You can be fabulous right here: Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s at Teatro, a review

Posted on July 15, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

To see the Teatro Live! revival of Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s at the Varscona is to be reminded of something special about this place. In Edmonton you make your own fun.

OK, maybe you have to (as this town’s go-to defensive position has it), but you can be original, funny, and fabulous here. You can be resolutely of this place, create excitement (possibly with multi-syllabic rhymes), fall in love, for example.

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That’s what Teatro has done for the last four decades, charting its own off-centre custom-made course through the urban landscape of comedy, and finding romance with audiences en route. That’s what this clever, spirit-raising, delight-filled showbiz musical, commissioned from four theatre up-and-comers in 2009, is all about, at heart. And that’s what this revival, with a new and impressive cast directed by Kate Ryan, proves in the doing.

Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s (book by Jocelyn Ahlf and Andrew MacDonald-Smith, music by Ryan Sigurdson and lyrics by Farren Timoteo) takes us to the 60s supper club scene in Edmonton, “the golden age of dining and dancing in Alberta’s capital” as billed. It’s where impresario Mitzi Dupar presides, in high style, over her own supper club. Lately Mitzi’s has been feeling the pinch from a surge in competition (“it used to be just us and Teddy’s chopped liver”). Should the surf ’n’ turf be re-priced? What if the drinks went up a nickel, and there were special guests? The bar and the bandstand (with a nook for the bookkeeping) are the keynotes of Mitzi’s world and Daniela Masellis’s design.

Andrea House as Mitzi in Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Embodied with riotous, not to say epic, 60s pizzaz by Andrea House, Mitzi is a glorious grand-scale vision of billowing sparkle who sings, dances, mingles, cracks wise, greets the regulars with showbiz flamboyance, match-makes, kibbitzes with the band (an excellent onstage trio led by pianist/ musical director Erik Mortimer), oversees the drink specials and has a few herself. Breezy exit line: “remember Mr. Mayor, you owe me a cha cha cha!.” The writing by Ahlf and MacDonald-Smith is full of period throwaways and Edmonton references. And like the apt and witty score by Timoteo and Sigurdson, it’s genuinely amusing.

House, an artist of rather awe-inspiring versatility and range herself — singer-songwriter/ actor/ playwright/ producer (don’t know about her mixology skills) — is captivating in this grand-scale and detailed comic performance. To see Mitzi stage-manage her own histrionic death-of-my era scene, plummeting to the ground in the “I’m falling, falling” number is to see a master comic actor at work.

The role was originally conceived for Leona Brausen, also Teatro’s resident costume designer, who returns to kit out the cast in an unfailingly entertaining ‘60s array of brocade, satin, chiffon, floaty floral caftans and natty suits with bowties.

The twin centrepieces of the musical comedy are two knotted romances. Mitzi is having a love affair with the younger man, bandleader/singer Jack, whom she lured from Tommy Banks’ band The Banknotes over at the Embers (mainly by flashing her brassiere, she says). Jack, played with a kind of suave swagger by Mark Sinongco, takes to the stage with effortless charisma; dreams of stardom south of the border dance in his head.

Andrea House, Mark Sinongco, Chariz Faulmino in Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The age difference gives Mitzi’s breezy confidence a ripple of unease, especially with the arrival of a brash, ambitious new singer Tippi Lala (that’s Lala with an emphasis on the second syllable) who has no shortfall in the confidence department. When your burden in life is “enormous personal charisma,” as Tippi puts it matter-of-factly, you just have to roll with it. “I’m very used to be ogled.” Chariz Faulmino’s performance is a lot of fun.

When Jack gets the call he’s been waiting for all his life — Vegas beckons with a replacement gig — Mitzi’s unease goes into crisis mode. Sigurdson’s score and Timoteo’s lyrics embrace both heartbreak and urban panic, and both well within the compass of House, a remarkable singer. Let’s Re-Decorate, a knock-out she sings with her staff, has a witty high-speed buzz of Sondheim (think Company).

Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

You’ll get a big kick out of the musical comedy couple who grate on each other’s nerves: the droll, deadpan bartender Mitch (Josh Travnik) and the primly organized by-the-rulebook manager Numbers (Bella King). Mitzi keeps trying to set them up but they’re not having it — until a terrific, perfectly formed, show-stealer of a number at the bus stop, beautifully calibrated by the actors, when the pair wonder if they just might be a teeny bit attracted to each other. Played by the co-writers in the original, Travnik and King are natural comic scene-stealers, a form of larceny that’ll have you hoping for a sequel.

Mitch’s song about the proper conclusion to draw from Edmonton’s Sunday temperance law — no problem, drink Scotch at home — is a highlight too. And the fantasy dream sequence in which Numbers is rescued from an island by Mitch as an American gallant in a sailor suit occasions a lovely, lush ballad.   

The creators of Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s really know their musical theatre. And the spirit and charm of their musical comedy is the way it’s both an expert homage to Broadway tradition and conventions and a tribute to the artists who stay here, in a small place, and fashion that tradition in their own image. What, you’ve run out of olives for the martini special? Try anchovies, says Mitzi to the bartender, and call it the ‘fish bowl’.

And that, my friends, is why everybody goes to Mitzi’s. And why you should too. It’s a helluva fun evening out, and it lifts your heart to see a new generation of artists infused by by the sense of possibility that brought Everyone Goes To Mitzi’s into being 14 years ago. As Jack sings, “I gotta be here…. The sky’s the limit. And we gotta lotta sky.”

Meet the creators in this 12thnight preview.

REVIEW

Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Created by: Jocelyn Ahlf and Andrew MacDonald-Smith (book), Ryan Sigurdson (music), Farren Timoteo (lyrics)

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Andrea House, Chariz Faulmino, Bella King, Mark Sinongco, Josh Travnik

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through July 30

Tickets: teatrolive.com

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A musical for Edmonton, set in a golden entertainment age: Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s is back at Teatro

Posted on July 14, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Ryan Sigurdson, Jocelyn Ahlf, Andrew MacDonald-Smith and (inside the cellphone) Farren Timoteo, Teatro Live. Photo by Yours Truly.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Fourteen years ago, four young Edmonton theatre artists, emerging talents in their mid-20s, got recruited by Teatro La Quindicina, now Teatro Live!, to do something together, something they’d never done before.

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Jocelyn Ahlf, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Ryan Sigurdson and Farren Timoteo, actors in love with musical theatre, got a Teatro commission to create their own musical. When Everybody Goes to Mitzi’s premiered at Teatro seven months later as the finale of the 2009 summer season, this theatre town had something it had never set eyes and ears on before: a New York-style ‘golden age of musical theatre’ musical actually set in Edmonton AB.

The new musical comedy was an original and high-spirited homage to Edmonton and its flourishing supper club scene of the 1960s, an historic decade when, amazingly, there were 20 supper clubs downtown alone, 13 of them on Jasper Avenue between 100th and 109th Streets.

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

In honour of the season finale revival of Mitzi’s that opens Friday — directed by Kate Ryan and starring Andrea House as Mitzi Dupar, club proprietor extraordinaire — the creators got together at the Varscona (three in person and Timoteo by speaker phone) to remember the origins of the musical, their shared love of golden age musicals, and the seven-month countdown to their opening night .

“The team was put together by Jeff Haslam … like a boy band,” says MacDonald-Smith of the Teatro leading man who became the company artistic director. “No, like the Spice Girls,” Timoteo amends.

Haslam, born-again producer, “was inspired by the golden age New York musicals that were about New York, and wanted that for Edmonton,” says MacDonald-Smith, these days Teatro’s co-artistic director (with Belinda Cornish). It was unprecedented. “I remember him having a lot of faith in us,” says Ahlf. The commission’s other given was “a grande dame character” for Teatro’s vivid and spirited leading lady Leona Brausen to play. And it had to be a big romantic leading role… I remember Gypsy came up a lot.”

And so it was that the four, who “moved in the same circles” and had even been in shows together (but weren’t yet the close friends they are today), repaired to Block 1912. They consumed copious coffee, they divvied up the responsibilities, they figured out a real-life romantic conflict: the grande dame and the younger guy; Mitzi, pushing 50, and band leader Jack, late 20s.

“I remember feeling very fortunate at the time to be selected from a big pool and asked to create something …” says Timoteo, the artistic director of Alberta Musical Theatre and a playwright/ director/ actor whose own solo creation Made in Italy will return to the Citadel next season. “Teatro was then, as it is now, a hotbed of emerging theatre talents…. You’d been in the company a bit longer, Jocelyn, but we were all coming up together at the same time.”

“When I think about this now I think what Jeff did was really smart,” says Ahlf (to general assent). “He assembled chemistry.” Which, as MacDonald-Smith points out, honours a distinctly Teatro tradition. Stewart (Teatro resident playwright Stewart Lemoine) would choose the people, then write the play…. Talent first. Even here, we came before the show, and then we came up with the idea of a lead role for Leona.” And then, as per Teatro practice, “we had a cast before we had a show.”

Ah, the talent. Ahlf had more writer experience. She’d collaborated with Lemoine on the comedy The Hoof and Mouth Advantage (about a couple of scammers who open a musical theatre school in the middle of the prairies) and A Momentary Lapse. So when it came to Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s she and MacDonald-Smith would write the book. And they’d be in the show too, playing off each other, in perpetual bicker mode, as a wry bartender and a phlegmatic server.

Sigurdson was the obvious composer designate of the team. Like his trio of collaborators, he’d graduated as an actor from Tim Ryan’s musical theatre program at Grant MacEwan. But his “real background,” as he puts it, was ‘playing the violin and the piano, classical music.” And he’d been picking up gigs as a musical director, sound designer and vocal coach. He’d written “wordless bizarre music” for Lemoine’s Orlando Unhinged (commissioned for Sigurdson’s MacEwan class) and then the Teatro comedy Eros and the Itchy Ant. And he’d even written an original musical Water’s Daughter with Northern Light’s Trevor Schmidt.

“I approached (composing) as an actor: what’s the actor going through? how would I speak this line? therefore, how would I sing this line?” The ‘60s setting made Dean Martin an inspiration, says Sigurdson. “How would Dean Martin sing this? How would Ethel Merman sing this?…. And in the end I wasn’t happy till I liked the song. I problem-solved my way through it.”

What upped the ante, Sigurdson explains, is that the musical-to-be had a commercial theatre resonance to it: stand-alone hits, preferably hummable, were de rigueur. Period musicals, after all, were a major source of jazz standards. As MacDonald-Smith says, “all the songs the Rat Pack sang were from musicals….”

“Much of my career was me trying to catch up,” says Timoteo, who more than caught up (he starred as Frankie Valli in the Citadel’s Jersey Boys this season). “I didn’t grow up around musical theatre at all. I’d grown up with a steady diet and rock ’n’ roll. I’d been in a rock band. And, yes, we did win Battle of the Bands (laughter from all). From the moment I landed at Grant MacEwan I was pretending I’d seen more than just Grease. The truth is I hadn’t.”

“I took a lot of inspiration from my collaborators,” he says. “I’d written rock and pop lyrics. But this was a deep education for me in dramatic lyric writing. They knew so much more about the craft, the mechanics of it…. I learned so much.”

What producer Haslam had provided them was the idea of the supper club scene in ‘60s Edmonton. And what they brought to it was a personal sense of what that setting meant for young up-and-coming musical theatre artists in Edmonton. Like Jack the bandleader in Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s “there was part of me still grappling with whether or not Edmonton was where I wanted to be,” says Timoteo. “I wasn’t necessarily ready to celebrate that….I had to rebel against my musical theatre assumption that I couldn’t be anywhere other than New York. It was a critical part of my life as an artist discovering the beautiful components to the Edmonton experience I maybe hadn’t seen without the help of my collaborators.”

The journey of Jack, who gets a chance to make it in Vegas, is all about that. MacDonald-Smith remembers the bona fide revelation he had when he was in Avenue Q (with his puppet Maurice) in New York. A dream come true, yes, but then “backstage was just the same as any backstage I’d every been in.”

Sigurdson muses, “a New York musical set in New York is about people who went to the destination. An Edmonton musical set in Edmonton is about people who didn’t go to the destination…. Even non-theatre folk, lawyers and doctors,  are faced with that same question: ‘what are you doing here?’” Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s is by way of a group response.

“It’s really a love letter to the Varscona don’t you think?” says Ahlf of their joint creation. “And also a love letter to Tim Ryan,” says MacDonald-Smith of the late great director/ mentor who “introduced me and Farren to the scope of older musical theatre.”

“Jeff wanted to be a New York producer for Edmonton,” MacDonald-Smith thinks. “So smart and such a great education for us to have a commercialist producer perspective,” says Timoteo. “We were held to a high and immediate standard. Songs got sent back. We had seven months and we were being encouraged and pushed in a pretty big way, to write something for the audience they hadn’t really had before…. A major growth moment for me.”

Ahlf echoes the thought, borrowed from the commercial impulse, that “I’m here for the audience…. They’re who we’re making this for.”

The four look back now with a kind of wonder on the fast track that took an idea from book to lyrics to music, en route to opening night. “We wrote everything down, we needed some splat, the ‘vomit blast’,” says MacDonald-Smith. “Then we’d all meet to discuss…. We learned by doing. That’s really what acting is, that’s what we all do! We do it, screw it up and fix it, and find the gold by screwing up.”

“We knew a lot of stuff,” says Sigurdson. “But I don’t know if we knew we knew it.” Now they know. “People were laughing, applauding in all the right places,” says Timoteo, who remembers weeping and mouthing the words all through opening night. “It was a race to the finish. And on that opening night I felt like we won the race…. ”

Now there’s the thrill of watching a cast of hot young Edmonton theatre artists, the same age as the creators were in 2009, take their musical material and run with it. Come Friday Ahlf and MacDonald-Smith can finally see the show they wrote, from the house seats.

“It’s our dream as writers isn’t it?” says Timoteo, “the ultimate writer’s dream, even if it’s just one more time.… And it’s an enormous, delightful, emotional experience to see that it’s back. All these words are going to get said again. All these notes are going to get sung again.”

PREVIEW

Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Created by: Jocelyn Ahlf and Andrew MacDonald-Smith (book), Ryan Sigurdson (music), Farren Timoteo (lyrics)

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Andrea House, Chariz Faulmino, Bella King, Mark Sinongco, Josh Travnik

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday through July 30

Tickets: teatrolive.com

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The Genie and the spirit of showbiz: Disney’s Aladdin at the Jube, a review

Posted on July 12, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Marcus M. Martin as the Genie, Disney’s Aladdin, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Deen van Meer

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Come for the hummus, stay for the floor show,” advises the outsized sprite in Arabian Nights, the opening number of Disney’s Aladdin. He pretty much nails the touring Broadway family musical that’s arrived at the Jube with a sultan’s ransom in razzle-dazzle, sequins, and bling, ba-da-boom one-liners, and manic showmanship.

Welcome to Agrabah, where “enchantment runs rampant,” where “even the poor people look fabulous…. And everyone has a minor in dance.”

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That stage — to start with designer Bob Crowley’s fantasy frames, grillwork cut-out screens, lanterns, pyramids — is a vision of delight, faux Turkish Delight. It’s so saturated with colours and light it positively glows. Lighting is by the great Natasha Katz, who knows everything about the way light hits sequins, fake scimitars, and gleaming dentition. The cast, in sparkly harem pants, turbans, baubles, feathers, draped in floaty scarves (costumes by Gregg Barnes), glows too.

Call it Casbah kitsch if you will. But this splashy, good-natured, relentlessly fun production directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon, The Drowsy Chaperone, Some Like It Hot) is on a scale of keep-it-comin’ that sheds the kitsch label like leg warmers off a showgirl. Nothing succeeds like excess, as Oscar Wilde says; I’m going with that. Finally, tap dance comes to its own in the Middle East, along with the tabbouleh pun.

Adi Roy as Aladdin in Disney’s Aladdin, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Deen van Meer.

OK, there is a boy-meets-girl story, young love across the tracks, in all this, as you already know from the 1992 Disney animation that (in Disney corporate tradition) inspired it . The musical is work of Disney’s go-to composer Alan Menken with lyrics by the late Howard Ashman (supplemented by Tim Rice) and a book by Chad Beguelin. The boy in question is Aladdin (Adi Roy), a buff young street thief with charm, a million dollar smile and no shirt. The plucky Disney girl is Princess Jasmine (Senzel Ahmady), thwarted by her dad the Sultan (Dwelvan David on opening night), who’s set on finding her a suitable husband. She’s got an independent streak and wants to pick her own mate and see the world. Yes, she feels imprisoned, by parental authority and tradition and all that, but as one of her handmaidens says “this is a really really really nice prison.”

Anyhow the princess and the pauper meet by chance at the bazaar where she’s temporarily gone AWOL in disguise from the palace. Their eyes meet…. Anyhow, you know how that goes. It’s the plot, it’s conventional, and I’m just going to leave that with you.

Which brings us to the main event: the Genie. He has employment issues, having spent the last 6,000 years trapped in a lamp. “It’s demeaning, but there you are….” And in the performance by Marcus M. Martin, the Genie is a dazzling and charismatic figure who sings, dances, talks a mile a minute, and is, in effect, the spirit of showbiz — from the vintage Cab Calloway variety through the Catskills and Vegas to the Golden Age of Hollywood.

And his spirit infuses a whole series of big, extravagantly playful, production numbers, stuffed with allusions to everything from Hello Dolly! to West Side Story. And the Act I finale, Friend Like Me, is a show-stopper. The Genie emerges from the lamp singing and dancing (the guy knows how to make an entrance), summoned when Aladdin rubs it, in a cave that so gold-encrusted it makes the Phantom’s boudoir look positively Scandinavian minimalist. As the villain’s assistant says, the Golden Rule is “whoever has the gold makes the rules.”

The Genie leads a gloriously frantic, mismatched, nonstop succession of showbiz-y bits inventively choreographed by Nicholaw, including a whiff of Western, a chorus line with scimitars instead of canes, a big gold-clad tap finish. “Do I look bigger to you?” he asks Aladdin, patting his ample girth. “I know, ‘don’t eat the poutine’.”

Another highlight is High Adventure, in which Aladdin’s trio of pals (Jake Letts, Ben Chavez, and Colt Prattes) attempt to rescue the hero from the Sultan’s dungeon. Their riotous performances, expertly individualized, are Marx-ist, in the Groucho sense, and fun throughout.   

There’s nothing in the Aladdin handbook about when to say when. My cavil with this basic principle is the sound of this touring production, which is so bright, forward, and tinny, at least at first, that you can scarcely hear the lyrics. It’s a shame since they’re shameless, crammed with witty rhymed anachronisms. And it takes some concentration at times to hear which character is speaking, from where.

The lead performances are outsized. This, after all, is a show where the villain, the Sultan’s vizier Jafar (Anand Nagraj), says “I feel an evil laugh coming on….” Even so, your interest in Jafar’s assistant Iago (Aaron Choi), a clown with a voice that could boil the fat off a Broadway producer, who specializes in mugging, could wane, as mine did, especially if you’re getting bling fatigue by Act II.   

The young lovers-to-be, played by Roy and Ahmady, are a likeable and suitably dreamy pair, who are very at home in the pop idiom of Mencken’s songs. They relentlessly turn to face the audience with their smile wattage, but, hey, this is a show that lives to wink. And the ensemble are absolutely top-flight dancers; they have to be to make Nicholaw’s choreography seem easeful.

The real star of this savvy family-friendly show is the Genie, purveyor of the Arabian Dream. And you’ll leave possibly dazed but certainly smiling. When I left the Jube last night I didn’t notice a long silver streamer (courtesy of the show) tangled in my purse strap. The lady behind me inadvertently stepped on the end, and we ended up eyeball to eyeball. “Well, don’t you look sparkly,” she said. That’s what a dose of fun will do.

REVIEW

Disney’s Aladdin

Broadway Across Canada

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca, edmonton.broadway.com

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Fun with Jane: Austentatious at Walterale

Posted on July 7, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Erin Harvey, Leslie Caffaro, Nicole English in Austentatious, Walterdale Theatre. Photo by Scott Henderson, Henderson Images

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Can a theatre town get enough Austen? Is there an Austen city limit? The people have spoken: the answer is No.

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Mieko Ouchi directed a cavorting stage adaptation of Pride and Prejudice at the Citadel this season. Brian Deedrick directed the Jonathan Dove opera Mansfield Park, as part of NUOVA Vocal Arts summer festival. And now, opening Wednesday at Walterdale, Edmonton’s venerable community theatre, Austentatious takes us behind the scenes as an earnest amateur troupe, the Central Riverdale Amateur Plays (C.R.A.P.) apply themselves, vigorously, to doing their own version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

What could go wrong? Funny you should ask. Austentatious director Barbara Mah calls the Alberta-grown musical (by Calgary-based Joe Slabe, Matt Board, Kate Galvin, Jane Caplow, and Luisa Hinchliff) “Waiting For Guffman meets The Play That Goes Wrong.”

For Mah, the show is a perfect marriage of her two great loves, musical theatre and Jane Austen. We are, after all, talking about someone who goes to Regency balls and sews her own Regency gowns. “Who doesn’t need eight in their closet?” she laughs. “Not even remotely historically accurate!”

Ah, and Austentatious comes with the irresistible added comic potential of stage disasters. “Fall down go boom is always funny,” says Mah, a veteran director of large-scale community productions  like Ragtime and Titanic, “where everyone dies onstage.”

“And fall down go boom while trying to produce a musical?” In these post-pandemic times, it’s meat and drink for Mah. “It’s proven to be hilarious,” she says of rehearsals where the chief difficulty is “trying hard not to crack up. It’s just wrecking the timing.” adjusting the timing while trying not to crack up.

Leslie Caffaro, Nicole English, Connor Foy in Austentatious, Walterdale Theatre. Photo by Scott Henderson, Henderson Images.

As Mah describes, in Austentatious the playwright/ choreographer Emily (Leslie Caffaro), “decides she needs a tap dance in the middle of the play. She sets the production in Amsterdam so she can have a clog dance…. And it goes completely downhill from there.”

Brian Ault and Erin Harvey in Austentatious, Walterdale Theatre. Photo by Scott Henderson, Henderson Images

There’s a pretentious director (Brian Ault): “highly delusional, thinks he knows everything about Austen since he once saw the DVD of Pride and Prejudice.” And there’s “a power-hungry diva,” who didn’t get the plum role of Elizabeth Bennet, “and will do anything to try and get there.” As per the perpetual shortage of male actors in amateur theatre, Mr. Darcy is played by “a guy who just showed up to support his girlfriend.” His day job in I.T. hasn’t entirely prepared him for the 18th century. Another member of the cast, perpetually stoned, is doing his community service in the show.

“It follows the production from the auditions to opening night. And it’s just bananas,” says Mah. “The only sane person is the poor beleaguered stage manager, who’s trying to push people through the technical rehearsal.” There’s actually a song called ‘Tech’. Sets slam, unsuitable props appear. “And opening night is as bad as you think it will be!”

Ballads, a tango, gospel … there’s a variety of musical styles in the seven-actor show, after an opening at the auditions that reminds Mah of A Chorus Line. And a three-piece band plays live (musical director Ruth Wong-Miller of One Foote In The Door Productions).

“I think the audience will be delighted,” says Mah. And, hey, no Austen homework is required.

PREVIEW

Austentatious

Theatre: Walterdale

Written by: Joe Slabe, Matt Board, Kate Galvin, Jane Caplow, and Luisa Hinchliff

Directed by: Barbara Mah, with musical direction by Ruth Wong-Miller

Starring: Leslie Caffaro, Brian Ault, Joyanne Rudiak, Nicole English, Erin Harvey, Connor Foy, Aaron Schaan

Running: Wednesday through July 22

Tickets: walterdaletheatre.com

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Let’s get Found: the festival of unexpected encounters with art and artists is back

Posted on July 3, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

COVIZ_2021, Found Festival 2023. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Surprise! You’re about to be Found.

Yes, the festival of of unexpected encounters with art and artists is back, starting Thursday, for a 12th edition in Old Strathcona. And at Found 2023 you could find yourself following actor/dancers through a memorial chapel as they explore the multi-generational immigrant experience. Or experiencing storytelling the multi-angled TikTok way in a hidden backstage nook at the Rapid Fire Exchange Theatre. You could find yourself partying at a hoedown, or in the secret upstairs at a Masonic hall where ghosts live.

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Or maybe you’ll be wondering if you just saw what you thought you saw — big wooden birds at whimsical feeders, in nests, in trees. Are magpies watching you back, following your movements, gradually taking over?

From the start Found has been the home of experiments in shaking up the conventional relationship between artists and their audiences to see what will happen. The lineup assembled by festival director Whittyn Jason puts the multi back in multi-disciplinary, says Found’s managing producer Mac Brock of the Common Ground Arts Society. “We’re leaning hard into that; we’ve broadened the scope,” he says. “We’re trying to bridge as many of the gaps as we can!” Visual art isn’t just visual at Found; it has performance and engagement angles. To be in the audience is, in intriguing ways, to be part of the show.

Take COVIZ_2021, for example. The live motion-capture media installation is the creation of Calgary-based animator Tyler Klein Longmire. He experiments with motion-capture that maps the movements of anyone who walks by, as Brock explains. Your movements are translated into kooky cartoon avatars (Saturday at the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market, Sunday at the Whyte Avenue Art Walk).

The career of up-and-coming sculptor and installation artist Mika Haykowsky is multi-disciplinary through and through; their website archive  includes work in pastels, photography, video, sound, ceramics, and performance that combines many of the above. In their Sky-Rat Home/ Are Birds Real?, “really cool bird sculptures, some mounted in trees,” as Brock describes, unlocks “conspiracy theories and stories. Found will be the only festival in this festival-peppered city that got City permission “to tie a bunch of large wooden birds in trees.”

El Funeral, Found Festival 2023. Photo supplied

El Funeral by Elisa Marina Mair-Sánchez is a bilingual, multi-disciplinary, roving dance/theatre play that takes its audiences through rooms in the South Side Memorial Chapel. Three years in the development (it had a reading at Found 2021), it’s “a kaleidoscopic look at the immigrant experience … through the lens of one family’s funeral,” says Brock of the festival’s biggest show. “It’s a big sensory feast of a show, a large, immersive experience of a show … a dive across time and generations really physical, with a talented dance team.” The cast of seven dancer/performers are led by director Andrés Moreno. “A hot ticket,” says Brock. “I’ll be surprised if it isn’t sold out by opening night (Friday).”

The path of El Funeral to full production (it’s the largest show at this year’s Found) demonstrates the festival’s commitment to seeing pieces through. The “Fresh AiR Artist” residency, for example, is a “multi-year program” these days, which “gives artists the chance to test material with an audience” and rework and expand it, as Brock puts it.

Brick Shithouse, Found Festival 2023, Photo supplied.

This year’s Fresh AiR Artist-in-Residence is Ashleigh Hicks. The festival includes a reading of their new play Brick Shithouse, directed by Sarah J. Culkin Sunday in the Studio Theatre at the ATB Financial Arts Barn. And it will get a full production, in person and online, at Found 2024. As Brock describes it, the characters of the play are young queer adults in a hard-scrabble world of cyclical poverty who “start an underground fight club that people online can bet on.”

“Artistic directors should be looking at Ashleigh!” says Brock of a playwright who works on an unusually large scale. Brick Shithouse, which has a cast of eight or nine, is “a big ambitious show that can fill a big stage,” says Brock.

TikTok Parody Dance Show is, as billed, “exactly what it sounds like.” A duet between its creators Tia Kushniruk and Rizwan Mohiuddin, it has all the surprises and shock comedy, sudden changes of direction and intention of TikTok and platforms like it. “Grotesque and engaging, almost-narrative, really theatrical,” says Brock.

Ghosts Are Everywhere, Found Festival 2023

Ghosts Are Everywhere: Live! is the work of a duo of comedy podcasters from Hamilton, Cecilia O’Grady and Carly Anna Billings, who specialize in real people’s ghost stories. They’re slated for two live recordings of their podcast in the upstairs at Acacia Hall (a venue I didn’t realize existed). “Very Lynch-ian,” declares Brock. And they’ll supplement by hanging at the Found Festival music patio behind the Arts Barn where “you can hear music and tell them your ghost stories.”

And the Found Festival afterparty Hoedown, a popular hit launched last year, is back, this year at Mile Zero Dance’s new venue (9931-78 Ave.). Curated by Salem Zurch, Hoedown, as Brock describes, is “campy, sexy, activated by black queer artists re-claiming … Alberta! And it is so much fun.” Advance tickets are “highly recommended.”

There’s spoken word poetry, there’s a music lineup, and more at Found. Find the full Found Festival lineup, the schedule, and tickets at commongroundarts.ca.

PREVIEW

Found Festival 2023

Common Ground Arts Society

Where: Old Strathcona, various locations including ATB Financial Arts Barn, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Sunday

Tickets: commongroundarts.ca  

  

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Two hauntings on Edmonton stages this week

Posted on June 29, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Ghouls Ghouls Ghouls, House of Hush and Send in the Girls. Photo by DB photographic.a

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Get haunted, at an Edmonton theatre (a couple of options).

•The sassy burlesque artists of Send in the Girls and House of Hush, have never shied away from uncovering stories from history, then uncorseting them, for their revues. Tonight and Friday they’re bringing back their sold-out 2022 Fringe hit Ghouls Ghouls Ghouls, this time to the Varscona stage.

It comes with a uniquely alluring warning: “ mentions of death, murder, drowning, illness, falling from great heights, the dark, ghosts, ghouls, creepy stories and hauntings.”

The script is by Ellen Chorley — playwright/ actor/ director/ Nextfest director — whose versatility apparently knows no bounds. Ditto her expertise in unbuttoning improbable subjects, like the 19th century literati, for example (A Bronte Burlesque), the Bard’s heroines (Shakespeare’s Sirens), the wives of Henry VIII (Tudor Queens), the women of the Wild West (Soiled Doves)…. The marriage of burlesque and theatre comes with a signature sense of humour when the Girls are sent in.

Ghouls Ghouls Ghouls peels back an assortment of superstitions, historical ghost stories — yes, the odd theatre ghost is involved — celebrity spiritualists, famous demons. The cast is led by Nikki Hulowski as the emcee, and the dancers include LeTabby Lexington (co-founder of Send in the Girls, House of Hush, and Burlesque Dueling Divas), Violette Le Coquette, Sharpay Diem, and Jezebel Sinclair.

Ghouls Ghouls Ghouls plays the Varscona tonight and Friday. Tickets: houseofhushburlesque.com.

WROL (without rule of law), Scona Alumni Theatre Co. Photo supplied.

•The Scona Alumni Theatre Co are having a good week. On Monday night they (and their collaborator Uniform Theatre) picked up three Sterlings, including best Fringe production, outstanding ensemble, and outstanding director for Linette J. Smith’s production of the odd-centre Canadian musical Ride The Cyclone.

Their production of a Michaela Jeffery’s dark coming-of-age comedy WROL (Without Rule of Law), intriguingly billed as “Judy Blume meets Rambo,” continues tonight and Friday at Scona (the high school, 10450 72 Ave. ). Edmonton audiences know Jeffery from The Listening Room, produced here by Cardiac Theatre in 2018, a futurist speculation starring a cell of teenage dissidents holed up in the desert scavenging the air waves for sounds of a world that no longer exists.

As director Smith describes, WROL is inspired by the tenor of the times: the characters are young teens who suspect that the fate of adolescent girls will not be a socio-cultural priority in the event of cataclysmic events. These youthful survivalists are preparing for the worst, and repair to the woods to investigate a mysterious disappearance. The cast has three Scona alumni and two current Scona theatre students.

Tickets: showpass.com

      

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Some things I learned at the Sterlings

Posted on June 28, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Here are some things I learned at the sold-out 35th annual Sterling Awards bash Monday night, celebrating the season just past in Edmonton theatre. Written by April Banigan with co-hosts Matt Schuurman and Sue Goberdhan, directed by Kate Ryan, it was the first to be live and in-person since COVID. And the refrain I heard all night from smiling theatre people: “I can’t believe we’re here!”

The venue, the Fringe’s Westbury theatre and lobby (with bar), was new, after decades at the Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Even the awards themselves were new. Tessa Stamp’s design used wood reclaimed from theatre sets. And the co-hosts, both ace improvisers, were welcoming, user-friendly and droll.

•The Westbury, said Schuurman, “has big balls.” So true. They were enormous, and celebratory, floating lightly over the cabaret tables and raked seating. Every other live Sterling gala has involved a buffet, prime rib, and booze. This one had charcuterie boxes from Partake … and booze.

•“No one’s ever applauded a quick change before,” said Deanna Finnman, the Sterling winner for costume design. who decked out the cast of the Citadel’s high-speed Pride and Prejudice in witty fashion. Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s hat; in fact all the millinery, got laughs too.

Dayna Lea Hoffmann in All The Little Animals I Have Eaten, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson.

•You can’t out-cool Dayna Lea Hoffmann, star of Northern Light Theatre’s A Hundred Words For Snow and Shadow Theatre’s All The Little Animals I Have Eaten. In accepting his Sterling for multi-media design of the NLT show, Schuurman explained that he’d show up at rehearsals on a vintage motorcycle. Hoffmann invariably out-cooled him, he said, by arriving by skateboard.

Schuurman, the artistic director of Rapid Fire Theatre who’s married to Fringe executive director Megan Dart, also paid tribute to the ingenuity of “theatre parents,” couples, who juggle parenting with the demands of professional theatre careers, assisted by the theatre community. “It takes a village,” he said, pointing at the audience. “And that village is you …. She’s gonna be weird,” he said of his daughter, laughing.

•Matthew Skopyk’s breezy video homage to Mel Geary, recipient of the Ross Hill Sterling for Outstanding Achievement in Production, was a highly entertaining and revealing assortment of photos, droll captions, and captures of the innovative spirit of its subject. For 40 years Geary, whose production career includes theatres of every size, the U of A drama department ,and the Fringe, has been a fearless and curious explorer of digital technology.

•Margaret Mooney, octogenarian theatre veteran who was a private student” of theatre pioneer Elizabeth Sterling Haynes back in the day, has an unrivalled deadpan and an exquisite sense of comic timing — revealed once more in her introduction of the Sterling named after her, for outstanding achievement in administration. It wouldn’t be a Sterling night without her.

The recipient Coralie Cairns, a rare combination of actor and administrator, was introduced by another Cairns, Eva (former general manager of Catalyst Theatre). Friends they are, but not (“so far as we know”) sisters. “Coralie believes collective success is the best kind of success,” said Eva of the collaborative spirit of her “soul sister.”

The Pansy Cabaret, starring Zachary Parsons-Lozinski and Daniel Belland. Photo supplied.

•“It’s a very scary time to be queer in this world,” said Zachary Parsons-Lozinski aka Lilith Fair, accepting their Sterling award for individual performance in a Fringe show, for a stellar performance in The Pansy Cabaret. “To my fellow queers (in the audience,’never stop celebrating your joy. Queer joy is a revolutionary act’.”

•It’s a thought echoed by playwright Elena Eli Belyea in receiving her Sterling for best indie production, Smoke. “It’s a really scary moment to be an LGBTQ+ person…. But we’re in a room of people who can do something about this!”

Braden Butler and Sheldon Stockdale in Fags in Space, Low Hanging Fruits. Photo supplied.

•Playwright Liam Salmon, accepting their Sterling for their new Fringe play, the romantic comedy Fags in Space, had similar thoughts. It is, they said, important to reclaim a persistent term of abuse, “and use that in an empowering way. Especially right now.” As we know from their play Subscribe or Like, Salmon is something of a philosopher. “If (your work) inspires someone, that’s the dream,” they said, with a smile. “If it doesn’t … well that happens too.”

•Accessibility was a keynote of the evening. Carly Neis, who uses a wheelchair, arrived onstage with her dog to accept the new play Sterling for her solo cabaret In My Own Little Corner. Access, both physical and creative, was crucial to her award, as she explained. Her friendship with the late composer/ musical director/ theatre artist Randy Mueller and his empowering advice to “stop letting people tell me No,” was a decisive inspiration, she said.

•Heartfelt acceptance speeches (mostly in absentia and delivered by the Citadel’s Daryl Cloran) from the creative forces of Prison Dancer, which won five Sterlings including best musical,  paid tribute to the Citadel’s attention to forging a connection with the Filipino community and talent pool.      

For the first time, Grindstone Theatre, one of Edmonton theatre’s great little success stories, was part of the Sterlings, with eight nominations for their original musical comedy satire Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer. Act II began with a rousing rendition of the audience fave from the show, Fuck Kenney.

•Edmonton theatre has a lot of great (and empathetic and creative) piano players/ musical directors/ composers, among them, on display on Sterling night, Erik Mortimer, Daniel Belland, Simon Abbott, Steven Greenfield.

Gordon’s Big Bald Head (Mark Meer, Ron Pederson, Jacob Banigan) in Clusterflick at the Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

•Gordon’s Big Bald Head and their expert DJ Ashley Ball were on hand, their night off from the Mayfield run of their very funny improvised movie show Clusterflick, to present the Fringe Sterlings. Quite right since the Fringe is where they do a sold-out run of a show where they improvise any show in the Fringe program, picked randomly by the audience.

*Speaking of the Fringe, people were discussing their show plans (look for a Davina Stewart Fringe production of Bathsheba and the Books, for example). So stay tuned. Meanwhile, here’s the full list of Sterling winners.

  

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And the 2022-2023 Sterling Awards go to …

Posted on June 26, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Prison Dancer, with Julio Fuentes, Josh Capulong, Daren Dyhengco, Renell Doneza, Pierre Angelo Bayuga, Byron Flores, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Austin Eckert in The Royale, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The season on Edmonton stages was toasted live and in person Monday night at the 35th annual Sterling Awards gala, for the first time at Edmonton Fringe Theatre headquarters — directed by Kate Ryan and hosted by the charismatic duo of Sue Goberdhan and Matt Schuurman.

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Prison Dancer and The Royale proved, overwhelmingly, the top choice of jurors, including Sterling honours as outstanding musical and play, respectively. Between them, the two productions, both at the Citadel, gathered 10 Sterlings, including all four of the acting awards, in an evening dominated by Edmonton’s largest playhouse.

Of its eight Sterling nominations, Prison Dancer, a back story of sorts to a YouTube sensation (the weird 2007 viral video of 1,500 prisoners at a maximum security Filipino prison, dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller), took home five. They include awards for Julio Fuentes’ leading performance (plus a Sterling for his choreography/fight direction). As well, Romeo Candido’s score will have a Sterling on the resumé when Nina Lee Aquino’s all-Filipino production runs at the National Arts Centre in the fall.

Nominated in nine categories, The Royale, which chronicles in its highly theatricalized way a collision of ambition and racial hatred on the 1905 boxing circuit, now has five Sterlings, including honours for André Sills’ direction, for Austin Eckert’s leading and Jameela NcNeil’s supporting performances, and for Dave Clarke’s sound design (a category newly separated from outstanding score this year).

Additionally, Scott Reid’s perpetual motion Clue set was Sterling-ed. And Mieko Ouchi’s high-speed production of Pride and Prejudice came home with two awards, one as the outstanding ensemble (a new category this year) and the other for Deanna Finnman’s costumes, a category in which all her competitors also designed Citadel shows.

Sheldon Elter (centre) in Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson

Of the smaller theatres, Northern Light, nominated for 10 Sterlings, received two, both for A Hundred Words For Snow. Alison Yanota’s lighting and Matt Schuurman’s multi-media design for Trevor Schmidt’s production, created a kind of floating iceberg for the protagonist’s journey to the North Pole. Of its seven nominations, Plain Jane Theatre’s ingenious eight-actor/ one-piano chamber version of Sweeney Todd received a Sterling for Shannon Hiebert’s musical direction of Kate Ryan’s production, and performing live from the keyboard.     

Jade Robinson, Hayley Moorhouse in Smoke, the second cast in the Tiny Bear Jaws production. Photo by Brianne Jang

In the very competitive indie and new play categories, the Tiny Bear Jaws two-cast production of Smoke, directed by Jenna Rodgers, took home the Sterling in the former. Elena Belyea’s challenging play, set in the smouldering ruins of a relationship, explores the aftermath of sexual assault without being definitive about cause and blame. A heterosexual couple alternated nightly with a queer one.

playwright/ actor Carly Neil in In My Own Little Corner. Photo by Brianne Jang

The new play Sterling goes to Carly Neis’s solo cabaret In My Little Corner, about love of music, friendship, and negotiating the disabled life. It premiered in the RISER Edmonton series, part of a national initiative for supporting indie artists, produced by Common Ground Arts Society.   

The two theatre for young audiences Sterlings were divided between Jana O’Connor’s CTL-ALT-DELETE at Concrete Theatre and Alberta Musical Theatre’s Jack and the Beanstalk. Of the five Fringe categories, three Sterlings went to Linette J. Smith’s Uniform Theatre/ Scona Alumni Theatre production of the Canadian musical Ride the Cyclone, with the Fringe new work honours going to Liam Salmon’s Fags in Space, and the performance Sterling awarded to Zachary Parsons-Lozinski aka Lilith Fair in Guys in Disguise’s Pansy Cabaret.

As previously announced, actor/administrator Coralie Cairns is this year’s recipient of the Margaret Mooney Award in administration. The U of A innovator Mel Geary received the Ross Hill Award in production. And the late Judy Unwin, artist/ artistic director/ indefatigable theatre volunteer and lobbyist, was recognized for her outstanding contribution to Edmonton theatre.

And the 2022-2023 Sterling Awards go to …

Outstanding Production of a Play: The Royale (Citadel Theatre).

Timothy Ryan Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical: Prison Dancer (Citadel Theatre and Prison Dancer Inc.).

Outstanding Independent Production of a Play: Smoke (Tiny Bear Jaws)

Outstanding New Play (Award to Playwright): Carly Neis, In My Own Little Corner (Common Ground Arts Society).

Outstanding Performance in a Leading Role – Play: Austin Eckert, The Royale (Citadel Theatre)

Outstanding Performance in a Leading Role – Musical: Julio Fuentes, Prison Dancer (Citadel Theatre and Prison Dancer Inc.)

Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role – Play: Jameela McNeil, The Royale (Citadel Theatre)

Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role – Musical: Diana Del Rosario, Prison Dancer (Citadel Theatre and Prison Dancer Inc.)

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Play or Musical: Pride and Prejudice (Citadel Theatre)

Outstanding Director: André Sills, The Royale (Citadel Theatre)

Outstanding Set Design: Scott Reid, Clue (Citadel Theatre)

Outstanding Costume Design: Deanna Finnman, Pride and Prejudice (Citadel Theatre)

Outstanding Lighting Design: Alison Yanota, A Hundred Words for Snow (Northern Light Theatre)

Outstanding Multi-Media Design: Matt Schuurman, A Hundred Words for Snow (Northern Light Theatre)

Outstanding Score of a Play or Musical: Romeo Candido, Prison Dancer (Citadel Theatre and Prison Dancer Inc.)

Outstanding Sound Design: Dave Clarke, The Royale (Citadel Theatre)

Outstanding Musical Director: Shannon Hiebert, Sweeney Todd (Plain Jane Theatre)

Outstanding Choreography or Fight Direction: Julio Fuentes, Prison Dancer (Citadel Theatre and Prison Dancer Inc.)

Outstanding Individual Achievement in Production: Nancy Yuen (stage manager)

Outstanding Production for Young Audiences: CTRL-ALT-DEL (Concrete Theatre)

Outstanding Artistic Achievement for Young Audiences: Shrina Patel, choreographer, Jack and the Beanstalk (Alberta Musical Theatre Company)

Outstanding Fringe Production: Ride the Cyclone (Uniform Theatre and Scona Alumni Theatre Co)

Outstanding Fringe New Work (Award to Playwright): Liam Salmon, Fags in Space (Low Hanging Fruits)

Outstanding Fringe Performance by an Individual: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski/Lilith Fair, Pansy Cabaret (Guys in Disguise)

Outstanding Fringe Performance by an Ensemble: Ride the Cyclone (Uniform Theatre and Scona Alumni Theatre Co)

Outstanding Fringe Director: Linette J. Smith, Ride the Cyclone (Uniform Theatre and Scona Alumni Theatre Co)

The Margaret Mooney Award for Outstanding Achievement in Administration: Coralie Cairns

The Ross Hill Award for Outstanding Achievement in Production: Mel Geary

Outstanding Contribution to Theatre in Edmonton: Judy Unwin

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Improv comes to the Mayfield for the first time, and it’s the best there is: Gordon’s Big Bald Head in Clusterflick

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Gordon’s Big Bald Head (Mark Meer, Ron Pederson, Jacob Banigan) in Clusterflick at the Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Something historic, and riotously funny, is happening at the Mayfield.

For the first time ever at this adventurous dinner theatre, a blockbuster movie is premiering on the Mayfield stage. In itself this pretty much nails high-grade extreme improbability. And there’s this: three suave guys in suits arrive onstage. What they have is a first-rate DJ, three chairs, an upper level, and sexy lighting. What they do not have is a script. Or any idea in advance of what movie is going to happen.

Gordon’s Big Bald Head in Clusterflick at the Mayfield. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

In Clusterflick, the elite trio of maker-uppers called Gordon’s Big Bald Head — Jacob Banigan, Mark Meer, Ron Pederson — improvise an entire movie on the spot, in all its complications, a new one every night. Western, sci fi, psycho-thriller, historical romance, film noir, romantic comedy. …  And this they do using the cues and prompts they get from the audience. “Thank goodness you’re here,” they say to us at the outset.

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Audience participation, the casually funny two-way bantering kind that improv demands, at the Mayfield? It’s a bold experiment. On opening night Friday, the collective ‘we’ provided an impossibly mis-matched assortment. The engaging improvisers asked someone from a table of patrons what their dad did for a living. The answer stopped all three in their tracks.: “he sold Barbies.” You couldn’t make that up. “Door to door?” wondered Meer.  “Wholesale?” asked Banigan. “That’s almost too interesting,” said Pederson.

Another table got asked “what did your next door neighbour do for a living?” The answer was considerably less startling: “grade school teacher.” A personality trait? “Shy and bashful,” suggested someone in the crowd. A location? La Ronde at the Chateau Lacombe. A celebrity cameo? Tom Cruise. A physical trait? A hairy chest.

What on earth could be assembled from the above? We all wondered, the way you do when a virtuoso juggler adds plate after plate. Meer, Banigan, and Pederson were affable, amused, unfazed, clearly enjoying off-the-cuff comic badinage.

All the cues were fed into AI, and what came out was a title, and a plot synopsis. So, that’s how the blockbuster Hairy Love —  complete with cinematic underscoring moment to moment by the remarkably inventive DJ Ashley Ball — came to be. On the spot. In 85 highly entertaining minutes.

A plot of dizzying intricacy and a romantic heart unfolds, with subplots involving miscellaneous recurring characters, dramatic encounters, comic interludes, escalating misunderstandings, exits in a huff, flashbacks, running gags, scenes in which Banigan and Pederson actually play two different couples on a date, simultaneously. Ah yes, and a cameo by Tom Cruise who gets mentioned in the same sentence as … Leduc.  And it’s all turned out with precise comic detail and expert physicality.

The concentration must be ferocious in that big bald head of Gordon, but the delivery is unhesitating and easeful. There’s uncanny comic chemistry at work. Which is something Fringe audiences know from Gordon’s Big Bald Head sold-out runs at the summer festival, where they improvise an entire Fringe show, randomly chosen from the hundreds in the program, armed with the title and the brief program description.

Inside Gordon’s Big Bald Head beats a single comedy brain. And it fires, impromptu and fast, on a frequency from old-school quips of the Catskills comic variety through pop culture references to more highbrow allusions tossed off lightly. The sense of humour includes the satirical and the goofball. In Hairy Love the teacher’s name is Miss Havisham, for heaven’s sake, and she was left at the altar, à la Great Expectations. Charles Dickens, O. Henry, Scientology, Mattel’s Barbie (played with droll gravitas by Meer) somehow find their way into the story.

There’s a weird kind of brilliance about this, and the undeniable live-ness of it all is part of the shine. Pederson, Banigan and Meer are all smart, quick on the uptake, and funny. And they’re experts at user-friendly audience engagement. I have to admit I had my doubts whether this could work in the dinner theatre context. Full marks to the Mayfield for their experimental spirit, because it does, and wonderfully well.

Edmonton, we have the best in the world ready to improvise for us, in a new venture at the Mayfield.  Don’t miss the chance to be there.

REVIEW

Clusterflick

Gordon’s Big Bald Head

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Running: through July 23

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca   

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Wrapping the self in fantasy: Strange/Familiar, a new ‘autofictional’ play at the Gateway

Posted on June 23, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Liam Monaghan in Strange/Familiar. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In a telling moment in Strange/Familiar, a new play by Liam Monaghan, we see the protagonist open a suitcase. Liam, who shares a name with the playwright in this “autofictional play,” seems to have packed light: a single skinny mirror. But he comes, as they say, with weighty baggage.

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As the title and Liam’s reaction, a mixture of perplexity, horror, and fascination, suggest, his reflection seems both strange and familiar to him. Sartre once said, memorably, in No Exit that hell is other people”; Monaghan’s ‘no exit’ takes the alternative view: hell as the Self, anxious to live in a mirrored world, frantic to blockade “reality.”

In Brett Dahl’s inventive production, the stage designed by Whittyn Jason is dominated by an old trunk, Liam’s own pandora’s box of mysteries which he nervously refuses to open. In fact Liam (playwright Monaghan), a queer musician who’s just moved in with his hard-working oncologist boyfriend Joseph (Graham Mothersill), has made anxiety about its contents into a veritable art form; his response is flamboyant self-creation. 

The stage is lit by scattered lamps on the floor, like footlights (as Liam says, “overhead lighting is a crime”). And a sense of a flickering unreality plays across a gauzy screen, which sometimes seems to have ominous shadows and at others looks a bit like looking at Monet’s waterlilies by moving your head without your glasses while stoned.

Liam Monaghan and Graham Mothersill in Strange/Familiar. Photo by Mat Simpson

You can cocoon the self in fantasy like Liam, imagine yourself into sequined suits (“I was born with a taste for sequins”), barricade yourself from the past and your adoptive Bible belt family with glamorous fantasy friends like chanteuse Julia (Kathy Zaborsky). But damn, there you are, with a boyfriend who’s actually real, out in the hard-ass “real world” every day, looking for moments of happiness.  “What are you protecting yourself from?” the remarkably patient Joseph asks. “From strangers, from my family, (pause), from you,” says Liam in a rare moment of candour.

The catalyst of the play, and the crisis that’s brought Liam to the stage to tell us his story, is the arrival of a note from his birthmother, the first communication he’s ever had from this mystery person. “So weird, like a letter from beyond the grave,” as he says. And it topples his fragile hegemony of reality and fantasy. Anxiety and obsession turn to panic.

“I hate it here. On planet earth,” he tells his showbiz mama Julia, who arrives to sing vintage jazz from time to time, in Zaborsky’s red-lipstick performance, full of  showbiz pizzaz. You know you’re pushing the histrionics when an alluring old-school diva tells you “I know a wallowing homosexual when I see one.”

There’s a fair bit of repetition involved in the unravelling of this knot. And after a very gradual build, the resolution seems sudden. To me, the play seems to end a couple of times. And since the playwright doesn’t let himself off the hook in performance as a conflicted character who late in the play comes to see that the world contains other people, Liam’s petulant tone does grow a bit tiresome in truth.

Mothersill is compelling and sympathetic as the doctor boyfriend who gets tired of coaxing, and being the tent peg that anchors Liam to the ground. And Zaborsky as the fairy godmother who offers Xanadu (and musical numbers) is convincing, too. To wonder about editing her numbers for length is not to be unappreciative of them.

Bountiful in its literary and theatrical allusions, Strange/Familiar is an intriguingly theatrical way to capture a certain sense of unreality, of elusive identity, of the self as exotic centre, a view that maybe in the end is plain old self-centred. Liam, a queer self-exploration addict, feels like an outsider in his own life. But there’s a part of him who wants to be “strange” as he puts it, and different — doubtless the orthodoxies of the southern Alberta bible belt are conducive to this sense — and a mystery to his boyfriend.

And the idea that family and home are not just to be inherited but also to be created by who you love is powerful, and generous-minded.

Strange/Familiar

Written by: Liam Monaghan

Directed by: Brett Dahl

Starring: Liam Monaghan, Graham Motherwell, Kathy Zaborsky

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through Saturday

Tickets: showpass.com

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