Mirror mirror on the wall … the holiday panto is back. Snow White at the Capitol Theatre, a review

Posted on December 1, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Chris Bullough and Andy Northrup in Snow White – a pantomime, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Hello friends!” an extrovert fairy calls out to us, every time she arrives onstage. And every time we holler back, in unison as coached, “Best Fairy Ever!” Now there’s all-ages audience rapport for you.

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Yup, the Christmas panto is back in town, in the charming Capitol Theatre on 120th Street at Fort Edmonton Park, where pantos have made themselves at home, off and on, since 2014. For the occasion, writer/director Jennifer Krezlewicz of the new company Edmonton Repertory Theatre has ransacked the fairy tale Snow White, for a blithely oddball holiday song-and-dance musical comedy that does handsprings off the Grimm remains.

Will we help Cinabon (Debbie Plaquin) get her fairy bona fides, her GFL (graduated fairy licence)? She only has her Learner’s. By the immutable laws of the panto, a Brit export of time-honoured exuberance and eccentricity, we support our allies onstage. Loudly. And we boo their enemies, like the evil court magician Jasper (Chris Bullough) plotting to marry the beautiful princess S.W. (Asiah Holm) against her will. Loudly. And when we’re asked for our input — “I don’t know what I should do! Can you guide me?” — we offer sage advice. Loudly.

Snow White – a pantomime, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied

For Snow White Krezlewicz has assembled a classic panto mash-up of fairy tale riffs, topped up with local allusions, re-purposed pop songs, and dance breaks. And a personable talking Cat named Oregano (Francie Goodwin-Davies), along with other life-sized critters (exeunt pursued by a bear: hold that thought). Kid, a rare bird who works as a mascot for the Edmonton Riverhawks, wanders in and out of the action.

Kid from Edmonton Riverhawks, Snow White, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

Ah, and there’s the Dame, de rigueur in matters of pantomime. She’s  a formidably burly deep-voiced sort who looks remarkably, well, festive all dolled up like a cake in Cherie Howard’s costumes. Andy Northrup rises to the comic occasion as Dame Bumbo Bee, confectioner and up-stager extraordinaire — with an assortment of exasperated eye-rolls, winks, and come-hither looks. He’s a riot.

“Never date a hockey player,” the Dame advises, having been over that blue line a few times. And she dismisses shivs about her age like so much lint off a lapel: “I’m fresh as morning dew.”

What gives pantos their distinctive flavour and appeal to every age of kid and grown-up is the rarefied combination of silly and sly, vintage and updated references, generic and local. And Snow White is on it. The kids get the jokes on one level, grown-ups on another. Pantos love their entendres double.

Bullough’s Jasper rises (lowers?) to evil with manic glee. The actor has played Richard III in his time, and this is Tricky Dick on uppers, ricocheting around the stage, gloating over his bad-ness, waving his wand like a conductor. “I’m evil, I’m evil, so don’t mess around with me,” he sings, with an intensity Elvis never achieved.  Michelle Todd is droll as a vague Queen who’s on the brink of her “warmer years,” as per the song “feelin’ hot hot hot.”

And the premier Canadian kids’ entertainer Fred Penner is present as the voice of the Mirror (and in a song, Brave, he wrote especially for the show, in honour of a hero with self-esteem issues), a truth teller with melodic voice and a secret alter-ego, .

Capitol Theatre, Fort Edmonton Park

You’ll get a kick out of the hero-in-progress, played by Rogan Coffey, a self-effacing nebbish who’s afraid of everything, including his impressively A-type mama, the Dame. As a baker who’s been forced to pivot to court huntsman, he has a contemporary career problem. And so does S.W., a princess who’s at heart a biology nerd with a specialty in bug studies, and a preference for jodhpurs over gowns.

They meet by chance at the Christmas Market next door to the Capitol Theatre. And the show is salted and peppered with Edmonton references (the LRT and Stony Plain Road construction are now comic targets, along with the Oilers and premiers with no skills). And you’ve got to love a family show with a classic cake-in-the-face moment.

Anyhow, there is absolutely no use me telling you the story. Will everyone make it through the Slough of Death? Will the hero embrace a quest and discover bravery? Will the Mirror release his true identity? My lips are sealed. Suffice it to say you can take your entire family to Snow White, and hoot and holler and sing along to The Cat Came Back, and have a blast. And there’s holiday magic in that.

Meet writer/director Jennifer Krezlewicz in this 12thnight preview here.

REVIEW

Snow White – A Pantomime

Theatre: Edmonton Repertory Theatre and Wild Heart Collective, as part of Edmonton Christmas Market

Written and directed by: Jennifer Krezlewicz

Starring: Chris Bullough, Andy Northrup, Debbie Plaquin, Francie Goodwin-Davies, Michelle Todd, Asiah Holm, Rogan Coffey, Hanna Kate Skibin, Kevin Tokarsky, Sue Huff, Justin Deveau, Kid from Edmonton Riverhawks

Where: Capitol Theatre, Fort Edmonton Park

Running: through Dec. 17

Tickets: yegxmasmarket.com/capitol-theatre-events    

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The Blank Who Stole Christmas: Rapid Fire Theatre’s original Christmas musical is back, with a different villain every show

Posted on November 29, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“You’re a mean one, Mr. (Blank)… You’re as cuddly as a cactus/ You’re as charming as an eel….”

They’ve always wanted a holiday tradition to call their own, a special Christmas show that, as Matt Schuurman says, “is very Rapid Fire.”

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That was the Sugarplum Fairy that danced in the heads of Rapid Fire’s deluxe improvisers in 2018, says their artistic director, retracing the route to the return Thursday of RFT’s original Christmas musical The Blank Who Stole Christmas. 

Theatre companies regularly ‘Bah humbug!’ their way to fame and fortune every Christmas. Ballet companies have their dancing nutcrackers, sure, and symphonies their Hallelujah Choruses. But an improv comedy company? A theatre that specializes in the unpredictable, in not knowing exactly how everything will turn out, by definition?

Five years ago Schuurman was looking at “our show season and audience attendance trends,” he says. And he was pondering the mystery that while December was the busiest of months for Rapid Fire’s corporate gig arm, “our December audiences were some of the lightest of the year, historically.” Conclusion: “we need a Christmas show!”

The closest RFT had come to a show for the figgy pudding season, during the company’s eight-year residence in the Citadel’s Zeidler Hall, was to invite the actor playing Scrooge in the Citadel’s A Christmas Carol to an improv night. “He’d say all his lines, and we’d improvise around him.”

“We always love the match-up of script and improv,” says Schuurman. Enter Dr. Seuss and his famous anti-hero. Getting the Grinch rights would be impossible, of course, and “we wouldn’t want to do a straight-up version of that anyhow.”

The other inspiration for The Blank Who Stole Christmas was a hit holiday show (still up and running)  that a former RFT artistic director Kevin Gillese had created for Rapid Fire’s sibling improv company Dad’s Garage in Atlanta. Invasion Christmas Carol, as Schuurman describes, is a version of the Dickens tale, “with all the roles in place. Then at every performance an invader walks in — a member of the ensemble as any character they want in any costume — and crashes the show. And the cast, who have rehearsed the script have to adapt…. I loved the idea!”

So Schuurman and co set about creating “an homage, a love letter, to everything Rapid Fire. What’s all the stuff we can cram into one show? Like (the Citadel’s) A Christmas Carol, so full of theatre magic, effect, spectacle, and wonder. Let’s do that, all that fun and joy in one show — but in an improv way!”

The Blank Who Stole Christmas, Rapid Fire Theatre. Photo supplied.

Rapid Fire Theatre’s Christmas musical is “heavily based on the Grinch,” as you’ll glean from the title. Two RFT stars Gordie Lucius and Joleen Ballendine wrote the script. And Erik Mortimer and Chris Borger wrote the songs. “We’ve upped the ante with an actor’s nightmare (scenario),” says Schuurman. The lead actor, who arrives onstage as a character of their choice — a different guest star every performance — hasn’t been to a single rehearsal, much less learned any of their lines. “And the cast of five around them is trying to stay on script, but having to improvise to respond and adjust….”

Yes, the Blank is the ultimate agent of comic chaos. They’re the star of a uniquely dizzy showbiz adventure, different every performance. “The first couple of scenes, before the arrival of the Blank, are perfectly scripted, and then the pages get emptier and emptier,” Schuurman laughs.

And that happens with the songs, too, which start complete, and then get looser as they shove lyrics aside to make space for improv. “You have to sing, to Erik’s backing tracks. But sometimes there are no lyrics!” That kind of spontaneity is, well, terrifying. But then, that kind of brinkmanship is how Rapid Fire’s improvisers like their theatre, live in the most challenging way, fully charged, and in the moment.

a previous performance of The Blank Who Stole Christmas, Rapid Fire Theatre. Photo supplied.

No one except the guest star knows in advance who the Blank will be. Schuurman reports that in two runs, in 2019 and last season, “sometimes the character is very specific, a celebrity impression or a pop culture reference, sometimes more generic.” One performance, John McClane showed up as the Blank, an intriguing pairing of Die Hard and Dr. Seuss. One of the most eccentric choices belongs to RFT’s Paul Blinov, who arrived onstage as Charles Darwin engaged in a scientific study and “obsessed with earth worms.” A WEM mall cop was the Blank in one performance, which led to an outbreak of  local references. Even “the shirtless roller-blading guitar guy” who haunts Strathcona has been the Blank.

A previous performance of The Blank Who Stole Christmas, Rapid Fire Theatre. Photo supplied

The show exists in three different versions, one “nice’ (kids’ matinees), one “naughty” (for 8 p.m. evening shows that are “more South Park than Seuss” as Schuurman describes), and one “wicked” for the late-night crowd.

Schuurman’s daughter Alice, a showbiz veteran in her single-digit years, “has often given me notes,” he laughs. The performer playing the Blank is “a secret,” says Alice’s dad, who’s directing the show this year for the first time. “Only I have the list.” The element of surprise, after all, is part of the fun. But there’s an optional spoiler link on the RFT website, with “a very easy hint” about the actor for improv fans.

RFT’s holiday tradition, happening for the first time in their new ‘forever home’ at the Exchange Theatre, can never grow old. “Literally any character works … beloved or low-status. And the cool thing is that we will never run out of possibilities. We have a year’s worth of references to work with!”

PREVIEW

The Blank Who Stole Christmas

Theatre: Rapid Fire Theatre

Directed by: Matt Schuurman

Starring: Abby Vandenberghe, Marg Lawler, Lee Boyes, Katie Turner and Katie Yoner, Michael Vetsch

Where: Rapid Fire Exchange Theatre, 10437 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Dec. 23

Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com

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And so it begins, the holiday show season: a new company returns the panto to the Capitol Theatre at Fort Edmonton

Posted on November 27, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Snow White – a pantomime, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

People, lighten up. It’s a theatre town, my friends, and you are sliding inexorably into the season of the holiday show, of every stripe and persuasion.

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It launches officially this very week, with the return of the Citadel’s lavish production of A Christmas Carol, the return of Rapid Fire Theatre’s own holiday tradition The Blank Who Stole Christmas, the return of the giddy theatre-panto-podcast mash-up It’s A Wonderful Christmas Carol to Fort Edmonton’s Capitol Theatre. AND the return of a vintage all-ages entertainment to that vintage venue, thanks to a new Edmonton theatre company.

The panto, the high-spirited holiday tradition that might be Britain’s kookiest export ever — daffier than the shrimp crisp, Marmite, or the pronunciation of ‘slough’ — is to be found, come Wednesday, at the  elegant Capitol Theatre, a 1929 reproduction on 1920 St. in Fort Edmonton Park. Snow White is the calling card of the new Edmonton Repertory Theatre. And for the occasion artistic director Jennifer Krezlewicz has fashioned (and directs) an original eight-actor musical comedy — “my first full-length play” — from the Grimm fairy tale.

As she points out,  Snow White – a pantomime comes with all the classic panto ingredients: a cross-dressing Dame, a beautiful princess, an aspirational fairy, a princess, a status villain, an unexpected hero, a gilt-edged invitation to the audience to be rowdy…. And, yes (to anticipate your question) there’s a pantomime cat, Oregano by name (christened in honour of MLA Janis Irwin’s celebrity puss-in-boots).

Snow White – a pantomime, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo suppied

You can’t have a panto without slapstick, goofy jokes, dancing … and music. Krezlewicz reached out to the star kids’ entertainer Fred Penner, “and he agreed to be in the show!” Not only does Penner voice the Magic Mirror (you know, the one on the wall who answers the fateful question ‘who’s the fairest of them all?’) and the Good Fairy, but to Krezlewicz’s delight he wrote the company an original song, Brave. “I sent him the script, and he thought I did OK!” she says modestly.

Krezlewicz, who’s directed pantos before now but never written one, was an early panto convert as a kid: Ross Petty’s Cinderella (a Toronto panto tradition for many years), via “my parents’ Beta recording…. It was so funny, so geared to silly. That was the catalyst that (pushed) me into comedy.” And it was an experience she’s passed on to her own kids, four in number, ages seven to 15. As “super-funny people” themselves, they contribute to the comedy quality control. “Guys, is this funny?” Krezlewicz asks. And she’s prepared to hear ‘not really’, and adjust accordingly.

It’s all about fun, she says. “Kids don’t have to sit still; they don’t have to ‘behave’.” And “audience interaction” is built into the entertainment. The fourth wall vanishes into the ether. “We have two actors walk through the audience to get back onstage.”

“We’ve been workshopping as we go, on the fly,” she says of the production that runs as part of the Edmonton Christmas market at Fort Edmonton Park. “The cast are so flexible, consummate pros, and so funny! If the crew is laughing, this is good.”

“For me, quality family programming is lacking here, outside of festivals,” Krezlewicz thinks. It’s a contribution Edmonton Repertory Theatre can make, she says. “If you can engage a six-year-old.…”

Chris Bullough and Andy Northrup in Snow White – a pantomime, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

Edmonton Repertory Theatre (a re-branding of a theatre that disappeared in 2015) “was born out of the idea that the process of theatre needs to adapt,” to be more accessible to artists with kids and family responsibilities, for example. “Twenty people are involved in a show with a cast of eight,” says Krezlewicz. So if a cast member can’t make a matinee, there’s a replacement. Unusually, “all our rehearsals are in the evening, over an extended rehearsal period…. So people can pay their mortgages at the end of the day. We’re working on building a work-life balance.”

She describes it as “a hybrid model” for professional theatre, “a reinvention of what’s possible in the post-pandemic world.” And she’s pleased with this debut production: “when the actors show up, they’re really prepped and ready to work.

The core company of 10 has big plans, including a home venue where, as a rep company, they can do more than one show at a time. “There’s a lack of mid-sized venues with availability,” Krezlewicz says of their research into the venue scene city-wide. Currently, they’re studying the feasibility of reno-ing the Princess Theatre, with its 300-seat main house, its 120 seats downstairs, and its their floor rehearsal and event space.

Krezlewicz’s theatre history started with dance. And she was an actor until the early 2000’s, when she left theatre for eight years (“and desperately missed it”). “I fell into directing,” she says of a gravitation to being the artist who “controls the space and paints the pictures.”

A 2018 women director’s intensive course at the Banff Centre was a life-changer, she reports. And the mentorship of Carey Perloff of Seattle Rep, the long-time artistic director of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, has been seminal, as Krezlewicz describes.

Her vision for Edmonton Repertory Theatre includes “classic pieces (“I want to play in rich text”) with a blend of contemporary work.” Meanwhile, there’s an inaugural production, big and boisterous. “No grants,” she says. “It’s been a matter of begging, borrowing, calling in favours. An incredible journey.”

PREVIEW

Snow White – A Pantomime

Theatre: Edmonton Repertory Theatre and Wild Heart Collective, as part of Edmonton Christmas Market

Written and directed by: Jennifer Krezlewicz

Starring: Chris Bullough, Andy Northrup, Debbie Plaquin, Francie Goodwin-Davies, Michelle Todd, Asian Holm, Rogan Coffey, Hanna Kate Skibin, Kevin Tokarsky, Sue Huff, Justin Deveau, Kid from Edmonton Riverhawks

Where: Capitol Theatre, Fort Edmonton Park

Running: Wednesday through Dec. 17

Tickets: yegxmasmarket.com/capitol-theatre-events    

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‘Concert and vacation’: Teatro season-opener Far Away and Long A-Gogo! A review.

Posted on November 25, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Andrea House, Farren Timoteo and Kendra Connor in Far Away and ong A-Gogo!, Teatro Live!, photo by Stewart Lemoine.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Far Away And Long A-Gogo, the “concert and vacation” that launches the new Teatro Live season starts, quite hilariously, in the kind of impasse that showbiz is designed to trounce. It’s a medley, slowed to lugubrious slo-mo, of musical theatre songs about being stuck in one place, and feeling bad.

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Farren Timoteo drags his way through Bidin’ My Time from Gershwin’s Crazy For You. Cy Coleman’s “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This is Kendra Connor’s aspirational declaration. And the ne plus ultra of feeling low, the depression capper so to speak, is I Wish I Was Dead from the Bernstein/Comden/Green musical On The Town. Andrea House kills it.

After that, three Teatro faves, strikingly versatile actor/singers with great pipes (and a three-piece band led by musical director Cathy Derkach) deliver an unusually eclectic  ‘concert experience.’ It’s a musical invitation to consider travel and “a change of scene” in all its implications, literal and metaphorical, from every perspective including sideways, aerial view, comic underbelly, and dreamscape.

Andrea House, Farren Timoteo and Kendra Connor in Far Away an Long A-Gogo!, Teatro Live!. Photo by Stewart Lemoine.

There isn’t much by way of between-song commentary or theatrical trapping beyond three standing microphones, a chaise longue, a couple of bouquets — and a dexterous trio which includes Derkach on keyboard, Andreas Wegner on bass and Cooper Ray on drums. So there’s no travel agent, in effect, beyond the intriguingly wide-ranging selection of songs curated by Teatro resident playwright Stewart Lemoine, whose theatre, from the start, has always leaned imaginatively into the experience of music you might not know.

And, as gathered by Lemoine, they resonate in very different ways that pretty much leave the emotional itinerary to you — in travel to exotic destinations, including the uncharted terrain of love, for example, or transformational escapes from solitary terra firma like Strangers in Paradise (a tune by the Russian composer Alexander Borodin that found its way into the ‘50s Broadway musical Kismet).

Why do people travel? The puckish cynic Noel Coward is good on this; Connor sings, with appealing lightness, his Sail Away, a veritable manifesto to travelling light. “When you feel your song/ is orchestrated wrong/ Why should you  prolong your stay?” Which may be a warning against reliance on carry-on instead of checking, or chucking, your bag (discuss).

Fresh from a sold-out run of his solo show Made In Italy in Calgary (he’ll be at the Citadel in January), Timoteo, who has a powerhouse operatic voice, delivers the aria Il Mondo Era Vuoto (“the world was empty”) from the Adam Guettel musical Light in the Piazza. And at virtuoso tempo he nails the very funny patter song Tchaikovsky, a ferociously speedy rhyming list of Russian composers. It’s from the ‘40s musical Lady in the Dark, a collaboration between Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin and Moss Hart. And I’m now mightily curious to see it, if only to find out how on earth this song tucks into the story of a woman courted by two guys and unable to make up her mind.

There are songs about the journeying involved in falling in love. And there’s an outstanding Rodgers and Hart song, It Never Entered My Mind (beautifully sung by House) about the solitary aftermath of love. The jauntiest of the evening’s songs are about the fun, and the sense of possibility, built into New York — the concept and the city. Take Me Back to Manhattan from Anything Goes gets a spirited delivery by House. “The crazy skyline is right in my line….”

The Act I finale, the Tonight quintet from West Side Story, is an astonishing capture of  about the rush of feeling one’s life transform, in the very moment. And the cast of three is joined by a couple of other Teatro faves, on opening night Jenny McKillop and Rachel Bowron.    

Neither play nor revue nor cabaret, Far Away and Long A-Gogo!, is billed as a concert that’s a musical introduction, through the Lemoinian lens, to a Teatro season of comedies — including Pith!, The Oculist’s Holiday and Coward’s Private Lives — linked by ideas of travel, adventure, discovery. And in the end, it adds up to thoughts about change — in locale, in sense of self, in emotional landscape. Also there’s this: it’s for all of us who have ever felt the urgent need to have a holiday from ourselves.

The last word to Cole Porter, via one of his musicals that rarely gets produced, Nymph Errant. “Before you leave these portals/ To meet less fortunate mortals … ” House sings in Experiment, a droll but telling exhortation to be curious and try things out, just like scientists do. At the start of a theatre season, words to live by.

Did you have a peek at 12thnight’s PREVIEW chat with musical director Cathy Derkach? It’s here.

REVIEW

Far Away and Long A-Gogo!

Theatre: Teatro Live?

Curated by: Stewart Lemoine

Musical director: Cathy Derkach

Starring: Kendra Connor, Andrea House, Farren Timoteo

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Sunday, and Nov 30 to Dec. 3, eight performances only

Tickets: teatrolive.com, varsconatheatre.com

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There’s no cure like travel: Far Away and Long A-Gogo! launches the Teatro Live season

Posted on November 22, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Andrea House, Farren Timoteo, Cathy Derkach, Kendra Connor rehearsing Far Away and Long A-Gogo!, Teatro Live!. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Oh, there’s no cure like travel/ To help you unravel/ The worries of living today…. “ — Anything Goes, Cole Porter

Ah, wanderlust. The journey as antidote to what ails you. “When the poor brain is cracking/ There’s nothing like packing/ A suitcase and sailing away.”

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Teatro Live! launches their 42nd season, a November to July lineup slanted to “adventure, travel, and discovery,” Thursday with a “concert event.” Far Away and Long A-Gogo! isn’t a play, says musical director Cathy Derkach, searching for the mot juste. Cabaret? Not really. Musical revue? Nope. And not a song cycle either.

With music curated by Teatro’s resident playwright Stewart Lemoine, the “concert event,” which has only eight performances over two weekends, gathers a trio of Teatro faves — Kendra Connor, Andrea House and Farren Timoteo. And it puts them onstage with a live band of three including Derkach, a Teatro star herself of long standing, on keyboard.

Cathy Derkach

“It’s the flavour of travel,” says Derkach, fresh from a starring role in Shadow Theatre’s premiere production of Crescendo!. Travel through time and space, across decades and oceans. “Literal travel, and travel within oneself,” along with the rediscoveries attached to “the feeling of change” and the return home.

The far-reaching song list “presents many challenges,” she says happily, “as Stewart does.” In Lemoine’s own plays, life changes are often attached to musical experiences, from the operatic and full-scale symphonic to the beginner piano student handbook. That Sondheim, Jacques Brel, Noel Coward, and Petula Clark are cast-mates in this new show might give you some idea of the range of Far Away and Long A-Gogo.

In her work as a vocal coach, musical director, accompanist, and mentor in the musical theatre performance program at MacEwan University, Derkach “plays hundreds of songs.” So when she says “challenging,” talks about “breaking the code of the composer,” and points to songs in the program she hadn’t known in advance, that counts, big time.  

Andrea House, Farren Timoteo, Cathy Derkach, Kendra Connor in rehearsal for Far Away and Long A-Gogo!, Teatro Live!. Photo supplied.

Some you will recognize, the Tonight quintet from West Side Story, for example, in which Connor, House and Timoteo are joined by two special mystery guests. Or Kander and Ebb’sNew York, New York. But even musical theatre devotés might not have rubbed shoulders with the Kurt Weill/Ira Gershwin musical Lady in the Dark, with its very funny Tchaikovsky patter song. Or the 1933 Cole Porter musical Nymph Errant. Or the Act II opener Dream With Me from Bernstein’s 1950 musical Peter Pan.

Derkach is especially intrigued by the provenance of the jazz standard Stranger in Paradise, which Timoteo delivers. It’s from the ‘50s musical Kismet, based on music by the Russian composer Alexander Borodin.

Travel and adventure, literal and metaphorical, threads through the Teatro season. The company’s most travelled show, Lemoine’s 1997 Pith! returns Feb. 9 to 25, in a revival directed by the playwright and starring Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Kristin Johnston (casting of the third role has yet to be announced). It is, par excellence, a theatrical tribute to the power of the imagination to transform the life of a widow paralyzed by grief.

Lemoine’s 2009 comedy The Oculist’s Holiday is a rom-com Euro-holiday adventure, in which a Canadian travels to Lausanne, meets an eye doctor, and, yes, her vision changes. The revival directed by Belinda Cornish happens May 30 to June 16. And the season finale in July, Noel Coward’s prickly Private Lives starring Cornish and MacDonald-Smith and directed by Max Rubin of Theatre Yes, is a kind of travel adventure, too. A warring couple whose marriage has gone up in flames meet by accident on their separate honeymoons, with new partners, in the south of France.

PREVIEW

Far Away and Long A-Gogo!

Theatre: Teatro Live?

Curated by: Stewart Lemoine

Musical director: Cathy Derkach

Starring: Kendra Connor, Andrea House, Farren Timoteo

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Sunday, and Nov 30 to Dec. 3

Tickets: teatrolive.com, varsconatheatre.com

 

 

 

  

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You know you’re Canadian if … Canada Rocks: The Reboot, at the Mayfield. A review

Posted on November 19, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Canada Rocks: The Reboot, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You know you’re Canadian if …

You’re prepared to crank up the barbecue in December. You make your kids’ Halloween costumes roomy enough to fit over a snowsuit. You know that double-double doesn’t just mean toil and trouble. And you know you’re Canadian Indigenous, as we’re told by a smiling Indigenous artist (Sheldon Elter), if you know that an M&M is “moose meat and macaroni”!

Five years ago the Mayfield assembled a hit revue with a non-pushy (quintessentially Canadian?) name. Canada 151, by the team of Will Marks and Gerrad Everard, was designed to celebrate this big wide country’s music and musicians — along with its signature cultural motifs, its idioms, its jokes, its personality quirks. It’s not often that a choreographer (the ever-inventive Christine Bandelow) is tasked with devising moves for a cast decked out in parkas, toques, and snow boots for the opening production number.

There have been many tests before and since of the (sometimes elusive) concept of Canadianness in the big wide homogenizing world. Some we’ve passed; some we’ve squeaked through; some we’ve flunked. Canada Rocks: The Reboot (Canada 156 to do the math), directed again by Kate Ryan, sets about searching for the heart of gold, making some space for something it missed first time around in its spirited revue of all things Canadian. It’s the Indigenous voice and contribution to the arts, music, the Canuck sense of humour, our collective cultural rhythms….

Canada Rocks: The Reboot, Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The stellar Indigenous actor/playwright/musician Sheldon Elter (Métis Mutt, Bears), a triple-threat of maximum versatility, has not only joined the nine-actor ensemble of singer-dancers but has contributed some additional writing for this snow-booted Re-Boot. And there’s a moment, touching but light of touch, in which Elter and his Indigenous cast-mate Pamela Gordon step forward, to introduce themselves and pay tribute to seminal Indigenous artists like Graham Greene, Gordon Tootoosis, and historical groundbreakers like Edith Monture, the first Indigenous registered nurse in Canada. It’s not so much a land acknowledgment as a culture acknowledgment. Gordon Downie, who unfailingly lent his energy to the principle of reconciliation, gets his due as a settler ally.

None of this is without a quirky sense of humour attached to the moment, for example, where the sound of the Indigenous drum beaten by Elter changes to the ‘Let’s go Oilers!’ charge, accompanied by a mischievous grin from the actor.

This expansion of perspective, and five fractious years in the life of “Canada,” concept and country, change the way we look at the stage backdrop of T. Erin Gruber’s giant translucent, possibly frost-covered abstract map of Canada, from sea to (Great Big) Sea, with the Trans Canada Highway picked out in Life Is A Highway black dots. A collage of Gruber’s projections play non-stop across the surfaces of the map — faces that fade in and out of focus, signature glimpses of cities and towns, landmarks, Rockies, prairie vistas at harvest time, waves and shores. And Leigh Ann Vardy’s lighting captures urban cores to ice floes.

Musically, the show is fulsome and wide-ranging. No one (sane) has ever accused the Mayfield of falling short in its top-flight musical values (musical director Van Wilmott) or being skimpy in its song lists. And in a two-hour-and-a-half evening the cast and an expert five-member band (whose ranks are amplified by such versatile actors from the cast as Larissa Poho on fiddle and Tyler Check on guitar) contribute to a cross-country range of musical offerings and styles that is, to understate the case, wide. Bublé to Bieber, Messer to Morissette, Lightfoot to Lavigne, Hank Snow to Céline, Leonard Cohen to Our Pet Juliette, Taking Care of Business to The Log Driver’s Waltz.

The Sarah McLachlan song, beautifully delivered by Devra Straker, nails it.  “I will remember you; will you remember me?” The show is an aide de mémoire in that sense.

In Ryan’s production, this isn’t a matter of impersonation, per se. The performances nod to signature motifs — a hat here, a wig there, an accent from designer Leona Brausen’s hundreds of witty costumes, a tangible seminar in the sneaky uses of plaid. Or to the unerringly stylish musical arrangements themselves, the vocal inflections and allusions of the strong-voiced ensemble onstage. Yes, my friends, Paul Anka’s  career-defining sing-hiccups are present and accounted for by Brad Wiebe, for example. Nick Sheculski is indeed wearing his sunglasses at night as Corey Hart. The close harmonies of the Rankin Family in Rise Again are precisely delivered by the women of the cast; The Trailer Park Boys rise to the jaunty rhythms of the Stan Rogers classic Barrett’s Privateers.

Which brings us to a Canadian through-line (or as we say in Canada, the blue line).  Hockey isn’t so much a sport as a national mythology, possibly the sole motivating force that propels whole generations of Canadians onto winter streets to battle ridiculously minor temperatures and passing cars. Intriguingly, “hockey” is virtually impossible to rhyme, even by a notable national lyricist like Stompin’ Tom (Tyler Check).

It’s been pointed out more than once that only in hockey-struck Canada would a gab-meister stuffed like a turkey into a loud tight sports jacket become a star. I leave this thought with you for further reflection.    

Anyhow, the comic muse moves through a show that has goofball fun with perusing the Canadian identity, from Tim Horton runs to taking anther shot at Nickelback (in an alternate universe, we’re told, they’re actually good). SCTV’s pair of vintage hoser sibs, Doug and Bob McKenzie, are present and accounted for, amusingly conjured by Elter and Sheculski. Gordon is the park ranger who presides over the funny Hinterland Who’s Who sequence that includes the Canadian Cougar (the dread hockey mom: “do not confront or make eye contact”), and the “batshit crazy” Canadian Teenager (who has red braids, attitude, and an uncanny resemblance to the orphan from Avonlea).

And, hey, it’s educational. We knew poutine and insulin to be a Canadian inventions. But the light bulb? And the green garbage bag?

The music keeps coming. The only pause, really, is waiting for the first ping of maple sap into a bucket in Quebec, in a scene presided over by Guy Lafleur (Elter) and including a Québecois folk song.

The Mayfield is the home of the giant playlist, the Big Finish, and the multiple ending (not to mention the hardest-working casts in showbiz). In the case of this entertaining evening devoted to “Canada,” this means a rockin’ medley, and stirring anthem to raise a little hell. Raising hell isn’t exactly built into the national psyche, you could argue. But in its Canadian application — in a world in which geniality, generosity, and breadth of vision are hard to come by, and culture tends to be something to be put on, like gloves — it’s a bracing add-on. “If you don’t like what you got, why don’t you change it?”

REVIEW

Canada Rocks: The Reboot

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre, 16615 109 Ave.

Created by: Will Marks, Gerrad Everard, with script consultant and additional writing by Sheldon Elter

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Tyler Check, Sheldon Elter, Sam Jamieson, Seth Johnson, Pamela Gordon, Larissa Poho, Nick Sheculski, Devra Straker, Brad Wiebe

Running: through Jan. 28

Tickets: 780-483-4051,  mayfieldtheatre.ca

 

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Follow the Whyte Rabbit! Alison Wunderland at the Spotlight Cabaret, a review

Posted on November 16, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Aimée Beaudoin, Jeff Halaby, Jamie Hudson, Tyler Pinset in Alison Wunderland, Spotlight Cabaret. Photo by Sarina Spicak.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

How do you get to Wunderland? A spot quiz.

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No, fellow travellers, not by LRT (get real). Not by sneaking through the stage door at the Varscona, or clicking your heels in the gazebo in the park next to Walterdale. Not by holding your breath till you see purple spots or dancing donairs.

Contrary to literary tradition Wunderland isn’t down, it’s up. Up the stairs in the brick building in Strathcona across from Meat and The Next Act, a few doors south of Pip. That’s the stronghold of the Spotlight Cabaret, an elegantly chandelier-ed second-floor niche where they create kooky, high-speed original song-and-dance-and- comedy entertainments — and serve whimsically themed cocktails, and fancy and delicious four-course dinners, with options that include beef, chicken, fish, vegetarian, and vegan choices.

And, judging by the Spotlight’s latest, Alison Wunderland, it’s where, under musical director Simon Abbott, four performers mine — exuberantly — a wide swath of pop music, from the Rolling Stones to Fleetwood Mac, Grace Slick to Rihanna (“We have a strict no-Enya and no-Seal policy,” we’re told). And the impeccable sound is the work of sound/lighting designer Aaron Macri.

It’s also where beaming Spotlight co-proprietors Aimée Beaudoin and Jeff Halaby along with their cast-mates Jamie Hudson and Tyler Pinset never stop dipping into a giant tickle trunk of unlikely props and preposterous wigs and costume pieces. And where, in John Hudson’s production, you don’t have to hold your breath to bring on the mesmerizing vision of a couple of agile meat wraps, with all the trimmings including foil cummerbunds, get down, and argue about hot sauce vs tzatziki. It just happens, and then the donairs dance away. Curiouser and curiouser.

Sulky crustaceans and beaming whales with dance moves weren’t, as I recall, available on Alice’s meet-and-greet down the rabbit hole in the original. Lewis Carroll was stingy that way. But that was then and this is now. The Caterpillar (Pinset) with his hookah is draped over the bar getting high. And the Cat is so Cheshire he shimmies from a puppet (designed by Terri Grant) into a hologram (designed by Macri), who grooves to Dreams.

Anyhow, in Alison Wunderland, which opens to Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Somewhere Over The Rainbow/ Wonderful World ukulele medley, our heroine (Hudson) is a 16-year-old in the classic blue frock whose career aspiration is to be an influencer. To this end, she spends all her time in her room “telegraphing” her friends, accumulating likes and trying to grow her following. Her parents aren’t thrilled.

Tyler Pinset, Aimée Beaudoin, Jeff Halaby, Jamie Hudson in Alison Wunderland. Photo by Caine Erickson

That business with the hyperactive White Rabbit (Pinset) — sorry, the Whyte Rabbit, “with a y, bitch, like the Avenue.” — always running late, is a life-changer. And Alison’s world goes even more topsy-turvy when she hits the “eat me/ drink me” table. Oh yeah, that was our table, too, where the pre-show soup and salad turned into the main course chicken and the sesame ginger tofu at intermission, both excellent.

Act II is devoted to an imminent encounter with “you know who,” the dread Queen of Hearts (Beaudoin), whose go-to greeting of “off with her head!” has left people a little leery. The Whyte Rabbit and Alice are late (parking problems, wouldn’t you know, and getting lost because of all the bike lanes).

But I must leave off; this, my friends, is the plot. And it would be the height of lunacy to explain that in detail. Except to say that the creators have a go at putting the boot into this ridiculously imperious un-democratic queen — with her terrible ideas about grabbing everyone’s pension money and ruining the environment — and her sycophant sidekick (Halaby). Both are very funny. Ring any bells, Albertans?

Anyhow, plucky Alison isn’t daunted. The phrase “selfish brutality” springs to her lips, and the Wednesday night audience cheered. Can the world be changed, filled with (“con-scent-ual”) flowers and democratic good will? Yes, yes, possibly, why not, my friends. “But the North Side will still be shitty.”

Jamie Hudson (centre) in Alison Wunderland, Spotlight Cabaret. Photo byt Caine Erickson

The quartet of performers are strong singers and selfless dancers in a small space, choreographed by Mhairi Berg. And they throw themselves into a musical comedy that plays with as well as for the audience, a sort of custom-made house party. Beaudoin and Halaby are relaxed comedians and improvisers, and droll hosts, amused by their guests. At the outset they take the time to find out birthdays, jobs, anniversaries, break-up parties and divorce celebrations among us. And quick on their feet, they extrapolate, and thread the evening’s entertainment with references to what they’ve learned. It’s a playful kind of audience participation, light of touch, unthreatening, and fun.

What, after all, could be kookier than reality? That’s the wonder of Wunderland. It will, I feel sure, be the only time the Canadian Tire in Leduc claims a place in a cabaret.

REVIEW

Alison Wunderland

Theatre: Spotlight Cabaret, 8217 104 St.

Written by: Aimée Beaudoin and Jeff Halaby

Directed by: John Hudson

Musical direction: Simon Abbott

Starring: Aimée Beaudoin, Jeff Halaby, Jamie Hudson, Tyler Pinset

Running: through Jan. 21, Wednesdays through Sundays

Tickets: spotlightcabaret.ca

 

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A thrilling and beautiful musical testimonial to what art and artists are all about: Hadestown at the Jube, a review

Posted on November 15, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Amaya Braganza, Will Mann, J. Antonio Rodriguez in Hadestown, Broadway Across Canada touring production. Photo by T Charles Erickson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The musical/ folk opera that returns to Edmonton in the thrilling touring Broadway production onstage at the Jube this week will take you to Hell and back.

And all along that eerie, high-stakes route through darkness, you’ll be warmed, and chilled, by a feverish dream — of love, of loss, of how to live in a world that’s “hard and getting harder all the time.”

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Yes, I say “returns” to us — in re-designed form. Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown, a marvellously imaginative and resonant theatrical creation 13 years in the making with director Rachel Chavkin, has been here before. In a 2017 workshop production at the Citadel that was its Canadian premiere — after its 2010 concept album origins, its 2016 Off-Broadway incarnation, and before Broadway and 14 Tony nominations and awards as best musical and best original score. As the personable, worldly wise god Hermes (the terrific Will Mann, in a snazzy silver suit), our narrator, tells us in song, “how to get to Hadestown, ya have to take the long way down.” Theatre artists get that.

Lana Gordon in Hadestown, Broadway Across Canada touring production. Photo by T Charles Erickson.

At the Citadel Hadestown happened on an open stage, Depression era minimalist, with a huge bare tree across which the passing seasons played in light (lighting genius Bradley King)  and double revolves dominated by the train track to hell. This time Rachel Hauck’s beautiful design locates us in an atmospherically smoky sepia-tinted cafe club, taking its location cue from the New Orleans jazz that infuses the score, along with folk, pop, blues, and musical theatre flavours (that hint at Rent, for example). So, distressed walls, wood, and a wrought-iron balcony from which Hades and his wife Persephone in shadow survey the action above the ground. King’s stunning lighting creates painterly effects in a domed, colour-saturated world. That’s where we find our musician hero Orpheus in his bus-boy gig, wiping off tables. And that’s where Eurydice, shivering in her meagre coat, arrives asking for a match.

There’s a new (to us) informality about the setting; the cast gathers and engages with us at the beginning in a way that didn’t happen before. Hermes performs for us; so does Persephone, who looks for allies among us.

Mitchell’s narrative inspiration is, as Hermes puts it, “an old tale from way back when.” That’s the Greek myth of Orpheus, the career singer-songwriter who ventures into the Underworld, the kingdom of the dead (or “the dead to the world, anyway”), to retrieve his lost love Eurydice. And he actually wins a dispensation from Hades, the reigning monarch of that subterranean realm. Orpheus can lead Eurydice back, provided he doesn’t look back.

What Mitchell and director Chavkin make of the myth — in luscious songs and stunning staging, respectively — is a contemporary/vintage musical with two intertwined love stories, both troubled. One is the story of Orpheus and his mission to the Underworld, a journey ingeniously set forth in swinging industrial lights. The other is Hades and his part-time consort Persephone. She spends half the year underground in the stronghold of the “king on the chromium throne” while the world above congeals in the cold, and half the year above ground where her annual arrival “with a suitcase full of summertime” is a celebration of greenery, flowers, wine, light, music, as per her song Living It Up On Top.

Will Mann, Amaya Braganza, J. Antonio Rodriguez in Hadestown, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by T Charles Erickson

Hadestown is about music and artistic creation; it alights on romantic idealism, climate change, capitalism, political populism with its fear and hatred of “the other.” It is an unusual achievement, masterfully set forth onstage in Chavkin’s production. And it begins in the thought that Orpheus, the penniless artist obsessed with writing the perfect song, sees “the world as it could be, not as it is.” Eurydice, “no stranger to the wind,” falls in love despite herself. Cold, starving, pursued by the Fates (“whatcha gonna do when the chips are down?” they sing provokingly), she can’t help leaning into the pragmatic. Can the promise of the heart stand up to the urgent demands of the belly?

Wintry privations in a world that’s “dark and getting darker all the time,” have made Eurydice wary that we can have “the world we dream about,” and susceptible to the proposition — security in return for soul-sucking labour in his factory — offered by Hades the ruthless oligarch of the heated, prosperous capitalist stronghold underground.

The magic of the piece, as you’ll know if you saw the production at the Citadel in 2017, is the imaginative way, as myths do, it speaks to the moment. When Hades, in his ribcage-rattling bass notes, sang Why We Build The Wall at the very moment that Trump had been unleashed on the world, it was if Mitchell had just written that powerful 10-year-old (!) anthem to hanging on to what you have. “The enemy is poverty. And the wall keeps out the enemy.” It continues to speak to the barricading of privilege, of course. This time the Fates seem to aim, with uncanny precision, at this very year of no return. “In the fever of a world in flames/ In the season of the hurricanes/ Flood will get you if the fire don’t/ Any way the wind blows.” Eurydice is on it, from personal experience. “It’s either blazing hot or freezing cold…. Any way the wind blows.” How could this not be about Now?

The band, seven strong, remains onstage, which seems vital to the sheer dramatic vitality of the piece (Edmonton-based trombonist Audrey Ochoa delivers a smashing opening riff). And this new touring cast make the roles vividly their own. Rodriguez is an endearing naif of an Orpheus, who thinks he can change the world with his art. And Braganza is an unusually feisty and resistant Eurydice, vocally and physically.

Lana Gordon, Will Mann (left), J. Antonio Rodriguez (right) in Hadestown, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by T Charles Erickson

As Hades, with his rumbling bass voice, Matthew Patrick Quinn in his long black coat and shades, is a chillier, angrier Hades than Patrick Page, who had a veneer of suavity about him that was almost seductive. But the character he creates is compelling and scary; Hades knows how to make an entrance. And Lana Gordon’s Persephone, the desperate party girl who rails against her marital imprisonment with a wild, charismatic energy, has a trapped-between-worlds eccentricity that makes her electrifying onstage.

David Neumann’s choreography is startlingly original in the way it creates movement that is never circumscribed by the notion of ‘dance’ — whether for the ensemble numbers or for the worker’s chorus, trapped on the revolve, who get a movement lexicon of slashing diagonals, the repetitive motion of labourers, riveting and hammering in their servitude. How do you get to Hadestown? By last-ditch choice, through the open jaws of a sort of giant steam shovel.

The finale of a production that reaches out to us, across the footlights — including an acoustic toast to solidarity — gives the floor to Hermes. He reminds us why we revisit stories, tragedies and sad songs that “we sing anyway.”

It’s a beautiful and moving tribute to what art tries to do. You shouldn’t miss your chance to go to hell.

REVIEW

Hadestown

Broadway Across Canada touring production

Created by: Anaïs Mitchell, developed with Rachel Chavkin

Directed by: Rachel Chavkin

Starring: Amaya Braganza, J. Antonio Rodriguez, Lana Gordon, Will Mann, Matthew Patrick Quinn

Where: Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca

 

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How To Ruin The Holidays, a new feature film from improv stars Kevin Gillese and director Arlen Konopaki

Posted on November 12, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“At Christmas all roads lead home.”

As the stand-up comedian heroine (Amber Nash) of How To Ruin The Holidays discovers, evasionary tactics may stall this inevitable Yuletide GPS, but it will not change the destination.

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There’s a parallel inevitability that has led Kevin Gillese and Arlen Konopaki from Edmonton, onstage and live, across this country and the border, through Europe, Down Under — to this their first feature film, a resonantly funny comedy with a bold palette of dark tones, starring Amber Nash.

Written and produced by Gillese and directed by Konopaki, How To Ruin The Holidays has been a fave on the festival circuit so far. And it’s having a month of theatrical releases in select cities, like L.A., Atlanta, Toronto and Edmonton (where a debut at Metro Cinema earlier this month will be topped up with another screening there Nov. 25), before it has a digital release through Amazon in December.

Filmmaker/producer Kevin Gillese. Photo by Ryan Parker

“It seems like all roads were leading to this for many years!” declares Gillese, with the kind of buoyant vigour Edmonton theatre audiences know from his time here as the artistic director of Rapid Fire Theatre and his Fringe appearances then and since with Konopaki in their improvised show Scratch!. “We had the short film That Was Awesome (an award-winner in 2018 and now available on YouTube). And this is a natural progression!”

The word “organic” does not go amiss in this Gillese/Konopaki improv-to-film story. The writer and the director are in the Zoom ether hovering over America. Gillese is in his adoptive home town of Atlanta where he moved from Edmonton in 2010 to spend a decade as the artistic director of Dad’s Garage, Rapid Fire Theatre’s sibling improv company. Konopaki, a U of A theatre school grad, is in West Hollywood where he moved from the Big Apple after five and a half years (and a master’s degree in film directing and cinematography from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts).

“We wouldn’t be doing a feature film if Arlen didn’t have the passion for film and directing he has,” says Gillese, who identifies his own passion as writing…. I’m not married to any particular form, improv, plays, film. It’s what you’re doing with it that counts. I also have a passion for bringing things together and making them happen.”

Konopaki muses on their drift from stage to screen. “I think even when were doing Scratch! full-time, we always had an eye on film and television.” Screen, it turned out, was the itch that had to be Scratch!-ed.

The pair met at Rapid Fire Theatre, as star improvisers. By 2005 they’d created Scratch!, one of the company’s biggest, and most internationally travelled, hits. In this intricate format, the duo intertwined three high-contrast storylines all based on audience suggestions — at escalating speed, with pellmell physicality, switching characters on the fly as they went — until, improbably, the narrative threads came together at the end.

“Kevin and I bonded creatively,” as Konopaki says. “And we both had a vision of what we wanted to do, make it our full-time thing…. “If we do a really good job, get really good at it, and stand out anywhere, it can support us financially.” Says Gillese, “I remember a turning point…. If we want to make this a full-time gig we can’t half-do it. We have to kind of go for it!”

And they did. Scratch! never stopped touring, one-night stands in Australia, Europe, across the Fringes. “Looking back at that period,” says Konopaki, “it was a really gratifying time…. We put the work in, to be as good as we could be, to do a show that would stand out, that everyone would remember and talk about. And I think we did. We took pride in that.”

In 2015 Gillese and Konopaki took the Scratch! format, with its intercutting of narratives and genres, and role-switching, into a 10-episode web series with an absurdist bent. Hart of America, produced by Dad’s Garage, is named for the hard-ass tough-talking cop character Grace Hart played by Nash (best known as the voice of the combative Pam Poovey in FX’s animated series Archer), Gillese’s wife and a comic actor of striking versatility, witness the assortment of other characters she takes on in the series.

Kate Lambert, Colin Mochrie, Luke Davis, Amber Nash in How To Ruin The Holidays. Still by Felipe Vara de Rey

In How To Ruin The Holidays, Nash is Michelle, an increasingly exasperated stand-up struggling to make a go of it in L.A., who finds herself cornered into going home to Atlanta for Christmas for the first time in years. Which means dealing with her dysfunctional family: Dad (Canadian comedy star Colin Mochrie), an eccentric doomsday preparation-ist; sister Andrea (Kate Lambert), a hopeful screenwriter; and lively special needs brother Mark (Luke Davis). It’s at a moment that turns out to be a turning point in all their lives.

The idea, as Gillese explains, has personal roots, planted when he moved to Atlanta 13 years ago. “All my family is up in Edmonton. So I know what it’s like to be living away from your family, only getting updates, from snapshots, once you pop home for the holidays.” And, as in his movie, he has a special needs brother.

“It was easy for me to take those experiences and put them into a narrative…. L.A. is a substitute for Atlanta. And Atlanta is a sub-in for Edmonton. When it’s framed like that, it sounds very dramatic. But It wasn’t much of a stretch to use humour as a lens…. Me and my siblings we’ve always used humour to handle all things!”

In How To Ruin The Holidays, “my number one goal was making the actors shine,” says director Konopaki. “Which wasn’t hard!” He and Gillese discovered Davis, a wonderful special needs actor, in a Dad’s Garage partnership with an Atlanta acting program for adults with cognitive, developmental, or intellectual disabilities. Davis, the star of their That Was Awesome, is a true find, funny and charismatic.

Colin Mochrie in How To Ruin The Holidays. Film still by Felipe Vara de Rey.

Gillese’s goal, he says, was to give the cast a chance to show what they could do, beyond more usual audience expectations. Mochrie, for example has intensely dramatic, emotional moments, like the intimate scene where he talks to Michelle about her brother. “It’s one of my favourites,” says Konopaki.

Amber Nash in How To Ruin The Holidays

And the film gives Nash, “best known for voice work” as Gillese says, the chance to show her on-screen range as an actor, a character “who’s constantly under siege from everyone around her.”

For a remarkable $300,000 Gillese and Konopaki have made an indie movie that looks and sounds top-drawer. Included among the favours the pair got was the expertise of an entire sound department (from Floyd County Studio, who make Archer). And, unusually, raising the money started with crowd funding, before other sponsorships were landed.

There are startlingly dark aspects to this new holiday comedy. And Gillese admits he initially had his doubts about its “genre-breaking” aspects. “It is for sure a Christmas movie. It is for sure a comedy with elements that aren’t.”

“Early in the process I’d gotten feedback to ‘pick a lane’, either go for a heartwarming Christmas movie or an adult comedy … don’t muddy the water. I found that very distressing; I think the best work is when you have both those flavours next to each other.”

It was Mochrie to the rescue, with a pep talk. “Kevin, you’ve got the rest of your career to compromise. Just do what you think is good!”

Tickets for the Nov. 25 screening at Metro Cinema of How To Ruin The Holidays: metrocinema.org.

  

  

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How did we get here? the question, the cabaret, the new play, the anniversary production

Posted on November 7, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

The young Jason Hardwick

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Consider for a moment the question that’s been asked — in every tone of voice, every degree of exasperation or relief, bemusement or amazement, wonder or perplexity — by every one of us, especially in the last three years. How did we get here?

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•How did we get here? The cabaret. It’s the name Jason Hardwick has given his new solo cabaret, his first one-man show How Did We Get Here?, happening Thursday at Grindstone Theatre as part of Conwitz Productions’ An Evening With .. series. “How did we, as a collective, get to this point?” asks actor/ dancer/ improviser Harwick. And he’s quick to add that he doesn’t mean the royal “we.” Nor is he looking for the conventional cabaret raison d’être of using his own personal bio as a coat rack on which to hang musical theatre songs.

“We quit theatre during the pandemic. And now we’re back at it. How did we decide to come to this show?”  Hardwick says “I sit and talk to the audience … face down the fears of doing it on my own. And then I sing songs,” accompanied by pianist/composer Daniel Belland. “I just love when I get to sing those songs…. Is there an arc? I’m not sure there is.”

the current Jason Hardwick

Hardwick, who’s droll and self-effacing, frequently performs with Guys in Disguise (most recently in Puck Bunnies at the Fringe). He’s also the artistic director of Die-Nasty, the weekly improvised soap opera at the Varscona, currently (through Dec. 11) in its circus mini-series Monday nights. Hardwick is Clarl the clown. He’s particularly known as a dancer, and even more particularly as a virtuoso in the rarefied art of tap dance (he teaches it at MacEwan University). Which is why, he explains, there will be no tap in How Did We Get Here?. “Everyone expects it, and I guess I’m tired of that expectation.”

He’d started to wonder if he landed roles just because he could tap. “This show is ‘look what else I can do’?” The 13-song playlist leans into the musical theatre repertoire, as you might expect from an actor who performs frequently with Plain Jane Theatre. “But, hey, there might be a Taylor Swift song; I’ve hear she’s popular…. And every song is taken out of context.”

“I find myself humming O What A Beautiful Morning every day,” says Hardwick, “and I’m not even from Oklahoma!” Another of his favourites, in the cabaret song list, is Empathy, “about having big feelings for inanimate objects.”

The lyrics will be up onstage with Hardwick, on a music stand. “I also want to say something about ‘perfection procrastination’,” putting off doing something because it won’t be perfect. “This is not going to be perfect, but it’s going to be something. And we’ll have fun!”

Hardwick’s special guest is Kayla Gorman. “I have so many talented friends who deserve to be in the spotlight, more than they are!” Tickets: showpass.com.

playwright Harley Howard-Morison

•How did we get here? The new play-in-progress. Speaking as we are of extreme versatility, this Sunday’s edition of Script Salon (a bona fide Edmonton success story) is a veritable live demo. It’s a staged reading of a new play, Redd Meats, by Harley Howard-Morison. Beef and beefs are involved.

Howard-Morison is a writer, a theatre maker, the founder of the indie company Cardiac Theatre; he’s the managing director of Theatre Network. Among other Cardiac bright ideas was The Alberta Queer Calendar Project (13 plays in podcast form by queer Alberta playwrights, including Makram Ayache’s The Hooves Belonged to the Deer, which recently ran in a fully staged indie production at the Westbury Theatre).

Intriguingly the protagonist of Redd Meats, set in the prairie hamlet of Redd, is “a scholarship vet student and part-time butcher,” a combination that seems to invite conflict from the get-go, who’s unexpectedly confronted by a ghost from the past. Theatre Network artistic director Bradley Moss directs a cast that includes Quinn Contini, Marianne Copithorne, Nikki Hulowski, and Mark Sinongco.

It happens at the Upper Arts Space at Holy Trinity Anglican Church (10037 84 Ave.) at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free; donations are enthusiastically welcomed.

•How did we get here? The birthday production. The indie company Foote in the Door Productions celebrate their 10th anniversary of musical theatre productions with a real charmer of a ‘60s rom-com. She Loves Me has Broadway cred, to say the least. It’s by the composer/lyricist team of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, the starry team who also brought the world Fiddler on the Roof and Fiorello!. The book (by Joe Masteroff) is an adaptation of the 1937 play Parfumerie by the Hungarian playwright Miklós László, set in a Budapest perfume shop in the 1930s.

Two sparring employees, the Beatrice and Benedick so to speak of She Loves Me, take solace from this job irritation in writing letters to their “secret admirers.” And here’s the romantic complication: their anonymous penpals are … each other. You might recognize the setup from the 1998 film You’ve Got Mail.

Melanie Lafleur directs the Foote in the Door production, which runs Nov. 17 to 26 at La Cité francophone. It stars the two company co-founders Ruth Wong-Miller and Russ Farmer, who met, as the theatre name tips off, at the Citadel’s Foote Theatre School.  Tickets: eventbrite.com.   

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