Bienvenue: a new artistic director and a new season for L’UniThéâtre

Posted on September 14, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Steve Jodoin, artistic director of L’UniThéâtre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I’m pretty stoked!” declares Steve Jodoin, the (perfectly bilingual) new artistic director of L’UniThéâtre, Edmonton’s only professional francophone theatre company.

In these post-pandemic times he has the sense that the venerable company has emerged into the light. “We disappeared for a bit. We just want to get back on the map.” To that end Jodoin has assembled a new leadership team, with fellow actor and long-time friend Mireille Moquin as administrative director. And this week, in addition to a new website, Jodoin has unveiled his first full season of shows, all four with national connections (and contemporary resonances for anglophone audiences too).

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The season-opener, Michel(le) is a solo show created and performed by Joey Lespérance, and inspired by the real-life story of the actor and his “bro-sister.” The Vancouver-based actor/playwright, familiar to L’UniThéâtre audiences, was most recently seen here as Pierre Trudeau in Darrin Hagen’s The Empress and the Prime Minister, which premiered at Theatre Network in 2019.

As kids Joey and Michel played together. And they escaped their environment in ‘60s and ‘70s Quebec by finding their way to artistic paths on opposite sides of the country — the former into an acting career in Vancouver, the latter into the Montreal drag scene. Tragically, Michel’s dreams of finding a new and truer identity as Michelle were never realized. Jodoin, who was struck hard by “the generosity and honesty of the play” describes it as “Joey’s love letter, homage, to his bro-sister. A very moving story….”

Michel(le), a production by Vancouver’s Théâtre La Seizième, runs Oct. 26 to 28 at La Cité francophone.

Lespérance and Jodoin have a long history as actors. “Our first time onstage together was in 2005, Kenneth Brown’s Cowboy Poetré,” recalls Jodoin. Originally from Quebec City, he came west for a year, to Jasper, to learn English, and never left. He ended up at Grant MacEwan in 2002, in the time of theatre arts program founder Tim Ryan and Brown. Professional gigs, in both French and English, were immediate.  “I missed grad in 2004 to do a show with L’UniThéâtre.” After that came a “western life documentary series,” in which he played an innocent from the city learning western culture. “I felt very connected,” Jodoin laughs.

Jodoin’s season, New Perspectives, includes a musical, unusual in itself for L’UniThéâtre,. The origins of Vaches The Musical, by Stéphane Guertin and Olivier Nadon, are to be found, loosely, in the news: it’s “freely inspired” by a true story, the dramatic Quebec ice storm of 1998. The farmer protagonist Jean is up against it — the mayor, the military, the elements — as he tries to save hundreds of cows from certain death.

It has “a light touch,” says Jodoin of Vaches. “Funny and touching, comedy with heart, about community, family, standing tall against adversity … a beautiful show.” The five-actor production, from Ottawa’s Créations In Vivo, runs March 21 to 23.

Jodoin himself is in the cast of Claudia Dey’s Trout Stanley (May 9 to 12), the play’s first French incarnation (translation by Manon St-Jules), with two actors from Quebec City’s Théâtre Niveau Parking, L’UniThéâtre’s co-producer.

The play, which has an eccentric, not to say weird,  gothic charm about it, is set in a remote B.C. town between Misery Junction and Grizzly Alley, where two orphaned twin sisters (who used to be triplets) on the eve of the big 3-oh, are awaiting the bad news that invariably attends on their birthdays. A stripper, who’s the town Scrabble champ, has gone missing. And the arrival of a mysterious, possibly sinister drifter changes the dynamic, as a love triangle emerges.

L’UniThéâtre’s touring show for the season is “an adventure story” that obliquely invites conversations about grief. The Théâtre La Seizième production of Anaïs Pellin’s La Befana alights in schools in B.C. and Alberta May 21 to June 14.

All L’UniThéâtre productions come with English surtitles. Subscriptions and tickets for the 2023-2024 season are available at lunitheatre.ca.

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Close encounters in the borderlands: Workshop West announces a new season

Posted on September 11, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Lora Brovold in Dead Letter, Workshop West Playwright’s Theatre. Photo by Dave DeGagné

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s a cross-country vision to Workshop West Playwright Theatre’s upcoming 45th season, Borderlands, Encounters on the Outskirts, announced Monday from their Strathcona headquarters, the Gateway Theatre.

The trio of 2023-2024 mainstage productions at Workshop West, a theatre devoted from the start to the development and showcasing of the Canadian repertoire and its writers, is bookended by plays, both mysteries in high-contrast ways,  one from Quebec and one from Edmonton. And between the two is a highly unusual touring production, an experiment in audience collaboration created by one of most exciting and inventive of the new generation of Canadian theatre artists.

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The season grand finale, one of the most anticipated premieres of the Edmonton season, is Dead Letter, by star Canadian playwright Conni Massing whose history with Workshop West goes back decades (most recently Matari in 2018). Born during the pandemic at WW’s Playwright’s Exchange, and workshopped at last year’s  Springboards New Play Fesival and Script Salon, it’s “a comedic mystery,” as WW artistic director Heather Inglis describes, spun from the small, hidden mysteries of our lives.

“Part rom-com part mystery,” Dead Letter is triggered by the arrival in the protagonist’s mailbox of a letter that’s years old. Suddenly it begins to add up to her, a clear signal of “larger forces at work” in a world where meaning is elusive — a cosmic connection between the letter, those single socks gone AWOL from the drier, the missing Tupperware lids….

Massing’s characters, says Inglis, “always feel lived in … down to what they eat, and even the recipes.” In the case of Dead Letter they’re in “a whodunnit that’s surprising and delightful.” Inglis’s production (May 17 to June 2), which happens in the round, stars husband and wife Collin Doyle and Lora Brovold (last seen together onstage in Conni Massing’s Oh Christmas Tree at the Roxy in 2018), along with Maralyn Ryan. And the multi-talented actor/playwright/composer Rebecca Merkley has been enlisted for the sound design.

Kristin Johnston in Mob, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Dave DeGagné

The season opens with Mob (La Meute), by the Quebec TV and film star-turned playwright Catherine-Anne Toupin. The touchstone of the hit psychological thriller, which premiered at La Licorne in Montreal in 2018 (and was remounted twice there), is Hitchcock, and especially Pyscho, says Inglis who directs the Workshop West production (Oct. 25 to Nov. 12).

“A slow burn,” as Inglis describes it, the play builds on concealed identities, and turns on a point of unease, restraint,  and escalating menace. Sophie, “a refugee from her job,” arrives at a remote B&B out of town in the Eastern Townships “looking for solace.” And she meets the inhabitants, including “a young man who’s a little odd, living with his aunt.” Ring a bell?

Not much more about Mob can be revealed in advance, as Inglis says, save that it’s “a dark, challenging piece, and super-well-written.” Her production, the play’s English language debut in western Canada, stars Kristin Johnston (“I’m a big fan … ever since We Had a Girl Before You” at Northern Light), with Graham Mothersill and Davina Stewart. Workshop West hasn’t done a Quebec play since the mid-‘80s, Inglis thinks: a production of Michel Tremblay’s Hosanna. “We’re primarily about Alberta voices, but other sensibilities enrich our writers as well….”

The English version, which premiered at the Centaur in Montreal in 2020, has an estimable pedigree: it’s translated by Chris Campbell, a former literary manager at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

This Is The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Dave DeGagné

Found Festival audiences in 2021 had a chance to see an early sighting of This Is The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear, David Gagnon Walker’s uniquely immersive experiment in storytelling. Since then, it’s been at SummerWorks in Toronto, the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary and Vancouver’s Pi Theatre, among other theatre to destinations, in a cross-country tour by the playwright’s company Strange Victory Performance. The short Edmonton run, Jan. 31 to Feb 4, is part of that ongoing journey.

It reminds Inglis, she says, of Spalding  Gray’s monologue Swimming To Cambodia, “but with  significant visual elements, multi-media design and projections.” And this: the audience is invited to join Gagnon Walker in telling the story, a fantastical poetic fable of the rise and fall of an imaginary civilization, with imaginary creatures in a state of slowly unfolding emergencies. Inglis calls it “a communal play reading.” You can participate to your own comfort level, reading for a character, joining the chorus, or sitting back to watch.” It was originally developed during COVID, “but it’s not specifically about that,” says Inglis. “Really it’s about coming together, the art of storytelling as a metaphor…. A reminder, in production form, of the power of just reading a play.” Christian Barry of 2b Theatre in Halifax, directs with Judy Wensel.

The third Edmonton iteration of The Shoe Project, designed to seek out and amplify the voices and stories of immigrant women, is part of the season in partnership with the SkirtsAfire Festival (March 2 and 3). And the lineup also includes the return of Workshop West’s signature Springboards New Play Festival (March 25 to 3), with readings of plays at every stage of development by playwrights at every level of experience. Presented in a cabaret setting, it’s a chance, as Inglis says, for writers to hear their works read by actors, supplemented by selected design possibilities, light, and sound.

For audiences, it’s our chance to go backstage in the process of theatre-making, where the artists hang out, and their ideas begin to take theatrical form. And, as plays like Dead Letter demonstrate, Springboards is a launching pad into full productions and onto stages of all sizes. Sneak previews with wine.

Consult workshopwest.org for subscriptions, schedules, and news about the company’s assorted  playwright development programs, including Writes of Passage, Indigenous Playwrights’ Circle, Edmonton Playwrights’ Circle, and Playwrights’ Reading Program.

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Play time! Prospects to intrigue you in the new season on Edmonton stages

Posted on September 5, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

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

Hannah Whitley and J. Antonio Rodriguez in Hadestown, North American Tour. Photo by T Charles Erickson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Answer Is Fringe, the 42nd annual edition of our giant summer theatre bash, with its 114,000 or so tickets sold, was a sign. Theatre is getting its groove back, after three hard years that have tried the ingenuity, resourcefulness, agility — not to mention the patience — of its artists. And it’s dawning on audiences what they’ve been missing, the excitement of the live in-person experience.

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Theatre companies and artists are returning to stages large and small, with thoughts about how to venture forth in a darkened, possibly absurd, world. Yes, the theatre season is starting. Musicians Gone Wild: Rock the Canyon, the first instalment of a new series designed to highlight seminal eras in pop music, opens at the Mayfield this week. The funniest, most perfectly formed, comedy in English language theatre, The Importance of Being Earnest, launching the Citadel season in a production directed by Jackie Maxwell, later this month, is in rehearsal.   

There’s a new Conni Massing, Dead Letter, premiering at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. L’UniThéatre opens a new season with Joey Lespérance’s Michel(le). And there will be more to come (indie theatre works that way). But to whet your appetite, from what we know so far, here’s a selection of intriguing shows (in no particular order) to look forward to.

The Play’s The Thing, Theatre Yes. Photo supplied.

The Play’s The Thing: Here’s an irresistibly wild idea, a real community-builder season-opener, from Theatre Yes’s new co-artistic directors Max Rubin and Ruth Alexander, Twenty Edmonton performance groups of every stripe and specialty, have signed up to create and perform a scene from Hamlet in their own style. Theatre companies, dance companies, sketch comedy troupes, burlesque artists, musical theatre specialists, collectives of the Shakespearean persuasion, a circus theatre … the variety in The Play’s The Thing has crazy showbiz fabulosity attached to it. And in its very essence it’s of this place. The first 10 scenes of Hamlet are on Oct. 7, with 10 the next night, at the Westbury Theatre. Proceeds to the Food Bank.

Wonderful Joe: The playwright/marionettiste extraordinaire Ronnie Burkett, who has a three-decade history with Theatre Network (renewed with last season’s Little Willy), returns to the Roxy this season to premiere his latest (April 2 to 21, 2024), billed as “a love letter to the imagination.” Faced with separation and homelessness, old Joe and his dog Mister head into a broken world for a last grand adventure. Has the magic of the world been irretrievably lost? Are we looking in the wrong places to find it? In the course of Wonderful Joe, the pair encounter Mother Nature, Santa, Jesus, and the Tooth Fairy. The music is by John Alcorn.

Wonderful Joe by Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Brochure photo.

Candy & The Beast: A new “multidisciplinary murder mystery thriller with music” by artistic director Trevor Schmidt premieres as the finale of the upcoming Northern Light season. The setting of Candy & The Beast, the dark demi-monde of a small prairie town, will remind you of the 2022 prairie goth musical Two-Headed/ Half-Hearted by Schmidt and Kaeley Jade Wiebe. There’s a serial killer on the rampage, and a couple of trailer-park outliers, Candy and her little brother Kenny, set forth to track down the monster (April 4 to 20, 2024). Jayce MacKenzie and newcomer Bret Jacobs star in Schmidt’s production.

Candy & The Beast, Northern Light Theatre. Graphic by Curio Studio.

Robot Girls: Another Trevor Schmidt play premieres this season, and in a cross-company venture, it’s at Shadow Theatre. Robot Girls chronicles the tensions and coming-of-age stresses of a quartet of teens, junior high-age girls in a science club who are building a robot for an international competition. John Hudson’s production (Jan. 17 to Feb. 4) stars Jayce MacKenzie, Hayley Moorhouse, Larissa Lashley, and Abigail McDougall.

Pith! A lot has happened in the 10 years since Stewart Lemoine’s 1997 theatrical homage to the transforming power of the imagination was last seen here. Teatro La Quindicina is now Teatro Live!. The 42-year-old company, born at the Fringe, has exited those summer festivities. And leading man Andrew MacDonald-Smith, who starred as the instigator Jack Vail in the 2013 revival of Teatro’s most popular, widely travelled, play, is now co-artistic director of the company (along with Belinda Cornish). He returns to the role of the vagabond Jack, who arrives in Providence, R.I. in 1931, and re-starts the stalled life of a gloom-laden widow forever by engaging her in an imaginary journey. The playwright directs (Feb 9 to 25) a cast that includes Kristin Johnston as the widow.   

Mermaid Legs: Three sisters in crisis are the centre of Beth Graham’s intriguingly named new play, premiering on the SkirtsAfire Festival mainstage (Feb. 29 to March 10). Billed as  “a surreal theatre dance fantasia about the difficulty of truth, the complications of family, and the bonds of sisterhood.” Annette Loiselle’s production, her grand finale as SkirtsAfire’s founder and artistic director, sets in motion three actors and four dancers, who evoke the inner and outer landscape of the piece, developed with choreographer Ainsley Hillyard.

Karen Hines in Pochsy IV, Theatre Network. Photo from Theatre Network website

Pochsy IV: The toxic kewpie we first met in 1992, attached to an intravenous pole, in Karen Hines’ brilliant hit series, bathed in the eerie light of gallows humour, is back after an absence of 15 years. Pochsy IV, workshopped at the 2022 Play The Fools Festival, is in the three-play all-Canadian Theatre Network season. Where has Pochsy been (the people want to know)? An ex-employee of Mercury Packers (where, yes, she packed mercury), is again looking to the future. Michael Kennard of Mump and Smoot directs (Oct. 17 to Nov. 5).     

The Three Musketeers: The grand finale of the Citadel’s upcoming season is a large-scale swashbuckler — a big cast with a built-in ensemble mantra (“all for one and one for all”), big costumes, and a lot of swords (fight director: Jonathan Purvis). Daryl Cloran directs this highly comic adaptation by the prolific and much-produced American playwright Catherine Bush (April 20-May 12).

Hadestown: Edmonton figures prominently in the production history of Anaïs Mitchell’s richly evocative folk opera musical: the Citadel is where it made its preparations in 2017 en route to a Tony Award-winning Broadway run that’s still playing to packed houses. Rachel Chavkin’s production, radically reworked for New York, is back in town, in a Broadway Across Canada touring production at the Jube Nov. 14 to 19. Your chance is at hand to go to hell and back, wrapped in a ravishing dream of two intertwined love stories, inspired by the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.

Sunday in the Park With George: Sondheim’s glorious 1983 masterpiece, in which the past wraps itself around the present, is a mesmerizing, shimmering tribute to art: the creation of it, the human price tag on creating it, the people who make art and the people who surround the people who make art. It’s spun from the famous painting by the pointillist master Georges Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Productions are rare; the MacEwan Theatre Arts production directed by Jim Guedo is one to seek out (March 20 to 24).   

Botticelli in the Fire: Sex and art and violent populism collide in this fascinating 2016 one-act by the young Canadian playwriting star Jordan Tannahill. At its centre is the queer Renaissance painter Botticelli, working on his masterpiece The Birth of Venus, in a contemporary landscape of escalating danger. The resonances with our world are multiplying as we speak. The seven-actor production was originally slated for this past April, and this season it’s happening. Sarah Emslie makes their directing debut, as part of Fringe Theatre’s curated season (April 19 to 27).

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

The Drawer Boy: It’s been a couple of decades since Edmonton audiences saw this funny, moving Canadian theatre classic. Michael Healey’s 1999 Governor General’s Award winner, in which art and life mingle unforgettably, tells of the adventures of a young actor in the Ontario farming heartland. He’s there as part of a Toronto theatre company researching farm life, on location, for the play that would become another Canadian classic, the seminal The Farm Show. The Shadow Theatre production (Jan. 18 to Feb 4)  directed by John Hudson, stars Glenn Nelson, Reed McColm, and Paul-Ford Manguelle.

Indecent: Paula Vogel’s play is another a play about a play — with a theatre story, a real one, that connects us to the explosive historical and cultural currents of the last century. A company of actors brings Sholem Asch’s 1907 Yiddish groundbreaker God of Vengeance (in which a rabbi’s daughter falls in love a prostitute in the brothel downstairs from the family) from the capitals of Europe to New York. And with it, across the Atlantic, the first lesbian kiss on an American stage. Warmly received in Greenwich Village in 1921, the move uptown to Broadway two years later had disastrous results. Ben Smith directs, at the U of A’s Studio Theatre Dec. 1 to 9.

Private Lives: There’s one for the archives in the unique casting of Teatro Live’s production (July 11 to 28) of the spiky and insightful Noel Coward comedy Private Lives. The company’s two co-artistic directors Belinda Cornish and Andrew MacDonald Smith star as the divorced couple who re-discover each other on their respective honeymoons with new spouses, and re-kindle their passion and their marital war. A third artistic director, Max Rubin of Theatre Yes, directs the romantic fray.  

A cross-company sampling: The Theatre 8-Pack, a bargain at the price ($210), includes a production from each of eight Edmonton theatres: A Phoenix Too Frequent (Northern Light Theatre), The Drawer Boy (Shadow Theatre), Pith! (Teatro Live!), Mermaid Legs (SkirtsAfire Festival), Rough Magic (Studio Theatre), The Swearing Jar (Walterdale Theatre), Trout Stanley (L’UniThéâtre), and Dead Letter (Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre). Tickets and full schedule: edmontonarts.ca.

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The Answer Is Fringe! The 42nd annual edition of our Fringe signs off: more tickets sold, more take-home for artists

Posted on August 27, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

The Answer is Fringe

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If The Answer Is Fringe, as we’ve long suspected, our giant summer theatre festival has arrived at the last day of exploring, and playing with, the Questions.

After 11 days and nights of sun, smoke, flood and mosquitoes, the 42nd annual edition of Edmonton’s summer theatre binge, the first and biggest of its kind on the continent, signs off Sunday night. And by Sunday morning, with a full day and evening of shows still to go (updates to come), the Fringe had sold 114,000 tickets to its 185 indoor shows in 35 venues.

The number of shows, artists, and tickets sold are substantially up, to be sure, from the 2022 edition, with its sales tally of 94,500 tickets to 164 shows in 27 indoor venues. But what pleases Fringe director Murray Utas the most, he figures, is the payout, exceeding $1.2 million, to Fringe artists, who take home 100 per cent of ticket sales (minus the $3 festival surcharge). That’s up from 2022. And it’s an even more impressive return, proportionate to shows, than the epic 2019 Fringe (258 productions) and the $1.4 million returned to artists that year.

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A Fringe artist himself by temperament and background, the ebullient director/ actor/ playwright/ producer Utas points, with delight, to the 365 sold-out houses at The Answer Is Fringe, compared in relative terms to the 440 of of the 258-show 2019 edition, with audiences spread out over a much larger landscape of shows.

“There’s nothing more adventurous than Fringe audiences,” he says. “And I want to honour them…. We’ve hit a new place in (audience-artist) interaction!” As he tells Fringe artists “show me your heart, and Fringe audiences will care for you…. We are all in this together.”

Elena Belyea in This Won’t Hurt, I Promise, Tiny Bear Jaws, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

In this he echoes actor/playwright Elena Belyea, whose solo show This Won’t Hurt, I Promise has been held over by Fringe Theatre Adventures Sept. 1 and 2. The muse-in-residence at the adventurous indie company Tiny Bear Jaws, Belyea says “the Fringe audience just isn’t a typical audience. They’re so ready to dive in head first … so game to play!” As a point of comparison, Belyea has taken her play Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable to both theatre seasons and to curated festivals, as well as the Fringe. “I’ve loved doing it for Fringe audiences best.”

For an indie artist, even one as experienced and accomplished as Belyea, getting an audience for an indie production is a struggle. “With Smoke and I Don’t Even Miss You (award-winners both), I’d get a 30-person audiences. With this show, at the Fringe, it’s 150 a night…. It’s a (better) way to try out something new, see what works.”

With the Fringe, “you don’t have to convince people to come; there’s a giant infrastructure and a built-in audience…. ” Belyea feels “a different kind of contract with the audience” at the Fringe,” and it’s very conducive to experimenting, as she did with a solo show that expands the notion of standup into a piece that sets about helping deal with a world that’s maddening and toxic.

“If I hadn’t got the Fringe slot I wouldn’t have made the show.”

Vance Avery and Chris W. Cook in Fiji, Shatter Glass Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Lora Brovold, an actor with a distinguished Edmonton theatre resumé, ventured into directing for the first time — on request of a new young producing team, playwright Michelle Robb and partner Gavin Dyer — with one of the Fringe’s trickiest, weirdest plays. Fiji starts out as a meet-awkward rom-com, and ends up taking audiences ever so gradually, plausibly even, into the truly shocking discovery of where the quest for human connection can lead.

The play itself is risky, to say the least. But then, as Brovold points out, the Fringe itself is a gamble … perfect for artists and for me, taking a creative risk.” And “because it’s all about risk, that takes away the fear that sits on my shoulder.” The audience seemed to be hip to that synchronicity of risk-taking, she reports. Nearly every performance of . was sold out.

Rat Academy, Batrabbit Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023

Utas, for his part, loves the co-mingling and collaboration at the Fringe of experienced artists and relative newcomers, as the four-show holdover series he’s curated attests. The delightful Rat Academy, a very skilful and funny dark-side clown show by the team of Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner, young heirs to the great Mump and Smoot tradition, is one (Sept. 1 and 2).

The Cabin on Bald Dune, held over by the Varscona Theatre Wednesday (Aug. 30), is another example. It’s a resonant, expertly turned out thriller by the young playwright Jezec Sanders. And it attracted an all-star cast, Jenny McKillop and Kristi Hansen.

The adventurously off-centre theatre-maker Steve Pirot, a former Nextfest director and the artistic director of iHuman Youth Society (a multi-disciplinary arts collective for marginalized youth), was onstage at the Fringe for the first time in half a dozen years. He brought his own new show Unkl Stiv’s Looping Machine, a case of  “Steve bringing his weird to the festival!” as Utas declares happily. 8-5 Crew on Cypher Avenue (85th Avenue), for young up-and-comers, a multi-disciplinary mural street-scene initiative for impromptu, music, dance and the visual arts, is a shared-custody brainchild with Utas, in its second year.  The idea is to nurture the next generation of artists.

As the townspeople in What Was Is All, a startlingly ambitious new folk-rock musical I caught this weekend at the Roxy, wondered (in song), “is it too late to try on a new life? The Fringe steps up and always answers No. Congrats to all the artists and audiences who hitchhiked together through the galaxy.

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Five Fringe Holdovers at the Varscona Theatre

Posted on August 26, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At the Varscona Theatre (aka BYOV stage 11), an intriguing lineup of five Fringe shows are held over Aug. 29 to 31.

The Cabin on Bald Dune, the only one of the five I’ve seen, is a dexterous multi-layered thriller embedded in a comedy, by the exciting young playwright Jezec Sanders. April Banigan’s cunningly calibrated production stars Kristi Hansen and Jenny McKillop, as old friends — or are they? — who meet up on an isolated island to plan a restaurant business venture. Are they answering the siren call of profit, or is something subtler, more mysterious at work? Check out the 12thnight review.

NextGen Theatre’s revival of the haunting 1998 Trevor Schmidt play Tales From The Hospital, originally produced by The Unconscious Collective, looks at the lives of two patients and two staff members in an Alberta mental health hospital in the ‘60s. Two members of the original cast, Elizabeth Allison-Jorde and Linda Grass, are in this cast 25 years later, along with two younger actors, Janelle Jorde and Sophie May Healey. It’s been selling out its houses all Fringe.

Multi-Vs is an original produced by the Vancouver company Affair of Honor, devoted to fight- and movement-based theatre. And this is rare: the combat is all-female, in a story of two strangers hurling themselves through time, space, and universes.

Alec Jones-Trujillo in Old God, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied.

Old God, a solo clown show starring Las Vegas’s Alec Jones-Trujillo, an eerie chalky-faced clown is billed enigmatically as “pantomime performed alongside improvisational feats of language.” By all reports he engages and interacts with the audience in entirely original ways.

Big Business, the only solo clown show at the Fringe (to my knowledge) starring a nimble clown in a business suit, stars Lee Boyes. Christine Lesiak a notable clown herself (For Science!) directs.

Full schedule of performances, and tickets: varsconatheatre.com.

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An update: The Answer Is (still) Fringe, and four of its top shows are held over

Posted on August 26, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Tiger Lady, Dead Rabbits Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Answer Is Fringe, the 42nd annual edition of Edmonton’s mighty summer theatre extravaganza, might end Sunday night. But don’t be alarmed that you will be left bereft in a universe full of unanswerable questions. A high-contrast quartet of the Fringe’s most exciting shows will be held over Aug. 30 through Sept. 2 in the Westbury Theatre: Tiger Lady, Rat Academy, and Anatomica: A Comedy About Meat, Bones & The Skin You’re In, and This Won’t Hurt, I Promise.

Tiger Lady: the ingenious Dead Rabbits Theatre production London cat-apults us us into an atmospheric, richly imagined world, the story of the world’s first female tiger trainer in the early years of the last century. And it uses the most theatrical of means. Have a peek at the 12thnight review.

Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner in Rat Academy, Batrabbit Productions. Pghoto supplied.

Rat Academy: a clever gem of a clown show, expert in its execution by Dayna Lea Hoffman and Katie Yoner, from the perspective of the ultimate marginalized outsider (especially in rat-free Alberta). Here’s the 12thnight review.

Anatomica: a weird and captivating solo show masquerading as stand-up comedy but more like funny performance art. Amica Hunter, an easeful and disarming performer, pursues a question you’ve never asked yourself. Check out the 12thnight review here.

Elena Belyea in This Won’t Hurt, I Promise, Tiny Bear Jaws, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

This Won’t Hurt, I Promise: In a world that offers us so many opportunities to be mad, and anxious, playwright/actor Elena Belyea of Tiny Bear Jaws offers an antidote. An original fusion of standup, conversation, and the comedy of empathy. The 12thnight review is here.

The holdover schedule, and tickets, are available at fringetheatre.ca.

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An update: Four top shows at The Answer Is Fringe are held over next week

Posted on August 25, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Tiger Lady, Dead Rabbits Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Answer Is Fringe, the 42nd annual edition of Edmonton’s mighty summer theatre extravaganza, might end Sunday night. But don’t be alarmed that you will be left bereft in a universe full of unanswerable questions. A high-contrast quartet of the Fringe’s most exciting shows will be held over Aug. 30 through Sept. 2: Tiger Lady; Rat Academy;  Anatomica: A Comedy About Meat, Bones & The Skin You’re In; This Won’t Hurt, I Promise. 

Tiger Lady: the ingenious Dead Rabbits Theatre production London cat-apults us us into an atmospheric, richly imagined world, the story of the world’s first female tiger trainer in the early years of the last century. And it uses the most theatrical of means. Have a peek at the 12thnight review.

Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner in Rat Academy, Batrabbit Productions. Pghoto supplied.

Rat Academy: a clever gem of a clown show, expert in its execution by Dayna Lea Hoffman and Katie Yoner, from the perspective of the ultimate marginalized outsider (especially in rat-free Alberta). Here’s the 12thnight review.

Anatomica: a weird and captivating solo show masquerading as stand-up comedy but more like funny performance art. Amica Hunter, an easeful and disarming performer, pursues a question you’ve never asked yourself. Check out the 12thnight review here.

And the mystery fourth holdover? Elena Belyea’s This Won’t Hurt, I promise, a “standup hybrid that’s smart, funny, and an empathetic antidote to the anxiety-generating times we live in.  Check out the 12thnight review here.

The holdover schedule, and tickets, are available at fringetheatre.ca.

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O for a muse of ice! Kenneth Brown explores the bond between art, life, and puck in Life After Life After Hockey, a Fringe review

Posted on August 25, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Kenneth Brown in Life After Life After Hockey, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective

Life After Life After Hockey (Stage 13, La Cité francophone)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“O for a muse of fire!” as Rink Rat Brown did not say under a prairie winter night sky in Life After Hockey.

No, as Rink Rat’s creator Kenneth Brown discovered at the Edmonton Fringe in his hit play of 1985 — and confirmed in the course of playing him more than 1,200 times in the next 17 years — it was a muse of ice. And Rink Rat didn’t have to ask for it, or invoke it. In this country, there is nothing more inspirational, more euphoric, more culturally intrinsic than the bond between ice and man. Especially if man is outside, holding a stick and shooting a puck.

In his new creation Life After Life After Life, directed by Sean Quigley, playwright/actor Brown arrives back onstage in his hockey jersey once more to reflect on life and theatre, and the Fringe, and the weirdly unplanned links between the three.  He has an appealingly self-deprecating charm onstage, as he conjures a boyhood self who spent hours playing shinny at the community league rink with his pals. “Garneau kids didn’t live through winter; we lived in winter.”

To a soundtrack invented spontaneously and played live by singer-songwriter Dana Wylie,  Brown, like his famous protagonist, apostrophizes, in poetry, the NLF idols who occupied his dreams. And when the hockey gods were in the front row enjoying Life After Hockey, and Gordie Howe was telling him “that was perfect!” Brown conjures for us the wonder of it all, and the theatre career that erupted from it.

A hit hockey play: that hadn’t been his goal when he arrived back in Edmonton from theatre school.  “I was going to make a theatre of protest,” he says with a hint of amused affection for his younger self. “A theatre based on the spoken word.” Enter THEATrePUBLIC.

It’s nostalgia of a particular kind that fuels Life After Life After Hockey. It’s nostalgia with regret on the flip side, since success and the grind of touring exact a heavy price on relationships and happiness. Brown is knowing and rueful, and that colours the show.

Kenneth Brown in Life After Life After Hockey, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective

Like so many of his experiments at the Fringe, this new piece has its own original shape. It’s more an illustrated memoir than a play, and more a variety performance piece than a memoir. There are original songs with Wylie, an ode to Edmonton by poet Pierrette Requier, and appearances by younger actors, like Candice Fiorentino (Anatolia Speaks), with whom he’s worked.

And above all, it’s a love letter to the enabling, transforming presence of the mighty Fringe Festival, that changed a city and its artists.

There’s an arc. Names of hockey stars, the Great One, Glen Sather, and the rest, are dropped in the first part of Life After Life After Hockey. Gradually, the name-dropping changes. As an acting teacher and mentor to young talent, he tells us of his new generation of theatre collaborators: Jon Paterson of RibbitRePublic, Caley Suliak, Bob Rasko….  They’re names the Fringe has taught us to know. What has spooled backwards in time, now spools forward.

As Brown promises at the outset, he will reveal the secret of happiness. As Rink Rat probably said in the play that defined him, “puckin’ A.”

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Rockin’ around the Christmas tree: the dark hilarity of Krampus: A New Musical, a Fringe review

Posted on August 24, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Krampus: A New Musical (Stage 13, La Cité francophone)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There is something quintessentially Fringe about the midsummer madness of watching a packed house watching a macabre new Christmas musical comedy. At noon. In August. It’s a sight that would send Santa into deadline anxiety, and the Grinch into therapy.   

Christmas is, of course, a perennial top draw for connoisseurs of family dysfunction. And it seems to bring out the best in the wicked Straight Edge Theatre team of Stephen Allred and Seth Gilfillan.

With Conjoined, their original rock musical of last year, they twisted a classic coming-of-age/ sibling rivalry story into a macabre and hilarious new shape. In Krampus, they take on the classic Christmas heartwarmers — togetherness, hospitality, family bonhommie — and cuts right through them (Straight Edge, right?) to the insight that the heart of the season is the lethal spirit of competition. Allred’s direction (and choreography) goes for the grotesque in style and weight, and the production is a lot fun.

The songs are spirited musical theatre numbers, cleverly rhymed, with amusing goth barbs (musical director/arranger Michael Clark). The opening number is a riot of one-upmanship in the household of the “perfectly perfect” family. Their Christmas lights are brighter, the Jesus in their Nativity is hotter…. It’s a vision led and enforced by the perky authoritarian who runs things: matriarch Rhonette, in a fierce and funny performance by Amanda Neufeld. Her perfect flip of a ‘do bounces murderously whenever she’s crossed in any way.

And mild-mannered Dad — Jacob Holloway makes excellent comic work of nerdiness — knows better than to try. His mantra? “Don’t talk back to your mother,” he says constantly to the two kids. “If your mother says Grandma is a judgmental bitch Grandma’s a judgmental bitch.”

The sibling interplay is delightful. Billy (Damon Pitcher), the starchier one, presses his luck with objections, but in the event of getting caught out in a kid misdemeanour favours subversion. His song Just Lie is a spirited ode to the solution. His sister Tilly (Victoria Suen), a dimbulb kewpie always a beat or three behind proceedings, has showbiz aspirations. She’s perpetually ready to rehearse her number for the Winter Pageant.

Something sinister is happening, it being Christmas Eve and all. C’mon that’s not the Amazon Prime delivery guy knocking at the door. Could it be a giant Christmas demon, impressively scary? The one Nanny Verla (Nicole English), has been warning everyone about in a spooky foreign accent? Yes, this is a family riddled with dark secrets and built on lies.

Crisp direction, smart funny songs sung by a cast who can sing, a band from the Edmonton Pops Orchestra (with a French horn!)…. and, holly jolly, the seasonal repertoire has a new Christmas musical.

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Into the woods, where longing takes shape: Lia & Dor, a Fringe review

Posted on August 24, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Cristina Tudor and Alexander Forsyth in Lia & Dor, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Lia & Dor (Stage 3 (Nordic Studio Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Dreams and memories, not fairies, are caught in the web of “once upon a time” spun by Lia & Dor.

In Cristina Tudor’s artful tale, inspired by Romanian folklore, the world is a fantastical place of journeys without destination, where animals speak, the generations mingle, and longing takes shape. But it’s also strangely familiar, like a flower between your lips, the taste of a mint leaf, basil under your pillow, the route through the village into the misty forest.

Lia (Tudor) is a young girl yearning for love, and footing in the world, and she’s contains all the generations before her, her mother, her grandmother, her auntie. And Keltie Forsyth’s production tucks into this particularly theatrical (and small cast) form of enchantment: the world and the people and animals in it are conjured by two actors.

Tudor plays Lia, and Lia contains all the generations before her — mother, grandmother, great aunties…. A lot of relatives, says Lia’s user-friendly stage companion, demanding on our behalf an annotated list of the characters to forestall confusion.

To Alexander Forsyth falls the exotic task of playing Dor, Lia’s Dor, invisible to others, but very tangible and wry in the person of the actor. Lia’s grandmother explains that everyone has a Dor, the embodiment of the elusive but somehow visceral sense of yearning and wanderlust, that indefinable mingling of aspiration, love, sorrow. In three letters, Romanian nails something that gets away from the English language. The Welsh title of Belinda Cornish’s Hiraeth, which premiered a season ago, has something of that wispy force, missing something you’ve never yet had.

Like dreams and the oddity of remembering the future, Dor goes forward and back in time, pretty much interchangeably. He (they?) waits, but not forever. And the journey into the forest Lia undertakes, at the centre of the show, ingenious in its simplicity, is to release Dor from a curse. Nature is full of dangers: a wounded wolf (an exquisite mask donned by Forsyth), a very attractive giant snake with a killer smile. Their voices are a blend of two voices. And there’s music: haunting songs in Romanian are a cappella as if they come direct from memory.

Like so many fairy tales, including the kind with fairies, Lia & Dor is a love story. And it’s haunted by the generations of love stories that have come before. This charming production sets them all in motion on a bare stage. And there’s magic in that.

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