On the street where she lived, stories from childhood: Morningside Road, a new Celtic musical, premieres at Shadow

Posted on October 13, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Maureen Rooney and Mhairi Berg in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The through-line of Mhairi Berg’s childhood was stories — fascinating, first-hand stories told to her by her Scottish grandmother about growing up in Edinburgh.

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“I didn’t realize how important they were to me,” says Berg, “But as I got older I realized they were pieces of her I’d been holding on to.” It’s an inter-generational inheritance that has found its way into Morningside Road, the “new Canadian Celtic musical” by Berg (book), with music by Berg and Simon Abbott that premieres Thursday to launch the Shadow Theatre season. “As I was starting to write the show I came to understand that my grandmother was teaching me things, about how to ‘do’ life, how to live life.”

And if she’d had any doubts about the wider resonance of those afternoons at her grandmother’s house, drinking tea with “a witty spitfire of a woman,” they evaporated in the thought that “ah, this could be a story people could relate to, even though they didn’t live those experiences…. Everyone has someone in their life they’ve connected to, heard stories from that have given them a different outlook on life.…”

For Berg, that someone was her grandmother, “fiery, full of wit and wisdom,” who’d moved to Canada, to Edmonton, from Scotland in the early ‘70s (Berg’s mom arrived as a teenager). And, after the overture (so to speak) just outside Sherwood Park, Berg spent the majority of her kid years in Mexico City. Theatre wasn’t the opportunity on offer there, but she took “the usual” (her words, tossed off casually) piano, dance, vocal lessons outside school. Which will shed light on the startling breadth of the artist’s versatility, as an actor, dancer, singer, singer-songwriter, playwright, composer, musician, sound designer, choreographer….

Josh Meredith and Mhairi Berg, As You LIke It, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang

Consider this expansive career: If you caught Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s music-filled As You Like It in Louise McKinney Riverfront Part this past summer you’ll have appreciated the appealing songs, performed acoustically, that Berg (as the courtier Amiens) wrote for the songs in the good Duke’s country court in the Forest of Arden. If you caught Frozen the Disney musical at the Citadel last season, you’ll have seen elaborate and witty dance production numbers in which Berg had a hand as assistant choreographer.

We return to the Berg story. Back in Canada for high school, she discovered theatre in a full-immersion way, musical theatre to be precise, first at MacEwan U’s theatre department, then a master’s degree in musical theatre from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. Until she arrived in Scotland, “I didn’t even realize my grandmother had an accent,” Berg laughs. “Ahah, people sound like her here!”

Berg’s play Caw-CAW, which premiered this past summer as one of Theatre Yes’s site-specific 20-minute Doorstep Plays, sent three girls on a mysterious, increasingly fractured, camping expedition to redress, or revenge,  And now, covering a lot of theatrical ground in high-contrast, a new Celtic musical with vintage flavours.   

Mhairi Berg and Evan Dowling in Die Harsh The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau

It was doing Grindstone Theatre’s hit all-improvised weekly musical The 11 O’Clock Number that Berg met Abbott. Grindstone’s extremely busy resident musical director/ composer/ lyricist has never met a musical style he couldn’t embrace, witness his original co-creations (with Byron Martin) Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, Die-Harsh the Christmas Musical, Accidental Beach: A Previously Improvised Musical and GUMS: An Accidental Beach Prequel, ThunderCats in a career that includes 50 shows so far.

Ah, and the fateful words were uttered by one of the two: “it’d be fun to write a musical with you.”

What they needed was a story. And that was something Berg’s storyteller grandmother provided, along with the musical style into which the pair could lean. “I came from a singer-songwriter energy,” says Berg of her origins as a composer. “But because of The 11 O’Clock Number I’ve been exposed to a wide variety of musical styles … super-helpful.” Abbott’s natural terrain is more pop/rock and musical theatre. “For this show it felt right to have Celtic music since it’s set in Scotland, in the past. With influences of jazz, which Simon knows very well. He’s a very smart writer!”

Composer/lyricist Simon Abbott, Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

“We really wanted the songs to feel organic to the story,” says Berg, “to feel like folk songs that belonged to the time, to feel like they’ve existed for hundreds of years, not songs that are placed in the show because it’s a musical…. So when the grandmother (played by Maureen Rooney) starts singing, you feel like ‘o this comes from Scotland; it belongs in her world’.”

The time travel, as Berg describes, was the biggest challenge for the co-creators (and for Berg the actor). “It jumps from the present to the past, her growing up in Edinburgh. I play the granddaughter in present-day Canada, and slip into playing Elaine, the young girl in Edinburgh, all the memories of her being young, every scene going back in time, changing accents.” The third member of the cast, Cameron Kneteman, plays a mysterious character The Lad in that Edinburgh memory time frame in the ’30s and ’40s.

Both Berg and Abbott were “intrigued,” as the former says, “by using fiddle music.” Writing for violin was a first for both. “We have an amazing violin player (Viktoria Grynenko) in the band, so we’ve we’ve been able to experiment. She’s so good she can take whatever we’ve written and use it!”

Directed by Lana Michelle Hughes, Morningside Road is a complex undertaking, dramatically and musically: in addition to songs, there’s dance music. And nearly the whole show is underscored, says Berg of a production with an onstage three-piece band led by Abbott at the keyboard. Since the characters live in different times, “finding ways for us to sing together was definitely a challenge, because we wanted to have those big ensemble moments too.” The band members occasionally join in the singing, to amplify the musical texture.

The first incarnation of Morningside Road, an hour-long version, happened at the 2023 Fringe, and racked up a handful of Sterling Award nominations. What we’ll see come Thursday at Shadow is the full-sized musical. “We haven’t added to the actual story, but we’ve fleshed it out, beefed it up it.”

Later this season Berg returns to Die Harsh, as Holly the estranged wife and a hilarious assortment of other roles (including a tap-dancing FBI agent). And after that she’s in the ensemble of The Wizard of Oz at the Citadel, as well as working on her own new musical for the Citadel’s Playwrights Lab.

Meanwhile, there’s a new Canadian musical to launch. Berg’s grandmother, alas, is succumbing to dementia, now in late stages, and it’s erasing many of her bold outlines and memories. It’s a hard road. But, says Berg, “this story is a great way for me to handle it all, reflect on it, feel close to her.”

PREVIEW

Morningside Road

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Mhairi Berg (book)

Music and lyrics by: Mhairi Berg and Simon Abbott

Directed by: Lana Michelle Hughes

Starring: Mhairi Berg, Cameron Kneteman, Maureen Rooney

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Nov. 2

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

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Hilarity and horror: ghost stories from the dark vault of our history, improvised. Ha-Ha-Haunting returns to Rapid Fire

Posted on October 11, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Ha-Ha-Haunting at Rapid Fire’s Exchange Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Embrace your ghosts, Edmonton.

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This is the season when the frontier between the living and the dead is at its flimsiest, and spirits are raving (and lining up for artisan beer at the bar. And Rapid Fire Theatre is once more dipping into the dark boneyard labyrinth where our macabre civic secrets lie fermenting.

Ha-Ha-Haunting, which sold out every show in its debut run last season, is back. The concept is crazy and inspired: to let a cast of improvisers loose on the horror stories embedded in our own history. It’s the kind of raw material Catch The Keys disinterred in their late lamented Dead Centre of Town excursions to the river valley. And this time, the stories (researched by playwright Megan Dart) are historical Edmonton locations that open different veins (so to speak) of horror — demonic possession, resident ghosts, bizarre acts of violence, restless avengers, ghostly voices … Edmonton history has it all.

We’re at a séance with the four-member cast (Diane Webb, Christina Harbak, Alaina Sadowski, and host Michael Vetsch on Friday’s opening night). And, eek, suddenly the table at which they sit is on the move (I mustn’t say more). They open mysterious black envelopes, each containing the location and seeds of a real-life story assigned them. And each improviser is compelled to lead an improvised re-enactment, with supplementary characters, narrative interventions, and direction by the others.

The train station in Strathcona (that’s became an assortment of bars including MKT in more recent history) is the eerie locale of a train incident and a subsequent haunting, directed by Sadowski. The U of A residence Pembina Hall, which became a military hospital during the 1918 flu epidemic, a kind of haunting that we know about from more recent viral rampages, is the setting for a doctor/nurse zombie tale, with weapons from the tickle trunk. And, the funniest improv of all, a tale of bizarre serial deaths showbiz revenge by a thwarted actor-turned-drama teacher (inconsolable because whose Fringe show didn’t get reviewed, a cautionary tale for some of us) proved the favourite of the spirits who occupied the house seats, and who get to vote, Survivor-style, on which story should be carried through to its grand finale.

OK, Shakespeare didn’t seem to be their forte. But that’s fair since it’s memories of high school drama that motivate a serial killer. And who knew that Peaseblossom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream was such a seminal character?

Anyhow The Exchange Theatre is decked out in spooky seasonal finery, with sound effects improvised by Vicky Berg, technical effects by Rhiannon Eldridge. And there are other RFT stars waiting in the wings to rotate into the Ha-Ha-Haunting casts: Nikki Hulowski, Kelly Turner, Joleen Ballendine, and Tara Koett.

Horror and improv aren’t natural bedfellows (except when it comes to Edmonton road renos). So this is an original. It’s funny and it runs at the Exchange through Nov. 1. The full schedule and tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com.

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A new season, and with the departure of Bradley Moss the end of an era at Theatre Network

Posted on October 9, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Theatre Network artistic director Bradley Moss

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Theatre Network, that storied company in the beautiful new theatre on 124th Street, turns 51 this season. And it’s with reduced programming that invites shows by diverse artistic creators onto its two stages — and news of a dramatic transition in artistic leadership after 30 years.

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“The timing is perfect for change,” says Bradley Moss, who’s leaving the artistic directorship of the company in December after a three-decade association with Theatre Network that includes 27 years in the top artistic position. “Across the country it happens constantly to companies who run new facilities. … Our company is going through an evolution; it’s a new company now. It needs new ideas,  new ways of doing things, new and fresh energy … like I had when I came in.”

“I owe a lot to Theatre Network … to do the things I got to do, the people I got to work with, the artists we got to support,” says Moss. It’s the moment “for me to return to being an independent individual artist. And I look forward to that,” an anticipation that for him is both professional and personal (his long-time partner lives in Calgary).

The two mainstage shows of season 51, neither produced by Theatre Network, are a new Christmas show, Girl Brain, Actually, a parody of the celebrated seasonal film Love, Actually by the sketch comedy trio Girl Brain. Moss himself directs the production that runs Dec. 11 to 21. Batrabbit Productions’ original Rat Academy, a hit bouffon show birthed at Nextfest, returns, this time to the Nancy Power mainstage (April 9 to 12) to chronicle the outsider fortunes of the last two rats in a rat-free province. And the capper, as usual, is Nextfest, returning for a 31st annual edition in June.

Before that, Theatre Network curates a February weekend “best of Fringe” festival (Feb. 20 to 22) of five indie shows, four of them culled from this past summer’s Fringe festival: Ready Go Theatre’s Where Foxes Lie, a solo thriller by and starring Jezec Sanders; Elon Muskrat by and starring Josh Languedoc; Viva Dance Company’s It’s Just You And Me, and Chris Bullough’s solo show Undiscovered Country, held over by the Fringe. Joining them in the weekend lineup at the festival is Shivamanohari  Company’s Dvaita / Duality, a show that explores, in two dance forms, the colonial constructs of gender.

The season also includes the Phoenix Series, a TN initiative to showcase the work of indie companies. So far the lineup includes Alberta Musical Theatre Company’s Pinocchio (running through Sunday at the Roxy), Andrew Ritchie’s Thou Art Here production of Cycle (Oct. 15 to 26), and Brian Webb Dance Company’s Action At A Distance/ BLOT – Body Line of Thought (Nov. 13 and 14). More announcements to follow.   

The mainstage performance schedule, in all, which usually runs to nine weeks of performances, has been reduced to 16 days. The struggle, as Moss puts it, is to run a new facility “and make our own work.” And that will be the challenge for the new artistic leadership at Theatre Network, which will, as he advises, include a both an artistic director and an executive director (Moss currently has both jobs).

Theatre Network artistic director Bradley Moss

When Theatre Network’s long-time ex-cinema home, a 124th St. landmark, burned to the ground Jan. 13, 2015, the company was determined to return to that storefront footprint. It took six years, spent in “exile” from their ‘hood in Strathcona at the (now) Gateway Theatre. But under Moss the new $12 million Roxy opened in 2022, an amazingly compact theatre on three levels that somehow feels spacious inside (two stages, an airy second floor rehearsal hall, a green room, a set-building shop, the works….). It was an achievement, in construction, logistics, government participation at all levels, fund-raising.

“What I learned, in hindsight, was that raising the money, getting government support, getting people excited,  to build a building wasn’t that hard,” Moss says and pauses, laughing, “well, OK, it was hard, and it took 10 years of my life.”

“But then, it changes the company. Running the facility becomes the focus, and you don’t get any increase in support and funding to do that…. Theatre Network is still funded at 2012 levels.”  And that’s a disappointment to Moss. “Bricks and mortar get supported. But running it at the level that got you there” is a challenge faced by by theatre companies across the country, as he points out. The lesson is that “with running a facility changes the company, it changes the focus, it becomes about running the facility.”

Since his arrival from Quebec to study directing at the U of A (he has an MFA and counts the late Jim DeFelice and Tom Peacocke as his most important mentors), Moss has championed new work by such Edmonton playwrights as Beth Graham, Collin Doyle, Darrin Hagen, Kenneth T. Williams, among many others. And he’s forged working relationships with star national artists too, Hannah Moscovitch, Mump and Smoot, Colleen Murphy, Ronnie Burkett, Daniel MacIvor, Karen Hines, Eugene Stickland among them. From the beginning Moss made a point of producing important Quebec playwrights, like Michel Tremblay, Dominique Champagne, François Archembault. Last season, in honour of TN’s 50th anniversary, Moss assembled productions by a trio of celebrated artists from across the country who have had long-standing relationships with the company under his leadership: Burkett, Murphy, Mump and Smoot.

Moss’s proudest achievement in a Sterling Award-studded three decades at Theatre Network, he figures, might well be the company’s legacy in nurturing emerging artists (12,000 and counting) and their work. He founded Nextfest in 1996. And the multi-disciplinary festival of emerging artists, a bright Moss idea that caught on, has grown in both size and influence exponentially since birth. It has a national profile, and it takes some doing to find theatre artists creating in the scene here, both newcomers and veterans who don’t have a Nextfest credit somewhere in their resumés.

All that and a snazzy new theatre…. “I’m grateful that I got to help the Edmonton community, its playwrights, actors, designers,” says Moss. “The positive story here is that we have a beautiful facility. And it’s perfect timing for new energy to come in, new ways of doing things. …. It happens in new facilities constantly. And that’s OK.”

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Pinocchio: a hit AMTC musical for kids returns, a test of ingenuity and theatre magic

Posted on October 3, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Katelyn Cabalo, Kevin Thomas, Chassidy Andrews in Pinocchio, Alberta Musical Theatre Company. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Fifteen years ago, a highly eccentric, episodic 36-chapter 19th century Italian novel, a fairy tale adventure with a puppet hero who dreamed of being a real live boy, tickled the fancy of a musical theatre writing duo whose jam was re-imagining classic fairy tales for contemporary kid audiences.

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The fairy tale was Carlo Collodi’s 1883 Pinocchio, serialized in Italy’s first newspaper for kids. And in the hands of playwright/ director/ actor Farren Timoteo and the late composer Jeff Unger, Pinocchio’s wildly fantastical odyssey over land and under sea became an ingenious much-travelled 60-minute musical comedy — for three energetic, very agile triple-threats. The trio, in constant motion, played two dozen or so characters — a kooky assortment of animals, con persons, monsters, with costume-changes to match. And they sang original Unger songs that ranged from an intricate Sondheim-esque number for Gepetto the puppeteer, G&S for a couple of sprightly groupers, an Italian tarantella, American Gospel….

Alberta Musical Theatre’s award-winner, a test of theatrical savvy if ever there was one, is back in a new production directed by Corben Kushneryk, starting tonight at Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre for eight performances before it sets forth on Edmonton theatre’s most demanding and extensive tour: 220 shows and counting in seven or eight months, in schools, community halls, even the odd theatre. “That’s a lot of little eyes watching,” grins Kushneryk, who has the cherubic aspect of a big little kid himself. “New venues, new acoustics … every day a new adventure.”

As with many AMTC shows, as Kushneryk points out, Pinocchio has proven to be a springboard for energetic young up-and-comers, mostly recent theatre school grads on the threshold of professional careers. You know their names; they’ve become significant players in the Edmonton theatre scene. Its premiere production in 2011 introduced Madelaine Knight, Byron Martin , Chris Scott. The revival of 2018 starred Josh Travnik, Chariz Faulmino, and Cameron Chapmen.

And so it is with Kushneryk’s new cast: emerging artists Katelyn Cabalo, Kevin Thomas, Chassidy Andrews, recent MacEwan and U of A theatre grads all of whom were in Fringe shows this past summer. And they will be tackling a musical “that’s full of zany comedy, gags and bits, a combination of farce, reality, age-appropriate horror.” Pinocchio does get eaten by a giant shark, for example. And a premise with contemporary resonance that re-works Collodi’s dark and whimsical tale in a way that’s much different than Disney’s 1940 animation since it focuses on a fractured father/ son relationship. “A sad, lonely elderly puppeteer feels abandoned by his son,” who has eloped. Pinocchio, Gepetto’s magical puppet creation, sets forth into the world to retrieve him. As Kushneryk puts it, “it’s about finding connections again, the strings that connect our hearts, a magical creature re-uniting a broken home….”

At the centre is the accordion, “the heartbeat, the push and pull, the bellows, the pulse, the breath….” It conjures, in Timoteo’s author’s note, “the spirit of Italy, past, present and future.” Often AMTC shows put a sassy feminist spin on familiar tales like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. And for this new production, Kushneryk has done some gender-swapping, as he says. “The judge who puts the heat on Pinocchio is a kind of Judge Judy character….” And “the head baddie” is a woman too.

In the post-COVID world of shrunk budgets, touring theatre is even more a test of logistical ingenuity and resourcefulness. Kushneryk, who spent three seasons as the co-artistic director (with Tracy Carroll) of Concrete Theatre, borrows from one of AMTC’s fairy tale re-creations, “it’s about spinning straw into gold.”

For the upcoming tour, the actors are on their own: “no stage manager, no live music (professionally recorded tracks, including underscoring). They fire their own sound cues, sometimes while they’re onstage. No technicians, no sound crew, no backstage (dresser)….” Says Kushneryk, laughing. “it’s a big puzzle,” he says of “tour-izing” the show. And since it’s clearly impossible, the result is … “magic!”

In his time Kushneryk himself has toured theatre for young audiences shows, among them Concrete’s The Bully Show. “I had a single jacket and a hat,” and in the Q-and-A sessions after the show, the kids would ask him where the rest of the cast was. “Magic! I can’t wait to see their minds blown with this one,” when a character disappears behind one drape, and emerges seconds later as a someone different in a different costume!

Deanna Finnman has designed new costumes. The set uses elements of Corey Sincennes’ original design, “re-imagined to tour” as painted bas-relief drapes. And the actors do the rest. “Very much a working-class job,” as Kushneryk says. “A lot of sweat and effort, full-body engagement, a labour of love. They are travelling troubadours.”

PREVIEW

Pinocchio

Theatre: Alberta Musical Theatre Company

Created by: Farren Timoteo and Jeff Unger

Directed by: Corben Kushneryk

Starring: Katelyn Cabalo, Kevin Thomas, Chassidy Andrews

Where: Theatre Network, Roxy Theatre, 10708 124 St.

Running: Oct. 3 to 12, then on tour

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca

   

  

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The reluctant activist who loves her kid: The Pink Unicorn opens the 50th birthday season at Northern Light, a review

Posted on September 29, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Patricia Zentilli in The Pink Unicorn, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb collective photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the solo play that returns to Northern Light Theatre after a decade to launch the company’s 50th anniversary season, we meet a woman whose alignment with her world — and the next one too — gets thrown off the rails. Which leaves her with a choice to make.

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In the play by the Canadian-born American writer Elise Forier Edie, Trisha (Patricia Zentilli) is not one of the world’s natural activists. She’s a small-town Texas widow and single mother, a conservative church-going Christian who is perplexed and appalled when her teenage teenage daughter announces she’s gender-queer. Joleen — new name Jo, new pronouns they/them — wants to start a gay-straight alliance at Sparkton High School. Guess how that goes.

“How on God’s green earth can you be a girl and a boy at the same time?” wonders Trisha. “A person without a gender”? What can that mean? In Trevor Schmidt’s boldly stylized design for his new production, Trish, blonde and beautiful and pink-clad in the person of Zentilli, puts her case to us not in a “real” small-town kitchen with a cup of coffee but in a fanciful pink salon with a glass of pink lemonade.

A cleaner in the local hospital, she lives in a kind of pink Barbie puppet theatre, imaginatively lighted by Larissa Poho. The pink wallpaper peels back a little in one place to reveal a window to the idealized outside world, a small framed image of white picket fence, wheat, blue sky puffy clouds.

Patricia Zentilli in The Pink Unicorn, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jan, bb collective photography

This is Trisha’s world from the inside out, in Schmidt’s design a vision through her eyes, and it’s unambiguously unilaterally feminine, bolstered, as we learn, by fundamentalist Christianity. It’s a chamber where the notion of gender as non-binary or fluid, indeterminately located somewhere on a spectrum, (or, as Jo says, invisible), is, to say the least, preposterous.

Trilling away in a light, bright, soprano timbre (with one of those improbable Texan drawls you have to get used to), Zentilli conjures for us a woman who is genuinely startled and dismayed to discover a whole new, darker, colour palette to the universe. If Jo had been knocked up, or even if “the Mormons had got hold of her,” Trisha’s equilibrium would have rocked, but held firm, she says. But “nothing in my life had prepared me for gender-queer” and “bi-what-nots.”

But when her minister, Pastor Dick (ha!), fulminates against gays, uses the Bible as a weapon, hauls out the Nazi argument, Trish finds herself outraged on behalf of her daughter. And she walks out of church and her own life — into a new one. In a nuanced, thoughtful performance Zentilli conveys the dramatic enormity of it all for the character, the sense of a Candide shoved, step by reluctant step, into a brave new world for which she has no GPS. Trish’s sense, sometimes comic and sometimes poignant, of her own limitations, prejudices, and flaws, makes her likeable despite it all, and gives her a different flavour than, say, the blue-collar heroism of a Norma Rae or an Erin Brockovich. Trish never does call Jo “they” instead of “she.” But she does confront the school principal, and finds his authoritarian hypocrisy infuriating.

In her new life the people she meets, including her first lesbian (Enid is so fat Trish “feels sorry for her bones, working overtime to hold her up) and wheelchair-bound Dorcas (whose speech is like “gargling”), are not to her taste. “I hate diversity,” she admits at one point; even the word feels foreign in her lexicon, as Zentilli conveys. The beauty in diversity is something Trish has to struggle to see. “I don’t know how Jesus did it,” she sighs. “The Other” is not someone she’s ever wanted to meet — until that Other turns out to be someone she loves.

Perhaps the most surprising thing of all in The Pink Unicorn is that Trish’s transformation isn’t so much about understanding — she admits she might never understand gender-queer — but empathy. And it’s empathy honed by the experience, new to a life-long majority-dweller, of being in the minority.

Social ostracisim ramps up with threatening phone calls, horrible names spray-painted on her car … and an unfamiliar sense of being an outsider, like Jo and her LGBTQ+ friends, bullied at school. Trish has always just had ‘her people’ around her. And now she doesn’t. And she pays a price. In standing up for her kid in a small town, she’s up against church, religion, school, social circle, red-neckism, even (or even more implacably) her mother. And the sheer mystery of Joleen-into-Jo compels Trish to re-think her estrangement from her alcoholic big bro, in a bar scene that will make you laugh, and cry.

Patricia Zentilli in The Pink Unicorn, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb collective photography

Part of Trisha’s “journey” is learning to speak to other people, to mobilize outrage to assemble her thoughts and impulses. It takes considerable acting finesse in shaping a character to pull this off. Zentilli is impressively skilled at negotiating this improbable development, from the woman with a supply of rustic similes (“nervous as a naked man in a pond full of snapping turtles”) to a woman who can toss off “cross-dressing in the name of Thomas Paine is not the American way.” Or in an encounter with school principal Cyril Makepeace (ha!) where she notices “a crack in his complacency.” Which sounds a lot more like the playwright than Trisha. Zentilli’s smart performance takes this into account: this is an insightful and emotionally engaging, funny and touching play, but not a great one in its writing.

Patricia Zentilli in The Pink Unicorn, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb collective photography

I must admit, I didn’t quite follow the elaborate (and to me a bit forced) line of reasoning in Trish’s story that links Jesus, this life to the next, a pink unicorn named Star Dancer to God, and civil rights and the ACLU (and a throw-away comment about “New York Jews”) to religious beliefs as opposed to organized church religion. Darrin Hagen’s delicate score, with its hints of celestial magic, seems entirely à propos. And, in a play about enlightenment, or lack thereof, Polo’s contributions as lighting designer are crucial to the rhythms of the production.

In one way, The Pink Unicorn is slightly out of date, of course, in a world that has pretty suddenly spun forcibly backwards to an out-and-out fascist repression of “diversity.” As reported by Trish, Jo’s commentary about the patriarchy or “the capitalist agenda,” has lost some of its comic lustre lately. But in another way, the play is timelier than ever, here in our own part of the world where an Alberta government is going out of its way to marginalize gay and trans kids. Empathy is called for, with some outrage too, as The Pink Unicorn and Zentilli’s performance, tell us. You don’t have to understand to be tolerant.

As Trish says “there is no happy ending.” It’s a thought that, like this play, stings and makes you teary.

REVIEW

The Pink Unicorn

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Elise Forier Edie

Directed and designed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Patricia Zentilli

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

Running: through Oct. 11

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

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A big birthday weekend of theatre in Edmonton. A little 12thnight survey

Posted on September 26, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Patricia Zentilli in The Pink Unicorn, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb collective photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

•Opening tonight: Northern Light’s 50th anniversary season, with a new Trevor Schmidt production of The Pink Unicorn — a solo play by the American writer Elise Forier Edie whose timeliness has only escalated in the decade since the theatre introduced us to it. Here’s the scenario: a small-town Texas widow, a conservative church-going single mother whose world and all her social connections in it splinter apart when her teenage daughter announces she’s gender-queer. Patricia Zentilli, who stars as the unlikely activist, has  fascinating things to say about the role in the 12thnight preview here. It runs through Oct. 11 at the Studio Theatre in the Fringe Arts Barns. Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com.

Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Troy Feldman, Davinder Malhi in The Life of Pi, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

•The Citadel is turning 60, and the opening production of their anniversary season, Life of Pi, is up and running (through Oct. 5). Directed by Haysam Kadri, a technical marvel it is — a perfect storm of inspired lighting, sound and set design, with a cast of humans and puppets in Lolita Chakrabarti’s stage adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novel by Yann Martel. The story of improbable survival — a shipwrecked teenage boy trapped on a lifeboat or hundreds of days with a quartet of zoo animals, and finally one ferocious Royal Bengal tiger — married to improbable theatrical magic. Have a peek here at 12thnight’s preview interview with puppet designer/creator Brendan James Boyd of Puppet Stuff Canada. And the 12thnight review is here.

Alberta Playwrights’ Network executive director Trevor Rueger with playwright Rose Scollard. Photo supplied

•And here’s a 40th birthday you might know about: the Alberta Playwrights’ Network.

Imagine this scenario: You’ve written a play. At least you think it’s a play…. So what do you do now? Alternate scenario: You’ve written a play, but you have the feeling that all is not quite right with it…. So what do you do now? Third scenario: you’re a seasoned playwright and you want to hang out with other playwrights and talk about the 12th draft of your new play and the how-to’s of getting your play read by a theatre and onto a stage…. So what do you do now?

That’s what the Alberta Playwrights’ Network is for.

Forty years ago an unofficial  quartet of Alberta playwrights — Stephen Heatley, Conni Massing, Lyle Victor Albert and Raymond Storey — founded it, with some money from Alberta Culture. At a moment in our collective cultural history when British and American theatre ruled, their inspiration, as executive direct Trevor Rueger points out, was “to create a network of support and assistance for our own Alberta playwrights. “A network for playwrights to meet each other — for education, advocacy, workshops, mentorship, the sharing of resources….” After all, actors and directors have each other.  What about the artists who write the plays? Who do they have?

And speaking of “networks,” it was Theatre Network that provided the backroom space for the office, until APN moved its HQ to Calgary in 1992.

APN is all about “the journey of the playwright,” as Rueger says. “It’s a playwright development centre, not a play development centre.” Still he reckons that APN has had a hand in developing some 3,000 plays in the last four decades, through many changes in the theatrical landscape and the growth of respect for and confidence in Canadian theatre production and the capture of our own stories.

Rueger compares APN to an AMA for playwrights. “For a membership fee, you can get a map from us if you’re lost. Or get towed to the nearest playwright” for advice and assistance.

The venerable Alberta Playwriting Competition is an Alberta Playwrights Network initiative (a recent winner Hayley Moorhouse’s Tough Guy will launch Fringe Theatre’s season in October). Script Salon, one of Canadian theatre’s notable little success stories which happens the second Sunday of every month at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Strathcona — new Alberta scripts read by professional actors — is jointly presented by APN and the Playwrights’ Guild of Canada. The idea is to provide actors and an audience to assist playwrights in preparing their plays for full production.

playwright Beth Graham

APN is having a 40th birthday celebration Saturday night at the Hazeldean Community League 9630 66 Ave. Expect readings from Alberta plays that have had successful mainstage productions here and elsewhere, among them David van Belle’s Liberation Days, Beth Graham’s The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble, Michelle Robb’s Tell Us What Happened. There will also be cake, Rueger assures, and a performance from his own Calgary-based cover band. Hello Penguins is their Calgary name. They are currently brainstorming an Edmonton name for the band: “The Whyte Avenue? Trevor Schmidt’s new Fringe play?” Tickets for Saturday’s event: pay-what-youy-can at 40thyeg@albertaplaywrights.com.

Postscript: congratulations to both Beth Graham and MacEwan University. The actor/ playwright/ dramaturge is their new playwright-in-residence.

 

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For the love of the kid: meet Patricia Zentilli, star of The Pink Unicorn at Northern Light Theatre

Posted on September 24, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Patricia Zentilli, star of
the Pink Unicorn, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Trevor Schmidt

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The woman we meet in The Pink Unicorn is a small-town Texas widow, a very conservative very religious church-goer whose world suddenly hits major turbulence when her teenage daughter announces she’s gender-queer. Not only that, Trish’s 14-year-old kid wants to start a gay-straight alliance at school.

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The character is a test-case for bonding with the audience, says Patricia Zentilli who plays the unlikely activist Trish in the funny, poignant piece by the  Canadian-born American writer Elise Forier Edie that launches  Northern Light Theatre’s 50th anniversary season. “She’s very flawed. She can be judgmental. She can be racist. She can be able-ist. She says fat-phobic things…. And somehow you love her. Somehow you’re rooting for her;, you care about her….” Tricky, that, as Zentilli points out .

“She has to really negotiate her child’s coming out. It affects her relationship with her church, her community, her child’s school, her own mother….” Trish is caught between her own beliefs, the instant hostility of her entire social milieu, and her renegade daughter. This unlikely activist has a lot to lose by standing up for her kid.

Ten years ago Northern Light Theatre introduced us to Trish, in a Trevor Schmidt production that was a critical and popular hit. It was indisputably relevant then. And needless to say it hasn’t lost its currency a decade later. Au contraire. “It’s even more timely now,” says Zentilli, “with all that’s happening with this government.” The Alberta government’s strident anti-trans legislation agenda and their threatened use of the Notwithstanding clause, the escalating politicization of health care, not to mention the rise in homophobia, and the general drift right, have taken care of relevance.

The Pink Unicorn has been on Zentilli’s mind for a while. She auditioned for the role 10 years ago, and didn’t get it. “Then I went to see (Trevor Schmidt’s production). And Louise Lambert was terrific!” She laughs. “When you don’t get a role you really wanted and then you go to the show and you think ‘well, they made the right choice’….Louise was so beautiful in the role.”

“For me as the mother of a queer teenager, it means so much more to me now,” she says. “That was another reason I loved it last time…. I have become an activist because of my child and her rights. It’s even more poignant now. I’m so grateful to be able to do it.”

“This mother does not do everything perfectly,” she says of Trish. “In fact, she messes a lot of things up. She gets her kid’s pronouns wrong…. But she loves her kid. And she has a real transformation by the end of the show; she grows a lot.”

A theatre artist of startling versatility, Zentilli, who’s originally from Nova Scotia, is perhaps best known to Edmonton audiences for starring performances in musicals of every size and shape — 9 to 5 to Billy Elliot — and cabarets, often of her own device. We’ve seen her as Audrey, the bruised flower shop assistant in Little Shop of Horrors, Donna in Mamma Mia!. She’s played Mrs. Cratchit in the Citadel’s musical account of A Christmas Carol. It’s a resumé crammed with musicals, and straight plays too.

She arrives in this her first solo show, from the Citadel/ Theatre Calgary production of the Broadway musical Legally Blonde, and a funny performance as a hairdresser with a tarnished romantic past and a penchant for Irish guys. “It’s a big gear shift,” she laughs.

And in November we’ll be seeing Zentilli in the much anticipated new Citadel holiday musical Vinyl Cafe, as Morley, half the Toronto couple (with Dave) around whom the quintessentially Canadian story archive of the late Stuart McLean revolves.

Appearing onstage solo is something Zentilli has done, to be sure, as the seasoned creator and star of many cabarets. And she loves “the joyful connection with the audience” But even in a solo cabaret “there’s a piano player to keep me company.” This time she’s really alone onstage, “and I’m a character, not me.” She laughs. “I’m amazed that my brain can do this. Wow, a 21-page script. How is this going to happen?”

Meanwhile, Zentilli can’t help thinking of Trish’s daughter, trying to start a GSA in small-town fundamentalist Christian Texas. “The bravery that would take…. And it’s dangerous; people have guns. Every kid is so different. Most kids who are queer and trans just wanna be kids, left alone, treated like everyone else. Which is what they deserve.”

“Ultimately this is a story about a mother who loves her child even though that child turns out to be very different from her.” The play “acknowledges the world is a dark place,” says Zentilli. “But luckily it ends on a kind of hopeful note. It invites the audience to try and operate from a place of love, kindness, understanding.

“We think, we cry, we laugh. And we might have a conversation….” It’s that kind of play.

PREVIEW

The Pink Unicorn

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Elise Forier Edie

Directed and designed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Patricia Zentilli

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

Running: Friday through Oct. 11

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

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‘The Vile and the Vigilant’: Workshop West announces a new season, with three new Canadian plays

Posted on September 22, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Workshop West Playwrights Theatre 2025-2026 season

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Three new Canadian plays premiere this season at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, as artistic producer Heather Inglis announced last week. The lineup that includes the company’s signature annual new play festival Springboards. And a return to this past season’s radical ticketing experiment in which all tickets are “pay what you will.”

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Devoted to expanding the Canadian repertoire and nurturing its writers, Workshop West turns 47 in 2025-2026, with a season dubbed ‘The Vile and the Vigilant’ in “honour” of the post-truth realities of the unstable and treacherous world in which we find ourselves. And the lineup includes a new play by a seasoned Edmonton playwriting star, one by a playwright/actor with a national profile, and one from an emerging Calgary-based award-winner.

playwright Nicole Moeller

With Wildcat, the season opener (Oct. 22 to Nov. 9), Edmonton’s Nicole Moeller (The Ballad of Peachtree Rose; The Mothers; The Preacher, The Princess, and a Crow) has fashioned a four-actor “crime caper” nail-biter set in the Edmonton in the “Smith Alberta” of 2025, as Inglis explains. “‘Caper’ describes the tone of it.” As billed it’s “a sure-fire antidote to the Alberta news cycle.”

The play has been in development at Workshop West since 2022, and a launch at Springboards (under the title The Resurrection of Dottie Reid). At the centre is a 65-year-old woman (Michelle Fleiger) who’s had enough of the dark, truth-resisting labyrinth of the internet, and fights back. Inglis calls it “a character piece with a crime attached.” The realism of Act I, as Inglis describes, gives way to a meta-theatrical experience in Act II. Her multi-generational cast includes Melissa Thingelstadt, returning to the live stage as the daughter, along with Maralyn Ryan and Graham Mothersill.

In Greg MacArthur’s intriguing two-hander My Testimonial, “a playwright invites you to a staged reading,” says Inglis of a conceit that has real-life traction at Workshop West, home of Springboards. He reads from his script with assistance from a guest actor. In this  scenario, “very meta,” a theatre artist prepares a witness to testify in the case of a real Alberta crime. Or is it? How does truth get constructed? For the Inglis production that runs Feb. 11 to 15, 2026, the versatile MacArthur, a former Lee Playwright In Residence at the U of A and a visual artist, returns to Edmonton, and stars in his play as the playwright. The other actor has yet to be announced. “Because it’s so small and compact,” Inglis hopes that My Testimonial will tour.

playwright James Odin Wade

Everyone Is Doing Fine is by Calgary’s up-and-comer James Odin Wade, who’s doing fine, too. Among the awards he’s gathered are from the Alberta Playwriting Competition, the National One-Act Playwriting Competition, and a Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award in 2024. And currently, he has a musical (Nowhere With You: An East Coast Musical in development at the Citadel (Mieko Ouchi directed a stage reading at the Collider Festival in June).

The three characters of the new Wade comedy-drama that got its first audience at the 2023 Springboards Festival area two art school friends get themselves employed by a hedge-fund manager. As described, the play, first submitted to Workshop West’s play-reading service, is something of an explosion at the intersection of commerce and ethics. Inglis, whose premiere production runs May 6 to 24, 2026, describes Everyone Is Doing Fine as “fast-faced, smart, sexy and sophisticated (she invokes Mamet and Neil LaBute) … where the characters are revealed to be people you never imagined them to be!”

Workshop West’s signature Springboards Festival returns March 22 to 29, 2026.

Tickets  and subscriptions (all pay what you will, with a suggested price of $40 per single ticket and $150 per subscription): workshop west.org.

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Quality time with the older generation: the unforced charm of Banana Musik, a review

Posted on September 21, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

The Alvarez family, Susan, Kris, and Jim in Banana Musik, Winterruption, Saskatoon. Photo by Andrew Bromell.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The homey smell of cooking hangs over the unusually hospitable show, developed at the Found Festival, that’s currently running at the Backstage Theatre.

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There’s dinner and there’s theatre in Banana Musik, launching Common Ground Arts Society’s new Prairie Mainstage Series. But this is by no means dinner theatre. There’s a rice cooker, a frying pan, crockpots stage right; the playwright’s mom presides over them, spatula in hand. At the end of the show you can stick around and share some dinner.

Meanwhile the playwright’s dad, a Beatles fan whose T-shirt says “I’m A Dreamer But I’m Not The Only One,” has picked up his guitar and headed for the couch to play and sing a “banana musik” song he’s written. His daughter occasionally breaks off from what she’s been telling us about growing up in Regina with her now Boomer-age immigrant parents from the Philippines, to join in for a chorus or two.

Banana Musik by Kris Alvarez, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo supplied.

I’m pretty confident that the casually charming free-form theatrical memoir devised by Regina-based actor/ playwright/ musician Kris Alvarez with (and about) her parents Susan and Jim Alvarez is unlike any other show you’ll see this season. Alvarez, an eminently likeable performer, talks directly to us; her parents, who aren’t actors, are onstage chatting to her or just carrying on imperturbably as if they’re at home just doing the things they do.

Alvarez isn’t talking about them behind their backs. Her mom and dad are right there as she explains that as immigrant parents, one of their major themes was a more reliable career choice than theatre for their kid. Be a nurse, they urge; “you can do your acting on the side.”  Be a lawyer; remember your triumph in Grade 8 debating?.

Have they noticed us? Every once in a while Susan, amused, looks up from cooking to wave her spatula at Kris: “what are you telling them now?” Their presence onstage is a kind of testimonial of authenticity. They’re not just talked about; they’re living 3-proof of lineage. And they’re remarkably indulgent, and unfazed, about the withdrawals their daughter makes from the family memory bank.

‘Banana Musik’ is the name Jim Alvarez gave the songs he wrote and recorded in the family basement on cassettes in the 1970s. And this original creation of Kris, Jim, and Susan is an informal warm-hearted invitation into an immigrant family. And the unforced cheerful charm of it is especially heart-warming in an age of escalating anti-immigrant rhetoric on both sides of the border.  As “a 50-year-old immigrant kid” with Filipino parents,” she pays tribute the sacrifice of parents who left their own lives to move across the world and “do whatever it takes” to ensure a better life for their kids.

Now it’s her turn to look out for them as they get older. And her affectionately comic exasperation in the show is something that everyone who has parents decades older than themselves, i.e. all of us!, recognizes. “There is never enough time,” says Alvarez. And what time there is gets cluttered with problem-solving: taxes, medical appointments and test results, a fridge crammed with unidentifiable containers…. Alvarez’s waterloo is the huge cache of their saved stuff under the basement stairs, the junk her parents never use but resist throwing out: a duct-taped gold club, chipped pottery, a formidable assortment of unusable pots and pans…. “What is the promise of a pan with no handle?” she sighs. “Why would we get rid of that? It’s in perfect condition!” says Jim, as Kris waves a broken-down plastic umbrella.

And then there’s technology. Who hasn’t spent time they don’t have on the phone trying to figure out why dad’s Apple password suddenly doesn’t work,  or why Netflix has barricaded itself against mom? “If someone doesn’t take care of it, who’s gonna take care of it?” an inter-generational variation on the immigrant mantra “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

And when time gets eaten up with aggravating practicalities, Alvarez returns us to memories: making music with dad, happy childhood road trips through an America that was actually benign, playing 20 questions in the car, eating “gas station snacks,” or playing the very amusing Alvarez family game “That’s Your House!” that reduces them all to howls of laughter every time.    

Banana Musik is unusual in form, but it trades in the familiar — the joys and stresses, and obligations, of connecting as an adult with the older generation as people. The familiar is what makes us share smiles with Alvarez. “There’s never enough time to ask all the questions,” she says of being an grown-up and getting to know her aging parents. It’s a poignant insight, and a reminder.

REVIEW

Banana Musik

Common Ground Arts Society Prairie Mainstage Series

Written by: Kris Alvarez

Performed by: Kris, Jim, and Susan Alvarez

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

Running: through Sept. 26, with Burnt Sienna Sept. 27

Tickets, full schedule, description of events: commongroundarts.ca

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Theatrical thrills in Life of Pi, launching the Citadel’s 60th anniversary season. A review

Posted on September 19, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Kevin Klassen, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Troy Feldman, Davinder Malhi in Life of Pi, Citadel Theatre/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Lighting by April Viczko, projections by Corwin Ferguson, set by Beyata Hackborn. Photo by Nanc Price

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A boy. A tiger. The vast Pacific. Onstage. How can it be?

A sense of wonder — in both the fantastical story and the thrilling theatricality of its telling — is the currency of the Life of Pi, the captivating production that launches the Citadel’s 60th anniversary season. A story of improbable survival conjoined to improbable theatre magic: what better way to celebrate an odds-defying birthday in the life, full of many firsts, of an influential theatre that started small, yes, but bold and risky in 1965.

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Based on the 2001 Booker Prize-winning novel of Yann Martel, adapted by the English actor/playwright Lolita Chakrabarti, Life of Pi brings to the stage— in a dazzling collaboration of light, sound, set, puppets and humans — the story of a teenager shipwrecked on a 1970s voyage from India to Canada. Pi Patel (Davinder Malhi, who’s wonderful) spends 227 traumatic days in a lifeboat with a quartet of zoo animals, and in the end one Royal Bengal tiger (who’s also wonderful), before he washes up in Mexico.

Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Troy Feldman, Davinder Malhi in The Life of Pi, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Pi (short for Piscine, French for swimming pool) Patel has nicknamed himself after the elusive, never-ending 3.14… of mathematics, “an irrational number … not easy to describe,” as he explains at the outset. Ah, his story in a nutshell. When the Japanese cargo ship carrying the Patels and their family zoo from Pondicherry in India to Canada meets its doom in a terrible storm, Pi’s family, his mother Amma (Deena Aziz), father (Suchiththa Wickremesooriya, understudying Omar Alex Khan on opening night) and sister (Anaka Maharaj-Sandhu), are lost. And Pi, an orangutan, a zebra, a hyena and the fateful tiger, somehow survive. Gradually (and viscerally), the crowded head, hoof, and paw count of the lifeboat is reduced by the tiger, enigmatically named Richard Parker because of a shipping clerk error. And so a lifelong vegetarian meets a formidable carnivore, eye to eye, at close quarters. A power struggle ensues. “It’s just you and me… Are we dead Richard Parker?”

Deena Aziz, Troy Felman Davinder Malhi in Life of Pi, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

As we see in lively earlier scenes on terra firms in India, Pi is a precocious kid who exasperates his parents by signing on with the Hindus, the Catholics, and Muslims because he finds similarities in their storytelling. “Nobody has three religions,” says Amma. “You have to choose.” Pi won’t pick. In fact, he’ll offer us alternate versions of his own sea adventure, so we can decide which is the best story.

Davinder Malhi in Life of Pi, Citadel/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

It takes considerable theatrical resourcefulness and magical stagecraft to bring Pi’s story to the stage. The animals of the cast are puppets,  physical and emotional players in the story — to a visceral degree that sometimes makes you flinch. It might horrify you to see what a hyena can do, much less a tiger. And since they’re puppets it takes imaginative participation both from the artists onstage and us. It’s always that way with bringing puppets to life: you have to believe. And in Haysam Kadri’s Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production, the first at a Canadian regional theatre after Life of Pi’s West End and Broadway incarnations, you do.

Calgary-based Puppet Stuff Canada (led by designers Brendon James Boys and Reese Scott) creates the animal cast. And the expertise of the puppeteers led by Troy Feldman and Braydon Dowler-Coltman (who succeed because you cease to notice them) sets them in motion: uncannily detailed movements, rhythms, breaths. And their joint pièce de résistance is Richard Parker, in his full and terrifying glory, pouncing, panting, leaping and prowling, spring-loaded for zero to 60 in a dangerous second. Whole schools of luminescent fish swim by, on poles  carried by the ensemble; sea turtles appear and disappear. Joelysa Pankanea’s compositions and sound capture the ominous and the magical.    

Bailey Chin, Daviner Malhi, Kevin Klassen in Life of Pi, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The warm-hued world of the Patels on dry land, and the beautiful, scary seascapes conjured by lighting designer April Viczko and video/projection designer Corwin Ferguson play out across a kind of outsized upstage bubble (set design Beyata Hackborn). Think snow globe but made of water. There’s a kind of poetry in them that’s alive in the mental landscape of Pi the philosopher who, even in extremity, ponders the majesty of the universe (“the heavens are miraculous!”). What his skeptical questioners post-journey call “impossible,” he calls “unexpected.” There are more things in heaven and earth … as another of theatre’s star philosophers has said.

This is not easily conveyed in the language of an adaptation that has its inert moments, for example, in its cumbersome framing device of questions from a Japanese insurance adjuster and a Canadian consular official. But in his compelling and vivid performance as Pi, who’s both the storyteller and a (very) active participant, Malhi makes it all seem seem natural, sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant. He’s a perfect Pi — slight, agile, boyish, a capture of a traumatized character on a quest to stay alive. He moves in and out of a memory or nightmare, struck by terror and beauty, possibly hallucinating an island of meerkats or an admiral (amusingly played by Garett Ross), who appears, magically, to offer pointers about survival at sea. Sometime he’s reduced to panic; sometimes he’s wonderstruck (which seems to be where the novel sits) by the tenacity of life itself that joins boy and tiger, human and animal. The ensemble is busy and dexterous in multiple roles.

I remember wondering about the story, as culled for the stage from the novel, when I saw the Broadway production a couple of years ago. And then giving up and just enjoying the theatrical magic of it, and the performances that bring it to life. And the same thing happened this time, with this production. “My story will make you believe in God,” says Pi early on. Possibly. But certainly in theatre.

Check out the 12thnight preview interview with Puppet Stuff’s Brendon James Boyd. It’s here.

REVIEW

Life of Pi

Theatre: Citadel and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre

Written by: Lolita Chakrabarti, adapted from the Yann Martel novel

Directed by: Haysam Kadri

Puppetry director: Dayna Tietzen

Starring: Davinder Malhi, Deena Aziz, Omar Alex Khan, Andrea Cheung, Bailey Chin, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Troy Felman, N. Girgis, Kevin Klassen, Azeem Nato, Kristen Padayas, Garett Ross, Anaka Maharaj-Sandhu, Suchiththa Wickremesooriya

Running: Saturday (in preview) through October. 5

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

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