The year in Edmonton theatre: the Sterling Award nominations led by The Royale

Posted on June 5, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A vintage boxing story with a stinging right hook proved the top choices of jurors, as the the 35th annual Sterling Award nominations were announced Monday at Fringe Theatre headquarters.

The Royale, Marco Ramirez’s highly theatrical drama set in the 1905 boxing circuit, happens at the battering conjunction of ambition, celebrity and racial hatred. The Citadel production gathered nominations in nine of the 26 Sterling categories, including outstanding production and director, André Sills. As well there were juror nominations for the star performance of Austin Eckert, the supporting performances of Jameela McNeil and Mohamed Ahmed, Shakeil Rollock’s choreography, Dave Clarke’s sound design, Rachel Forbes’ costumes and Steve Lucas’s lighting.

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

A new Canadian musical inspired by a YouTube sensation and a homegrown musical comedy satire, the one from Edmonton’s largest theatre and the other from one of its smaller companies, each received eight nominations from the Sterling jury. Prison Dancer, inspired by a 2007 video of 1,500 inmates at a maximum security Filipino prison dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, premiered in an all-Filipino production at the Citadel. Its nominations include outstanding musical and ensemble (the latter a new category this year). In addition to a leading role nod to Julio Fuentes, also nominated in the choreography and fight direction category, there are Sterling nominations for Diana Del Rosario’s supporting performance, for Joyce Padua’s costumes, Romeo Candido’s score, and Kierscey Rand’s musical direction.

Abby Vandenberghe and Donovan Workun in Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Darla Woodley, Red Socks Photography

With Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, Grindstone Theatre joins the ranks of the Sterling-nominated for the first time, a contender in both the outstanding musical production and new play categories. As well it scooped up nods for Byron Martin and Simon Abbott’s original score, the latter’s musical direction, Donovan Workun’s lead performance as the infamous former Alberta premier, and supporting performances by Malachi Wilkins as both Trudeaus (father and son), Abby Vandenberghe as Kenney’s compliant chief medical officer Deena Hinshaw, and the ensemble.

Named after a theatre visionary in these parts, Elizabeth Sterling Haynes (that’s Mrs. Haynes to you), the awards celebrate excellence on Edmonton stages during the past season. And the Sterling nominations return to the gender-neutral landscape established in 2019, as per theatre awards elsewhere (with the notable exception of the Tonys).

The other top Sterling nomination draws are Northern Light Theatre’s A Hundred Words For Snow and the Plain Janes’ production of Sweeney Todd, with seven each.

Dayna Lea Hoffmann, A Hundred Words For Snow, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

A Hundred Words For Snow drew a Sterling nomination as an ‘outstanding production of a play’ contender. And it  garnered a leading role nomination for director Trevor Schmidt and solo star Dayna Lee Hoffmann, as well as nods for Alison Yanota’s evocative floating iceberg set and her lighting, Matt Schuurman’s multi-media design, and Daniela Fernandez’s ice-cracking soundscape.

The Janes’ ingenious chamber (eight-actor/ one pianist) account of  Sweeney Todd, Sondheim’s macabre and innovative masterwork of 1979, drew seven Sterling nominations. Kate Ryan’s production joins the quintet of nominees for outstanding musical production that  hail from theatres large, mid-sized, and small: the Citadel’s Prison Dancer and Jersey Boys, Theatre Network’s collaboration with the indie Wildside Productions on Joni Mitchell’s Songs of a Prairie Girl, and Grindstone’s Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer.

Sheldon Elter as Sweeney Todd, Plain Jane Theatre Company, Photo by Mat Simpson

Sweeney Todd’s seven nominations include nods for director Ryan and musical director Shannon Hiebert, as well as both  leads — Sheldon Elter as the vengeful barber and Kristi Hansen as Mrs. Lovett — with a supporting role nod to Vance Avery as Judge Turpin. Additionally, the production garnered a nomination in the Sterlings’ new ensemble category.

Five of Shadow Theatre’s seven nominations were for the company’s production of the edgy Karen Hines satire All The Little Animals I Have Eaten: for outstanding production, Alexandra Dawkins’ direction, Dayna Lee Hoffmann’s “supporting” performance (curiously, in the lead role), Ainsley’s Hillyard’s choreography, and the ensemble work of the cast.

Two notable productions presented by Common Ground Art Society — which hosts and facilitates RISER Edmonton, a national initiative to support indie theatre in partnership with Toronto’s Why Not Theatre — gathered four Sterling nominations. Both Even Gilchrist’s Re:Construct and Carly Neis’s In My Own Little Corner are nominated in the outstanding new play category (along with Darrin Hagen’s 10 Funerals and Lianna Makuch’s Alina). And both RISER shows have nominations in the independent production category too.

Geoffrey Simon Brown and Émanuel Dubbeldam in Re:Construct, RISER 2022. Photo by Brianne Jang

In the end, the Citadel comes away with 32 Sterling nominations, overwhelmingly the most of any theatre company. Three Citadel productions — The Royale, Network, and Pride and Prejudice — are up for outstanding production, along with Northern Light’s A Hundred Words for Snow and Shadow’s All The Little Animals I Have Eaten. And Edmonton’s largest theatre has a two-production presence (Prison Dancer and Jersey Boys) as well in the outstanding musical category.

Dayna Lea Hoffman, centre, Elena Porter, Noori Gill, Coralie Cairns, Sophie May Healey in All The Little Animals I Have Eaten, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson.

Unusually, all five costume design nominations are for Citadel productions: Prison Dancer, Jersey Boys, Pride and Prejudice, The Royale, and Trouble in Mind. And of the supporting performance (in a play) nominees, four were in two Citadel productions: Jameela McNeil and Mohamed Ahmed in The Royale, Ben Elliott and Nadien Chu in Pride and Prejudice.

After that, the nomination dispersal lands on Edmonton’s array of smaller theatres: Northern Light Theatre with 10; Grindstone Theatre with eight; Leave It To Jane and Shadow Theatres with seven each. The indie production category, particularly competitive, introduces a new company, AuTash Productions, whose calling card production, Anahita’s Republic, an exploration of the struggle for women’s rights in Iran, garnered as well nominations for Roya Yazdanmehr’s leading performance and Farhad Khosravi’s score.

Nathan Cuckow and Doug Mertz in 10 Funerals, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Darrin Hagen is in an exclusive Sterling subset reserved for the extremely versatile. His 10 Funerals has an outstanding new play nomination. In a year when score and sound design have for the first time been deemed separate categories, he’s nominated for his Unsung: Tales From The Front Line score at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. And he’s competing against himself in sound design for that company’s Subscribe or Like and (with Morag Northey) for the Theatre Network premiere of Eugene Strickland’s The Innocence of Trees.

The Theatre for Young Audience categories are dominated by Jana O’Connor’s CTL-ALT-DEL at Concrete Theatre and Alberta Musical Theatre’s Jack and the Beanstalk. 

The Sterlings get divvied up at a June 16 gala, written by April Banigan and Sue Goberdhan and directed by Kate Ryan. Goberdhan, Azimuth Theatre’s co-artistic producer, and Rapid Fire Theatre artistic director Matt Schuurman co-host the event at Fringe Theatre, a new Sterling venue after many years at the Mayfield Dinner Theatre. And, hey, there are new Sterling statuettes, designed by Tessa Stamp.

On gala night, Coralie Cairns will be honoured with the Margaret Mooney Award in administration. Mel Geary will receive the Ross Hill award in production. And the Outstanding Contribution to Edmonton Theatre Sterling, goes, posthumously, to the late great Judy Unwin, long associated with  Walterdale, the Varscona Theatre and the Sterling Awards themselves, who was the very embodiment of public-spirited stand-up support for theatre.

Tickets: tiered pricing in effect with no-cost and pay-what-you-will options are available now at fringetheatre.ca, 780-409-1910, or in person at the Fringe box office. 

The 2022/23 Sterling Award nominations

Outstanding Production of a Play: The Royale (Citadel Theatre); Network (Citadel Theatre and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); All the Little Animals I Have Eaten (Shadow Theatre); A Hundred Words for Snow (Northern Light Theatre); Pride and Prejudice (Citadel Theatre)

Timothy Ryan Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical: Prison Dancer (Citadel Theatre and Prison Dancer Inc.); Sweeney Todd (Plain Jane Theatre Company); Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer (Grindstone Theatre); Jersey Boys (Citadel Theatre); Joni Mitchell’s Songs of a Prairie Girl (Theatre Network/Wildside Productions)

Outstanding Independent Production of a Play: Smoke (Tiny Bear Jaws);
Re:Construct (Common Ground Arts Society); Anahita’s Republic (AuTash Productions); In My Own Little Corner (Common Ground Arts Society); Boy Trouble (Amoris Projects)

Outstanding New Play (Award to Playwright): Carly Neis, In My Own Little Corner (Common Ground Arts Society); Byron Martin and Simon Abbott, Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer (Grindstone Theatre); Even Gilchrist, Re:Construct (Common Ground Arts Society); Darrin Hagen, 10 Funerals (Shadow Theatre); Lianna Makuch, Alina (Pyretic Productions)

Outstanding Performance in a Leading Role – Play: Davina Stewart, Squeamish (Northern Light Theatre); Austin Eckert, The Royale (Citadel Theatre); Dayna Lea Hoffmann, A Hundred Words for Snow (Northern Light Theatre); Roya Yazdanmehr, Anahita’s Republic (AuTash Productions); Kristin Johnston, Enough (Northern Light Theatre); Maralyn Ryan, The Innocence of Trees (Theatre Network)

Outstanding Performance in a Leading Role – Musical: Julio Fuentes, Prison Dancer (Citadel Theatre and Prison Dancer Inc.); Sheldon Elter, Sweeney Todd (Plain Jane Theatre Company); Donovan Workun, Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer (Grindstone Theatre); Farren Timoteo, Jersey Boys (Citadel Theatre); Kristi Hansen, Sweeney Todd (Plain Jane Theatre Company)

Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role – Play: Jameela McNeil, The Royale (Citadel Theatre); Ben Elliott, Pride and Prejudice (Citadel Theatre); Nadien Chu, Pride and Prejudice (Citadel Theatre); Mohamed Ahmed, The Royale (Citadel Theatre); Andrea House, The Wrong People Have Money (Shadow Theatre); Dayna Lea Hoffmann, All the Little Animals I Have Eaten (Shadow Theatre)

Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role – Musical: Etta Fung, Orphée+ (Edmonton Opera); Diana Del Rosario, Prison Dancer (Citadel Theatre and Prison Dancer Inc.); Malachi Wilkins, Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer (Grindstone Theatre); Abby Vandenberghe, Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer (Grindstone Theatre); Vance Avery, Sweeney Todd (Plain Jane Theatre Company)

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Play or Musical: Prison Dancer (Citadel Theatre and Prison Dancer Inc.); Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer (Grindstone Theatre); All the Little Animals I Have Eaten (Shadow Theatre); Pride and Prejudice (Citadel Theatre); Sweeney Todd (Plain Jane Theatre Company)

Outstanding Director: André Sills, The Royale (Citadel Theatre); Trevor Schmidt, A Hundred Words for Snow (Northern Light Theatre); Alexandra Dawkins, All the Little Animals I Have Eaten (Shadow Theatre); Kate Ryan, Sweeney Todd (Plain Jane Theatre Company); Mieko Ouchi, Pride and Prejudice (Citadel Theatre)

Outstanding Set Design: Stephanie Bahniuk, Alina (Pyretic Productions); Lorenzo Savoini, Network (Citadel Theatre and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); Beyata Hackborn, Freaky Green Eyes (Screaming Mantis in Association with Punctuate! Theatre and Fringe Theatre); Scott Reid, Clue (Citadel Theatre); Alison Yanota, A Hundred Words for Snow (Northern Light Theatre)

Outstanding Costume Design: Joyce Padua, Prison Dancer (Citadel Theatre and Prison Dancer Inc.); Leona Brausen, Jersey Boys (Citadel Theatre); Deanna Finnman, Pride and Prejudice (Citadel Theatre); Rachel Forbes, The Royale (Citadel Theatre); Sarah Uwadiae, Trouble in Mind (Citadel Theatre and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre)

Outstanding Lighting Design: Steve Lucas, The Royale (Citadel Theatre);
Narda McCarroll, Listen, Listen (Teatro Live!); Kat Evans, Freaky Green Eyes (Screaming Mantis in Association with Punctuate! Theatre and Fringe Theatre); Roy Jackson, Enough (Northern Light Theatre); Alison Yanota, A Hundred Words for Snow (Northern Light Theatre)

Outstanding Multi-Media Design: Hugh Conacher, Network (Citadel Theatre and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre); S Katy Tucker, Orphée+ (Edmonton Opera); Matt Schuurman, A Hundred Words for Snow (Northern Light Theatre); T. Erin Gruber with Rebecca Cypher, The Space Between Stars (produced by Small Matters Productions and presented by SkirtsAfire); Ian Jackson, Subscribe or Like (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre)

Outstanding Score of a Play or Musical: Romeo Candido, Prison Dancer (Citadel Theatre and Prison Dancer Inc.); Hawksley Workman, Almost a Full Moon (Citadel Theatre); Simon Abbott and Byron Martin, Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer (Grindstone Theatre); Farhad Khosravi, Anahita’s Republic (AuTash Productions); Darrin Hagen, Unsung: Tales From the Front Line (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre)

Outstanding Sound Design: Aaron Macri, Alina (Pyretic Productions); Dave Clarke, The Royale (Citadel Theatre); Daniela Fernandez, A Hundred Words for Snow (Northern Light Theatre); Darrin Hagen, Subscribe or Like (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre); Darrin Hagen and Morag Northey, The Innocence of Trees (Theatre Network)

Outstanding Musical Director: Shannon Hiebert, Sweeney Todd (Plain Jane Theatre); Chloe Meyers, Stabat Mater (Edmonton Opera); Simon Abbott, Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer (Grindstone Theatre); Steven Greenfield, Jersey Boys (Citadel Theatre); Kierscey Rand, Prison Dancer (Citadel Theatre and Prison Dancer Inc.)

Outstanding Choreography or Fight Direction: Shakeil Rollock, The Royale (Citadel Theatre); Ainsley Hillyard, All the Little Animals I Have Eaten (Shadow Theatre); Amber Borotsik, Alina (Pyretic Productions); Morgan Yamada, Death Trap (Teatro Live!); Julio Fuentes, Prison Dancer (Citadel Theatre and Prison Dancer Inc.)

Outstanding Individual Achievement in Production: Even Gilchrist (production designer and builder); Kat Evans (production manager); Andrea Handal Rivera (stage manager); Tristan Fair (house technician); Nancy Yuen (stage manager)

Outstanding Production for Young Audiences: CTRL-ALT-DEL (Concrete Theatre); Jack and the Beanstalk (Alberta Musical Theatre Company)

Outstanding Artistic Achievement for Young Audiences: Shrina Patel, choreographer, Jack and the Beanstalk (Alberta Musical Theatre Company); David Anderson, performer, Jack and the Beanstalk (Alberta Musical Theatre Company); Corben Kushneryk, director, CTRL-ALT-DEL (Concrete Theatre); c.m. zuby, set and props design, CTRL-ALT-DEL (Concrete Theatre)

Outstanding Fringe Production: Ride the Cyclone (Uniform Theatre and Scona Alumni Theatre Co); Jesus Teaches Us Things (Dammitammy Productions); Crack in the Mirror (Guys in Disguise); Fags in Space (Low Hanging Fruits); Conjoined (Straight Edge Theatre)

Outstanding Fringe New Work (Award to Playwright): Ellie Heath, Fake n’ Bake (Oh Hello! Productions); Rebecca Merkley, Jesus Teaches Us Things (Dammitammy Productions); Jake Tkaczyk, White Guy on Stage Talking (Innocent Operations); Liam Salmon, Fags in Space (Low Hanging Fruits);
Seth Gilfillan and Stephen Allred, Conjoined (Straight Edge Theatre)

Outstanding Fringe Performance by an Individual: Rebecca Merkley, Jesus Teaches Us Things (Dammitammy Productions); Zachary Parsons-Lozinski/Lilith Fair, Pansy Cabaret (Guys in Disguise); Ellie Heath, Fake n’ Bake (Oh Hello! Productions); Andrea House, Salsa Lesson (Stardust Players); Josh Travnik, Conjoined (Straight Edge Theatre)

Outstanding Fringe Performance by an Ensemble: Ride the Cyclone (Uniform Theatre and Scona Alumni Theatre Co); Walter (Pansy Haze Collective); The Erlking (Scona Alumni Theatre Co); Destination Vegas (Whizgiggling Productions); Crack in the Mirror (Guys in Disguise); Fags in Space (Low Hanging Fruits)

Outstanding Fringe Director: Linette J. Smith, Ride the Cyclone (Uniform Theatre and Scona Alumni Theatre Co); Brennan Doucet, Walter (Pansy Craze Productions); Trevor Schmidt, Crack in the Mirror (Guys in Disguise); Kristi Hansen, Fake n’ Bake (Oh Hello! Productions); Carmen Osahor and Jessy Ardern, The Big Sad (The Fox Den Collective)

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

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

Outstanding Contribution to Theatre in Edmonton: Judy Unwin

 

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How do you change people’s minds? In She/They Nextfest playwright Madi May wants to know

Posted on June 5, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

She/They at Nextfest. Program image supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The thorny question of how you change people’s minds is at the heart of a new comedy about serious things, premiering on the Nextfest 2023 mainstage.

In She/They, a famed feminist author, cancelled and doxed, and her granddaughter, a gender studies major, find themselves together — and miles apart. “I was really trying to figure out why people think the way they do,” says playwright Madi May, “and how transphobic feminist minds might be changed.”

The inspiration, she says, was the reverb from suddenly discovering that “iconic feminist authors, writers I looked up to growing up, were  revealing themselves to be transphobic…. They have a megaphone online. And they were disagreeing fundamentally with the existence of people I care about.” J.K. Rowling, Germaine Greer, Margaret Atwood … “it was quite shocking, especially Margaret Atwood,” says May. “I felt if only I could pick up the phone and speak with her for an hour, maybe we’d get somewhere….”

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Yes “transphobic is a harsh label,” she says. “But it’s important for conversations to be exact. And I do think it’s possible for people’s minds to change.”

“Originally conceived as a TV show,” She/They is a comedy, which defies audience expectations in a way May likes. “When I’m writing a play I don’t often think it’s going to be a comedy, but it often ends up that way.” And so it went with the play Nextfest and soon Fringe audiences will see. “Moments that are very funny…. With plays in general, I’m trying to find something that’s personal and needs to be explored.”

playwright Madi May. Photo supplied.

“I wanted it to be entertaining,” says May of her comic muse. She immersed herself in feminist literature, heavy-going at the best of times (let’s face it, The Female Eunuch in audio book form isn’t on many road trip playlists). “Where are the laughs?” she says, a smile in her voice. “How do I keep the good times rollin’?”

And when you’re setting out to change people’s minds, there are serious pluses to this comedy manifesto. “Feminism and gender, which I’m very interested in exploring, are also very sensitive things to talk about. People, I think myself included, get a little nervous, a little clamped up, talking about these things…. (Comedy) allows things to breathe.”

The subject at hand is so interesting, “why not make it entertaining? So it’s two good things happening at once.” Just so you know, She/They doesn’t end badly for the characters. “I took the feminist mantra of the personal being political to heart. People’s minds do change when things become personal. I think that’s a fact of life, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”   

Nextfest artistic director Ellen Chorley, who’s followed the development of May’s career, was drawn to the originality of her playwriting from the start. “Even very early on, Madi had a distinct voice,” Chorley says. “Definitely someone who really understands comedy and how it works,” by no means a universal insight in theatre artists. She/They “tackles tough topics around feminism, but in a loving and interesting way!”

May has been a writer for a lot of her 21 years.  “I tried writing a novel in Grade 3, and quickly realized it was mostly dialogue”: an early tip-off that theatre would be her destination of choice.  “At 15 I started writing plays, and I’ve been doing that ever since.” And in high school theatre was a  total immersion experience: she explored technical theatre, stage managing shows, doing lighting and sound design. She did the sound design for She/They herself.

May is a veritable poster artist for Nextfest. “It was integral to me cementing a career in theatre,” May says. It was at the festival that “I realized it was something I could do, something I really loved doing…. Getting the whole thing together: I truly felt on top of the world afterward.” She/They is her seventh show at Nextfest. Her first? At 16 she wrote and directed Pas De Deux, “quite the personal piece about two girls in a dance theatre” who gradually realize they’re not attracted to dance, they’re attracted to each other. “Pretty sweet,” she says, recalling with a laugh being a bit taken aback when it was called “angsty.”

Her most recent? Last Nextfest’s Fantomina, a solo show that’s a contemporary re-telling of an 18th century Eliza Haywood proto-feminist novella about a woman who disguises herself as different women to continue sleeping with the same man.

And now, much to her delight, with She/They May has a play that Nextfest will produce at the upcoming Fringe. “I’m thrilled,” she says, “the first time a play I’ve written has gone to the Fringe.” And She/They is a rare chance to see May herself onstage. “I had so much fun writing it. When I write I speak every line… I wanted to own the show,” she says of Daisy Brazil’s production, in which she co-stars with Tessa Yakimchuk. “I really believe in it.”

She/They runs Tuesday at 7 p.m.  and Wednesday at 5 p.m. See nextfest.ca for tickets and further details.

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What is a guilty pleasure anyhow? Is it bad to like popular things? Meet the creators of (Taylor’s Version) at Nextfest

Posted on June 3, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

(Taylor’s Version), Baker Miller Pink. Photo by Samantha Ketsa.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Anyone who’s ever looked a bit furtive while ordering a pumpkin spice latte knows this: you don’t get credit for liking what’s popular or ‘girly’. Au contraire.

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Cayley Wreggit and Samantha Ketsa, the engaging Calgary-based creators and joint directors of (Taylor’s Version), premiering on the Nextfest mainstage, wondered about that. The seed from which the play grew was fan-don, and says Wreggit, the playwright of the pair.

“Both of us are really big fans of Taylor Swift…. On camping trips we bonded,” she says of a partnership forged in Swiftian listening parties. “We both found that was a real comfort during that time when everything felt uncertain to be able to fan-girl about an incredible female artist.”

As Wreggit explains, Ketsa, a dancer/choreographer, “had the idea of a piece that celebrated all things feminine…. There’s a reason things are so popular. And it’s not a bad thing to like them.” There it is, a radical manifesto of sorts.

In a gender studies course, “I’d gone down a bit of a rabbit hole,” says Ketsa. “The aesthetics of subordination, questioning the idea that things labelled ‘for girls’, things associated with the feminine, are inherently ‘lesser than’…. So, questioning that and thinking about our own mutual Swift-y bond, and the value of that,” discounted as it is in the world.

One question led to others. “What is a guilty pleasure? And why does that put shame into what has a greater purpose of catharsis, and healing, and bonding?”

As for ‘why Taylor Swift?’, the answer has something to do with that artist’s well-known advocacy for artists owning their own work and having control over their contracts, says Wreggit. The title (Taylor’s Version) is an homage to Swift’s drive to re-record her masters, as a feisty response to “her whole body of work having been sold out from under her.” Taylor designated her re-recorded songs with that parenthetical annotation, “to note which version of a song you should be listening to, which version is owned by the artist.”

Wreggit and Ketsa met at the University of Calgary, across the ever-shrinking theatre/dance frontier. The former graduated as a playwright/director, “never an actor!” she laughs. “Jokingly I say I didn’t like to be emotionally vulnerable in front of people. More seriously, it’s that I like being a creator, having more creative agency to tell stories. Writing has always been a passion.” Wreggit’s new musical Home For The Holidays (with composer Alixandra Cowman) ran at Calgary’s Lunchbox Theatre this past December. And the structural possibilities in musical theatre have intrigued both Wreggit and Ketsa.

Post-graduation Wreggit has leaned into film and TV, as a co-founder of the indie all-female film company Prairie Kitten Productions, started by U of C arts grads. “We’ve branched out separately now. But it was a great incubator for us as artists to figure out where we wanted to go….”

Playwright Cayley Wreggit and dancer/choreographer Samantha Ketsa, creators of (Taylor’s Version), Baker Miller Pink at Nextfest. Photo by Kate Boyce.

Ketsa, who grew up in Edmonton and went to Victoria, the performing arts high school, emerged from the U of C’s dance program. “By trade I’m a dancer and choreographer, desperate to do theatre and collaborate with other art forms!” Nextfest was a natural, and she has a history with the festival’s dance series, back to 2018 and Just Girly Things.

This year as part of Merge, one of Nextfest dance programs, Ketsa has choreographed (with Lizzie Rajchel) Perennial, “a stage adaptation of a short film I made a year ago.” And in Marvel, her choreography moves Visions of Lillian, with Wreggit in the three-dancer cast.

In (Taylor’s Version), Josie and Callie, both avid Swifties “go down the rabbit hole of their fan experience,” as Ketsa puts it. Abigail, the third of their trio, “gets dragged along with them, reluctantly.” And the play happens “as they’re getting ready for a Taylor Swift dance party in a bar, discussing parallels with Bob Dylan and conspiracy theories about Taylor Swift re-records, the lore of her PR and marketing….”

(Taylor’s Version), Baker Miller Pink at Nextfest. Photo by Samantha Ketsa.

“And through this there’s an undercurrent of their own personal experience and love lives, influenced by the music,” says Wreggit. “That’s what’s so magical about Taylor Swift’s music.” In that enormous canon, “you can, you will, find a song that will apply to you and your life, and will hit you very hard…. And suddenly you’re crying.”

Abigail is the skeptic, as Ketsa describes. She starts from the position that pop music is “superficial, bubblegum, no substance. What she comes to find is that Taylor Swift writes from a place of specificity … to a point that makes the themes (of her songs) universal.”

Collaborating with Ketsa, says Wreggit, “has been wonderful … to have a sounding board, to tell the stories I want to tell and exploring ways of doing that.” And in (Taylor’s Version), that exploration includes a wealth of movement possibilities. For one thing, there’s the dance party setting. For another, one of the characters “tends to go off into a sort of dream space, an imaginary space where she expresses herself and what she’s dealing with through her body and Taylor Swift’s music.”

Ketsa was inspired, she says, by the choreography of Swift’s current tour. “And she’s not a very smooth, technically trained, or even sexy, dancer…. There’s something tongue-in-cheek we played with. It pokes fun at itself.” Another choreographic inspiration was the work of Alyssa Martin of Toronto’s feminist indie dance company Rock Bottom Movement, “often very abstract, leaning into the satirical.”

Wreggit and Ketsa tried the show out in Calgary, “one night only, a year ago, on a much smaller scale.” Nextfest is an opportunity for a more fulsome premiere. “People are so excited; they want to be in something that’s really fun, and not viewed as high art. And isn’t that high art in itself?” says Wreggit.

“There are so few opportunities for indie artists to gather and cross-pollinate,” as Ketsa says. The life of an indie artist “can be so isolating.” The Nextfest experience works against that isolation. It’s an invitation “for the like-minded to gather and cheer each other on.”

(Taylor’s Version) runs at Nextfest June 6 and 8 in the Nancy Power Theatre at Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre, 10708 124 St. Tickets and schedule details: nextfest.ca

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Shadow Theatre announces an all-Canadian 30th anniversary season

Posted on June 1, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Larissah Lashey, Jayce McKenzie, Abigail McDougall, Hayley Moorhouse in Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Shadow Theatre will launch its upcoming four-production all-Canadian 30th anniversary season with its first-ever mainstage musical. And it’s homegrown.

Crescendo!, set in a women’s community choir, is by Sandy Paddick, with original music and musical arrangements by Jennifer McMillan. Based on Paddick’s personal experience singing in choirs, it explores the choir dynamic, as Shadow artistic director John Hudson explains. “Who joins, and why? What do they get out of it? The choirmaster’s journey….” And it touches on our human need for music, the urge to sing.

Crescendo!, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

The piece got its first try-out in 2019 the Edmonton way, at the Fringe. Kate Ryan of Plain Jane Theatre is back to direct the premiere (Oct. 18 to Nov. 5 at the Varscona Theatre). Her cast includes Michelle Diaz, Jenny McKillop, Kirsten Piehl, and Colleen Tillotson.

The other premiere in the anniversary season is Robot Girls, a new play by Northern Light Theatre artistic director Trevor Schmidt. As both a playwright and a theatre director/producer himself, Schmidt has leaned into writing women characters. Robot Girls dives into a girl community, a quartet of junior high teenagers at Nellie McClung Charter School for Girls. They’re in a science club building a robot for an international competition, negotiating personal conflicts and the stresses of coming-of-age. “Heartfelt,” says Hudson, who directs the Shadow production that runs March 15 to 31, 2024. “Honest and beautifully crafted.” His cast includes Larissa Lashley, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie, and  Hayley Moorhouse.

Glenn Nelson, Reed McColm in The Drawer
Boys, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

The season includes a play that is, as Hudson puts it, “in the pantheon of great Canadian plays.” Michael Healey’s 1999 The Drawer Boy is a back story of sort. It chronicles the adventures of a young actor who’s part of a Toronto company on a foray into the Ontario heartland to research, on location, farm life for the play that would become the landmark The Farm Show.

A true Canadian classic, The Drawer Boy hasn’t been seen in these parts since a touring production arrived at the Citadel in the early 2000’s. “I’ve been hankering to do it for years,” says Hudson, who directs the Shadow revival (Jan. 18 to Feb. 4, 2023) starring Glenn Nelson, Reed McColm, and Paul-Ford Manguelle (recently seen in Grindstone’s The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee).

Michelle Todd in Tiny Beautiful Things, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

Tiny Beautiful Things, the season finale (April 25 to May 12, 2024), is by the Canadian actor/playwright Nia Vardalos, whose big breakthrough in theatre and film internationally was My Big Fat Greek Wedding. At the centre of Tiny Beautiful Things, based on the Cheryl Strayed novel, is an anonymous online advice columnist Sugar, the recipient of every sort of human question, problem, crisis. Michelle Todd stars as Sugar in Hudson’s production; her castmates are Emily Howard, Michael Peng, and Yassire El Fassi El Fihri.

In other news from Shadow, Amanda Goldberg, the company’s artistic director fellow this past season, is having a big finish, with Thursday’s announcement that she will be the new artistic producer at the SkirtsAfire Festival. But first, she will direct Twelfth Night for the Freewill Shakespeare Festival this summer.

Tickets, subscriptions, schedule details: shadowtheatre.org.

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So, what’s new? Come to Nextfest 2023, and find out

Posted on May 31, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Graphic by Psi Lo.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What’s new? What’s next? What are our up-and-coming artists thinking about anyhow?

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You’re in a position to find out for yourself since the 28th annual edition of Nextfest, the multi-disciplinary 11-day (and night) festival dreamed up at Theatre Network in 1996 is at hand.

Opening Thursday at the Roxy, Nextfest is designed to showcase and celebrate the creative ideas of the generation of emerging artists. And as festival director Ellen Chorley, a multi-faceted artist herself, has said, the answer to what’s new at Nextfest? is, by definition, “everything, every year.” The vibe is young, true. But “emerging” at Nextfest isn’t a matter of age, says Chorley. “It’s being in the first 10 years of your career…. You could be in your 80s writing your first play.”

Featured at Nextfest 2023 is the work (and the work-in-progress) of more than 500 artists as they play across the spectrum of theatre, dance, music, poetry, film, design, comedy, clowning, visual art, drag, permutations of multi-media — in 50-plus events. They meet and collaborate with each other. And they can take creative risks as Chorley explains, because “we give them a little chunk of money to work with, and we present their show.”

Nextfest takes care of the ticketing, the administration, the box office, the technical equipment and expertise, the marketing, the venue. “Their job is to make the art.” And speaking of arts administration, Nextfest has an Emerging Producers program designed to train IBPOC women, non-binary and trans people for this difficult and indispensable part of arts careers. After a six-week course, they’re paid to oversee a project at a festival in town, this year at Found Fest, the Fringe, or Nextfest.

To say that Nextfest “happens” at Theatre Network’s new Roxy doesn’t really tell the story of its full-immersion occupancy. Last year, the festivities returned to live and in-person there, their debut in the first in the beautiful new theatre — and they gloried in it. “We used it all, full to the brim, every inch of it” says Chorley. “It felt so special to be in a building that’s made to create art (in), that’s really thought out….”

There were performances in the mainstage house, the black box studio, the lobby, the bar, the rehearsal room, even on the rooftop. There was Nextfest art on the walls. And no nook or cranny was safe from Nextfest’s signature performance Nite Clubs. They’re back this year in four themed nights. “Going up in the elevator and hearing a solo,” says Chorley, who’s in perpetual brainstorming mode, which undoubtedly makes her an inspiring leader. “Going into the bathroom (admittedly deluxe) and hearing a serenade; the sound is great in there!”

Theatre happens on the mainstage, and in progress showings and “workshop readings” at Nextfest. Chorley says she got “submissions from all over the world” after the later November call. Additionally she’s a fomenter and talent scout: “I go out to talk to artists about their projects and what they’re interested in creating for the festival.”

“And this year we’re trying to move projects through multiple festivals,” she says. Nextfest experimented with the idea in 2022. Amanda Samuelson’s play Pressure happened as a staged reading at the festival, then got a full Nextfest production at the Fringe.

What Was Is All travels that cross-festival route this year. The folk-rock musical by Jacquelin Walters and Michael Watt, got a Nextfest debut last year, in the form of a 45-minute concert/song cycle, then called Host Town. Nextfest produced it as “a partial progress showing” at Theatre Network’s Another F*#@$G Festival in February.“They’ve spent the year writing the book,” says Chorley of the creators. And what is now a full-fledged piece of musical theatre, with a cast of four and a band, is moving forward as a Nextfest “Progress Show” June 11. Nextfest will produce it at the upcoming Fringe.

Similarly, Madi May’s She/They plays first on the Roxy mainstage Friday, Saturday and June 8, then at the Fringe, too in  Nextfest production. Says Chorley, “we’re trying our best to help with the progression of work.” Ah, and the progression of artists, too. “For me, that’s what’s so exciting about Nextfest,” says Chorley of following artists through different stages of their careers, “what they’re interested in talking about and investigating with their art…. You don’t just ‘emerge’ one year. Emerging takes time!” Chorley has followed May’s work since high school; last year her Fantomina was a Progress Reading.

The mainstage lineup is “a balance of folks we’ve invested in,” like May, and folks who are new to the festival,” like Bashir Mohamed whose play Black Alberta gets a mainstage Nextfest premiere Saturday, Sunday, and June 8.

This year Chorley has moved a couple of “showcases” to full three-performance presence  in the Nextfest theatre lineup. Thanks For Coming Out, by and starring Cindy Rivers and billed as a “standalogue” (not quite standup, not quite dramatic monologue), is one. A Fate Worse Than Death, created and performed by spoken word poet Nisha Patel, is another.

“It’s great for emerging artists to learn about consistency in performing more than once,” says Chorley. And it’s a chance to suss out different audience reactions.

Some “showcases” remain in the festival lineup: The iHuman Mixtape on June 8, and a free music showcase including five acts in Helen Nolan Park on 124th St. June 7.

There’s striking variety in the mainstage theatre lineup, including Alexandria Rose Fortier’s Just The Two Of Us, Kijo Gatama’s Hyena’s Trail, Cayley Wreggitt’s (Taylor’s Version), Rat Academy by the clown team of Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner. And there’s even a big-cast drag play The Mys-Queery of the Missing Wig: Deadliest Snatch. “So much fun, great choreography, fantastic costumes! And everyone in it has been doing drag for less than five years,” says Chorley.    

Ah yes, and to return to those four curated Nite Clubs…. Friday night’s Chew On This! is “here for the fear.” Saturday night’s is 2023: A Nextfest Space Popera. F! Is For Filth, the 2023 edition of Nextfest’s annual hot-ticket Smut Nite, is June 9. And Abjection (Pride Night) June 10 “focuses on queer narratives in the horror genre.”

You’ll find music, film, visual art, performance art installations (Good Grief is inspired by quarantine periods in the pandemic). And it goes without saying there are conversations to be had and connections to be made, before and after every performance. (And there’s Duchess right next door, just saying). As the Nextfest mantra goes, “come for the art stay for the party.”

Meanwhile, there’s opening night Thursday. And it’s free. As Chorley explains, there are musicians and a DJ. There’s a magician (Russel Comrie, recently arrived from South Africa). Velocity Complex, a troupe of aerial artists all under 18, will be up in the air. A documentary was shot at Nextfest 2022. And it gets its world premiere screening Thursday. In it you’ll meet Nextfest people, and hear why they love this unique festival. Says Chorley, “I might shed a tear or two.”

Nextfest 2023 runs Thursday through June 11 at Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre (10708 124th St). Ticket and complete schedule: nextfest.ca

 

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Sunday in the park with Greeks: Euripides’ Helen from Trunk Theatre, a review

Posted on May 29, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Euripides’ Helen, Trunk Theatre. Photo by Jerry Aulenbach

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Sometimes you just have to marvel at the adventurous chutzpah of Edmonton indie theatre. You just don’t expect to find yourself in a park on a sunny Sunday afternoon sitting in a lawn chair watching a Greek play happen in front of an planetarium.

That it’s an anti-war comedy by Euripides, as adapted by the Irish playwright Frank McGuinness (Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me),  is another surprise from Trunk Theatre. The premise of Euripides’ Helen is pretty wild: “There is no Helen of Troy,” says Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. “Paris got a ghost.”

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The Trojan War started, as you may recall from school, when Paris abducted Helen, who was married to Menelaus, and spirited her off to Troy. And the Greeks felt obliged to get her back. It turns out, as per Euripides’ comedy, that Paris only got the phantom version of the world-famous knockout. The real Helen spent the war hanging out in Egypt (a bunch of barbarians and slaves, she feels) and having no fun whatsoever, getting depressed and waiting for her husband to come and rescue her. If he isn’t dead, of course.

“I’ve never set foot in Troy,” she declares feelingly. Which means that a war with a high cost in human life on both sides was fought for an illusion, a cautionary tale. And the virtuous Helen has been blamed, and vilified as a slut. “I am cursed…. I caused the Trojan War,” she says. “I gave birth both to tears and blood.”

The crisis that starts the play is that the pressure is on: the King of Egypt is hot to marry the chaste Helen and he won’t wait forever while she stalls. And lo and behold, when a shipwrecked beggar  arrives on Egyptian shores, seeking assistance, he turns out to be none other than Menelaus himself. The obstacle to a happy ending is how they will escape and get home.

Amy DeFelice directs an all-female cast, led by Linda Grass as Helen, in dazzling white. McGuinness’s adaptation infiltrates the incantatory cadences of Greek with playful modern colloquial turns of phrase. And Grass negotiates these gracefully. “The Greeks believe I did the dirty on him.” Kristin Johnston plays Menelaus with amusing macho swagger. “When a big man hits the skids … one hellhole after another hellhole,” he says of taking the long way home in his post-war career. He doesn’t get a warm reception from Egypt: “no dogs, no Greeks, fuck off foreigner.”

Rebecca Merkley is funny as the brisk but gullible Egyptian king, who struts through his world confidently, punctuating his certainties by knocking on his chest armour.

The arrival of Helen’s brothers Castor and Pollux is a surprise, orchestrated by designers Rory Turner and Even Gilchrist. And the whole production has an agile, improvised feel to it, with an ensemble that veers, with comic touches, between the ritualized and snappy asides in DeFelice’s 90-minute production .

The new and huge Coronation Leisure Centre  in construction next to the planetarium is,  director DeFelice has noted wryly, is a stand-in for the ruins of Troy. The gods, as the odd character in this play observes, screw up from time to time, but they do provide.

REVIEW

Euripides’ Helen

Theatre: Trunk Theatre

Written by: Euripides and adapted by Frank McGuinness

Directed by: Amy DeFelice

Starring: Linda Grass, Kristin Johnston, Julie Golosky, Sophie-May Healey, Rebecca Merkley, Prudence Olenik, Caley Suliak, Jacquelin Walters, Alison Wells

Where: Coronation Park, in front of the Queen Elizabeth Planetarium

Running: through June 4

Tickets: eventbrite.com

  

       

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A social media thriller, in a digital world that works on escalation: Subscribe or Like at Workshop West, a review

Posted on May 28, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Gabby Bernard in Subscribe or Like, Workshop West. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Gabby Bernard and Geoffrey Simon Brown in Subscribe or Like, Workshop West. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Sometimes I wonder what’s real,” says Rachel, one half of the millennial couple in Subscribe Or Like. That invasive ambiguity digs an ever-deeper channel right through a relationship in this very tense, fascinating new play by Liam Salmon, currently premiering at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre.

For one thing, Subscribe Or Like is a theatrical exploration of the slippery frontier where human connection is losing ground, and its footing — to a boundary-free world of digital ciphers. As you’ll see in a veritable visual barrage of a production — directed by Kate Ryan and compellingly acted — that world, and the money it offers, is in every way based on escalation.

It’s mesmerizing, and kind of appalling, to see live theatre actually put onstage its thoughts about its own audience — and the seductive allure of the invisible, infinitely expandable audience of the digital universe. In the internet (and the way we live on it, with it, inside it), have we created a playground where the brute side of our nature can roam freely?

It’s 2018 and Rachel and Miles live in a one-bedroom basement apartment they can barely afford. And in Stephanie Bahniuk’s striking design, it’s entirely blue, with one tiny window. It seems to have landed from  outer space — along with seven multi-angled screens. Are they the  theatrical fourth wall made to be broken? Do Miles and Rachel actually live inside the internet?

Ian Jackson’s projection-scape moves through landscapes, continuing wall to wall, flickering across the screens, stopping from time to time to alight on distorted facial close-ups. Roy Jackson’s lighting suffuses everything — including the little basement window that might otherwise hint of a ‘real world’ outside — with an eerie blue-ish computer screen glow. There is no oasis, inside or out-, from the internet in this thriller.

In its way, Subscribe Or Like is about desperation, the thwarted creative energy of the millennial generation. And the performances from Bernard and Brown are so authentic, and the characters so fully inhabited by the actors, they make you flinch. Bernard’s Rachel works long exhausting hours as a barista, pasting on the “Welcome, how can I help you?” smile of corporate retail for meagre money. Miles can’t find a living wage job he’s willing to do, given his marketing degree. “It’s hard for me, waiting … nothing but free time.” Their future in the world seems very hard to nail down.

Pressure, recorded so dramatically in Darrin Hagen’s score and the ominous rumble of his underscoring, builds. In the absence of viable prospects, they turn to YouTube, lured by the potential of making money on their own channel if they get enough subscribes or likes. At first the videos are prankish: queasy gotcha! fun. When the subscribers are still just trickling in, Miles ups the ante … with self-inflicted physical abuse. And since we get to see him rehearsing horrifying bright ideas for stunts, and then the videos themselves, we have the chance to get tense and stay that way, then cringe. At several points I had to look away, and I wasn’t the only one.

It’s Rachel who’s the target of awful online commentary and threats. And as she withdraws into silent exhaustion and depression, you find out whether a loving and playful couple can survive a life lived so much in the demanding online universe — not to mention vis-à-vis Miles’s relentless escalation of the money-making potential of sensational YouTube content. “We’ve worked so hard. I can’t go back…” he says. “We need to step up our game.” Rachel says “let’s never speak again.” Bernard and Brown have the kind of live hot chemistry that takes you with them all the way. You believe them.

The performances will have you leaning forward, and they fling you back in your seat too. Miles has the intense, restless drive of desperation about him in Brown’s super-charged performance. He catapults, more and more wild-eyed, through the space and his relationship, a caged creature who’s improvising his escape, always returning to look at his computer screen, moth-to-flame style.

Rachel is the more uneasy of the pair, as Bernard conveys so eloquently. “All you think is ‘I need an adult’, and then you realize that the adult is you.” We gradually understand, in the subtle weave of Salmon’s theatrical storytelling, that she’s unspooling back into memory, reviewing the videos, looking for insight, and sometimes stepping forward to ask us, as live representatives of the online world of invisible viewers, what she’s missed. “Is anyone there?” she wonders, looking right at us — which is pretty disturbing. “Everything adds up to something…. Suddenly there’s a trajectory.”

Ah, that trajectory…. Like Rachel we are filled with dread. I haven’t spent a more nerve-racking evening in the theatre so far this season. I left the show shaken Saturday night. And I’m still thinking about it.

REVIEW

Subscribe or Like

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Liam Salmon

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Gabby Bernard, Geoffrey Simon Brown

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd

Running: through June 11

Tickets: workshopwest.org

REVIEW

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‘Music without ego’: background music vs silence, a fierce battle in Listen Listen, a new Teatro comedy. A review

Posted on May 27, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

©Eric Kozakiewicz / Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There is a quixotic premise that underscores Listen Listen, the new Elyne Quan comedy premiering in the Teatro Live season in a Belinda Cornish production. And it will make you smile.

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In a mall in 1986, in a chain bookstore with 43 other outlets elsewhere, one clerk is trying to make a difference. Montague Gray (Farren Timoteo) curates background mix-tapes for the store from “my own extensive personal collection” as a backdrop mood-enhancer to the retail experience. Yes, Montague’s passion is Muzak.

That “easy listening” is the battleground of the new Teatro comedy is in itself cheeky in the company’s “reinvention” as billed. The Teatro canon is dotted liberally with Stewart Lemoine comedies where music , mostly from the orchestral and operatic repertoires (with occasional excursions into jazz), and specified in detail in the stage directions, is a life-changer — Schubert in Shocker’s Delight and Fever Land, Verdi in Pith!, Schoenberg in The Margin of the Sky … the list goes on.   

Farren Timoteo in Listen Listen, Teatro Live. Phoro by Eric Kozakiewicz

The hero of Listen Listen listens to music that is expressly designed to not listen to. He notices music to not notice. His music is memorably unmemorable and remarkably unremarkable. A man who is neither modest nor unassuming, he is fierce in defence of it.

He’s devoted to the bland with a researcher’s intensity and conviction. “‘Elevator music’ is derogatory,” sniffs Montague, bridling at the term. And he is of course right.

Montague’s obsession is vividly set forth in a bristling, physically acrobatic performance by Timoteo, an expert comic actor. He’s very funny as a character with his dander up, both fastidious and hyper-active. He bustles and dances through his world dusting books, picking up cues from the soundtrack he’s selected specially to be conducive to browsing. Montague’s fellow clerk Chuck (amusingly played byAlexander Ariate), a poli-sci grad student who calls himself an “anarchist realist,” indulges him, because (shrug) why not?.

Montague’s (not very deeply buried) inner warrior is unleashed when Jean (Nadien Chu, in zestful high-dudgeon comic form), a university English prof, goes book shopping. She demands briskly that the music be turned off; “I don’t want my mood improved by music!” Is Jean of the view that Muzak is the graveyard where the lame over-exposed parts of the pop repertoire go to die? Well, yes (and shopping in a mall if your jam is Jane Austen has ironies of its own). Does she consider Muzak, however assiduously curated, an assault on public spaces? “Torture” is the word she uses.

Montague’s obsession has come smack up against the brick wall of what turns out to be an obsession as adamantine as his own …an obsession with silence. And Montague and Jean have matching capacities for outrage.

The premise is droll, and promising. But Listen Listen loses steam in a confrontation that can only escalate, not develop, once the characters have revealed the dimensions of their respective obsessions. Both proselytize for opposing points of view that are nothing if not forcefully established. Both start mad, and get madder … about the music that’s designed to be soothing. And the actors, excellent and inventive as they are, can only repeat, more loudly (with actorly embellishments), the opposing positions of the characters, who arrive in the play fully formed. A two-hour play starts to feel a bit long.

I must add that there are funny scenes with the supporting characters. Chuck, without an obsession to call his own, is ineffectually attracted to, and continually confounded by, Tiffany, a frozen yogurt clerk (comically perky in Nikki Hulowski’s performance) who’s a jigsaw puzzle virtuoso. There’s a rom-com subplot there waiting for the development of the characters. Chuck’s efforts to assist Montague in making a decision about acting on his rage involve choosing between two stacks of books, one from the mystery section, one from the self-help table. Chuck the vague anarchist is intriguing, but a bit too sketchy to be really funny.

Both Ariate and Hulowski, be-wigged by costume designer Leona Brausen, have the fun of playing all the other characters. The former is, for one, the callow new bookshop manager whose main concern is covering his butt. Hulowski plays all the obstructionist receptionists (sorry, “executive assistants”) in Montague’s disastrous venture into the labyrinthine corporate headquarters to meet the big boss. The apocalyptic look on Timoteo’s face as the ‘elevator’ version of Girl From Ipanema goes on the fritz is a keeper.

Chantel Fortin’s stylized design has an insight into the disorienting everywhere-nowhere world of malls, where the characters are always forgetting which way to exit, and the clock suspended in the air is stopped. It’s lighted with lurid ice-cream-coloured enthusiasm by Narda McCarroll.

Verbal wit isn’t really the thing for the characters of Listen Listen; the fun is in the conviction of the performances. But the play is dotted here and there with comically non-prophetic asides about the future, from the standpoint of 1986. The boss’s complacent line about publishing and books being “an incredible stable market” got a round of audience laughter.

He rolls his eyes: how are people going to acquire books if not in bookstores? “The mail?” he jokes. The joke’s on us.

REVIEW

Listen, Listen

Theatre: Teatro Live

Written by: Elyne Quan

Directed by: Belinda Cornish

Starring: Farren Timoteo, Nadien Chu, Alex Ariate, Nikki Hulowski

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Jun 11

Tickets: teatroq.com

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The Answer Is Fringe: the upcoming 42nd edition of our summer theatre bash, and a curated season of shows, too

Posted on May 26, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

The Answer Is Fringe. Design by Pete Nguyen.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

We’ve long suspected it. And now it’s official. “The answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” is … the Fringe. 

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The Answer is Fringe, the upcoming 42nd annual edition of Edmonton’s summer theatre extravaganza, is named in honour of Douglas Adams’ droll and trippy sci-fi adventure The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. As toasted at the first Fringe Revue of the year Thursday night in the Westbury Theatre (with music by Lindsey Walker), the oldest and biggest Fringe of its kind on the continent is counting down to take-off. It’s preparing to take fringees on galactic journeys to the far corners of the theatre universe — which is to say destinations unknown — Aug. 17 to 27 in Old Strathcona and environs.

The Answer to the Great Question of dimensions is that the festival galaxy hasn’t expanded dramatically in size since last year’s Destination Fringe. But it has grown. Fringe director Murray Utas and Fringe Theatre executive director Megan Dart announced an international lineup of 180-plus shows (up from 160 in 2022) in 34-plus venues, eight of them programmed by lottery and 26 BYOVs acquired and outfitted by artists themselves. And the tally of artists from here, across the country, and eight countries around the world currently stands at 1,400.

KidsFringe, a free destination for little kids with their grownups is back, directed by Alyson Dicey of Girl Brain. So is the Fringe’s Youth Empowerment Program, which gives five young people the rare chance to be mentored as they explore theatre from every angle on and off the stage.

The imagery of this summer’s fringing is by designer Pete Nguyen, the CCO of Sea Change Brewing Co. This is also the Answer to your Great (Followup) Question about the official Fringe beer.

At Thursday’s launch, Dart and Utas, both in their hitchhikers’ jammies, also announced the lineup for Fringe Theatre’s 2023-2024 season. It starts with the holdovers from The Answer Is Fringe Aug. 30 to Sept. 2. The Fringe Revue of Dec. 8, an “original holiday special,” as Utas says, will be devised by four writers with an ensemble cast.

Small Matters Productions, specialists in expanding the clown repertoire into theatre, bring their production of The Spinsters, a dark comedy of grotesques devised and performed by Tara Travis and Christine Lesiak, Jan. 19 to 27. And Botticelli in the Fire, a  provocative and epic conflagration of love, sex, art, and violent populism by the star Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill, runs April 19 to 27, in a seven-actor production directed by Sarah Emslie. Tickets and subscriptions: fringetheatre.ca.

Meanwhile,, though, your summer hitchhiker explorations await. Tickets and passes for The Answer Is Fringe go on sale Aug. 9 at noon, at Fringe headquarter box office in the ATB Financial Arts Barn and online at fringetheatre.ca. And the fringehikers guide to the galaxy, i.e. the program, is on sale July 31. Stay tuned for further information: fringetheatre.ca.

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Fame and fortune in the digital world: Liam Salmon’s Subscribe or Like taps into millennial ambition

Posted on May 25, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Gabby Bernard and Geoffrey Siimon Brown in Subscribe or Like, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Subscribe or Like, Workshop West. Poster image by DB Photographics

You’ve got to figure it’s no accident Liam Salmon wants to meet for coffee the old-fashioned way, in person, to talk about their new play Subscribe or Like, premiering live and in person Friday at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. And, hey, unlike everyone else in the packed Whyte Avenue joint, they don’t even bring their cellphone.

Maybe they’re escaping, it crosses your mind. As a theatre artist they gravitate to characters grappling for a foothold in a world where the frontier between on- and offline has been fudged forever. They’re drawn to the “paranormal”; they think about the vanishing of the fourth wall in theatre. Their new job is at the Fringe, in charge of enhancing the presence of the festival and its live artists on digital platforms.

“A weird force we barely understand,” says Salmon, cheerfully, of the internet and its ubiquitous penetration into what we used to confidently call ‘the real world’. “Social media as an extension of humanity,” a sort of theatre of self-produced avatars, alter-egos, caricatures.

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“It interacts and affects relationships in so many different circumstances. It magnifies everything….” And it’s double-sided: “on the one hand, it could be the place where a trans person finds their community. At the same time, people with violent viewpoints find each other….””

playwright Liam Salmon

The millennial characters of Subscribe or Like live at the intersection where the hard-scrabble 3-D reality of one-bedroom basement apartments and global 2-D dreams of fame and fortune meet and greet. Rachel (Gabby Bernard) and Miles (Geoffrey Simon Brown) are wannabe YouTube stars. University grads whose lives are on hold on the long hours/low pay treadmill, they launch their own channel.

Gabby Bernard and Geoffrey Simon Brown in Subscribe or Like, Workshop West. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Phorography

“Young people trying to navigate the world, ‘hey, notice me!’, and make money,” says the playwright of the ambitions of the couple in Subscribe or Like. “You can make a ton of money doing things on the internet. And it mirrors the fame narrative” that’s always worked its way into plays about theatre people. “It feels like another evolution of that, and how that can pervert or distort a relationship,” muses Salmon, who’s smart and thoughtful (and given to musing). “Social media is a fantastic motor, I think.”

How far will it take Rachel and Miles? Salmon feels connected to the characters. “In my situation as an emerging artist, I’ve felt it, that you almost have to destroy yourself for anyone to notice, anyone to care.”

“It’s a thriller,” they say of Subscribe or Like. “And it’s a memory play; Rachel is trying to make sense of something that’s happened (from video footage)…. Like most of my work, it’s funny. And funny gets to a point where you’re like ‘o my god!’”

“I’m just warning you,” grins Salmon, a graduate of the National Theatre School playwriting program. “There’s a scene that’s … visceral. It’s ‘o god, how far is this going to go? O god, it’s getting worse. And we go all the way!”

Coming from Salmon, this counts. After all, “I listen to murder podcasts to fall asleep — I find them comforting. Is that weird?.” They’ve always been drawn to sci-fi and horror. they say. “I really think of them as sleeper feminist genres … women as ferocious, as fighters, as capable. Ridley Scott in Alien is the perfect example. Those are the women I’ve related to in my real life too.”

Uncertainty — what’s real, what’s supernatural, what’s imagined — is prime horror fuel. It’s an un-erasable part of contemporary life now, lived as it is both live and online. From the start, Salmon has mined “the limbo space” between in their plays. In Arkangel, for example, which premiered at Nextfest’s digital 2021 edition, people are talking about strange things happening in a creepy small town, as the “real” interviews dissolve into mysterious static.

Even the relationship in Salmon’s 2022 Fringe hit Fags in Space, a queer rom-com that evolved from their time at the NTS, evolves in both obstacles and resolution from a random chance encounter in the gay digital galaxy.

The woman in Salmon’s latest, What Made You Think Of The Grass (slated for a reading at Lunchbox Theatre’s Stage One Festival in Calgary) lives in a luxury bunker with her A.I. toaster for company. “She doesn’t know if the ‘outside world’ even exists,” as the playwright describes. “But she can’t continue forever in this bunker. At some point you have to open the door and see what’s happening.”

The engine of the play is “the idea of safety,” the certainties of a halcyon age gone by. Salmon detects a pattern: “Every generation is marked by a global trauma in their lives, 9-11, financial crisis, COVID … and the wanting to return to a time when they were safe.” Fat chance.

Gabby Bernard in Subscribe or Like, Workshop West. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

“How do we intelligently acknowledge the world we’re in now and move forward instead of returning to ‘safety’?” And how do you measure the dimensions of the “real world” when it includes the unmapped horizons of the digital world that’s now pretty much inseparable. Salmon thinks about things like that, in their plays and in coffee shops.

At 32, they didn’t entirely grow up online (so to speak), “the technology that has literally changed our brains. How we interact with the world and how we see the world on that structural level is completely different.” But Salmon’s kind of theatre takes that into account.  Subscribe or Like, set in 2018, includes “real live people doing something onstage with us there in the audience,” and projections that aren’t just there to be pretty.

So the technology of the production directed by Kate Ryan of Plain Jane Theatre is complicated; video imagery and memory are part of the present of the play. “It’s a dream team,” says Salmon of a set design by Stephanie Bahniuk, musical score by Darrin Hagen, video productions by Ian Jackson, lighting by Roy Jackson.

“Each scene has to feel fast and furious like a YouTube video, both a form and a style choice.” And because video is “a real thing that’s happened, time is all over the place.” But never fear, we won’t be lost in time. Subscribe or Like is the only play of the season with “a handy subscriber counter” onstage, from a handful to 10s of thousands, to remind us where we are in the story.

PREVIEW

Subscribe or Like

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Liam Salmon

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Gabby Bernard, Geoffrey Simon Brown

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd

Running: through June 11

Tickets: workshopwest.org

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