A test of comic timing and ingenuity: The 39 Steps launches Farren Timoteo’s artistic directorship at Teatro Live!, a review

Posted on November 16, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Geoffrey Simon Brown in The 39 Steps, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It seems exactly right, inspired really, that Farren Timoteo should launch his Teatro Live! artistic directorship of the comedy theatre company with a show that turns a 1935 Hitchcock spy thriller into a manically high-speed, hilariously low-budget adventure for four actors. Correction: four actors, plus four trunks, four chairs, a ladder, a movable door, and a whole bunch of hats.

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In an age of inflated big-money stage extravaganzas, you’ve got to love any theatrical enterprise that starts with the actors assembling stuff on a bare stage.

The 39 Steps, Patrick Barlow’s stage riff on the movie thriller adapted from John Buchan’s intricately plotted 1915 spy novel, is a test of ingenuity and comic timing that’s a tribute to theatre and its less-is-more brigade of practitioners. And it’s also a chance to use the words zany and clever in one sentence; I’m grabbing it while I can.

It begins with our ridiculously suave hero Richard Hannay, recently returned from Canada, languishing in ennui, pipe in hand, in his London flat. In the production directed by Timoteo (himself a Teatro leading man of note), the dashing Hannay is played in high tweedy style by Geoffrey Simon Brown, with a ’30s Leslie Howard accent that’s as clipped as his moustache.

He’s bored with the world, the news of endless “wars and rumours of war,” and himself. He requires “something mindless and trivial. Something utterly pointless,” he says. “I know! A trip to the theatre!”

And so it begins, with a theatre joke and a slinky femme fatale (Priya Narine in the first of her three femmes fatales in the show) with an unidentifiable mittel-Euro accent, a gun, and a knife in her back. And suddenly Richard Hannay, accused murderer, has been seduced out of his armchair into a sinister international intrigue that involves the fate of the whole country.

Katie Yoner and Michael Watt in The 39 Steps, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

What ensues in this Hitchcock spoof cum homage is a top-velocity chase, by train, by car, by crop-duster (a little wink at North By Northwest), on foot, through the fog and mist of the Scottish highlands into sinister hotels, remote inns, creepy farmhouses, cop shops…. It is for the Clown 1/ Clown 2 duo of  Michael Watt and Katie Yoner, the one statuesque and the other petite, to populate the stage with 130-plus characters. Newcomers both to Teatro, they start with a funny music hall duo at the Palladium, and expand their escalating repertoire to include hapless coppers, vaudevillian detectives, rustics, hoteliers, aassassins, innkeepers, a milk man, a professor, an engineer, sheep …), a lot of moustaches, and a dizzying assortment of accents — sometimes multiples in a single scene.

Yoner (of Rat Academy fame) is an experienced bouffon with a tiny (sometimes inaudible) voice. Watt, whose purchase on a whole lexicon of accents and volumes is unerring, is a find as a physical comedian. They both commit, valiantly, to the most outlandish theatrical demands, as they scramble to keep up with the plot.

Michael Watt, Katie Yoner, and Geoffrey Simon Brown in The 39 Steps, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

And since their theatrical duties include rearranging the trunks, the chairs, the ladder and the door, and the odd lamp (designer: Chantel Fortin) to establish locales, assisted materially by Rory Turner’s noir-esque lighting — their inventiveness and comic busy-ness are extreme. The crop-dusting image is executed ingeniously with a ladder and lights. Lighting and Brown’s agility conjure a chase scene in and on top of a hurtling train. A walk-through in a sinister Scottish mansion is amusing theatrical legerdemain.

Minimalism is a strenuous workout with a big comic payoff, it turns out. As the plot gathers more and more characters and voices, the quick changes get more frenzied, and sillier. Weapons, along with Brian Bast’s wigs, hats, costume pieces, fly through the air. This larky Timoteo production is based on the rarefied art of the timed near-miss (and the mysterious wandering impulses of fake moustaches).

Priya Narine and Geoffrey Simon Brown in The 39 Steps, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Brown’s dashing Hannay, the straight man of the enterprise, perpetually on the move, gets nearly trapped over and over, and escapes by the skin of his teeth, without breaking a sweat. Must be those years in Canada, old chap. But will Narine’s Hitchcock blonde, or her the rural maiden, be his undoing? Is this a classic case of cherchez la femme fatale?

The actors and Timoteo and co embrace high-style silliness, so that you can just sit back, take your mind off worry mode, and let clever theatricality work its magic. The first show of the Timoteo tenure is a ripping night out.

REVIEW

The 39 Steps

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Patrick Barlow, adapted from Hitchcock’s movie The 39 Steps

Directed by: Farren Timoteo

Starring: Geoffrey Simon Brown, Priya Narine, Michael Watt, Katie Yoner

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Nov. 30

Tickets: teatrolive.com

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‘The perfectly imperfect holiday’: Vinyl Cafe The Musical premieres at the Citadel, a review

Posted on November 14, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

The cast of Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Vinyl Cafe The Musical, the new Canadian holiday musical premiering at the Citadel in a Daryl Cloran production, is a cool idea bravely built on a double challenge.

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On one hand it’s an homage to a bona fide Canadian institution, as vintage as the vinyl in the hero’s indie record shop, very Canuck in an appealingly unself-conscious way. For its inspiration it dips into the story and character archive of the late great storyteller/humorist Stuart McLean, a voice in the ear of nostalgic CBC Radio listeners from 1994 to 2017.

On the other hand Vinyl Cafe The Musical is … a musical. A singing dancing musical theatre entertainment for 2025, and the festive season. For an audience that includes people who know nothing in advance of the Toronto couple Dave and Morley, and their kids, their neighbours, their urban ‘hood (or CBC Radio).

That duality made for a fascinating opening night experience Thursday. When the hapless and hopeful Dave (Mike Nadajewski) says to his wife Morley (Patricia Zentilli) at the outset, “it’s Christmas. Relax. We got this….” by way of brushing away her mounting mental checklist of seasonal tasks, there were those in the house seats who got it as a pre-emptive punchline to Dave’s chronic misadventures (Dave, the man of famous last words), and laughed. And there were those (I sat near an assortment) who didn’t. Fair enough. You don’t have to study up to enjoy.

Mike Nadajewski and Patricia Zentilli in Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

In any case making a big piece of musical theatre from stories grounded in the small, and the familiar homey details of daily life (the motto of Dave’s shop: “we may not be big but we’re small”) is a delicate theatrical matter. The charm of the episodic source material, with its texture of the quotidien and its distinctive narrative voice, is tricky to capture as reinvented for the stage in a musical’s more extrovert energy, bolder outline, and heightened dramatic frictions.

Does Vinyl Cafe The Musical succeed? On this first viewing, there’s a lot to love, and some things to reconsider, about the new 16-actor six-musician musical, two years in the making, created (and directed) by Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran with longtime Vinyl Cafe producer and McLean estate executor Jess Milton.

Damon Pitcher and Muhaddisah in Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

The book — curiously, this most Canadian enterprise is by a Mexican-American playwright, Georgina Escobar, with Milton — has hits and misses, which will no doubt be worked on for future iterations of the show.

The driving force is the relationship of all the characters onstage to Christmas, the most stressful holiday of them all, the one with the weighty obligation to make people joyful and the tendency (and to-do lists) to make people crazy. And the musical weaves together two of McLean’s most popular stories, Dave Cooks The Turkey and Rashida, Amir and the Great Gift Giving, the latter an amusing newcomers’ perspective on festive traditions.

Morley, who’s feeling beleaguered by Christmas, Martha Stewart’s holiday tips, and ‘101 ways to fold a napkin’, longs to reclaim the special holiday spirit. In order to appease her, Dave’s one obligation is to take charge of the fateful turkey. And his breezy confidence that this will be easily accomplished is what threatens to be his undoing. It all becomes Dave and Turkey, a funny, farcical, hallucinatory union (with its own duet and pas de deux, amusingly choreographed by Gianna Vacirca), which I won’t spoil for you. It’s a literal embodiment, in poultry form, of go big or (maybe and)  go home.

Leon Willey and Nadien Chu in Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The dramatic conflict starts in the friction between easy-going Dave, embodied with loose-limbed ease by Nadajewski, and his officious, fiercely competitive, perfectionist neighbour Mary Turlington (Nadien Chu, in riotous comic red-alert), the President of the Neighbourhood Christmas Club. It escalates into a veritable war for the ownership of Christmas in the ‘hood. When Dave sings “we’re heading for a very Mary Christmas,” it’s an opening gambit.

If you know Dave and his turkey situation from the story, you’ll know that a posh hotel kitchen figures prominently in his solution to his culinary deadline crisis. But the hotel scenes and a disjointed little subplot about Tommy and his Aunt Sue, a hotel chef with her own backstory, could use a re-think. They seem to stop the show, until Dave’s back in action, wing to wing, puns akimbo, with poultry.

Kristin Johnston, Nadien Chu, Jameela NcNeil in Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

On this first hearing, the pop songs by the Canadian team of composer Colleen Dauncey and lyricist Akiva Romer-Segal are accessible, comfortably rhymed, and mostly a bit on the bland side with some notable exceptions. These include a funny tango number for Dave and Mary locking horns, and a couple of knock-out songs for Morley, beautifully delivered by Zentilli. I Am A Train is all about her feeling that Christmas is a grinding milk-run of repeating duties. Along Comes Life, in Act II, is a lovely ode to going off-book in your life plan. Stephanie (Rain Matkin), the teenage daughter of the family, has a sweet duet Scare Me Away with Tommy (Shaemus Swets), the boyfriend she’s brought home to meet the family. Family, incidentally, rhymes with calamity.   

But the opening song, which has Dave at the door of his shop, seems oddly flat and generic. And the only rock number, The Beast Inside, sung by Dave and Morley’s nerdy pre-teen son Sam (Benjamin Hill, a real theatre find, alternating with Cooper Nash Rajotte), is energetic but seems like a set piece inserted awkwardly (the sound mix didn’t help) that doesn’t get much of a pay-off except a fleeting sight gag.

Cloran’s cast is excellent, and the production establishes a real family dynamic. It’s led by the rueful, distractible Dave as conjured by Nadajewski, a remarkably physical comic actor. He’s a particularly Canadian sort of hero, forever misstepping blithely and then scrambling to pry himself out of scrapes. Nadajewski the human pretzel has an inspired scene actually inside a Canada Post letter box. Zentilli is just right as the graceful, more practical Morley, exasperated by Christmas as overtime. And the neighbour couples, Rashida and Amir (Muhaddisah and Damon Pitcher) and the Turlingtons, Mary the Yuletide dragon and her affable, defeated hubbie Bert (Chu and Leon Willey) are vividly cast too.

Nick Boegel and Rain Matkin in The Vinyl Cafe, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Cory Sincennes’ set conjures a whole neighbourhood of rooms — bedrooms, a kitchen, competing living rooms, a record store —  sliding magically across the stage behind the brick townhouse facade. And Jareth Li’s lighting has fun with a sparkly season.

Naturally, you don’t have to be a prophet to feel a resolution coming on; it isn’t a spoiler to say that Vinyl Cafe The Musical ends with a validation of community and family — Christmas as ‘a beautiful day in the neighbourhood’ — where festive joy prevails, as per the catchy finale ensemble number about a “perfectly imperfect holiday.” Speaking of imperfections and working with them, if the translation of story and characters into musical hasn’t quite arrived yet in a satisfying and cohesive final form, the new musical has a lot going for it as it starts its journey to other theatres across the country. And you leave feeling the seasonal bounce.

REVIEW

Vinyl Cafe: The Musical

Theatre: Citadel Theatre, based on The Vinyl Cafe story collection by Stuart McLean

Book by: Georgina Escobar with Jess Milton

Music and lyrics by: Colleen Dauncey and Akiva Romer-Segal, respectively

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Mike Nadajewski, Patricia Zentilli, Nadien Chu, Rain Matkin, Muhaddisah, Damon Pitcher, Kristin Johnston,  Jameela McNeil, Nick Boegel, Benjamin Hill, Cooper Nash Rajotte, Leon Willey, Sheamus Swets, Andrés F. Moreno, Kristel Harder, Koko

Running: Saturday (in preview) through Dec. 7

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

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‘I’m starting with the man in the mirror’: MJ moonwalks the Jube stage, a review

Posted on November 12, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Jordan Markus as MJ, and the company of the First National Touring Company. Broadway Across Canada, photo by Matthew Murphy

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

MJ, the touring Broadway bio-musical that has arrived on the Jube stage, is a curiosity in every way. Like its star, and subject, Michael Jackson, arguably the 20th century’s greatest and most influential entertainer, a singer/dancer nonpareil, it’s complicated, contradictory, conflicted. It’s also amazingly light on its feet, and dazzling to behold.

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A jukebox musical, crammed with some of the biggest hits in pop music history in its song list of three dozen, MJ dances its way out of the circumscribed dimensions of that genre with an agile cast, choreography by director Christopher Wheeldon, a specialist in dance musicals — and in Jordan Markus a sensational star. He moves the Michael Jackson moves; he dances the Michael Jackson dance (in all its concave dipping, leg-forward glides, Fosse diagonals); he (moon)walks the walk. He captures the strangely wispy other-worldly figure with the breathy high whisper of a voice, who’s perpetually in motion at the centre of MJ.

Robert as MJ, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy

A first-rate band of a dozen or so, conducted by Nathanael Wilkerson, is onstage too. And the sound quality, for once at the Jube, is just excellent (original sound designer Gareth Owen). So you’ll hear, and see, Thriller, Billie Jean, Bad, Man in the Mirror, in top form. In short, MJ has great music and great dancing going for it. And lots of both. And it’s on a grand theatrical scale: a stunning design (Derek McLane), brilliant lighting (designer: Natasha Katz), layers of Peter Nigrini’s gorgeous projections, a eyeful array of costumes by Paul Tazewell that re-create the performer’s famous wardrobe.

But here’s the thing. Since its existence depends on compliance with the Michael Jackson estate (“by special arrangement” as the program says), MJ is curatorial about the Michael Jackson story, alert to re-polishing a legacy tarnished by plausible allegations of child sexual abuse that started emerging immediately after the 1992 present time of the play.

It is a sympathetic portrait of the star. And, as many reviewers have pointed out since the musical’s 2022 Broadway debut, whether you can get past queasy accusations that are once known impossible to un-know, will have an impact on your experience of the show. The opening night audience loved the show, clamorously cheering the donning of the sparkly glove, the doffing of the signature hat.

Jordan Markus and Devin Bowles in MJ, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy

In the libretto written by the celebrated playwright Lynn Nottage (Intimate Apparel, Ruined, Sweat), who’s won the Pulitzer Prize twice, Jackson is a prodigious talent traumatized by his past. And his present is infiltrated constantly by a harsh childhood of touring with his siblings in the Jackson 5, abused by a vicious stage father (Devin Bowles). In Nottage’s script there are three Michael Jacksons, the startling little boy (Quentin Blanton Jr.), the teenager who’s beginning to understand his own talent (the terrific Brandon Lee Harris), and MJ.

And along with his father and mother (the warm-voiced Ranané Katurah) his younger selves physically infiltrate the life of Jackson in the present, not only as flashbacks but also inhabiting other characters in MJ’s story of a brilliant performer haunted by ghosts. The double-casting of Wheeldon’s production is meaningful. The impact of Bowles as both the father and the tour manager, two contrastive authority figures, has particular weight.

MJ is nothing if not cleverly put together. Except, that is, for the inept framing device — crude, for such an accomplished playwright — of an MTV reporter  (Kristin Stokes) who’s scored a rare interview with media-averse Jackson for a documentary. “I wanna keep this about my music,” he says.  “But is it possible to separate your life from your music?” she asks.

There’s a question that weaves its way through MJ (and quite possibly all jukebox biomusicals). And his aggrieved response taps into a continuing theme that the tabloid media are predatory and the truth is beside the point. “No matter what I do it always get twisted….Just because you see it on a TV screen don’t make it factual.”

But the verbal exchanges with the reporter, as written, are oddly banal and dull, starting with gambits like “what drives you creatively?” or “when you perform it’s like a switch gets turned on….” Or this one: “It feels like you’re courting controversy.” Well, yeah. It’s one thing to allude to the shallow water in which the media swim, with Jackson as victim; it’s  another to actually build those questions into the script.

Jordan Markus as MJ, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy

So, Michael, where do you get your ideas? Yikes. It’s telling, not showing, to hear that “I process my ideas through my body.” And the showing, is well within the compass of Markus’s performance — the way life events and their emotional accretions seem to arrive in his movement lexicon, with its original angles, strange playfulness, tortured extensions. The Jackson 5 scenes, including an Amateur Night performance at the Apollo, are vividly realized onstage, and like past and present they flow wonderfully together in this production. If Jackson never seems quite grown-up or of this earth, it’s to the choreography and direction we look, not the thudding script.

The trickiest thing about MJ, bound to seem slippery, is that when Rachel, desperate as she claims to “get inside his his head” (ah, those crack MTV investigative reporters), frequently alludes to allegations and tabloid stories, she’s actually talking about his whitening skin colour and his enhanced nose, not the allegations and stories the musical knows we’re thinking about. It’s one thing to be (contractually) evasive; it’s another to drop hints in order to sidestep them.

The song lyrics themselves, in numbers astutely positioned in the musical, tell a story with reverb, too — Beat It, with its advice to avoid responsibility (“it doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong”), or Human Nature with its title as the answer to every why? question about human behavior.

The show begins at the outset in the rehearsal hall where Jackson’s corps of dancers are limbering up,“Five minutes to Michael!” Then “two minutes to Michael!” says the man in the suit. And after that, fanfare cum warning, there he is, the artist himself, sliding quietly into the rehearsal hall, right into Beat It. And we get to see a driven and demanding working pro, constantly tinkering, in detail (and expense), with the upcoming, maybe ruinously costly, Dangerous tour. There’s a delish scene where MJ dances with Fred Astaire and Bob Fosse, and the Cotton Club’s Nicholas Brothers.

That perfectionist, a true original whose music videos remain peak experiences of that form, is remarkable to see in action in MJ’s big, full-bodied production numbers in this fulsome touring show. The rest of the story unspools in clouds.

REVIEW

MJ

Broadway Across Canada

Book by: Lynn Nattage

Directed and choreographed by: Christopher Wheeldon

Starring: Jordan Markus, Devin Bowles, Kristin Stokes, Brandon Lee Harris, Quentin Blanton Jr. (alternating with Bryce A. Holmes), Michael Nero, Rajané Katurah, J. Daughtry, Austin Rankin

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca

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Ray: a little tribute to a great theatre lover

Posted on November 11, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Ray Christenson, 1931-2025

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

With the passing of Ray Christenson this month, at 93, Edmonton theatre and its community of artists have lost someone essential to what they do, how they create — and, especially, why.

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The live theatre isn’t alive, after all, without an audience. And Ray (as he was known to everyone, of every age, in his expansive circle of friends and acquaintances), was the ideal audience, the theatre lover every artist loves (or should): curious, open-minded, receptive to new experiences on any evening, eager to discuss.

If Ray asked you what you thought of a production, and the two of you disagreed, he was fine with that. If you were resistant to a show (there’s diplomatic reviewer talk for you), and the word “excruciating” came unbidden to your critic’s brain, Ray was there to remind you of a bright performance in a small role, perhaps, or something special about a scene, or a telling line of dialogue.

Chatting to Ray at intermission or post-show, or running into him at the Fringe, was always a reminder that for the audience there’s invariably something positive, discussable, challenging, in every creative experiment, no matter how imperfectly realized or out-and-out screwed-up onstage. What a valuable lesson that is for any theatre reviewer.

No matter how extreme the point of view in a show, how harsh and ugly, or confrontational, anti-social, or self-indulgent for that matter, Ray was remarkably non-judgmental and open-hearted. He remained outward-looking, optimistic, ready to be delighted, to listen and entertain other points of view, to see the world through other eyes.

He had tickets and subscriptions to a wild assortment of theatre companies in town, big-budget theatre, indies, student shows, church basement productions…. Until he was physically unable to venture forth, he happily sat through every kind of Edmonton theatre, including of course Catalyst productions created by his son Jonathan Christenson, the company’s artistic director. And then when his eyesight began to fail, Ray bore the affliction with patience and exemplary fortitude; as his vision dimmed, his impish smile did not. Ray’s final exit came “just shy of his 94th birthday,” says the Park Memorial obituary. It will be the only time that “shy” and “Ray” ever appear in the same sentence.    

Ray wasn’t an artist; he was a champion of artists who wasn’t a pushover.  And he transcended, effortlessly at every age, the stereotypes of chronology and career. He was a pastor and university chaplain who was pretty much unshock-able; an arts lover who, like his great friend director/actor Jim DeFelice, got a big kick out of hockey and back in the day Trappers baseball. You’d run into the two of them in Strathcona cafes or on Whyte, in intense, incomprehensible pre-game confabs about sports stats.

We track artists; we follow their careers, their creative initiatives. But how often do we acknowledge the contribution to theatre of audiences, who are inspired to connect, ready to buy into a whole variety of mind- and heart-expanding experiences? In rooms they share with a community of other people, in house seats and onstage? It’s the moment to appreciate a quintessential appreciator.

Every encounter with Ray was not only fun, but made me understand that rapport better. And the Ray-less theatre world seems diminished.

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A new (and all-Canadian) season at L’UniThéâtre launches with Le Palier

Posted on November 6, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the play that launches the new, all-Canadian season tonight at L’UniThéâtre, Alberta’s only professional francophone theatre company, an unlikely friendship blossoms, fast, in an unlikely place.

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As director Steve Jodoin explains, Le Palier opens with 11 quick scenes, “and no talking” — on the third floor landing (le palier) of an apartment building. The 2005 play, a touching two-hander by Quebec’s Réal Beauchamp and Jean-Guy Côté, chronicles an unexpected, intergenerational, bond between neighbours: “a lady nearing the end of her life and a young university student who doesn’t know what to do with his…. The whole play happens in a year and a half.”

Neighbourly connection, friendship, loneliness, compassion: Le Palier embraces them all, says Jodoin, L’UniThéâtre artistic director. “Laughter and hard reality.” His production (in French with English surtitles), starring Ève-Marie Forcier and Gabriel Gagnon, is the first of four shows (and the return of an annual festival) in the 2025-2026 season at the 33-year-old company. It’s attracted a top-drawer design team, including Paul Bezaire (set), Scott Peters (lighting), and Dean Stockdale and Ryder J. McGinnis (sound).

Le Palier runs at the Servus Credit Union Theatre at La Cité francophone (8627 91st St.) tonight through Sunday. Tickets: lunitheatre.ca.

Bouée, a buoy or a lifeline in English, by Céleste Godin, takes L’UniThéâtre audiences for the first time across the river to Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre. A six-actor touring production from Satellite Theatre in Moncton N.B., it’s “cool and quirky, very physical,” as Jodoin describes. “It explores the ‘what’s next’,” he says. “Sci-fi meets everyday life,” in an absurdist, highly theatrical experience, as a group of scientists sets about updating the received portrait of humanity. It touches down in March 6 and 7 at the Roxy, 10708 124 St.

The season includes the premiere of a new play by Edmonton theatre artist Sophie Gareau-Brennan, set in Alberta. Bouanderie/ Boulangerie, a rom-com as Jodoin describes, is named for the two businesses, a laundromat and a bakery, next door to each other in a small Alberta francophone community. Among its quartet of characters is an a complex geometry of friendship and love, reunion and rediscovery. Part of the annual Theatre 8-Pack initiative that includes eight productions from eight different Edmonton theatres, the production co-directed by Jodoin and Gareau-Brennan runs May 21 to 24 and 28 to 31 at the Servus Credit Union Theatre in La Cité francophone.

In alternating seasons, L’UniThéâtre and their Vancouver counterpart Théâtre La Seizième take turns producing a kids’ show that tours in Alberta and B.C. It’s a long-time collaboration that counts as a bona fide Canadian theatre success story. This season the show is Petite Ondine, written by Anaïs Pellin and inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, a co-production between Vancouver partners Théâtre La Seizième and Kleine Compagnie. And its particular aesthetic is miniature and found objects, a puppetry that happens directly onstage amplified by live video (and accompanied by the songs of Nina Simone). Jodoin plans a public performance here for this touring show at the end of May.

The L’UniThéâtre season also includes the return of an annual theatre festival for junior and senior high school students.

The L’UniThéâtre season happens in French, with English surtitles. Tickets and subscriptions: lunitheatre.ca.

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Vinyl Cafe: The Musical. Stuart McLean’s beloved characters come to life in the Citadel’s new holiday musical, a preview

Posted on November 5, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the new Canadian holiday musical that premieres next week at the Citadel, characters we know well do something they’ve never done before. They step out of the radio and off the page — and, for the first time ever, onto the stage, 3-D. To breathe the air of live theatre, and speak and sing for themselves.

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Vinyl Cafe: The Musical taps into the much-loved quintessentially Canadian CBC Radio story collection created over 20 years by the late great Stuart McLean. It’s inspired by the stories of the Toronto couple Dave and Morley, their kids, their neighbours, their ‘hood, and in particular two of the archive’s holiday classics, Dave Cooks The Turkey and Rashida, Amir and the Great Gift-Giving.

Five years in the development, Vinyl Cafe: The Musical is the bright idea of Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran, who directs the premiere production that starts previews Saturday. And it’s been on his mind for a decade at least, since his time as artistic director of Western Canada Theatre in Kamloops.

“I reached out to the Vinyl Cafe team (led by Jess Milton, the long-time Vinyl Cafe producer, podcaster, and the executor of the McLean estate). They always considered it would make a good musical but didn’t have time to pursue it.” Not till 2020, that is, “when Jess and I built a fast friendship, and started to build the team…. We had similar ideas of what this could be, what it would look like as a musical.”

Citadel Theatre artistic director Daryl Cloran. Photo supplied

Musical theatre isn’t an outlandish destination for The Vinyl Cafe, of course. Far from it. “Music was such a big part of Stuart’s radio shows (and his live touring concert/shows),” says Cloran of the signature McLean format, with musical interludes featuring the hippest bands across the country. And after all, Dave is the owner of a vintage record shop.

“We started with the music,” Cloran says. And after considering submissions by a variety of artists, he and Milton went with the Canadian composer/lyricist duo Colleen Dauncey and Akiva Romer-Segal. “They’re quite something,” Cloran says, pointing to The Louder We Get (formerly The Prom Queen, book by Kent Staines), which premiered at Theatre Calgary during COVID, and Grow, a new musical comedy about a couple of green-thumbed Amish kids in partnership with a cannabis dispensary, slated for a 2026 premiere at Montreal’s Segal Centre. “They write a great contemporary pop musical, super-catchy tunes. Definitely you’ll be singing the songs as you leave the theatre.”

“In the sense that the characters sing their feelings as part of the story, it’s a traditional musical ” says Cloran. As an example he points to the song I Am A Train. Dauncey and Romer-Segal wrote it as a musical response to Morley’s line, in Dave Cooks The Turkey, where she describes the unending to-do list attached to being a mother at Christmas.

Stuart McLean, creator of The Vinyl Cafe. Photo supplied

The book was a challenge for theatre, as Cloran describes, not least because the voice of McLean, with its signature cadence, pauses, and intonation, is so inextricably built into his stories. He’s a storyteller. In his radio and live shows “he doesn’t play a bunch of characters,” the way Farren Timoteo does, for example, in his solo show Made In Italy, or Rod Beattie does in his Wingfield series. “So it’s quite something to see them come to life,” Cloran says of Dave and Morley and the rest onstage.

“How do you take a story and make it something that leans into the power of theatre?” That was the question that propelled the development of The Vinyl Cafe: The Musical. “We made a conscious decision not to have a narrator or a narrative voice, not to have somebody pretending to be Stuart.” Instead, two of the most popular Dave and Morley holiday stories (Dave Cooks The Turkey and Rashida, Amir and the Great Gift-Giving) “are intertwined into a narrative musical…. For the first time the characters are being embodied.” The musical isn’t “telling” the stories, as Cloran says. As a piece of theatre, it “leans into action and dialogue.”

The book for the new musical is written by Mexican-American playwright/librettist Georgina Escobar along with Milton. “We wanted someone with experience writing musicals, someone with a unique take on it,” says Cloran. Citing Milton, he says “there’s an inherent nostalgia about these stories and the tone of The Vinyl Cafe…. Jess knows these characters inside out. So she’s able to say ‘in this situation Dave would do this.”

The goal, says Cloran, was to honour the history of The Vinyl Cafe “and speak to contemporary audiences.” In locating stories written 15 or 20 years ago in a contemporary setting, Rashida, Amir and the Great Gift-Giving was particularly apt, as he describes: “new Canadians who’ve moved into a neighbourhood as they take in all the neighbours’ wacky stress about this particular holiday.”

“Escobar was really able to tap into that experience…. We approached a whole bunch of writers, and Georgina’s take on it was the one that got the team the most excited.”

Damon Pitcher and Muhaddisah in Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

Vinyl Cafe: The Musical is heir to such Citadel musical premieres as Full Moon and Prison Dancer. With its $800,000 budget and 16-actor cast, led by Shaw Festival veteran Mike Nadajewski as Dave and Edmonton theatre star Patricia Zentilli as Morley — plus a six-piece band — it’s on a scale. And Cloran has hopes its appeal, its sense of humour, its Canadian-ness, will have appeal across the country and beyond. “Other (Canadian) theatres have been sniffing around about the show,” he says. And The Vinyl Cafe has always had American fans; the CBC Radio series was  picked up by some 80 public radio stations in the U.S.  

Meanwhile ticket sales have been “quite impressive,” as he puts it. So brisk, in fact, that  weeks ago, “unheard of for us, that early,” the Citadel announced an extension to the run. “If we do this right, there’s a good chance it will have a life after the run here.”

Canadians, Cloran among them, have a history with The Vinyl Cafe. “They feel a connection, not only to the stories themselves but the (family) ritual of hearing those stories on the radio every Sunday, and going to the live Christmas concerts.” His wife’s parents took the family to the Christmas shows in Toronto every year. “It’s been a big part of my life.”

Threaded through the radio broadcasts are McLean’s jocular “don’t get ahead of me” asides to audiences anticipating developments in the stories. At the workshops (there have been three since 2020) of the new musical, “people would be laughing at the jokes half-way through. Fascinating to see,” reports Cloran.

“As we navigate into previews making changes,” he and Milton have been at pains to create something for long-time fans (“with little Easter eggs”) and for Vinyl Cafe newbies who “just want a great night out….”

PREVIEW

Vinyl Cafe: The Musical

Theatre: Citadel Theatre, based on The Vinyl Cafe story collection by Stuart McLean

Book by: Georgina Escobar with Jess Milton

Music and lyrics by: Colleen Dauncey and Akiva Romer-Segal, respectively

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Mike Nadajewski, Patricia Zentilli, Nadien Chu, Rain Matkin, Muhaddisah, Damon Pitcher, Kristin Johnston,  Jameela McNeil, Nick Boegel, Benjamin Hill, Cooper Nash Rajotte, Leon Willey, Sheamus Swets, Andrés F. Moreno, Kristel Harder, Koko

Running: Saturday (in preview) through Dec. 7

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

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Opening the doors into the past: Ecos, a multi-generational dance/theatre piece from Common Ground. A review

Posted on November 3, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Tatiana Duque and Alexandra Lainfiesta in Ecos, Diaspora Diaries Collective, Common Ground Arts. Photo by Mat Simpson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the opening scene of Ecos, a woman arrives onstage to build, piece by piece, an altar of tiny objects — bottles, a wine glass, flowers, a little cake, picture frames, salt, a dead plant.…

A funeral tribute collection? A shrine? We wonder about that. “I need this to work,” says Amaya (Tatiana Duque). “I am so lost…. I don’t know who I am.”

As we learn in this lyrical bilingual (English and Spanish) dance/theatre piece by Elisa Marina Mair-Sánchez, Amaya is an immigrant who left her home and her family of immigrants 15 years before, and hasn’t returned. And she hopes to “open the doors to the past,” ever-receding in time and memory: “how hard it is to remember everything; how hard it is to remember anything.”

And “la ofrenda,” the offering she’s assembled, is her way of conjuring her past, her immigrant parents and their immigrant parents worlds away — and their dreams, motives, and regrets about changing their lives. “Coming to Canada was easy,” says Amaya. “Now I don’t know if it was the right thing to do.” The question that haunts her, and propels Ecos forward, dead plant included, is “Can I still grow if I have no roots?”

Tatiana Duque and Alexandra Lainfiesta in Ecos, Diaspora Diaries Collective, Common Ground Arts. Photo by Mat Simpson

Ecos, a bilingual word if ever there was one, is a ghost story of sorts. And the first to arrive on the scene through the curtains that separate present and past (designers: Even Gilchrist and Whittyn Jason) is Eli (Alexandra Lainfiesta), a bright bold-outlined figure from Amaya’s childhood, demanding to know “why we are here.” Whether she’s a sibling, a friend, a young version of Amaya, an incarnation of the playwright, is up for grabs. But Eli is here to challenge Amaya to confront her motives and doubts full-on.

After that, the multi-generational stories come to life, in the play first developed at Common Ground Arts’ Found Festival (as El Funeral). Amaya and Eli host a sort of memory pageant. In Andrés F. Moreno’s evocative Diaspora Diaries Collective production, the finale of Common Ground Arts’ new Prairie Mainstage Series, characters appear and disappear through sliding curtains at either end of the stage, in atmospheric scenes. And sometimes they’re shadows in motion, visible echoes of the past. The lighting is evocative.

Fernando Garcia Reyes and Phany Peña, Tatian Duque and Alexandra Lainfiesta in Ecos. Photo by Mat Simpson.

The grandparents on one side of the family, who moved from the U.K. to Mexico (Phany Peña and Victor Snaith Hernandez), glide into view dancing, a love story that becomes a triangle. The grandparents on the other side (Ana Mulino and Fernando Garcia Reyes), who moved from Spain to Argentina, are a love story, too — one that begins to bend and crack under the stresses. Amaya’s parents (Reyes and Peña), who left Argentina for a life in Mexico, arrive too. As choreographed by Jason Romero and costumed in a time-travelling way by Gilchrist and Jason, they are vivid ghosts who seem to slide in and out of memory. The clarity of the storytelling, and Moreno’s production, are bona fide achievements.

The scenes are framed by a chorus of much-repeated self-doubting questions from Amaya — “was leaving the right thing to do?” or “what am I supposed to do?.” And they come to seem rather long on self-analysis, and grow unnecessary, not least because Duque is such an appealing, expressive actor, eminently able to convey doubt without words. And her counterpart, Lainfiesta as Eli, is charismatic, too. The look is beautiful; Nano Uribe’s  soundscore, after suspenseful opening riffs, seems a bit generically melancholy.

This six-actor indie production by a playwright mining her own past as a immigrant, is a welcome insight. It’s a rich and fulsome reminder, in this country of immigrants, that new Canadians move here for many reasons, bravely setting forth, leaving lives-in-progress, and bringing with them fascinating, dramatic pasts. They gain something, as we’re fond of reminding everyone, but they give up things too. They make big changes in their lives; they adapt; they regret; they sacrifice for love.

REVIEW

Ecos

Theatre: Diaspora Diaries Collective, Common Ground Arts Society

Written by: Elisa Marina Mair-Sánchez

Directed by Andrés F. Moreno

Starring: Tatiana Duque, Alexandra Lainfiesta, Ana Mulino, Victor Snaith Hernandez, Phany Peña, Fernando Garcia Reyes

Where: Mile Zero Dance, 9931, 78 Ave. 

Running: through Nov. 9

Tickets: commongroundarts.ca 

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How tough do you have to be? Surviving trauma: Tough Guy gets a visceral premiere production, a review

Posted on November 1, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In Tough Guy, an exhilarating new play by Hayley Moorhouse, a queer up-and-coming filmmaker tries to justify turning their camera on their friends, survivors of a shooting in queer nightclub mere days before, and reeling from the death of one of their circle.

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Emerson (Autumn Strom) has arrived back home too late for the funeral (“I lost track of time”). Their artistic concept, in progress, is a film capture of “queer joy,” something visceral and powerful (also words in the Emerson lexicon). They’re arguing for the idea of art, self-expression, the compelling need to put the queer story out there in the world and thereby restore “agency” to the queer experience. And their friends, shattered in various ways, aren’t buying.

They accuse Emerson variously of pretentiousness, of “trauma porn,” of putting career and “a vanity project” ahead of friendship. They have no patience with phrases like “an unmistakeable fragility,” or Emerson’s argument that the concept is more “a reflection, a meditation” than a documentary. “But who is it for?” demands Ella (Michelle Diaz).

It takes a tough guy of a playwright, one with chutzpah and wit, to enfold this acidic kind of artistic self-reflection into her own play, and invite us to consider it. Tough Guy is brave that way, with its multiple frames and angled mirror reflections of friends splintered by trauma. And the production, directed and choreographed by Brett Dahl, premiering in the Fringe Theatre season, explodes onstage, no holds barred. It’s riveting, a sensational barrage of visceral (I know, that word, right?) movement, a pounding Kena León score that’s nightclub fabulous and rib-rattling — and acting from a five-member cast who don’t just inhabit the characters but live them.

Jasmine Hopfe in Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson

They all process horror and grief in their own way, starting with Strom as the filmmaker character who brings their own complicated trans history to their filmic exploration of queer joy. There’s Quinn (Jasmine Hopfe), who’s the reason there’s a punching bag centre-stage in Lieke den Bakker’s set design, strikingly lighted to invoke both a nightclub and a boxing ring. In a flashing, thrashing world, Quinn is a taciturn boxer, who communicates with blows not words. “You wanted to talk,” they say to Emerson, landing a punch on the bag. “This is me talking.”

Ella (Diaz) habitually takes the teaching-moment outreach position. “I don’t have time to be traumatized,” they say. “People are counting on me…. How can we make change if we don’t step outside our echo chamber?” Ella is the one who sets up the memorial wall, the one who takes the trouble or the risk to post on social media, who’s a bit conciliatory about the conservative, religious parents who signally failed to even mention the queerness of their murdered daughter Jamie (Mel Bahniuk) at the funeral.

“They’re old-school,” says Ella, much to the outrage of the sardonic Sutton (Marguerite Lawler), the wiseass of the bunch, who survived the shooting with a gunshot wound.

Marguerite Lawler and Michelle Diaz in Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson

And since Moorhouse’s play flips back and forth between the present and assorted, incremental moments in the pre-event past, Jamie is a presence, both alive and dead, in Tough Guy. They’re only a year out of the closet, “a baby queer,” as they say, a new and happy addition to the circle of friends we see — in Emerson’s queer joy footage dancing the night away at the fateful club Aria, or just hanging out, camera-free, making each other laugh in the garage with the punching bag.

Rage and humour are rarely stage roommates; here they’re in bed together. “Being sad all the time, it’s the most lesbian thing you can do,” says one of the characters, and it’s a big laugh line.

How tough do you have to be to be authentically queer in a stressful world of homophobic and transphobic violence, where a queer club is targeted by a shooter and then the memorial wall in honour of the victims gets graphically vandalized? How tough do you have to be to not go it alone? To admit need, as a way to not be paralyzed at a moment that seems to freeze time? The characters are in motion, trying to find that out.

Moorhouse’s intertwined dialogue, which dispenses with narration and exposition, is muscular, staccato, and believable. And the performances are inflammatory.

REVIEW

Tough Guy

Theatre: Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre

Written and produced by: Hayley Moorhouse

Directed by: Brett Dahl

Starring: Mel Bahniuk, Michelle Diaz, Jasmine Hopfe, Marguerite Lawler, Autumn Strom

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

Running: through Nov. 8

Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca

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An activist crime caper? Nicole Moeller’s Wildcat at Workshop West, a review

Posted on October 31, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Michele Fleiger and Maralyn Ryan in Wildcat, Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Timeliness? Irony? The world provides, and sometimes theatre just nails it.

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There’s something downright uncanny about the arrival onstage of Wildcat in a week that will live in infamy in Alberta labour history. Workers’ rights, injustice, resistance and retaliation, the connection between people that ignites change … these motifs thread their way through the long set-up and many, sometimes confusing, complications of this new “crime caper” by Nicole Moeller, premiering in a Workshop West production directed by Heather Inglis.

Wildcat, which lives up to its name in several ways in the course of a couple of hours and two acts, is set, in recognizable detail, in Edmonton in 2025. It’s very likely the only play of the season where Kingsway and the old Gainers plant on 66th get mentioned. And it will almost certainly be the only play you’ll see this season you could call an activist crime caper. Moeller’s plays, never skimpy, notably live at the intersection of the intimate and the bigger world of socio-political engagement. And so it is with Wildcat.

In this Moeller experiment, we meet Dot (Michele Fleiger), a union negotiator and shop steward of old, an aging veteran of the anti-government rallies, protests, strikes on behalf of workers’ rights of the ‘80s and ‘90s, during the Klein era.

Thirty years on (and a stroke and bad knees later), “Dottie with the bullhorn” has gradually isolated herself from the world, and her own sense of social outrage. It’s Alberta, for god’s sake, so there’s more to protest than ever; Alberta Next and the health care fiasco instantly come up in Wildcat. But Dot feels past her best-before date, “alone, depleted,” exhausted by doing nothing. And Fleiger, brusque and sardonic, captures wonderfully the prickly fortifications and vulnerability of a character whose sense of absurdity is directed at her own life.

Barricaded in her own kitchen, alone and in full retreat, talking to her deceased houseplant (and to us, in temporary asides from first-person narration), Dot has somehow “lost the ability to leave the house,” as she puts it. And she’s highly resistant to taking calls and returning messages. So it’s a surprise when Pearl (Maralyn Ryan), an old friend and fellow relic from the glory years, makes contact. “I don’t really like to re-hash the old days,” Dot tells her. “I’m not that person any more.”

Memories of Dot’s adrenalized days as a resistance fighter, participating in marches 10,000 strong, handcuffing themselves to cop cars, barricading the gates at Gainers, making the front page in an era when there was real media covering real local news … these are as wispy as Pearl, who has a quavery sweetness and a certain intriguing vagueness in Ryan’s performance.

Dot is resentful about the ministrations of her daughter Gloria (Melissa Thingelstad), a busy but not-uncaring lawyer who squeezes in time she doesn’t have in order to be briskly parental about her aging mom. Gloria oversees Dot’s bills, taxes, passwords, groceries, medications, appointments — and encounters resistance at every turn for her pains. Grown-ups with parents who are hovering on the frontier of old age will recognize the syndrome.

Anyhow, things are not going well in the mother/daughter relationship. Dot hangs out somewhere on the spectrum from tetchy to surly; Gloria is exasperated. “If you don’t start talking to people, you’ll go insane,” she says to Dot. “Too late,” snaps her mother.

Capers and cons do have to be set up gradually, true; the concept of routine plausibility has to be floated, after all. But the setup of Wildcat presses its luck by taking an entire, rather lengthy, first act to let the self-imposed dullness and unexciting inertia of Dot’s life play out: the regular repetition of Dot’s deflections of Gloria, Dot half-heartedly and ineffectually making the acquaintance of Google, Dot’s reluctant exchanges with poor old Pearl. And I’m afraid you do feel its length; it’s something to be got through despite convincing performances from Fleiger, Ryan, and Thingelstad, and dialogue from Moeller that feels real. So surreptitious is Wildcat that Dot sticking a cig, unlit, into her mouth to fake-smoke a Marlboro, a kind of half-assed screw-you to Gloria, counts as an event.

A lot happens at intermission. By the time we’re back for Act II, the crime caper that ensues is an object lesson in how isolated older people become vulnerable to internet scams, for one thing. And how they could use their life experience, and an arsenal of skills no one (including themselves) realize they have in order to fight back. Honestly, I don’t quite understand the machinations of the seniors revenge plot, and I don’t want to tread into spoiler territory. But Act II is where there’s an adventure and Graham Mothersill enters, in full-throttle, as … well, you’ll have to see for yourself. Jason Kodie’s crime caper sound design is a tip-off.

Heather Inglis’s production happens with the audience wrapped around the stage. Ami Farrow’s design doesn’t really have much of a pay-off, except aisles for stage exits and a pack of Marlboros in close-up, in Act I. But it comes into its own with playful moving parts and mid-century kitchen chairs in Act II. Payal Jotania’s costumes, which have a lived-in look for Dot and Pearl (who seems to be wearing a whole closet of old clothes), leave us perplexed in the case of Gloria. The play (and the always terrific Thingelstad) says she’s a high-powered lawyer who travels the country. Her baggy clothes and plastic purse say she’s eccentric thrift shopper, huh?

Revenge is sweet, though, and the revenge of undervalued seniors even sweeter. And if you hang in, you’ll have the rare experience of seeing a play with a topical, even political, edge with enough chutzpah to get wacky. In these disheartening times, when it’s easy to slide into the slough of despond — authoritarians count on this — the old-fashioned Dot spirit of yore, that change is possible if we fight back, collectively, is pretty inspirational (yay, teachers!). Fighting back, collectively: that’s at the heart, in the end, of a messy, somewhat trying, two-part play that, like Dot herself, takes a while to get going.

“We can’t lose each other,” say mother and daughter late in Wildcat. And there it is, activism in a nutshell.

REVIEW

Wildcat

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Nicole Moeller

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Michele Fleiger, Maralyn Ryan, Melissa Thingelstad, Graham Mothersill

Where: The Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through Nov. 9

Tickets: workshopwest.org (all tickets are pay-what-you-will

 

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A week of bounty in Edmonton theatre, a 12thnight survey

Posted on October 29, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Simon Abbott, Cameron Kneteman, Mhairi Berg, Maureen Rooney in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a week of bounty in Edmonton theatre (your biggest problem is choice). Much-awaited new plays are premiering and so is a full-bodied multi-generational dance/theatre extravaganza. A gem of a new musical continues its run. Continuing too is an involving, heart-warming and funny show invites us to think about the stuff we just can’t throw away. A Canuck classic lands once more. And, hey, stories from our own dark history return from the grave, as cues in improv.

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The theatre, my friends, can be a magical place. And you should be there.

Michele Fleiger and Maralyn Ryan in Wildcat, Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre. Photo supplied.

•Wildcat, Nicole Moeller’s much-anticipated new crime caper (an intriguing pairing of playwright and genre in itself), finally opens at Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre.

The premiere at the Gateway Theatre comes after an eerie and mysterious chain of theatre technology breakdowns. Not only that, opening night happens in an appalling week in Alberta labour history. Which gives Moeller’s caper (lighter than usual for her, she tells 12thnight) an added edge, you’d think, since the protagonist Dot (Michele Fleiger) has a personal history in the labour movement, the strikes and protests of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

The heavy-hitter cast of Heather Inglis’s production is led by veteran theatre stars Fleiger and Maralyn Ryan, with Melissa Thingelstad and Graham Mothersill. Have a peek at the 12thnight interview with the playwright here. It runs through Nov. 9 at the Gateway (8529 Gateway Blvd), Tickets (all pay-what-you-will): workshopwest.org.

Cast of Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo supplied

•The ignition of Hayley Moorhouse’s new play Tough Guy, premiering in the Fringe Theatre season Thursday (a Persistent Myth production) is a tragedy: a shooting at a queer nightclub. In a world that’s tough and getting tougher all the time, it chronicles the lives of a circle of queer friends, and the amazing resilience of queer joy as they grapple with the emotional fallout. Brett Dahl’s production at the Backstage Theatre in the Fringe Arts Barns (10330 84 Ave.) runs Thursday through Nov. 8. Meet the playwright in a 12thnight preview here.

Elisa Marina-Sanchez, Ecos, Diaspora Diaries Productions. Photo supplied.

•It’s a big week for Common Ground Arts. Tough Guy was developed there, in the RISER initiative. And so was Ecos (formerly El Funeral), a journey from the Found Festivals of 2021 and 2023 to their new Prairie mainstage Series. It’s the work of Edmonton playwright Elisa Marina-Sánchez. The Diaspora Diaries Collective production directed, in both Spanish and English, by Andrés F. Moreno and Jenna Rogers, features a seven-artist cast of Latin-American heritage: Tatiana Duque, Victor Snaith Hernandez, Alexandra Lainfiesta, Ana Mulion, Phany Peña, Fernando Garcia Reyes, and Jason Romero. Ecos, a co-presentation of Common Ground and Mile Zero Dance, runs at the latter’s headquarters (9931 78 Ave.) Thursday through Nov. 9. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

Naomi Snieckus and Matt Baram in Big Stuff, Baram and Snieckus at Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

•Ever since I saw Big Stuff in the Citadel’s Rice Theatre I can’t stop thinking about it. The married comedy duo Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus with director/co-creator Kat Sandler have created something irresistibly funny and touching — and entirely original in the way the show wraps around their own unfolding love story and embraces, in a specially welcoming kind of improv with us, our own stories of people we’ve lost and the connections we value, through toasters we don’t need and oddball objets d’art … you know, stuff. Theatre is full of stories of people who arrive in relationships with “baggage.” Big Stuff, though, is about … stuff, the stuff we accumulate, the stuff, no matter how small and useless we can’t bear to part with because it’s embedded in memory and wrapped in emotional connection. What are we supposed to do with all our stuff? 

It’s a lovely show, funny, warm-hearted, insightful, and I loved it. Read the 12thnight review here. And 12thnight talked to the pair in a preview here. It continues through Nov. 9. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.

Mhairi Berg and Maureen Rooney in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

•There’s a “new Canadian Celtic musical” at Shadow Theatre. And if you haven’t seen Morningside Road yet, you really should. By Mhairi Berg with music by Simon Abbott, it takes a cast (and a live band) of three into a story about stories, and a kind of haunting. A Canadian girl (Berg) is fascinated by the romance of her grandmother’s stories about growing up in Edinburgh on that road, before, during, and after the war. And gradually, as Granny’s memory gets eroded by dementia the layers of her story multiply.

The ways the past inhabits the present, as remembered and as imagined, are intricate, and surprising. And Lana Michelle Hughes’ production, starring Berg, Maureen Rooney, and Cameron Kneteman, weaves a spell. The music by Berg and Abbott is terrific. The 12thnight review is here. And a preview interview with Mhairi Berg is here. Morningside Road runs through Sunday at the Varscona (10329 83 Ave.). Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.  

Steven Greenfield in Billy Bishop Goes To War, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

•A new company, Edmonton Repertory Theatre, launches its first season with a production of a Canadian classic, the 1978 two-hander musical Billy Bishop Goes To War, by John MacLachlan Gray in collaboration with actor Eric Peterson. Its wry view of what “hero” means in Canadian terms, is built into its chronicle of the young, self-deprecating, accident-prone underachiever who becomes a World War I flying ace, his quixotic relationship with his colonial masters across the sea, and his darkening views of what war is all about. Gerry Potter’s production, starring Steven Greenfield and Cathy Derkach, lands the musical at a moment when this country is under siege. Have a look at the 12thnight preview with the director here, and the review here. You’ll find the show at a newly discovered theatre, the Biederman, in the Lifestyles Options Retirement Community (17203 99 Ave.). Tickets: eventbrite.com.

•Speaking as we are of phantoms and the thin veil that separates us from the Great Beyond, it’s the last week (Thursday through Saturday) for Ha-Ha-Haunting. Rapid Fire Theatre’s highly original seasonal co-opting of horror stories from the dark vault of our own history (researched by Dead Centre of Town resident playwright Megan Dart) lets a crack cast of improvisers loose on them. A nefarious comic agenda, am I right?  Who would do that (unnecessary question of the week)? Opening night was riotous (read about it here). Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com.

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