…. We looked at each other and … DING!”

“It’s all about The Dress,” though the Brothers Grimm didn’t put it that way in their aspirational fairy tale about the put-upon but upwardly mobile girl, victimized by the meanest step-sisters in sibling history, who gets to rock at the ball and nab the prince. “If you have The Dress you can be anything you want,” as Lesiak puts it. “It’s about access — to the illusion of wealth and class. If you have The Dress you can change your life, and the way everyone sees you, effectively how you’re received.” Travis laughs. “A mask of epic proportions!”

The infamous squabbling duo are the underdogs of the fairy tale world, overshadowed by their famously annoyingly goodie two-shoes (sorry, shoe singular) step-sister. Finally, with The Spinsters, they’re stars. Over coffee, Lesiak and Travis, who have a sisterly hilarity about them and crack each other up constantly, are joined by their amused director Jan Selman. “We meet them after their youths, middle-aged (and single) and still needing all that approbation they never feel they got enough of…. Cinderella had a fairy godmother and they didn’t and it’s really Not Fair.”

And, to add insult to injury, admit it, you don’t even know their names. “They’re tired of the lies always told about them. And they’re wanting to write their own story,” says Lesiak. “They’re trying to reclaim the narrative,” says Travis. “They feel they’re owed.”

Tara Travis and Christine Lesiak in The Spinsters, Small Matters Productions. Photo supplied.

So “no voice, no names, upstaged all the time by Cinderella….” What did they do? “They’ve set out to prove history wrong,” says Travis. “They bought the freakin’ palace,” says Selman. “They’re making good, or at least good enough,” says Lesiak. “And they’re hosting a ball for you, just like the good old days. They’re choosing to perform….”

“We’ve got a point to prove, and we’re gonna prove it,” says Travis. “If it kills us!” says Lesiak.

Selman calls The Spinsters “a big-splash coming-out party. They’ve invited us all; they’ve got a show for us. In their minds they’re opening in Vegas. They set out to show off to the nines, and rehearse the heck out of it. And (mysterious laughter) other things ensue.”

Which is which? “I’m the elder sister,” says Lesiak of her character. “I’m the one who’s more fiscally responsible. I take care of the palace insurance!” She and Travis, who finish each other’s sentences, burst out laughing. “I’m the short-attention gal,” says the latter. “Very impulsive, basically informed by my neurodivergence; yup, I’m an ADHD-er!”

“The sister dimension is so rich,” says Travis, who has several sisters and is very close to them. In a way, she argues, sisterhood is “a more emotionally intimate relationship” than romantic ones; “sisters are  vaults for each other’s secrets.”

“I find working on this I’m always thinking of my sister and our relationship and how it’s changed over the years,” says Selman, a U of A drama prof. “Love and rivalry all bundled together.” Lesiak grins. “I’m the only one here who doesn’t have a sister. And now I feel like I have one.” “You are my chosen sister,” says Travis consolingly.

“It’s a delicate balance” with the stepsisters, she says, “between them in cahoots, then in competition and how quickly that can switch: instant hate, instant love.” Lesiak laughs. “At the end of the end everyone wants the prince.”

The pair assembled their dream team of six design collaborators, some from Vancouver some from Edmonton, and all with innovative theatre cred. As Selman discovered when she joined the team last summer, when “the play existed but was still developing,” they’re “each mad geniuses in their own way, with an intense area of experience.”

The dresses, say the actors and their director, are architectural wonders, engineered (and that’s the right word) by Walker who invented structures for the show, including a chandelier. “Once he entered my life, my envisioning of shows got a lot more complicated when I saw what he could do,” says Lesiak. 1,100 hours of sewing went into the frocks built by Adam Dickson and a team of nine sewers.

How to move in them was the challenge of coach and choreographer Ainsley Hillyard. Puppet designer Dusty Hagerüd (did I mention there are puppets?), had to figure out how his vertiginous wigs — which instantly add at least a foot to already tall women —  could be worn “without pinning them into our heads!” as Travis says with a grin. Composer/sound designer Michael Caron is currently working on Catalyst Theatre’s revival of The Invisible: Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare about to open at the Grand Theatre in London, Ont.   

Physical comedy is something both Lesiak and Travis lean into. Is The Spinsters a clown show? Selman says no. “But they’re bringing their ‘clown stuff’ with them — elevated choices, a great capacity to engage directly with the audience on the spot. Really fun!” There is, after all, no fourth wall in the palace. “There’s always room for the new on any given night,” says Lesiak. “That’s the liveness of live theatre.”

Surprise! “Every scene is a little different in style,” says Selman of the show, which had a short inaugural run in Vancouver before Christmas. “Just when you think you get it, it flips around on you. Physical theatre, yes, but other things too. Stand-up at moments, but not really….” Travis says “you’ll never know what’s next. Unless you’re a very gifted psychic.”

“Bonkers. Yup.” says one. “The most bonkers show either of us has ever been at the root of, for sure,” says the other.

PREVIEW

The Spinsters

Theatre: Small Matters Productions and Edmonton Fringe Theatre

Created by and starring: Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis

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

Running: Jan. 16 through 27

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

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In the beating heart of a big Italian famiglia: Farren Timoteo’s Made In Italy comes home to Edmonton

Posted on January 9, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Farren Timoteo in Made In Italy. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Farren Timoteo has always loved being Italian. “To me, it’s always been great!” he declares with his usual spirited good cheer. “Film-making, sports cars, architecture, fashion and food, music!”

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What’s not to love?

That thought — and that question mark — threads its way into Made In Italy, Timoteo’s hit, much-travelled, coming-of-age solo show, back at the Citadel opening Thursday, this time on the Shoctor mainstage. It’s inspired by the story of Timoteo’s own Italian family, with its vivid multi-generational panoply of idiosyncratic characters — and its appealing teenage protagonist, who’s having a tough time of it growing up Italian, as an immigrant outsider in small-town Alberta in the ‘70s.

Francesco is a fictionalized version of Timoteo’s rock musician dad Luigi, who did indeed grow up in the small and very non-Italian town of Jasper, AB. “My whole life, it’s been art and music, knowing the great contributions Italians have made to the world and how recognized they’ve been for that,”says Timoteo.“It only dawned on me in my 20s my dad had had a difficult time with it … and that if there was going to be a story, it would be rooted in his experiences.”

“Not to be dramaturgically cold, but stories do need conflict; they do need growth and development.” And as Made In Italy audiences of every ethnic background have discovered, the family stories are funny,  and the play also speaks to the immigrant experience, the sense of being outside the mainstream culture and yearning to belong.

The show premiered in Kamloops in 2016 (director Daryl Cloran’s last moments as artistic director of Western Canada Theatre there before he moved to Edmonton) arrives at the Citadel from a sold-out November run in Calgary in both the Theatre Calgary and Alberta Theatre Projects seasons. “It felt like a real community event,” he says. And bringing it home — the 200th performance of Made In Italy happens in Edmonton — is particularly joyful, he says.

For the actor/playwright, who grew up surrounded by music, creating the show grew from roots, and discoveries. “As a teenager I started to play with it, the idea of sharing the experience of the family…. My dad and I would do family impressions at the dinner table, laughing and laughing. Not in a mean-spirited way; we did them for the family too.” It was a father-son bond. He and Luigi, a gigging musician to this day (“he can play anything in the pop repertoire; he’s great on folk; we pride ourselves on being able to rock out!”), are still on the phone with each other every week, “sharing experiences. ‘Do you have a gig? I had a gig’….”

Timoteo had experimented a bit with stand-up comedy in high school,” he says. “The idea of solo performance and Italian comic material was taking shape for me.” And he remembers auditioning at 15 or 16 for a play with a stand-up act about his convivial and quirky family. “And that just took another step when I got to Grant MacEwan Theatre Arts and met Ken Brown (Life After Hockey), who taught us solo performance, and is himself one of the great Canadian solo performers.”

It was the era when classmate Sheldon Elter, another Brown mentee, was creating his one-man show cum personal memoir Métis Mutt. “Somehow I was aware that that as a playwright, something I wanted to be but wasn’t yet, I might want to go into that family material and do something with it,” says Timoteo. “It took me quite a long time to realize the potential.”

And when he did, he asked permission of his dad and the rest of the Timoteos, the aunts and uncles and the cousins, “to share experiences from their lives, to borrow characters and personalities…. And I was also reserving the right to change things as need be. And everybody gave me their blessing.”

Farren Timoteo in Made In Italy. Photo supplied

“I tried very hard to create something hilarious, and fun to do,” he says. “But I was pretty nervous when it was all said and done…. I felt a great responsibility: I’d used these real-life textures and experiences and memories. And to what end? Is this any good?”

His dad, who now lives in Sherwood Park, “made himself very available,” Timoteo says. “We’d meet at the Old Spaghetti Factory on 103rd St. I’d bring a notebook and we’d sit for hours and talk as I filled it up…. He was gracious and kind about making himself vulnerable to reliving his experiences.”

The father in Made In Italy is inspired by Timoteo’s grandfather, who passed away shortly before the show’s premiere in 2016. He’d arrived from Abruzzo in the 1950s with the idea of getting a job (on the railway), bringing his family and creating a better life. “He was a very joyful, kind spirit, the perfect host…. And another one of the great joys of doing the show is resurrecting his spirit,” says Timoteo. “There’s something ghostly and mystical about theatre, about conjuring spirits. They feel very real to me as I perform.” And Cory Sincennes’ set, a dining room with an outsized table, is lined with real photos from the Timoteo album.

The cultural iconography of the show, Italian through and through, is part of Timoteo’s inheritance growing up. Rocky and John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever were “real organic figures in my life.” He remembers being six or seven, getting home from school to see “two VHS tapes face-down on the carpet.” And a solemn coming-of-age pronouncement from his dad, “son, I think you’re old enough now,” as Luigi turned them over: Rocky and Rocky II.  “I was obsessed,” says Timoteo. “I rented Rocky so much from the local video spot they just gave me the big Rocky V cardboard cut-out.”

He laughs. “Rocky, technically, was my first play … on a mattress in an unfinished basement. I’d do ‘plays’. I’d invited people to come over and basically watch me jump around to the Rocky soundtrack, wearing boxing gloves.”

Farren Timoteo, Made In Italy. Photo by Murray Mitchel

When Saturday Night Fever came out, “a lot of pennies dropped for me. Hey, this isn’t just my dad — the rigid hair regime, the dressing a certain way. To quote my dad, when they saw Saturday Night Fever they felt like somebody had been following them.”

The dance in Made in Italy, fun for the audience, is “such an identifier of the period,” Timoteo says of Laura Krewski’s choreography.  “I contacted her immediately, and asked ‘would you …? And she said ‘disco? I’m in!’” Timoteo laughs. “I was 33 when I started and I’m 40 now. That work-out feels a bit different now.”   

“I just had so much fun as a writer digging into as much Italian culture as I possibly could,” he says. “‘70s cinema was practically ruled by Italians: Scorsese, Pacino, De Niro ,Coppola. Great actors, great films. For me I had representation. For my dad, he didn’t…”

Farren Timoteo, Made In Italy. Photo by Murray Mitchell

Italian-ness seems to have followed Timoteo through a stellar theatre career that’s included such starring roles as Black Stache in Peter and the Starcatcher, in which the Mollusks, led by Fighting Prawn, speak a lingo — “manicotti! prosciutto! pasta fazool” — derived exclusively from Italian cuisine. He’s been in (and has directed) Light In The Piazza, the Adam Guettel musical about an Italian romance set in Florence. Last season he turned in a sensational performance as Frankie Valli, he of the swooping falsettos,  in the Citadel production of Jersey Boys. “He felt very relatable,” says Timoteo.

When he became artistic director of Alberta Musical Theatre Company, a touring kids theatre company specializing in sassy original musical versions of fairy tales, Timoteo and the late composer Jeff Unger went back to original Italian sources for their version of Pinocchio. “I discovered my creative voice” at Alberta Musical Theatre, he says of a hands-on ‘writing school’ where such Timoteo signatures as multiple characters, comedy (“sometimes absurdist”), energetic pacing, music, developed. All of it, “practised in front of tens of thousands of children,” is part of the artistic continuum that led to Made In Italy.

Farren Timoteo, Made In Italy. 2017 photo by Murray Mitchell.

A lot has changed in the world since Timoteo first stepped onstage as his dad, his grandfather, and a dozen other characters in 2016. A pandemic, for one thing, that made live performance desperately uncertain for a time. It was at Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton post-pandemic that “we discovered Made In Italy was alive again … and that we could fill a mainstage house.” And alive it’s been (and kicking up those disco moves) ever since.

“I barely remember the first run in Kamloops… I was holding on for dear life trying to remember my lines.” Now, after tours that have taken the show to sold-out houses, sometimes multiple times, in Edmonton, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Hamilton, Calgary, and places in-between — Cloran calls it a bona fide Edmonton success story — “it’s still the same show. But it feels so fun, it’s playful. I feel so free to connect with the audience, to discover all the text as it goes.”

Before it premiered Timoteo had always been concerned whether “a show that was specific to our family’s experience” would resonate with a broader audience. But whether it’s the immigrant story, the cultural deep dive, or the inter-generational experience of the young guy and his father, “the connection is powerful and pretty consistent,” he reports.  And so is the discovery that “a lot of people feel they’re alone when they’re experiencing life as an outsider. It’s fascinating to me now how much that’s a common struggle.”

A communal experience is what theatre is all about, after all. And that, for Timoteo, has been a joyful affirmation.

PREVIEW

Made In Italy

Theatre: Citadel

Created by and starring: Farren Timoteo

Running: Thursday through Jan. 28

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 7890-425-1820

 

  

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Support independent theatre coverage: a new year’s request from 12thnight

Posted on January 6, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Hello theatre friends!

Suddenly, it’s 2024, and Act II of the theatre season is about to begin. Yes there’s more — more of the live theatre experience that’s such a defining part of the city. And it’s my joy and privilege to write about it.

It’s the right moment to thank you, dear readers of 12thnight.ca, for your support and encouragement, for sticking with me through a time of tough challenges for the performing arts everywhere. It’s been inspiring to see the creativity, ingenuity, and persistent our valiant theatre artists have brought to meeting them.

Covering theatre here, independently, outside the vagaries of the mainstream media, is what 12thnight.ca is for. I hope you’ve been enjoying the content which has been, so far, free. And I’m hoping that you’ll be up for chipping in a monthly amount to my Patreon campaign to enable 12thnight.ca coverage of Edmonton’s theatre season to continue. That support from readers is, solely, 100 per cent, what makes it possible. Here’s the link (www.patreon.com/12thnight). Spread the word, as only theatre people can.

If you’re already signed on as a 12thnight.ca patron, I’m so grateful. 12thnight can’t continue without your support.

Meanwhile, we’ll see each other, live and in person, in a theatre soon. Happy new year! And thanks again.

Liz

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What’s up, Edmonton? Act II of the theatre season is about to begin

Posted on January 5, 2024 by Liz Nicholls

Noori Gill, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Mel Bahniuk in Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Lights up, Edmonton. Take your seats, friends; intermission is over. And Act II of the theatre season is about to begin.

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The tip-off? Next week, Farren Timoteo’s terrific (and much-travelled solo show Made In Italy returns to town, on the Citadel mainstage. Broadway Across Canada arrives on the Jube stage with the touring musical Mean Girls (book by Tina Fey), just ahead of the opening of a new movie version. Before that, there’s a Saturday night cabaret at the Grindstone, starring two of this theatre town’s hottest young musical theatre talents: An Evening With Bella King and Josh Travnik: A Capricorn Cabaret.

There will be more, much more, of course, when the vagaries of funding settle for indie theatre. Look for the Plain Janes to return to the Fringe with a musical, Pump Boys and Dinettes, after a year’s hiatus, and there will be a mainstage show, too. Details to come.

Meanwhile, what looks too good to miss?

To whet your appetite, here’s a sampling, in no particular order, of a dozen possibilities, among many, for your nights out at the theatre. Intriguing how many are new plays, premiering on a variety of Edmonton stages before anyone anywhere else gets to see them.

Mel Bahniuk, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Noori Gill in Mermaid Legs, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang

Mermaid Legs: Billed as “a surreal theatre dance fantasia” (and adorned with the season’s most intriguing title), this new play by actor/playwright Beth Graham (Pretty Goblins, The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble, Weasel) is the mainstage centrepiece of this year’s  11th annual SkirtsAfire Festival. It’s all about sisters, the bonds of sisterhood, the destabilizing damages of the stigma attached to mental illness. The three-actor four-dancer SkirtsAfire production (Feb. 29-March 10  at the Gateway Theatre) directed by Annette Loiselle is her grand finale as the festival’s co-founder and artistic director. And it stars actors Noori Gill, Mel Bahniuk, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, and dancers Mpoe Mogale, Alida Kendall, Max Hanic and Tia Kushniruk. Tickets: skirtsafire.com.

Wonderful Joe by Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Brochure photo.

Wonderful Joe: The latest from the actor/playwright/designer/ marionettiste extraordinaire Ronnie Burkett, premiering at his home-away-from-home Theatre Network, is a love letter to the imagination,” as he has described. And old man and his dog Mister, who lose their home, set forth into the great big screwed-up heartbreaking world for one last adventure. Joe has a gift for spotting magic and beauty in the small, the overlooked, the lost and disenfranchised. On their journey the travelling companions meet Jesus, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus … and a homeless troupe of actors. The production created by and starring Burkett runs April 2 to 21 at the Roxy. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.

Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis in The Spinsters, Small Matters Productions. Photo by Ian Walker

The Spinsters: You want the real dirt on the palace, that scandalous business with the footwear, the ragtag victim who gets first a makeover from a fairy godmother — and then the prince? Of course you do. So why not ask Cinderella’s infamously snarly and treacherous step-sisters for the low-low-down? This much-anticipated new dark comedy is from Small Matters Productions, ingenious purveyors of original physical comedy and interactive theatre. And music, movement, shadow puppetry are involved! Christine Lesiak (FOR SCIENCE!, The Space Between Stars) and Tara Travis (Till Death: The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Who Killed Gertrude Crump?) are the joint creators and stars. And the production in the Edmonton Fringe Theatre season Jan. 16 to 27 is directed by Jan Selman. Look for a 12thnight interview with Lesiak and Travis soon. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

Candy & The Beast, Northern Light Theatre. Graphic by Curio Studio.

Candy and the Beast: If you saw Two-Headed/ Half-Hearted, an ingenious two-character song cycle for conjoined twins at Northern Light a couple of seasons ago, you’ll know that prairie gothic has a powerful attraction for playwright/director/designer Trevor Schmidt. This new “multidisciplinary murder mystery/thriller” for two characters seems to return to the dark underbelly of the hinterland with its story of a small-town sister and brother, amateur detectives, who set out from their trailer court to track down a serial killer. Schmidt’s production, starring Jayce McKenzie and Bret Jacobs, runs April 5 to 20. Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com.

The Pillowman: Theatre Yes, whose community-building venture The Play’s The Thing warmed hearts in the fall, returns to the stage in April with something very different: Martin McDonagh’s luridly chilling and provocative 2003 (very) dark comedy. The protagonist, who’s being interrogated by police in a Kafka-esque regime, is a storyteller, whose luridly gruesome fairy tales, designed to keep you awake at night, have landed him and his brother in the slammer. It’s a play that can’t not be argued about. It happens downtown April 11 to 21 in the Pendennis Building, where I’ve never set foot before. Max Rubin directs. Tickets: theatreyes.com.

Pith!: Teatro Live! revives Stewart Lemoine’s magical 1997 tribute to the transforming power of theatre, the imagination, and storytelling. In the production directed by the playwright Feb. 9 to 25 at the Varscona, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, the company’s co-artistic director, returns to a role he played a decade ago: Jack Vail, the vagabond who changes the melancholy life of a widow paralyzed by hope (Kristin Johnston), with an invitation to travel with her maid (Jenny McKillop) on an imaginary South American journey. Tickets: teatro.com.

This Is The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear: Workshop West hosts the Edmonton stop (Jan. 31 to Feb. 4 at the Gateway) of a cross-country tour of David Gagnon Walker’s highly unusual immersive experiment in communal storytelling. Developed at the Found Festival here, with subsequent runs at high-profile national festivals like SummerWorks in Toronto and the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, it’s an invitation to join the multi-talented theatre artist Gagnon Walker in reading aloud the “poetic fable” of the rise and fall of an imaginary civilization in an imaginary land, as emergencies proliferate and crises gather force. Audience participation, yes, but to your own comfort level: you can read a character, you can join the ensemble, you can sit back and listen. Christian Barry of Halifax-based 2b Theatre directs the Strange Victory Performance production with Judy Wensel. Tickets: showpass.com.

Glenn Nelson, Reed McColm in The Drawer
Boy, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

The Drawer Boy: Michael Healey’s Governor General’s Award-winning 1999 play, a Canadian theatre classic that hasn’t been seen in these parts since the early 2000s at the Citadel, is a sort of back story, but more than that a beautiful and intricate tribute to the power of storytelling. It chronicles the adventures of a young actor who’s part of a Toronto company on their foray into the Ontario heartland to research rural life for the play that would become another classic, the landmark collective The Farm Show. John Hudson directs the Shadow Theatre production that stars Glenn Nelson and Reed McColm, and as the young actor Miles, Paul-Ford Manguelle, most recently seen in a cluster of roles in Grindstone Theatre’s Die Harsh. Meet him in an upcoming 12thnight interview. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

Vaches The Musical: You can’t help but be intrigued by the musical that arrives in the L’UniThéâtre season March 21 to 23 at La Cité francophone. Vaches, by Stéphane Guertin and Olivier Nadon was inspired by the dramatic Quebec ice storm of 1998. The protagonist, farmer Jean, is up against the elements, the military, and the mayor as he tries to save hundreds of cows from certain death. The five-actor production is from Ottawa’s Création En Vivo. And, says L’UniThéâtre’s new artistic director Steve Jodoin, it’s “funny and touching, comedy with heart.” With English surtitles. Tickets: lunitheatre.ca.   

Lora Brovold in Dead Letter, Workshop West Playwright’s Theatre. Photo by Dave DeGagné

Dead Letter: Conni Massing’s mischievous new rom-com/mystery takes the universal hunger for meaning and cosmic connection down to the small-scale — to the minor hidden mysteries of our lives. The catalyst is the appearance of a dead letter, years old, in the protagonist’s mailbox. Massing, whose history with Workshop West is long and distinguished (most recently Matari), has a way with witty dialogue and recognizable characters. Heather Inglis’s production (May 17 to June 2 at the Gateway) has the additional draw of a premium cast: Lora Brovold and Collin Doyle, real-life wife and husband rarely onstage together, with Maralyn Ryan. Tickets: showpass.com.

Sunday In The Park With George: You don’t get many chances in life to see Stephen Sondheim’s mesmerizing 1983 masterpiece inspired by the famous painting of the same name by the pointillist  Georges Seurat. It’s a glorious tribute to art and artists, and the price tag on creating it, in a merger of past and present. Jim Guedo directs a MacEwan University theatre arts production March 20 to 24. Tickets: tickets.macewan.ca.

Citadel Theatre, graphic supplied.

The Three Musketeers: Your chance to see a major intersection of  actors, swords and swashbuckling onstage is the lure of the Citadel season grand finale. It’s an adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas tale with its ensemble mantra, “all for one and one for all.” Daryl Cloran’s big-cast production (April 20 to May 12) will have all the period trappings, including lavish costumes, and a contemporary sensibility tuned to comedy, a specialty of the savvy American adapter Catherine Bush. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.

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A clown dreams his own funeral in Corteo: the Cirque du Soleil at Rogers Place, a review

Posted on December 28, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Corteo, Cirque du Soleil. Photo by MajaPrgomet

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Cirque du Soleil has always been a purveyor of the death-defying (gravity be gone!). Corteo, the 2005 Cirque show that’s ensconced for seven performances at Rogers Place, turns its imaginative eye on death: a clown dreams his own funeral.

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And, lo and behold, in Corteo (Italian for cortege) Mauro’s dream is anything but static or sombre. The improbable virtuosos of the storied Canadian company, an international cast of 60, inhabit a free-floating dreamscape of beautiful images and perpetual motion. Angels float by and hover over his bed, angelic stage management par excellence. One teaches him how to fly, and why not? “It’s just like swimming.”

Harlequins appear. Some of them play the appealing klezmer-flavoured score (by Jean-François Coté). One arrives upside down on a tight wire high in the air and holding a candelabra. Funeral parades form, and turn into dance parties. In the stunning opening sequence, women from Mauro’s past, dressed in the floaty lingerie of the 19th century (the work of costume designer Dominique Lemieux) do intricate acrobatics on a trio of sparkling giant chandeliers. O death, where is thy sting?

Corteo, Cirque du Soleil. Photo by MajaPrgomet

A celebratory energy presides in the piece created and directed by circus arts specialist Daniele Finzi Pasca in his debut Cirque assignment. And the personable Mauro (Gonzalo Munoz Ferrer) gets off his death bed in a period suit (the costumes are always fun to look at) to join in. In fact, one of the most energetically ‘impromptu’ scenes is a playful bed-bouncing pillow fight, conjured from childhood, in which all participants amazingly miss braining themselves on the brass bedsteads in the course of triple-somersaults.

Since 2016, the Cirque has toured the show, which premiered in Montreal under the the Grand Chapiteau (the Big Top), to larger-scale arenas, like our own vast hockey emporium. For the occasion, designer Jean Rabasse divides the audience in half, on either side of a stage with a baroque Italianate proscenium frame, decorated by cupids. So we can see a version of ourselves, watching the watchers onstage. The observers in every scene, wonder-generators, are something of a Cirque signature. The stage floor, incidentally, is painted with a labyrinth that, according to the press kit, reproduces “a classic design  on the floor of the aisle in Chartres Cathedral.” Four bands occupy the corners, two on either side, and the singers wander in and out of the stage action and join tableaux of observers from time to time.

And another Cirque signature is an aesthetic with an appetite for surreal imagery, like the unoccupied gaggle of shoes and boots that crosses the stage and disappears through a sort of stage manhole — a possible variation of the clown classic pratfall, minus the human participants.

What’s missing, perhaps, is the mythic resonance of shows like Varekai or Kurios. Ah, or OVO, the last Cirque arena show to come to Edmonton There’s a looser, more free-associative frame in Corteo. But you could argue that dreamscapes, after all, don’t have narrative logic to them; they work the way memory works, by free association.

Having said that, I have to say the Scottish golf scene, with a  human ball, lost me. Mauro seems to be borrowing someone else’s memory, possibly from another show. When it rains rubber chickens and they get juggled, well, haven’t we all dreamed that?

The ultimate dream image? A little person (Anita Szentes), a clown small of stature and huge in charm, attached to giant balloons, floats above the stage, and then the crowd, in an enchantingly weird sequence. We join in to push her feet up and back into the air — audience participation at its oddest. And she rewards us with air kisses. This charismatic personage is the centrepiece of a moment, borrowed from Fellini, in which she and a second Little Clown (Viktor Sovpenets) are on a pedestal. She dances with a giant (Victorino Lujan), sprinkled by an airborne angel with falling show — a human snow globe.

Corteo, Cirque du Soleil. Photo by MajaPrgomet

In the marriage of theatre and circus arts which is the particular genius of the Cirque du Soleil, dreams are the playground for the improbable virtuosos, limber beyond the human, who populate the show. A contortionist (Santé Fortunato) who spins multiple hula hoops while contorting. A team of trapeze acrobats who fling women through the air at each other from opposing towers. Performers of impossible strength and suppleness like the beautiful woman (Stéphanie Altman) who suspends herself into balletic shapes on a swinging pole way above the stage. Or the artists who hurl themselves at terrifying speed off and around a cube of horizontal bars in a complex choreography of near-misses. If they weren’t in perfect sync, you can’t help thinking they’d kill each other. Or the artist (Roman Munin) who somehow manages to climb a free-standing ladder; ah, the route to heaven is precarious my friends.

Corteo, Cirque du Soleil. Photo by MajaProgomet

And in one of the most memorable scenes, no high-flying or gravity defiance at all is involved: the eerie music of a virtuoso whistler (also the “ringmaster”) and the the celestial sound of Tibetan glass and crystal bowls played by performers scattered across the stage.

I have to say that Act II doesn’t sustain the creative theatrical energy of Act I, despite continued angelic intervention. A farcically chaotic scene in an adorable miniature theatre, as Romeo and Juliet falls apart, seems like an elaborate interpolation, for example, and thuds. The clowning palls, and the production becomes a showcase for, admittedly formidable, circus skills.

Or is that a measure of how fast your sense of wonder gets a bit jaded? The Cirque is always the victim of the law of diminishing returns.

The theatricality of the concept may flag after intermission. But the visuals are superb, all retro lighting, costumes, and pageantry. And the reinvention of the unatmospheric cavern that is Rogers includes a top-drawer audio refit. It’s a treat to hear live musicians deliver an attractively exotic score. Great entertainment.

REVIEW

Corteo

Theatre: Cirque du Soleil

Created and directed by: Daniele Finzi Pasca

Where: Rogers Place

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca, cirquedusoleil.com

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2023: The year in Edmonton theatre, part 2

Posted on December 22, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Dayna Lea Hoffmann, A Hundred Words For Snow, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

2023 (part 2). Here’s a small assortment (in no particular order) of highlights — moments, performances, bright ideas, experiences — of the year of live theatre on Edmonton stages.

Home sweet home. 2023 was the year.…

Rapid Fire Theatre got their new “forever home,” the Exchange Theatre in Strathcona, perfect for improv, mere steps from the actors’ pub The Next Act.

The Freewill Shakespeare Festival, evicted from their Hawrelak Park stage found themselves a new home, a vintage Spiegeltent, and built two productions, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night, to fit the locale.

Little Willy, The Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Photo supplied.

Theatre Network brought Another F!*#@$G Festival home to the new Roxy, and the name struck a chord. And here’s heavyweight validation: Jesus Christ and Shakespeare appeared onstage in the same show (Little Willy by the great marionettiste /playwright Ronnie Burkett).

The In Arms Collective brought a memorable production of Makram Ayache’s The Hooves Belonged To The Deer home to Edmonton after a splashy Toronto premiere.

The Answer Is Fringe, the 42nd annual edition of our beloved, outsized wayward summer festival, brought it home, after a few summers of cautious incremental increases. It wasn’t the biggest it’s ever been, but it felt like a return to the Fringe’s old fringe-y self — and sold 114,000 tickets to 185 indoor shows.

Theatre Network premiered a playful new holiday musical With Bells On (based on Darrin Hagen’s festive two-hander) that brought co-creator Devanand Janki (with Tommy Newman) back to his home town to work after decades in New York. And with an 11 o’clock number, Fabulous.

Theatre Yes got a pair of new artistic directors who now call Edmonton home: Ruth Alexander and Max Rubin, who between them are a director, an actor, a musical director, a cabaret artist, a composer. Our gain.

Performances that linger in the mind: 

Austin Eckert, all nervy bravado and simmering rage and angst as the aspirational Black boxer in The Royale.

In a fine ensemble cast, Makram Ayache as the marginalized, increasingly troubled queer Muslim kid, searching for a way to belong, in his play The Hooves Belonged To The Deer

Gianna Vacirca as the quick-witted, wry, often exasperated Lizzie Bennett, who retained the original spirit of Austen amidst the Citadel’s high-spirited screwball ‘fun in the Regency’ version Pride and Prejudice.

Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova in First Métis Man of Odesa, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alexis McKeown.

Mariya Khomutova as a version of herself, funny, charming, and increasingly fractured by the competing urgencies of love, motherhood, and country in First Métis Man of Odesa.

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski (aka Lilith Fair) as the drag queen, flamboyant, sardonic, and charismatic, who shares a stuck elevator with her conceptual opposite, a defeated sad sack accountant in With Bells On.

John Ullyatt in a persuasively subtle performance as an intelligent, civilized man who knows right from wrong, until he somehow doesn’t, in Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes at Theatre Network.

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

Tenaj Williams as the nebbish floral assistant who rises to botanical greatness by striking a Faustian bargain with a carniverous plant in the Citadel’s Little Shop of Horrors.

Dayna Lea Hoffmann as the 15-year-old heroine who sets forth on an arctic expedition in the touching coming-of-age solo show A Hundred Words for Snow at Northern Light. And as the beleaguered grad student server surrounded by her alter-egos, starting to have her doubts about the feminist success story in Karen Hines’ funny insightful satire All the Little Animals I Have Eaten, at Shadow Theatre.

Bella King, Josh Travnik, Andrea House, Mark Sinongco in Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Andrea House as the irrepressible Mitzi, queen of the ‘60s Edmonton supper club scene that’s the setting for the homegrown musical Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, revived this year by Teatro Live!.

Gabby Bernard and Geoffrey Simon Brown, entirely convincing as a couple of millennials trapped in an unsatisfying reality that’s gradually being erased by the internet, in Subscribe or Like at Workshop West.

Kate Newby as Dorothy Parker in Fresh Hell, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Kate Newby as the acerbic wit Dorothy Parker in Conni Massing’s Fresh Hell, at Shadow Theatre.

Jason Sakaki, Kale Penny, Farren Timoteo (front), Devon Brayne in Jersey Boys, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Farren Timoteo brought unexpected emotional layers to his stage-owning portrait of Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys (not to mention an eerie command of those virtuoso falsetto swoops).

Amelia Sargisson, pitch perfect in a comic performance as the flinty and charming Gwendolyn in the Citadel’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Braydon Dowler-Coltman, who (in addition to playing Miss Bingley and Mr. Wickham) fashioned a very funny comically physicalized portrait of the narcissistic cleric Mr. Collins in the Citadel’s Pride and Prejudice.

Kristin Johnston as a mysteriously traumatized but self-possessed woman in Mob, at Workshop West.

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

Clown performance of the year: A Tie. Nadien Chu as the party-hearty tippler Lady Toby clutching an assortment of drinks in Twelfth Night and Zachary Parsons-Lozinski (see above) in full drag foliage slipping into that heightened style with daffy aplomb in With Bells On.

What we have got they don’t got:

Not one but two improv comedy companies who created an original holiday musical. (a) Rapid Fire Theatre’s The Blank Who Stole Christmas is an impressively impossible hybrid of the improvised and the scripted, in which the cast is confronted every night by a different villain, unknown to them in advance and completely unrehearsed. (b) Grindstone Theatre’s daffy, theatrically ingenious, and very funny Die Harsh, an amusingly synchronized mash-up of that thriller and A Christmas Carol by the team of Byron Martin and Simon Abbott. Both shows, incidentally, run through Saturday night at the Exchange Theatre and the Varscona Theatre, respectively.

Bright idea of the year: Theatre Yes’s The Play’s The Thing, a two-night “deconstruction” of Hamlet, with 20 Edmonton stage companies each doing a scene in their own signature style. An experiment in community bonding.

Surprise concept of the year: Director Jackie Maxwell boldly set her production of Importance of Being Earnest, that high-Victorian comic jewel ahead by half a century into the 1950s. And it was an unexpected fit. Which only goes to show the class system with all its trimmings, including parental authority, respectability and privilege, doesn’t age.

Romar Dungo and Maxwell Hanic in Boy Trouble, Amoris Projects. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

New talent: directors Benjamin W. Smith (Indecent) and Brett Dahl (Strange/ Familiar), playwright Emma Houghton (Freaky Green Eyes, a stage adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oates novel), actors Mohamed Ahmed (a portrait of wary grace in The Royale) Romar Dungo (a gay Filipino kid stepping up to domestic and social pressures in Boy Trouble).

Dramatic premise of the year: Many possibilities. Here are three. (a) The protagonist of Elyne Quan’s Listen Listen, which premiered at Teatro Live, is passionately devoted to, and fierce in his defence of his favourite art form, Muzak, music expressly created to not listen to. (b) In each scene of Darrin Hagen’s very dark comedy 10 Funerals, the same gay couple is returning from a funeral (with two sets of actors), a kind of survey of gay life from the huge death toll from AIDS through the gay party scene, activism and onward. (c) Die Harsh: Grindstone Theatre’s ingenious hybrid of the irredeemable action thriller and the world’s most famous redemption ghost story, A Christmas Carol.

Moments you take with you: 

Jason Hardwick’s tap number in First Date at the Mayfield, a full-on validation of the proposition that all New York waiters are artistes waiting for their big break.

Hodan Youssouf in After Faust, RISER Edmonton 2023. Photo by Brianne Jang

In Connor Yuzwenko-Martin’s ambitiously off-centre After Faust at RISER 2023, Elon Musk leads a bicycle charge through the twinkling galaxy.

In a funny deadpan performance as a Count Orsino in Amanda Goldberg’s music-filled version Twelfth Night for the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, Scott Shpeley strides briskly up the aisle toward the stage carrying his double-bass the way ordinary mortals carry their lunch.

In Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s at Teatro Live, a musical comedy pair of scene-stealers (Josh Travnik as a wry deadpan bartender and Bella King as a rule-bound account manager) find themselves at a bus stop trying out their dawning realization they may be attracted to each other, via a terrific Ryan Sigurdson/Farren Timoteo song.

Chris Dodd in Deafy, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

The realization that Chris Dodd’s Deafy was the first play by a Deaf playwright on a Citadel stage, in 58 years.

Creating the theatrical world: In a great year for designers on Edmonton stages, full of contributions by projection specialists, sound and lighting whiz kids, here’s a sampling of stand-outs.

Beyata Hackborn’s tilted high-tech quilt of frosted tiles and light-up doorways into the internet nightmare for Workshop West’s Mob.

Anahita Dehbonehie’s design for The Hooves Belonged To The Deer, a wood-slatted chamber of red sand, dominated by a ladder, for a play that moves beyond the prairie horizons to the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Knowledge, and … heaven.

Darrin Hagen’s serial sound score calibrates the subtly gradated declension into a queasy world of bad behaviour in Theatre Network’s Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes.

Roy Jackson’s lighting made dramatic contributions to Northern Light’s Enough, with scenes divided between 30,000 feet in the air and on the ground, and to the unnerving glow of the internet world in Workshop West’s Subscribe Or Like.

Alison Yanota’s design for A Hundred Words For Snow at Northern Light made of the stage an ice floe in a sea of ice overhung with translucent icicles, an effect enhanced by Matt Schuurman’s projections and Daniela Fernandez’s eerie cosmic sound score.

Nadien Chu, Alexander Ariate, Jeff Lillico, Helen Belay, Amelia Sargisson, Davina Stewart, Julien Arnold in The Importance of Being Earnest, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Michael Gianfrancesco’s gorgeous array of high-style ‘50s costumes for the Citadel’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Cory Sincennes’ evocatively detailed design conjured the backstage view of big self-contained theatre in the Citadel/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s Trouble in Mind.

Daniel Van Heyst’s design for Shadow Theatre’s Fresh Hell created a shimmering liminal space where 20th century Central Park in Manhattan and the 15th century French countryside somehow meet.

Have you seen 2023: the year in Edmonton theatre, Part 1, the play’s the thing? It’s here.

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