‘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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Kris Alvarez invites us to meet her parents: Banana Musik launches Common Ground’s Prairie Mainstage Series

Posted on September 17, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There is nothing remotely classifiable about Banana Musik, launching Common Ground Arts’ new Prairie Mainstage Series Friday. There’s storytelling, yes, and a memory play with unusual trimmings. There’s original music. There’s a celebration of the immigrant experience, check, and an honouring of aging parents and the generation that put their own dreams on hold to give their kids a better crack at a fulfilling life, all there.

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Ah, and there’s this fascinating rarity: Regina-based theatre artist Kris Alvarez, a 50-year-old first-generation Filipina immigrant, shares the stage with her actual parents. Jim and Susan Alvarez, in their ’70s, are artistic, creative people, as their daughter describes, who emigrated from the Philippines to Regina in the 1970s, via Toronto and Windsor. “My dad thought the idea of going West not East sounded exciting; it was all the Westerns he’d watched.” But they’re not actors. And we get to meet them live and in person, and tour their stuff, as inventoried onstage by their daughter.

Alvarez, personable and friendly in conversation, explains that the music of Banana Musik, and the show title, come from “the name my dad gave his original music recorded in our basement in the 70s.” As a teenager growing up in Regina (“I’m very partial to Regina, and the Prairies”), she’d discovered a whole box of cassettes of her dad’s songs in his car.  “I was really curious about him listening to his own music while he drove around…. We think we know our parents, but there are all these other parts to them.”

Kris, Jim and Susan Alvarez in Banana Musik, Found Fest 2024. Photo by Mat Simpson

Of the five songs in Banana Musik, Alvarez chose four inspired, she says, “by the memory of being young,” and one is more contemporary. The Alvarez household was a creative, music-filled place to grow up, as she describes. “Even back in the Philippines, my mom and dad were big Beatles fans, very into the British Invasion music of the ‘60s.” Her dad started as a drummer, and took up guitar; “he still plays in the living room all the time.” And father and daughter play music together, sometimes busking just for fun….” Her mom is creative in handicraft mode; she “paints, beads, sews purses and dresses….”

The seeds of the show were planted in 2017 when Alvarez, who’d always been “a self-proclaimed theatre artist” make a conscious decision to “dig in full-time  to arts-making and community-building.” And she counts actor/ director/ playwright Joey Tremblay as one of her mentors in that decision. Instead of writing a solo play for herself, she wondered “who are the other people in town who consider themselves brown or ‘other’. And what are they up to?”

The result was Burnt Siena, a sort of talk show/ variety show mashup. The tagline: “a live variety show with a lot more colour. Special guests weren’t artists per se. “They were teachers, restaurateurs, business people….” And Alvarez would ask them “what does it mean to you to be brown? What is it like to grow up here, on the Prairies?” Burnt Siena ran for four years till Alvarez put it to bed in 2022.

And she devised a replacement, Burnt Siena Boulevard, still running in Regina, an homage to Sesame Street especially designed for young people. “We weren’t teaching didactically about race or culture. We just exist.”

As you will glean, Alvarez finds her inspirations in inter-generational ways. “I’ve always (included) my parents, all along the way…. I want to spend more time with them as they get older, appreciating them. And they’re fully artists in their own right, who gave up a lot as immigrants to do full-time jobs to raise a family.”

“If I’m doing an art show or a performance I want to scratch below the surface of the questions I’ve got. And this one, Banana Musik, is about elder care, about getting to know your older relatives….”

How do you construct a script for yourself as an actor, and your parents who aren’t actors? “Tricky ,” says Alvarez, laughing. Though not an actor, her dad had been a front man in bands in his time, so he’s used to performing. Her mom, primarily a visual artist, had never been onstage. “I used a few different theatre tricks, realism tricks; it feels a bit verbatim…. While I’m recounting family stories I just wanted them to be there, the family dynamic.”

“My mom’s track is (dealing with) the meal of the day; my dad’s track is playing music on the couch. And once in a while I engage with them singing…. When they have lines, it’s very much what they’d say (in real life).” After all, as Alvarez points out, “we all have scripts, when we go for Sunday dinner or at Christmas, certain jokes, certain arguments…. So that wasn’t hard when I started thinking that way. We all have our party tricks that are part of our identity.”

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

And when it comes to some of the ‘issues’ that Alvarez explores in the play— “their stuff, their aging bodies, my worries about how to take care of things” — Alvarez and her parents had conversations about all of the above before they read the script — and during rehearsal. “I’d ask them ‘is this too exposing? Is this too much?’” Alvarez mostly “does the heavy lifting” in acting, she says. “They just have to be themselves.”

“The gift of them being Boomers is that they’re pretty confident about the way they’ve lived…. We check in. And mostly they find it super-special that we get to share this. They’re generous people and I’m very lucky to have them in my life.”

As a community-building bonus, the run of the show includes an Intergenerational Songwriters’ Circle Sept. 20, hosted by Jim Alvarez and his granddaughter Zoë James, as well as a Burnt Sienna Workshop Series, and Burnt Sienna Blueprint Sept. 24. On Sept. 21, Alvarez hosts Golden Potluck, “a special dinner party featuring Indigenous and immigrant women sharing perspectives on family, culture, and identity. Bring a dish to share.” Plus, Sept. 27, Burnt Sienna, “an evening of conversation, food, humour, and heart with prairie artists, thinkers, and entertainers from diverse backgrounds.”

PREVIEW

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

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

  

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Edmonton, it’s time to play: here are 10 intriguing prospects in the upcoming theatre season

Posted on September 16, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Andrew Ritchie in Cycle, Thou Art Here Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Hey Edmonton, it’s time to come out and play.   

As always our mighty summer Fringe is the tip off. And the 44th annual edition sold a spirit-lifting 140,000-plus tickets to its 221 shows, hinting at a post-pandemic bounce we’ve all been dreaming of. 

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But escalating production costs, a continuing funding freeze that amounts to a reduction, dwindling sponsorships, have all contributed to a year of continuing struggle, with more than a whiff of desperation, for Edmonton’s theatres and festivals, in perpetual fund-raising red-alert. Which makes the return of our theatre companies and indie artists to stages large and small, a sign of remarkable ingenuity and creativity in the face of big challenges.

The theatre season is happening: new artistic directors; new plays (by Stewart Lemoine Trevor Schmidt, Nicole Moeller, Kenneth T. Williams among others); new musicals at the Citadel and Shadow Theatre, significant theatre birthdays (the Citadel turns 60, Northern Light 50). A teenage boy and a Bengal tiger are currently together in a lifeboat onstage, negotiating the vast Pacific in Life of Pi, opening this week at the Citadel. The Pink Unicorn, launching Northern Light’s big five-oh season, is in rehearsal (opening Sept. 26). The sounds of silence are floating through the ether at the Mayfield (The Simon & Garfunkel Story).

The upcoming Workshop West Playwrights Theatre season awaits a Thursday reveal (though the sale of Theatre 8-packs has spilled the beans about one of the shows if you’re curious). The Fringe hasn’t yet announced their season offerings. And Theatre Network is holding off till “early October” to declare their 2025-2026 plans. And, of course, there’s more to come from Edmonton’s roster of indie companies and artists (that’s just the way the indies work).

Meanwhile, to intrigue you in the new season, here are ten exciting prospects (in no particular order) to seek out.

Morningside Road. Shadow Theatre launches their season with the premiere of a new Canadian musical, the company’s first-ever mainstage musical, a Celtic-flavoured original with a fascinating team: book by actor/ playwright/ choreographer/ composer Mhairi Berg and music by the the playwright and Simon Abbott (Grindstone Theatre’s remarkably versatile resident composer/ musical director). The story connects a girl seeking life advice from her grandmother, who shares stories of growing up in Edinburgh on the title street. It’s a quest for truth and meaning  challenged by the old woman’s memory under assault from dementia. The Shadow production (Oct. 15 to Nov. 2) is directed by the company’s new artistic director Lana Michelle Hughes, who takes over from John Hudson when he retires July 1. Berg and Maureen Rooney star, accompanied by Abbott’s three-piece band. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org.

Vinyl Cafe: The Musical. In its 60th anniversary season the Citadel is premiering a new Canadian holiday musical — based on the legendary, quintessentially Canadian CBC Radio story collection created by the late Stuart McLean. The new musical, by Georgina Escobar with Jess Milton, music by Colleen Dauncey, lyrics by Akiva Romer-Segal, incorporates some of that Canadian archive’s most popular Dave and Morley stories — the Toronto couple, their kids, their friends and neighbours, their ‘hood. Yes, “Dave Cooks The Turkey” and “Rashida, Amir, and the Great Gift-Giving” get tapped. Daryl Cloran, who thought up the idea, directs; his production runs Nov. 8 to 30. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

Request Programme, Northern Light Theatre. Graphic supplied.

Request Programme. In this wordless 1973 piece by the German avant-gardiste Franz Xaver Kroetz, a solitary woman comes home from work, prepares dinner, cleans up, tunes in to a call-in radio show — nothing out of the ordinary. And then something happens that makes all the “ordinary” detail significant and turns the piece (artistic director Trevor Schmidt has called it “performance art”) into a gut-wrencher. In honour of NLT’s 50th anniversary it’s a tribute to the large-scale experimental work of NLT in the ‘90s under Schmidt’s artistic director predecessors D.D. Kugler and the late Sandhano Schultz. And Schmidt’s cast features actresses, a different one per performance, who have Northern Light credits in their resumés, 17 in all, ranging in age from their 20s to their 80s. It runs May 1 to 16. Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com.

Crybaby. Uniform Theatre, the enterprising young indie musical theatre company that brought Stephen Sondheim’s macabre Assassins to the Fringe, is back. Cry-Baby, a 2008 Broadway musical is based on the 1990 John Waters film, a rom-com musical comedy (and cult fave) that tells a Romeo and Juliet-esque story about a bad-boy rebel and the upper-class “square” that falls for him in 1950s Baltimore. The book is by the Hairspray team of Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan; the music, intriguingly, is by the late Adam Schlesinger, the co-founder and muse of the stellar rock band Fountains of Wayne. Cry-Baby runs March 14 to 24 in Theatre Network’s Phoenix Series at the Roxy. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.

Cocktails at Pam’s. Forty years ago Edmonton audiences found themselves at a a Stewart Lemoine comedy that wasn’t so much a play as an actual 60s cocktail party. In real time. With small-talk, mismatched guests, conversational fragments, canapés, non-sequiturs — and the perfect hostess until.… (well, my lips are sealed). Stewart Lemoine’s Cocktails at Pam’s was Teatro La Quindicina’s first outing onstage at the old Varscona after assorted Fringe venues hither and yon. And it got revived at three Fringes after that, five years apart, before landing in Teatro’s first season at the re-built Varscona in 2016. It’s back in this first Teatro season under new artistic director Farren Timoteo, a veteran Teatro leading man who’s paying his first visit to Pam’s as part of the all-new cast of 11. Lemoine’s revival runs July 9 to 26 at the Varscona. Tickets: teatrolive.com.  

actor/playwright Jameela McNeil, whose play Ms. Pat’s Kitchen premieres at SkirtsAfire Fest 2026.

Mrs. Pat’s Kitchen. The mainstage production at the upcoming 14th annual SkirtsAfire Festival, by the award-winning actor-turned-playwright Jameela McNeil, is an a contemporary Edmonton story, that celebrates the Caribbean community here. At the centre of the inter-generational fractures in Mrs. Pat’s Kitchen, which had its start in a workshop production at the 2024 Nextfest, is a contentious mother-teenage daughter relationship in a Jamaican family. And it steps up to the thorny issue of consent, nuanced by cultural and age factors. Mrs. Pat’s Kitchen was at the RISER New Works Festival this season, directed by Sue Goberdhan. And in 2026 Patricia Darbasie directs the full-length SkirtsAfire premiere March 5 to 15. As a bonus, it’s in a “new mystery venue.” Tickets: skirtsafire.com.

Cyrano de Bergerac, Citadel Theatre. graphic supplied.

Cyrano de Bergerac. A new adaptation of the classic Edmond Rostand romantic adventure, a glorious intersection of  wordplay and swordplay, is the grand finale of the upcoming Citadel season. Commissioned by the theatre, it’s by Edmonton playwright Jessy Ardern, who’s made something of a specialty of adaptations with contemporary resonance (Queen Lear). She retains the 17th century Paris setting, and even pays homage to the virtuoso verse form of the original by turning it out in rhyming couplets! Amanda Goldberg directs the Citadel production (May 2 to 24), starring Scott Shpeley as the brilliant swordsman with the seductive gift of the gab (and the epic nose). Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

Ecos (formerly El Funeral, 2023), Common Ground Arts Society. Photo supplied.

Ecos. This large-cast bilingual immersive dance-theatre piece by Elisa Marina Mair-Sanchez — developed at the Found Festival as El Funeral in 2021 and 2023 — is a kaleidoscopic insight into the immigrant experience across generations, focused by a family funeral.  Andrés F. Moreno’s production for Diaspora Diaries Collective (Oct. 30 to Nov. 9 at Mile Zero Dance, a co-presenter) is part of Common Ground Arts Society’s new Prairie Mainstage Series. Tickets: commongroundarts.ca.

Big Stuff. You know that feeling: you’re gradually being buried in your stuff.  What do you do with the stuff you’ve accumulated along the way and can’t bear to part with? The stuff that connects you to people you’ve lost? The show, by the Toronto-based married Canadian comedy duo Matt Baram (originally from Edmonton) and Naomi Snieckus along with director Kat Sandler, combines memoir, storytelling and improv with the audience in a particularly original way by all reports. It was a held-over hit in Toronto a year ago, and runs Oct. 18 to Nov. 9 as part of the Citadel’s alternative Highwire Series in the Rice Theatre. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

Cycle. Who owns a city anyhow? In a city where the subject of bike lanes is in the top 10 provocations, Andrew Ritchie’s exciting (and nerve-wracking) solo show spins its wheels, and dares to do its storytelling from atop a bicycle. And Ritchie, an ex-bike food courier in Toronto (who has lived to tell the tale, and cycles everywhere in all seasons in Edmonton!) invites audiences to join him on stationary bikes, as he makes a case for sharing of urban space. Kristi Hansen’s award-winning Thou Art Here Theatre production of Cycle — choreography by Ainsley Hillyard, projectionscape by T. Erin Gruber — is part of Theatre Network’s Phoenix Series Oct. 15 to 26. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.

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The hopes and dreams of a raccoon existentialist: The Shiniest Piece of Trailer Trash, a review

Posted on September 11, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Meegan Sweet, creator and star of The Shiniest Piece of Trailer Trash. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Aww, this is the life! I get to be here, for free!” declares the resourceful, scrappy character we meet in The Shiniest Piece of Trailer Trash.

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In Meegan Sweet’s imaginative solo show, the staff choice at the 2024 Fringe, that character is a raccoon, wary but chipper, making a life in “the most decrepit trailer park — a world of garbage, left-overs, discards. The raccoon’s-eye view of things transmutes trash into treasure. But is that enough for happiness? Fulfilment?   

It’s a fundamental existential question. For our new raccoon friend the trashed half-empty Hungry Man containers are a find, but also a symbol. They aspire to be human, a being driven by appetite that creates the trash, not just consumes it. More poetically, it’s the dream of being “re-incarbonated into a yuman bean.” After all, who can say No to a Hungry Man?

Our aspirational raccoon is looking for a transcendent experience (aren’t we all?). Which explains why they’re drawn to interact with the audience: “I have never seen so many human beans in one place before,” they say, cautiously approaching one of us. “You look nice. Are you nice?” And since existential questions are a veritable dumpster dive (or rabbit hole, to mix our species allusions), the curious raccoon wonders about destiny, identity, and whether we’re locked in, to either. Death: now there’s a question. Which brings them to God — who, what, where? “what is your real name?”.

Sweet’s show touches down on big questions lightly, whimsically rifling through our human “trash.” This is not raccoon Beckett; our protagonist is not waiting for Godot. And it’s not Old Deuteronomy ready to ascend to the Heavyside Layer. But there’s poignancy in the humour, and a witty way of addressing the profound by tossing it up, then undercutting it while it’s still in the air.

Meegan Sweet in The Shiniest Piece of Trailer Trash. Photo supplied.

A black-nosed clown, they’re a free-associator, highly distractible in that clown-ly way. In this odd original of a show directed jointly by Charlie Peters and Autumn Strom. Sweet, a fearless performer and improviser, creates a mischievous, sly character who’s paws-on with the audience. “Share!” they command. And we do. There are outbursts of poetry both lyrical and muscular; there are songs (“the pineapple of human existence”).

Its biggest risk comes at the end, which faces up to the challenges of creating an imaginary world in a way that leans into clarity a bit too much perhaps. I’m of two minds about that ending, and reluctant to tell you more. But getting there with the self-styled “king of garbage” is clever fun, with a soulful edge: this is a smart, funny performance piece, and such a bold opener for the Fringe Theatre season. “Come in come on, follow the trail of stars.”

REVIEW

The Shiniest Piece of Trailer Trash

Theatre: at Edmonton Fringe Theatre

Created by and starring: Meegan Sweet

Directed by: Charlie Peters and Autumn Strom

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

Running: through Saturday

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

  

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The season is underway, in dreams, aspirations, memories. A quick 12thnight survey of the week on Edmonton stages

Posted on September 10, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Meegan Sweet in The Shiniest Piece of Trailer Trash. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

•The star of The Shiniest Piece Of Trailer Trash, the solo show launching the Fringe Theatre season tonight, is a dreamer. The aspirational raccoon from the crummy trailer park on the wrong side of the tracks wants to be human, a real live ‘yuman bean’. The solo show, by and starring the multi-faceted Meegan Sweet (who’s is also the costume, set and sound designer) was the ‘staff pick’ of the 2024 Fringe. And, as I know, it was impossible to get a ticket, for love or snacks.

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It runs through Saturday in the Studio Theatre at the Fringe Arts Barns, before de-camping to Toronto’s What The Festival later this month. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

•It’s been 85 years since the Battle of Britain, as British prime minister Winston Churchill coined it. And in a genuine l940s hangar at the Alberta Aviation Museum Saturday evening that seminal event, and Canada’s role in it, are celebrated in an original site-immersive play by Kenneth Brown, specially written for the occasion.

The evening, which includes dinner, is the inspiration of the 700 (City of Edmonton) Wing of the Royal Canadian Air Force Association. And all proceeds benefit the veterans at the Capital Care Kipnes Centre.

The playwright is an expert in bringing Canadian wartime history to life in the theatre, as Edmonton audiences know from such Brown plays as Letters in Wartime, Roy versus The Red Baron, and his epic Spiral Dive Trilogy, with its Canadian fighter pilot hero. As Brown explains, at the centre of Battle of Britain, which unfolds in four parts (and three intermissions for dinner), we meet Kent, a Canadian test pilot enlisted to lead the RAF’s 303 Polish Squadron. Based on a real Canadian aviation story, “one of the great ones,” his crazily dangerous job is “to test huge helium-filled balloons suspended on cables at 10,000 feet,” by ramming them — designed to repel the Luftwaffe air onslaught. “Kent leads us into the story,” says Brown. “And he’s an extraordinary character, in a way blandly ‘Canadian’, but managed to corral these Polish ex-pats; he didn’t even speak Polish.”

Brown has borrowed liberally from his Spiral Dive plays for Battle of Britain. And, he says, he “welcomed the opportunity to go back to a historically important period … a battle that changed the course of world history.” And not least, because it counts as “a glorious defensive war, nothing morally ambiguous about it.”

Brown’s cast includes a top-flight trio of Edmonton actors: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, Graham Mothersill, and Brennan Campbell. Tickets: 700wing.com.

•Starting previews Saturday (and opening next week) is Life of Pi, a stage adaptation of the Yann Martel best-seller about a shipwrecked Indian teenager on an impossible journey — afloat for hundreds of days on a lifeboat in the Pacific with a menagerie of zoo animals de-populated (by ways you can imagine) down to a Bengal tiger. The Citadel-Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production directed by Haysam Kadri features puppets by Calgary-based Puppet Stuff Canada (you can read about how they came to life in this 12thnight preview here). Life of Pi runs through Oct. 5. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

•Continuing at the Mayfield is their season-opening production of The Simon & Garfunkel Story, in which an expert cast and band conjure those indelible songs and that signature sound. It runs through Nov. 2, and the 12thnight review is here.

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A change in artistic leadership at Shadow Theatre: the multi-talented Lana Michelle Hughes will be the new artistic director

Posted on September 10, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Lana Michelle Hughes, Shadow Theatre’s new artistic director as of July 1 2026.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

After 35 years, a torch is being passed at Shadow Theatre.

At the end of the 2025-2026 season, John Hudson, a co-founder of the company and its artistic director from the start, is retiring. Stepping into the a.d. role is Lana Michelle Hughes, the highly accomplished director/ actor/ playwright/ producer/ sound designer who’s been Shadow’s associate artistic director since 2024.

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Of the four productions in the 2025-2026 lineup, jointly programmed by Hudson and Hughes, each will direct two, starting with the latter’s premiere production of the Mhairi Berg/ Simon Abbott musical Morningside Road in October. And on July 1 2026 “a new generation with new ideas,” as Hudson puts it, takes over, at the artistic helm of one of Edmonton’s flagship theatre companies.

Shadow Theatre artistic director John Hudson

As its name implies, Shadow was born on the dark side of town, where the gritty plays live, three-and-a-half decades ago (Hudson jokingly calls the aesthetic “young man theatre”). He and his U of A theatre school classmate Shaun Johnston, newly minted U of actors, shared an appetite for dark and edgy, and a dream of starting a theatre company.

Hudson traces Shadow back to a 1989 Fringe production of Sam Shepard’s Fool For Love. The late great Jim DeFelice was in that show, and directed How I Got That Story for the new Hudson-Johnston venture. Hudson made his own directorial debut with the bizarre black comedy Some Things You Need To Know Before The World ends (A Final Evening With The Illuminati).

The budget? “Nothing!” laughs Hudson. “We put in our 800 bucks out of our pockets to be in the Fringe, and we paid ourselves back…. We all made 10 cents. We were young!”

The new company launched itself more officially at the old Phoenix Downtown, with Johnston’s own play Catching The Train (which won the first Sterling new play award) and The Day They Shot John Lennon. As Johnston left for the world of TV and film, the  productions were a confluence of key Shadow players, including Coralie Cairns, John Sproule, and David Belke (whose own company ACME Theatre merged with Shadow in 1995). The debut Shadow season was a three-show lineup, with 32 subscribers.

Hudson doesn’t discount luck in the Shadow success story. When the Fringe decamped from Chinook Theatre to the Bus Barns across the street in 1993, suddenly there was an available theatre space, and a consortium of Shadow, Teatro La Quindicina and Rapid Fire Theatre snapped it up and renamed the ex-firehall the Varscona. “And we snuck in the back door with the Alberta Foundation of the Arts, when Union Theatre left town. They had a charity number and let Shadow have it…. So we could fund-raise. We were on our way!”

And that way was assisted by dexterous administrators in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Eva Cairns and Al Rasko among them, who secured “foundational funding” and taught the company the ropes. “We all learned; we’ve had solid administration,” says Hudson of a Shadow genealogy that now includes general manager Karen Brown Furnell.

Since those early days of “young man theatre,” the programming has expanded. Hudson, now 63, has directed some 110 Shadow productions, and more than three dozen new Canadian plays, “the most raucous comedy to the most serious drama,” as he says. His list of favourite Shadow productions includes The Comedy Company, Bloomsday, Sexy Laundry, Blithe Spirit, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. And it includes “an exhausting 10 years” fund-raising for the $7.1 million Varscona re-build which opened in 2016.

“The timing is right for me,” he says of his exit from the artistic leadership. “I’ve had to put writing and acting on the shelf.” And he’s sure the company with the very flexible mandate — “the best of contemporary theatre” — has found in Hughes an ideal successor, with an impressive skill set.

In addition to her multi-faceted history as an artist, which includes directing and sound design, devising a solo show, and acting in an assortment of Promise Productions, Hughes was at Catalyst Theatre for 14 years — as managing director and producer, “a really challenging outside-the-box job, not at all cookie-cutter,” as she describes. “There was nothing I didn’t do,” at the unique theatre company that develops and tours original work. Grant-writing, marketing, administration…” Hughes has done it all. What she hasn’t done before, as she says, is “to be the face of a company.” And that’s what her new job will mean.

Not only did she pitch Hudson in 2017 an idea for an Artistic Director Fellowship Program for women and gender/ marginalized people, “as a stepping stone towards theatre leadership, she raised the funds, some $90,000, to support it for three years. Alexandra Dawkins and Amanda Goldberg were the first Fellows; in the second of her two years, Hughes became Shadow’s first-ever associate artistic director.

Developing new work is a particular focus for Hughes. Shadow has always developed and premiered Canadian plays, by Conni Massing, Neil Grahn, Darrin Hagen, and other Edmonton playwriting stars. But it’s been on a piecemeal project by project basis (Shadow, like their Varscona roommate companies, has never received any Canada Council funding). And Hughes will be working to make new play development and playwright outreach a more formalized and sustainable program at Shadow.

Meanwhile, the transitional season of joint-artistic directorship at Shadow is about to begin, when Morningside Road opens Oct. 16.

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Boy, tiger, sea journey … and the magic of puppets. Life of Pi at the Citadel: meet puppet designer/creator Brendan James Boyd

Posted on September 9, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Leah Carmichael, painting the hyena for Life of Pi, Puppet Stuff Canada. Citadel Theatre, photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It would seem to define the impossible: the page-to-live stage adventure of Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s 2001 Booker Prize-winning novel.

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A story about an Indian teenager lost at sea for 227 days? Afloat on a lifeboat in the boundless Pacific in the company of a shipwrecked menagerie of zoo animals, and finally a Bengal tiger?

It’s been a movie, yes, (Ang Lee, 2012). But theatre magic requires a much different kind of imaginative participation, from artists and audiences. It’s transported Lolita Chakrabarti’s 2019 stage adaptation from northern England to the West End and on to Broadway. And now, for the first time at a regional theatre in this country, Life of Pi is happening on the Shoctor stage at the Citadel in a co-production with the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production, starting previews Saturday.

The design and building of the animal characters led by Richard Parker, the fearsome tiger with the whimsical name, is the work of Calgary-based Puppet Stuff Canada. And the lead designer/sculptor Brendan James Boyd, the company co-founder (with Reese Scott) and a passionate career inhabitant of the world of puppets, is on the phone to explain the particular challenges of the production we’ll see.

Brendan James Boyd of Puppet Stuff Canada. Photo supplied.

“Gargantuan!” says Boyd, an Edmontonian who moved to Calgary five years ago to work on the Apple+ Fraggle Rock reboot series Back To the Rock. “So exciting to come back to theatre on this scale!” he says of his return from the film and TV gigs of the last few years. If you fell in love with Olaf the adorable snowman in the Citadel production of Frozen the Disney Musical last winter you know something about Puppet Stuff creativity.  “That was our re-entry. We were the last-minute choice,” says Boyd, “and we had a month!”

Life of Pi was years in development before its stage debut at the Crucible in Sheffield England, and “they’re now on their seventh iteration (of the puppets)…. We’re doing it in way less time (two months) with significantly less resources,” says Boyd. “This was a challenging build! They asked us to do something different from the established show.”

Start with this test of ingenuity: the logistics and choreography involved way fewer puppeteers. In London the six or eight puppeteers of the West End production, who give the zebra, the hyena, the orangutan, the goat, and super-star tiger Richard Parker the breath of life, were nominated for a supporting actor Olivier Award. Here, the cast includes only two dedicated puppeteers (Troy Feldman and Braydon Dowler-Coltman), Boyd explains. “And the 14-member ensemble jumps in to (puppeteer) when possible.”

Boyd is delighted by the continuing collaboration — with director Haysam Kadri, the actors, the design team led by Beyata Hackborn — this demanded. “A lot of what we do is third-party. Here, we were in there from the start with the production,” a collaboration updated constantly. And fine-tuning will happen till opening night, Boyd figures.

Leah Carmichael of Puppet Stuff Canada, working on Life of Pi, Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied.

Originality was required — in the weight of the puppets, the aesthetic, the movement lexicon. “We built the tiger from the ground up,” Boyd says. There are no blueprints, no instructions. It’s not like Little Shop of Horrors where the instructions for building the plant (the carnivorous Audrey II) are included in the front of the libretto. We had to make this up from scratch.”

Boyd and his Puppet Stuff team-mates made cardboard miniatures for the initial workshops. Director Kadri (whose production of Heist was at the Citadel last season) “wanted to keep the puppets in the scale of real animals,” neither reduced in size nor abstract.

“For me, I speak mostly through sculpture. When I design for clients I don’t sketch on paper; I sketch with water-based clay, and quickly sketch out a shape and a silhouette. That’s how I get inspired…. It’s impulsive, very emotional. You get that artistic fervour when you get what’s in your head out into clay…. That’s the raw first pass, and there’s something beautiful about it, and something does get lost in the process of refinement.”

So Boyd and co set about translating those first passes into puppets. The originals, as he points out, were hand-sculpted, hand-carved, and beautiful…. But we didn’t have the time or the staff to do that.” So they alighted on the idea of using full-scale 3-D scan printouts to capture the initial artistic impulses. “Life-sized, and in the case of Richard Parker, even a hair bigger,” says Boyd, in the interest of “making Richard Parker an aggressive form onstage, more threatening.” Be warned: “when he glares at you, in the face, it’s quite intimidating!”

“Every week we’re constantly re-jointing the legs, or the neck, adjusting for all the little nuances the performers figure out…. The two puppeteers (Dowler-Coltman and Feldman), both movement-based artists, are fantastic, very collaborative.” And the puppets themselves … well, as Boyd points out, “generally in theatre they tell you what they want to do, and you have to adjust accordingly.”

The largest of the puppets (who has to be the lightest) is the zebra. A single human performer brings the hyena to life. Each puppet presents their own challenges, especially with person-power at such a premium. It’s a balance, thinks Boyd who personally hand-sculpted all the faces. “Because of the limitations the puppeteers help sell the characters, with the movement of their bodies. They help fill in the information for the imagination….”

As you might guess, the tiger is the most complex and challenging of all. At core inside the tiger, Richard Parker is an athletic human being “with a crutch/stilt configuration.” And it will not surprise you to learn that “it’s incredibly hard to fit a human into any animal profile.”   

The infrastructure is plastic, Boyd explains. “We managed to 3-D print it SO thin, 2 mm shells …. Mostly in puppetry you build from the inside out. For this we worked from the outside in. Which gave us room to adjust the mechanics.” And that thinness gives the puppets a kind of shine, almost a translucency.”

The original aesthetic inspiration of the West End touring show, as the English puppet-makers have said in interviews, was driftwood. Boyd and Puppet Stuff are thinking “shipwreck, water, wave formation.” And in this they work in tandem with lighting designer April Viczko and sound designer Joelysa Pankanea. “Puppets take a team!”

And there’s sustainability to consider too, as Boyd points out, since Pi’s traumatic journey at the Citadel is followed by another in Winnipeg. “I have never built puppets that had to go through so much vigorous use and stress. They take a beating…. I mean, they kill each other!” Puppetry director Dayna Tietzen, a puppeteer and movement specialist herself, “goes to bat for the puppets,” as Boyd puts it.

“We swore we’d never build puppets again for people,” Boyd laughs of his Puppet Stuff plan with Scott of five years ago to “just sell supplies, hence the name — fleece and foam and sculpting tools. Very quickly people started asking us to build again. And that’s been our trajectory. Now we’re building for companies all across North America.” If you’re hot to have a 16-foot puppet climb a 41-storey building, Puppet Stuff is your go-to.

A home base in Calgary is a natural terroir: “the puppet capital of Canada” is a mysterious vortex of puppets and their human collaborators, with at least six puppet companies, including the Old Trout Puppet Workshop and the Green Fools (it’s where marionettist Ronnie Burkett made his start), and 54 independent puppeteers. “I’ve gone on many journeys in my life,” Boyd laughs, “many forks in the road.” But the five-year-old who saw a marionette show at a festival and said “I’m going to be a puppet man when I grow up” stuck to his GPS.

“”Everyone who works in our collective is a puppeteer, and very talented performer in their own right,” Boyd says of his cohorts, who also write, direct, and perform.  “At least once a year we all devise a show together.” The Boo Revue, their cabaret-style “passion project” family musical, which embraces hand puppets and bunraku puppets (Boyd’s own favourite), has taken to touring — it’ll be at the Arden Theatre in St. Albert Oct. 26. “It’s our chance to try new things,” a impulse he compares to Burkett’s free-wheeling Daisy Theatre.

Meanwhile, Puppet Stuff’s return to theatre from film and TV has excited the collective. “Theatre is thrilling and it lives in a different way in space in front of people. We fill in the gaps with our imaginations….” That’s something puppets demand of their audiences. And Life of Pi is “the Olympics of puppetry!”

PREVIEW

Life of Pi

Theatre: Citadel and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre

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

Directed by: Haysam Kadri

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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Nostalgia in sight and sound: The Simon & Garfunkel Story opens the Mayfield season, a review

Posted on September 7, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Kaden Brett Forsberg and Josh Bellan in The Simon & Garfunkel Story, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What is conjured for us at the (newly renovated) Mayfield showroom, in The Simon & Garfunkel Story, is the signature harmonious blend of the last century’s most celebrated duo. There is something witty about starting a show, and a season, as the lights go down in the theatre, with “hello darkness, my old friend….” But I digress.

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This is a show that taps into memory (“the vision that was planted in our brain still remains”) as two expert singers, Josh Bellan and Kaden Brett Forsberg, take on Paul Simon’s indelible songbook. In the Mayfield production directed by the show creator Dean Elliott (with associate director Kate Ryan), this they do in collaboration with a hot band (led by musical director Lisa MacDougall), and an elaborate projection-scape mashup of black-and-white period footage and abstract interpolations of light and colour. It’s nostalgia, in sight and sound. And there’s even currency: the intrepid Simon has continued to tour this summer.

There they are, onstage in concert: the intense Bellan, guitar in hand as songwriter Simon; the lanky Brett Forsberg with the mop of hair, motionless, hands in his pockets, as Garfunkel. They have the look. And what the pair delivers, in an uncanny way, is a series of hits from a hit-studded archive, arranged in rough chronological order, from their earliest days as high school rock buds Tom and Jerry to their triumphant 1981 reunion concert in Central Park: Hey Schoolgirl to Cecilia, Bridge Over Troubled Water, The Boxer…. On opening night the sound mix, usually impeccable at the Mayfield, was marred by over-amplification in favour of the band, easily adjusted one imagines.

Great songs aplenty from a stellar archive. A “story”? Not so much. Narration exists only in brief, flat annotations by the singers, who step out of the music and their “roles”  occasionally to address us about Simon and Garfunkel, in the third person. “Paul had a decision to make.” Or “they were making a real name for themselves in the folk-rock scene all over the world.”

The famous break-up which preceded the famous reunion gets the helpful notation that “at this time Paul and Art’s relationship was at a breaking point.” It was “a rollercoaster relationship,” and “they felt they were moving in different directions.” Did the fact that one guy wrote the songs and lyrics, and the other guy didn’t, have anything to do with the celebrated estrangement? Discuss amongst yourselves. And, hey, think of it as relief for survivors of exhaustive musical revues where a narrator introduces every song, and footnotes every trip to the recording studio, every rehearsal.       

Anyhow, instead of “story,” in which the show clearly isn’t much interested (beyond identifying the albums from which songs are culled), there are projections (by Z Frame). They’re a fascinating, ever-changing collage of images that seem to be about cultural context, capturing the moment in America. The news footage sequence at the outset, for example, alights on seminal Civil Rights Movement identifiers. The haunting Scarborough Fair is accompanied by Vietnam protest footage. There are period ads; there’s a collage of images from The Graduate….

And occasionally, there are insertions, projected in type, of titles of films in which Garfunkel appeared in his actor period, or Simon singles. We learn, in one projected sentence, that Garfunkel became a math teacher, and in another that he walked around the world writing poetry (there might be Fringe comedy in that).

The two stars, both excellent, are new to the much-travelled hit homage devised by Elliott, the designated Paul Simon the last time we saw the show at the Mayfield nine years ago. As last time for me, the most striking juxtaposition of visuals and music happens in the great song America. It unrolls in a series of vintage postcards from out-of-the-way places evoked by the song’s quest through the hinterland: “Greetings from Barstow,” or Denver, or Santa Cruz.

What has changed in the last decade is the battering ram the word Freedom has become, and even the word America doesn’t have the same meaning. In so many ways we are all “looking for America,” and it makes that song poignant and nostalgic as never before, a kind of requiem for what has been lost.

So, a season-opening evening in the company of an archive of songs with memorably poetic lyrics, delivered in concert by two harmonizing singers with a first-rate band, projections (and the bonus possibility of a cocktail called Bridge Over Bourbon Waters). This highly enjoyable evening is all in the music. And that’s a lot.

REVIEW

The Simon & Garfunkel Story

Theatre: Mayfield

Created, produced, directed by: Dean Elliott

Starring: Josh Bellan, Kaden Brett Forsberg, Oscar Derkx, Matthew Atkins, Lisa MacDougall, Derek Stremel, Harley Symington

Running: through Nov. 2

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca 

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