Fun (really!) with Hamlet: The Play’s The Thing, an inspired Theatre Yes 2-night production

Posted on October 8, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Augustus Williams as Horatio in Catalyst Theatre’s take on Hamlet Act I scene 1, The Play’s The Thing, Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson

Freewill Shakespeare Festival does a scene from Hamlet. The Play’s The Thing, Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Well, THAT was fun!. A word that is only rarely (I need hardly remind you) applied to productions of Hamlet.

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The first night of The Play’s The Thing, Theatre Yes’s two-night production of Shakespeare’s longest, most mysteriously alluring play, had 10 Edmonton stage companies each do a scene, from Act I, i through Act III, iv — each in their own signature style. To call it a riotous, original deconstruction would be entirely accurate. But beyond that, what an inspiring way to remind us, at the start of the theatre season, of the remarkable breadth of Edmonton’s performance scene. The sketch troupe Marv N’ Berry, who graciously shared some of the slings and arrows of their Shakespearean research with the crowd, presided; they are the souls of affability.

Catalyst Theatre, home of original, boldly physical reinventions of the musical form with poetic texts, delivered a great opener, elbowing iambic pentameter aside for their own kind of rhymed verse. The theatre kids from Vic, some 20 of them, stepped up, led by Hamlet’s BFF Horatio (“don’t get me wrong, I love the guy…”), an ironic and thoughtful sort with questions about ghosts — and a suspicion that Elsinore was haunted, even before the ghost of Act I, scene i. Once you realize admit the possibility of change, there’s no going back. Yup, four more tumultuous and violent Acts are bound to follow, with momentum as they go.

Photo by Mat Simpson

A couple of bouffon rodents (from Batrabbit Collective, whose Rat Academy was a hit at the Fringe) delivered a very funny version of the farewell scene in which Laertes, who like his dad Polonius is full of pompous advice, announces to his meek, somewhat dim sister Ophelia he’s off to France. There was rambunctious improv from Rapid Fire Theatre, led by artistic director Matt Schuurman; they dallied with Hamlet, gave Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the classic improv craziness of speaking in unison,  and flirted outrageously with the audience. Hello Denmark!

Photo by Mat Simpson

Intriguingly, Hamlet’s great ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy of Act III scene i landed in the scene assigned (randomly, out of a hat) to L’UniThéâtre. How fascinating to hear it in French. Thou Art Here, the site-sympathetic company that has taken The Man to The People in all manner of locales, did the play-with-in-a-play scene with wild give-‘er puppets, and an overlay of advice from a hyperkinetic concept director à la Hamlet, with an eye on getting held over. A theatre critic with (possibly dubious) blonde hair got to have her first and only and fleeting crack at playing Ophelia, with a Mousetrap audience that included the King and Queen of the Fringe, Murray and Megan.

Zachary Parsons-Lozinski as Hamlet’s mama in Guys in Disguise’s scene in The Play’s The Thing, Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson

Another queen, Hamlet’s mom Gertrude, played in high style by Guys in Disguise’s Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, did a memorable phone-acting scene with Ophelia, taking her cue from Polonius and trying to ferret out the goods on her wayward son’s activities — with whom and how many?

Workshop West does Hamlet, a scene from The Play’s The Thing, Theatre Yes. Photo by Mat Simpson

Workshop West, Ready Go, Freewill Shakespeare Festival, and Shadow Theatre stepped up too.

So, 10 high-contrast scenes and 10 different companies who had a blast showing off their stuff. We all had a terrific time. And there are 10 more to come tonight, at the Westbury. How does it all turn out for the Melancholy Dane anyhow? Tickets: fringetheatre.ca. All proceeds to the Food Bank.

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A matter of death (and life): a quirky rom-com en route to the Underworld: A Phoenix Too Frequent at Northern Light, a review

Posted on October 7, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Brenna Campbell, Julia van Damme, Ellen Chorley in A Phoenix Too Frequent, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

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Multi-faceted theatre artist Ellen Chorley returns to the stage in A Phoenix Too Frequent, the Northern Light season-opener

Posted on October 4, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Julia van Dam, Ellen Chorley, Brennan Campbell in A Phoenix Too Frequent, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The production that launches the Northern Light Theatre season Friday, returns a company known for its edgy contemporary choices to a play — a vintage post-war romantic comedy, in verse — it produced 45 years ago. And Christopher Fry’s A Phoenix Too Frequent is another kind of special occasion too.

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Trevor Schmidt’s production marks the return to the stage of a startlingly multi-faceted theatre artist — playwright, actor, director, festival director artistic director, teacher, mentor — whose 18-year history with Northern Light includes being artistic associate, running the box office, publicity, fund-raising, volunteer coordination. In 2020 Ellen Chorley even wrote NLT a play; the funny, insightful Everybody Loves Robbie premiered on the mainstage.

A Phoenix Too Frequent is Ellen Chorley’s first-ever appearance at Northern Light as an actor. She plays Doto, the droll and earthy maidservant/ companion of a grieving widow (Julia van Dam) determined to join her recently deceased husband Virilius in the underworld. In the story, borrowed from Petronius, the pair are in hubby’s tomb, and Doto is along for the ride across the River Styx to Hades. That’s when a particularly appealing soldier (Brennan Campbell) arrives, curious about the light coming from the tomb. Will his attractions, and the life force, prevail over the widow’s death-centric determination?

Playwright Ellen Chorley with cast of Everybody Loves Robbie, Jayce McKenzie left and Richard Lee Hsi. 2020 photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

“Isn’t Doto fantastic?” declares Chorley, a sunny exuberant sort with a buoyant effect on her human surroundings (as the hundreds of emerging artists at Nextfest, the festival she runs, can attest). “She’s so funny! I love her! It’s just a blast to walk around in her shoes.”

Verse dramas are not thick upon the ground, to be sure. The play, a rarely produced one-act by the author of (the much better known) The Lady’s Not For Burning, is “definitely dense, with incredibly stylized language,” as Chorley says. “Also, it’s a lot fun.” And in the devastated post-war landscape “it seems so ahead of its time, in its thoughts about grief and hope, moving on from grief. Somehow it seems very progressive for 1947.”

Delia Barnett and Ellen Chorley in Soiled Doves, Send In The Girls Burlesque. 2019 photo by db photographics.

Writing, running Nextfest, founding theatre companies like Promise Productions, nurturing the theatre careers of new generations of artists … Chorley’s theatre career is multi-limbed. She herself hasn’t been onstage herself since January 2019, in a play she wrote for the burlesque company she co-founded, Send in the Girls. Soiled Doves was a tribute to the female stars of the Wild West. “A very different experience than doing this language-rich play, of course,” she laughs, thinking of the challenges of Fry’s exuberant, often lush, poetry. “Before that, along with play readings and workshops here and there, it was a 2017 Trunk Theatre production of Caryl Churchill’s Fen.”

The Fry play is a challenging way to return to acting. “Fun and exciting to stretch those acting muscles again; I haven’t used them as much lately…. That’s the great thing about acting training: it’s a tool kit of how to approach different projects, and I was able to (dip into) that.” Comedy, as Chorley points out, “is so technical in a lot of ways. It’s about speed, about timing, about pitch…. I had to rely on those technical elements to start figuring out how the performance comes together.”

Ellen Chorley and Brennan Campbell, A Phoenix Too Frequent, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang

“In rehearsal, with Trevor’s vision, we’re figuring out where this play lives in style … ancient myth, yes, but written in 1947, and we’re doing it in 2023. All this grief and sadness, yes, and it takes place in a crypt. But there’s also so much life in the play.” It’s what Chorley likes best, she says, “peeling back the layers.”

And speaking of layers, the production we’ll see, Chorley explains, is “classical-looking. We’re all in togas, and the soldier is in a gladiator uniform.” But there’s the playful feeling, as she describes, of “the early ‘50s doing an ancient story.” Schmidt’s design, down to the wigs and the earrings, nods to Cleopatra, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments — “all colourful and gauzy and beautiful. Fun!” To get in the groove “we all watched Anne Baxter in The Ten Commandments.”

Chorley and Northern Light: a relationship forged 18 years ago when “the new little musical theatre grad from Grant MacEwan” did a group audition with a cluster of the small theatres. “I just started going to see plays a lot,” she remembers. “I always tell young actors to do that. And I really liked what Northern Light was doing — interesting scripts, challenging work, productions that would make me think.”

She was (and is) an indefatigable volunteer. ” Northern Light always did A LOT of bingos.” And one thing led to another. “When you love a company you just want to keep showing up for them!” And “truly at Northern Light I’ve learned so much about my whole career as an artist …. Trevor (Northern Light artistic director Trevor Schmidt) has been so generous in letting me in to see his artistic process; his mentorship has been so valuable.”

Northern Light’s 2020 commission to write Everybody Loves Robbie, a love letter to first relationships and high school theatre, was “a life changer,” says Chorley. “A big leap in my writing career! Before that I was mostly producing my own work. To be produced by a professional company allowed me to join the Playwrights Guild of Canada, become a full member of the Alberta Playwrights Network … to operate on a more professional basis as a writer. A Big Step. I was over-the-moon thankful for the opportunity.”

Chorley grew up in an arts-oriented household. The importance of children’s theatre is one of her favourite subjects and she’s eloquent in its defence. It led, in 2006, to her own kids’ theatre company Promise Productions  (her trilogy of amusingly sassy, genre-bent feminist Cinderella plays were a hit at the Fringe).

And high school theatre was crucial, thinks Chorley. At Ross Sheppard, not much known as “an arts school” at the time, theatre was “a scrappy DIY” affair. “It was ‘we don’t have any money but we’re not going to get in trouble trying things. You can be an actor but you should know how to build a flat, do some lighting, figure out stage management, sew costumes.’ And writing and creating our own work was valued! That was a big part of the culture there. And it was really important to the artist I’ve become!” Conversation with Chorley, as you’ll glean, comes with its own built-in exclamation points.

“We were empowered to figure things out for ourselves! And it’s made me a bit bold in my own writing and producing work.”

The teenage Chorley and her theatre pals took a cabaret play they’d created to Nextfest, the multi-disciplinary festival of emerging artists she’d later head. And her first play Bohemian Perso ran there. Her first Nextfest gig was curating the festival’s high school theatre offerings. An it was at the 2010 edition she tried burlesque for the first time. Send in the Girls, and the burlesque/theatre hybrid Tudor Queens that she wrote for the new troupe, were at the Fringe the next summer. And their productions, have found full-house audiences ever since.

What was the attraction of that art form? “I liked what it had to say about body positive image,” Chorley thinks. “I liked the relationship with audience. And I liked the style, the glamour, the glitz.” She laughs. “You may have a costume designer. But you’re the one sitting for seven hours gluing on the rhinestones. There’s a DIY quality to burlesque!”

And now, with A Phoenix Too Frequent, Chorley returns to Northern Light, and to acting, her original entry point into theatre as a kid (“I wanted to be a Shakespearean actor”), with a skill set that extends to every aspect of “making art.” And she returns with her usual gusto. “I’m so excited, and maybe a little nervous. But experience just makes you stronger!”

PREVIEW

A Phoenix Too Frequent

Theatre: Northern Light

Written by: Christopher Fry

Directed and designed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Julia van Dam, Brennan Campbell, Ellen Chorley

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

Running: Friday through Oct. 21

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

  

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The delectable fun of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Citadel, a review

Posted on September 29, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Nadien Chu as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In a glum age where the things to be serious about are piling up by the second, there is something inspirational about launching a season with a comedy whose airy architecture is built, rock solid, on topsy-turvy inversion. A comedy that that takes triviality seriously, by balancing its intricate symmetries on a pinpoint.

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That’s what the Citadel has done, via Jackie Maxwell’s delectable production of The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s comic masterpiece of 1895. “I am sick to death of cleverness,” sulks Jack Worthing (Jeff Lillico), one of a pair of best friends, debonair young men-about-town whose romantic aspirations come up against the adamantine obstacle of not having the perfect name: Ernest. “Everyone is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people….The thing has become an absolute public nuisance.”

Nadien Chu, Alexander Ariate, Jeff Lillico, Helen Belay, Amelia Sargisson, Davina Stewart, Julien Arnold in The Importance of Being Earnest, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Sorry Jack, but the comedy that’s been called the most perfectly constructed in English theatre — and is almost certainly the repertoire’s wittiest — is full of clever people. And they’re repositories of Wilde’s paradoxical wit and hyper-articulate playfulness (“divorces are made in heaven” or “in matters of grave importance style, not sincerity is the vital thing”). But they’re not kidders. They’re in deadly earnest about the social realities of their glittering world — marriage, money, class, the sexes, respectability. Which makes them hilarious, and the play a cross between a romantic comedy and an eagle-eyed satire.

Maxwell has bravely chosen to dislodge Earnest from its high-Victorian setting, and take it ahead by a full half a century into the 1950s. You’re bound to have some reservations in advance. Earnest relocations are risky in theory (witness a long line of Earnests stranded with their thumbs up their epigrammatic backsides in time periods where the nuances of class, parental authority, and social respectability don’t quite resonate). But check your reservations at the door. One of the chief delights of Maxwell’s decision is immediate: Michael Gianfrancesco’s ’50s high-style costumes are an eyeful, the dizzying array of checked trousers, ravishing pastel cocktail frocks, silky lounging jackets, brocade suits. And don’t get me started on the shoes.

Tellingly, the fortunes, privileges and high-handed assumptions of the upper classes sit just fine 50 years later. Surprise! The great social revolution is still on hold. Witness the pair of butlers played very amusingly by Doug Mertz, one urban one country, one sublimely implacable and the other wheezily disintegrating as his hair levitates.

The implacable arbiter of the social status quo at the centre of it all, “a monster without being a myth,” as Jack says, is Lady Bracknell. This magisterial role is occupied with fierce un-ironic gravitas and an entire arsenal of withering looks by Nadien Chu. From her first entrance, feet planted like Cortez claiming a continent, her facial expression is set to disapproval. She’s perpetually ready to have her worst suspicions confirmed by an entire generation — starting with her unreliable nephew Algernon (Alexander Ariate), who’s forever reneging on his social obligations by claiming the need to visit his fictional invalid relative Bunbury. Her lips are pursed, and she spits out the consonants of Bunbury’s name like someone expelling rancid cashews at a distance.

Lady Bracknell’s checklist of questions for male eligibility are very funny, mainly because they’re grimly practical. And Chu never wavers. She demands to know if her daughter Gwendolyn’s potential beau smokes. He admits he does. “I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.” Designer Gianfrancesco decks her out in a succession of wonderful hats with feathers that positively quiver with a sense of righteous outrage.

A hard-headed realist, Lady Bracknell has her views on every aspect of modern life, from the inadvisability of long engagements (“they give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage”) to the financial merits of investments vs land (the latter “has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure; it gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up”). Modern education? “Ignorance is a delicate exotic fruit. Touch it and the bloom is gone.”

Jeff Lillio, Helen Belay, Amelia Sargisson, Alexander Ariate in The Importance of Being Earnest, Citadel Theatre., Photo by Nanc Price

One of the great delights of the production is the way there are hints, especially when she’s crossed, that Amelia Sargassin’s utterly charming but flinty Gwendolyn (“I am never wrong”), in a first-rate comic performance, is her mother’s daughter. They have matching daytimers, that snap shut like alligator jaws on an arm.

The scenes in a country garden crammed with roses (including Patrick Beagan’s lighting and two women who look enchanting in their frocks), are great fun. The worldly sophisticate Gwendolyn discovers to her dismay that her fiancé Ernest has an “excessively pretty” 18-year-old ward. In a matching performance Cecily (delightful Helen Belay), the country “innocent” brought up on a steady diet of romantic novels, strikes poses, writes lurid fictional entries in her diary, bats her eyes — and when a rival for Ernest arrives, rises to the occasion with impressive steel.

The fractious relationship between Jack and Algernon, the former with top notes of exasperation and the latter with a certain mischievous insouciance, is convincingly supple. And they surf the cadences of Wilde’s epigrammatic wit in very different ways, which irritates both of them.

In the country scenes, the ‘50s leave their mark on the production in a more relaxed, less decorous, physicality. Characters fling themselves onto settees. Lady Bracknell’s arrival leaves both couples either prone or crawling. Victorians would gasp.

Davina Stewart, Helen Belay, Julien Arnold in The Importance of Being Earnest, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

As the rural cleric Canon Chasuble, Julien Arnold is droll, expansively generous in his theological references and embrace; he provides his own footnotes as he delicately approaches Miss Prism. As Cecily’s prim governess, Davina Stewart has an unusually fluttery and slightly addled take on a character who is more often formidably drab. She’s amusing (especially since her auburn hair is set like two Brillo pads on the either side of her head). Clearly Miss Prism is a novelist manqué, who’s been waiting to be swept off her feet rather than just doling out German grammar on a Draconian quota system.

The play is an amazing comic construction. And the pleasures of a production in which the characters are so attentive to each other are manifold, a treat of a way to start the season.

REVIEW

The Importance of Being Earnest

Theatre: Citadel

Written by: Oscar Wilde

Directed by: Jackie Maxwell

Starring: Nadien Chu, Alexander Ariate, Jeff Lillico, Helen Belay, Amelia Sargisson, Julien Arnold, Davina Stewart, Doug Mertz

Running: through Oct. 15

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

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‘Celebrate amazingness!’ The Play’s The Thing has 20 Edmonton stage companies do Hamlet

Posted on September 27, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Talk about a hold on the collective consciousness. For 400-plus years the world has been wondering, and arguing, analyzing and thinking about Hamlet, the most celebrated and mysterious of plays by history’s most celebrated and mysterious playwright.

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It’s been four centuries of wildly divergent interpretations (face it, being dead hasn’t slowed Shakespeare down much). But the production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that happens over two nights Oct. 7 and 8 on the Westbury stage under the Theatre Yes flag, will be like no other the world has ever seen. By definition.

The Play’s The Thing is the bright idea of Theatre Yes, and the calling card of its two new co-artistic directors Ruth Alexander and Max Rubin,. They invited 20 different Edmonton stage companies, of every proclivity, size and aesthetic, to perform one scene each from Hamlet in their own signature house style. Saturday night, 10 companies do Hamlet Act I scene i to Act III scene iii. Sunday night, 10 companies carry Hamlet forward Act III scene iv to the big finale of Act 5 scene ii.

Really, haven’t you always secretly wondered what a Mile Zero or Good Women Dance Hamlet would look like? Or what the House of Hush Burlesque take would be? What if Teatro Live! did Hamlet? How would the sketch comedy trio Girl Brain dig in? Or the neo-bouffon collective Batrabbit?

When Theatre Yes put the call out to the theatre community, they weren’t sure what to expect. Alexander and Rubin, relative newcomers to the scene here who emigrated from Britain seven years ago with their own company (Lodestar) and a zest for experimentation, were amazed and delighted by the response. Within a week 20 Edmonton performance companies had said Yes. The only No they heard was from Punctuate! Theatre, and only because they’re on tour (with First Métis Man of Odesa).

“Edmonton is quite the theatre town,” says Rubin in admiration. “There’s so much going on.” In Liverpool, where Lodestar did site-inventive Shakespeare among other off-centre ventures, casting about for 20 companies to go on a theatre adventure “would have been a real struggle,” says Alexander. “There’s not nearly the volume or breadth….”

The raison d’être of The Play’s The Thing, in this post-pandemic out-of-joint time when theatres are hoping to get audiences back through the doors full strength, is “to show us what we’ve got!” As Rubin puts it, “we need to create something for everybody to celebrate the amazingness of the theatre scene here…. So we hope it does!”

When Theatre Yes was casting about for new artistic leadership (after the departure of Heather Inglis for Workshop West), the couple, who’ve now retired Lodestar, couldn’t believe how perfectly it aligned with their own theatre profile and proclivities. “It’s exactly what we’ve done for that last 15 years!” says Rubin. “Innovation was in the Theatre Yes mandate. And that’s us: we’ve taken great delight in experimenting, in making things that are new to us, and to other people. That unknown-ness is really exciting to both of us.” The Play’s The Thing is built on that very principle of unknown-ness.

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

Why Hamlet? “It’s the most iconic play in the world.” And not only does everyone have their own idea about what it is, it’s a play that seems always to speak to the moment. And there’s this: it’s nice and big, Shakespeare’s longest, a size large 20-scene play, “pretty capacious with a great big range of characters.” Some of the scenes are huge, others fleeting. “I can’t wait to see what people do with them, how many people they use, what their approach will be.”

“There’s a real sense of ‘we’re in this together’:  the audience and the cast are discovering the whole play together” for the first time. In this, it follows the original practice at Shakespeare’s Globe, says Rubin, where the first nights of plays were more expensive than subsequent performances — “because no one knew what was going to happen.”

The artistic spectrum from the companies who stepped up to do Hamlet is unexpected, and fascinating. There are established text-based theatres like Shadow, Northern Light, Workshop West, and L’UniThéâtre. Catalyst, which specializes in marrying bold theatricality, music, and poetic text, will do a scene. There’s an emerging artist collective, Ready Go Theatre, and an indie company that seeks out the off-centre in musical theatre, the Plain Janes. There are artists of the improv persuasion (Rapid Fire Theatre). There’s drag (Guys in Disguise), burlesque (House of Hush), sketch comedy (Girl Brain), and dance (Mile Zero and Good Women Dance). And there are even theatres that specialize in matters Shakespearean: the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, Thou Art Here Theatre, and Theatre Prospero. You can see the full list on the Theatre Yes website.

What will happen, scene by scene? What sort of Hamlet will it all add up to? That, my friends, is a mystery, not least to Rubin and Alexander. “We have no idea!” says the former happily. “And we can’t wait to see. No one will know till it happens. And that’s the joy of it!” Says Alexander, “all the companies are under strict instructions not to tell us anything.” And between-company collaboration is absolutely verboten, too. “They have to keep everything secret, and they’re finding it hard apparently,” she laughs.

Theatre Yes gave every company $1,000. The only stipulation in spending it is that “every Equity member they use in their scene has to be paid (the required) amount. “For considerations of space”  the maximum cast size is 10.  “What’s important to us is that their company ethos and style is foregrounded…. We wanted people to go crazy with their signature style, for them to show everybody what’s at their core. The original text of Hamlet is less important than that.”

You won’t get lost. The sketch comedy troupe Marv N’ Berry hosts, and introduces the scenes. There are graphic prompts to the story. And “all the Hamlets have to wear black, and no one else can.”

The Play’s The Thing is a celebration of “our community of artists,” says Rubin, “all focussed on the same goal, to raise as much money as we can for a really good cause.” All proceeds go to the Food Bank.

“It cross-pollinates and re-vitalizes audiences between companies,” hopes Alexander. “We’ll all benefit from that…. And it shows Edmontonians what they have here in the city.”

It’s “hi community! We’re here and we’re ready to work and collaborate!”

[The Theatre Yes adventure continues. Next spring (April 11 to 21), look for a production of the gruesome, disturbing Martin McDonagh play The Pillowman in the Pendennis Building on Jasper Ave. downtown.]

PREVIEW

The Play’s The Thing

Theatre: Theatre Yes

Directed by and starring: 20 Edmonton performance companies each doing a scene from Hamlet

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

Running: Oct. 7 and 8

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca, theatreyes.com

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A beautiful day in the neighbourhood: Laurel Canyon and the ‘California Sound’ in Rock The Canyon at the Mayfield

Posted on September 25, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Andrea House, Brad Wiebe, Pamela Gordon in Musicians Gone Wild: Rock The Canyon, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

When the poet Joni Mitchell referred in song to “pouring music down the canyon,” the image attaches its mythical reverb to a real locale in a real city — and a real, remarkably expansive five-year period in the history of popular music.

It’s Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, in an epochal five-year span in the late 60s early ‘70s. Capturing in its music and intricate iconic sound that place, that time, and the mysterious visceral attraction of music (and musicians to each other) is the raison d’être of Musicians Gone Wild: Rock The Canyon. The season-opener at the Mayfield, a theatre with a particular strength in first-rate bands and stylish musical captures, launches a proposed to-be-continued series celebrating seminal eras in pop culture history.

Rock the Canyon traces a tangled genealogy of hit songs, bands, generations of artists back to an idyllic sort of “hippie haven” (as the narration has it), in a magical ‘day for a daydream’. Musicians who’d been poor in the Village in New York (and left unlikely places in Canada) began California dreamin’. And by dint of a mysterious magnetism, they found themselves in Laurel Canyon, where the leaves weren’t brown, the sun shone and the rent was do-able. Where they smoked each other’s weed, ate out of each other’s fridges, slept with each other, and inspired each other to make music.

Designer Narda McCarroll creates a bi-level ‘sweet dream’ of aquas, pinks, paper lanterns, plants with green leaves. Ah, and the proverbial couch from which a generation of folkies arose, reinvented themselves as folk-rock stars — and formed and re-formed themselves as couples and in bands. It’s a fantasy theatre world bathed in Jillian White’s rosy lighting.

There have, of course, been books and documentaries before now about Laurel Canyon in that halcyon period. Rock The Canyon co-creators Tracey Power and Van Wilmott have assembled a terrific cast of 10 musician-performers and set about capturing it in music. The Eve in this Eden seems to be a Mama Cass figure (Andrea House), assisted by a Michelle Phillips figure (Pamela Gordon). They, along with Brad Wiebe, riff narratively on the poetic attractions of a place where you can ‘go where you wanna go, do what you wanna do’, and a sound quintessentially related to a certain guitar, the Rickenbacker 12-string.   

The show opens with California Dreamin’ and Mr. Tambourine Man, borrowed from Bob Dylan and turned into a pop hit by The Byrds. And the more-than-ample song list is a whole musical landscape of memorable mood-enhancing memory-triggering songs you know, beautifully delivered — even if you (like me) don’t know the exact chronology of Crosby, Stills, Nash and sometimes Young. Who was sleeping with whom is even more complicated; let’s just say Laurel Canyon didn’t need a Welcome Wagon. The show has an easy, pleasant way of alighting on the songs created from shacking up, then splitting up.

In Laurel Canyon, and the Troubadour (the L.A. club where everyone showed up and performed) the show has a blue-chip entry card into a remarkable collection of hit songs from The Mamas and Papas, The Byrds, The Lovin’ Spoonful, Buffalo Springfield, The Doors, the Turtles, then Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills and Nash, Neil Young, James Taylor, Carly Simon. Even the Beach Boys; a visitation by Brian Wilson occasions Good Vibrations, in all its orchestral and choral complications, beautifully delivered by the cast.

The Monkees, manufactured for a TV show, were in the ‘hood. So was Carole King. The fascinating eccentric Frank Zappa moved in, too. The Eagles and Jackson Browne were there. Brad Wiebe does a lovely version of Desperado.

Mark Sterling and Harley Symington, Rock The Canyon, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

‘60s activism is invoked, though in curiously elliptical ways, by the Laurel Canyon crowd. Joni Mitchell didn’t actually go to Woodstock, though her song about it is a memorable generational anthem. Stephen Stills’ For What It’s Worth, inspired by the Sunset Strip so-called “riots,” has a certain observational detachment: “something’s happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear.” Mark Sterling’s rendition of the Neil Young angry Kent State ode Ohio, in a guitar duet with Harley Symington, is memorable too.    

Power’s production wisely isn’t about impersonating the name players. But the forces under Wilmott’s musical direction are unerring, as you’ll hear, in nailing a range of styles, most involving complex harmonies. Andrea House, a singer of amazing versatility, has a wonderful way with the supple colours and strange lyricism of Joni Mitchell, including Carey from the Blue album. Pamela Gordon’s version of the Carly Simon song You’re So Vain, is a killer; ditto her version of Linda Ronstadt’s great cover You’re No Good.

Lisa MacDougall in Rock The Canyon, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

It’s a multi-talented cast, who move seamlessly through the song list. John Banister, who brings his native Brit cadences to Graham Nash songs (including Our House), sings and plays a whole variety of instruments, including keyboards, trumpet and violin. Harley Symingston plays a whole variety of guitars, including the fateful “Ricky 12”. Perhaps the most unusual voice in the cast, a smoky earthy mezzo, belongs to Lisa MacDougall, a pianist of rare skill. And the sound is impeccable, by now a Mayfield signature.

Come to that, Happy Together might be one of the cultural anthems of the production. Narrative interpolations like “we felt we were on top of the world” or Joni’s “I thrive on change” or “for me, Laurel Canyon was like the elixir of life” pale in comparison to the song lyrics. It’s hard to know how to fashion a finale from such a rich pageant of songs. But commentary about the effect of music on the human psyche might not, in the end, be the way to go. Still, the narrative bits and assorted choreographic accompaniments do stick the songs together, and fashion a chronological genealogy of sorts.

Laurel Canyon, the narration tells us, “gave us community and freedom…. But it was always about the music.” And so is this music-rich highly enjoyable evening.

REVIEW

Musicians Gone Wild: Rock The Canyon

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Created by: Tracey Power and Van Wilmott

Directed by: Tracey Power

Starring: John Banister, Andrea House, Pamela Gordon, Steve Hoy, Paul Lamoureux, Lisa MacDougall, Mark Sterling, Derek Stremel, Harley Symington, Brad Wiebe

Running: through Nov. 5

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca

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‘A new bounce in its step’: The Importance of Being Earnest at the Citadel relocates to the ’50s. A preview

Posted on September 21, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Nadien Chu, Alexander Ariate, Jeff Lillico, Helen Belay, Amelia Sargisson, Davina Stewart, Julien Arnold in The Importance of Being Earnest, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The last time the distinguished director Jackie Maxwell was in town — working at the Citadel for the first time, amazingly, in 2018 — she brought to the stage a darkly funny, disturbing group portrait of three generations of disappointed people in one family. The play was the Canadian premiere of Stephen Karam’s 2015 Tony winner The Humans.

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Five years later, it’s another first (also amazingly) for Maxwell, the former artistic director of the Shaw Festival. The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s high-Victorian comic masterpiece of 1895, is positioned right smack in the original festival mandate of plays of Shaw and his contemporaries. But Maxwell’s production of Earnest, which goes into previews Saturday night to launch the new Citadel season, is, to her delight, the first time she’s directed the sparkler — a veritable repository of paradoxical wit that’s been called the most perfectly constructed comedy in English language theatre.

The importance of Being Earnest was in the lineup in Maxwell’s first year at Shaw, in her 2002 to 2016 tenure there. But she asked her predecessor Christopher Newton to direct it. “And he did do a lovely production!”

“We did two or three more Wildes (including An Ideal Husband) under my watch. But not this one.” So she found Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran’s invitation irresistible: “I’m loving giving it a whirl, totally up for it, especially when Daryl said it’d be on the Maclab thrust stage, oh yeah!”  Staging The Importance of Being Earnest on a thrust, where we surround the action and nothing can be hidden, comes with its own challenges, to be sure. But Maxwell finds those spaces “more conversational.”

And she’s taken the bold initiative of relocating Earnest from its original setting into … the 1950s. Hang on, more of this in a moment.

director Jackie Maxwell. Photo supplied.

“I do like theatre that’s a bit smarty-pants,” says Maxwell of the play, subtitled “a trivial play for serious people. “And this is full of smart, funny people.” People like high-society bachelors Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing, who for romantic motives (named Cecily and Gwendolyn) scramble, ever more preposterously, to keep up the pretence of being a man named Ernest.

The hilarity of The Importance of Being Earnest couldn’t be more different from the dark, morbid comedy of the other Maxwell production running at the moment. Halted by COVID in 2020 two weeks into rehearsal and now, finally, onstage at the Shaw Festival, The Playboy of the Western World by the Irish playwright J.M. Synge is set in motion when the title character walks into a bar on the wild west coast of the Emerald Isle. He announces that he’s killed his father, and becomes an instant star in the village.

“Dark but funny,” says Maxwell, who loves the play. Its premiere in 1907 caused riots (it was deemed an affront to the Irish character) and the Dublin police had to be called in. Needless to say this hasn’t happened in Niagara-on-the-Lake. For one thing, she thinks, “people’s sensibilities have been shifted” by our exposure to the plays and films of Martin McDonagh (most recently The Banshees of Inisherin). Synge is “not as crazily violent” as his contemporary dark comedy heir, to be sure. But “there’s an underlying violence, and audiences have become a little more accustomed to it.”

Has Maxwell unearthed a hitherto undiscovered vein of darkness in Earnest? She laughs. “I’m not pushing to go down to a darker place. Wilde wanted to write a sock-‘em sold-out comedy. And he did!… And yet it’s sophisticated too. The laughs are earned; they’re built beautifully. The characters are funny but they have a core to them.”

“So there may not be a darkness in it, but there is a base for it,” says Maxwell, whose long and illustrious theatre career began as a little kid in her native Belfast (which retains a very light lyrical touch-down on her cadences). “The people come from somewhere. They have connections and all of them are hiding things” — from the crisp governess Miss Prism to the redoubtable social dragon Lady Bracknell, down to the young debonair layabouts with the Ernest alter-egos.   

The characters “are smart and interesting people who’ve … gotten themselves into scrapes, and have to decide how they going to deal with them, what they really want…. They’re leading double lives.” As Maxwell points out, the cruellest irony of the play’s history is that the glittering opening night triumph of Wilde’s most popular hit was followed, shortly thereafter, by his being hauled up for leading a double life himself. Having launched an ill-fated libel suit, he was tried for homosexuality and convicted of “gross indecency.”

Part of the fun of “a trivial comedy for serious people” is the running commentary on money, status, class, social obligations, education, smoking, manners, morals, marriage, cucumber sandwiches, delivered, hilariously, by earnest people who are inadvertent satirists of their world. They’re led by the formidable Lady Bracknell, a social realist of adamantine views on respectability. “There’s meat on the bones,” as Maxwell puts it. “They have to look fabulous, but it’s not just a total ‘put them in pretty dresses’.”   

Speaking as we are of the frocks, “the couture of the 1950s,” as Maxwell says, “is one of the most glamorous of eras…. The people have to be recognizably fashionable,” as fashionable as they were in  1895. And the play needs the reality of being in- or out of fashion to work. When Maxwell announced her intention to pry the play out of its period setting, that suggestion of the ‘50s came from the designer Michael Gianfrancesco. “So much has happened of course between 1895 and 1955.” says Maxwell. “But it’s only in the ‘60s or ‘70s that politics would wrench things around a lot more.” In the ‘50s the class system still held sway.” When I read the play in that light, I thought this could really be fun!” She reports that “actors swooned when they saw the costumes!”

As part of her research, Maxwell says she immediately re-watched the first two seasons of The Crown. “You know, those parties with Princess Margaret….”

She thinks the distinctive qualities of the ’50s “have allowed us to stay very true (to the original)…. I can’t tell you how little we had to change the text.” The set pieces on the Maclab stage are “quite Edwardian…. in the ‘50s people still lived in those beautiful houses in fashionable such-and-such Square. A foot in each era.”

“I’ve really tried to see what we would lose by moving the play to the 1950s. And there was so little I saw as impediments…. The last thing I would ever want do is to take away from the core of the play.”

“Everybody working on it is enjoying the sense of really making sure that the way we present the world of the play is as rich and clear, as vivid and as right for the play as it would be doing it in the original.”

“I just think it’ll have a new bounce in its step.”

PREVIEW

The Importance of Being Earnest

Theatre: Citadel

Written by: Oscar Wilde

Directed by: Jackie Maxwell

Starring: Nadien Chu, Alexander Ariate, Jeff Lillico, Helen Belay, Amelia Sargisson, Julien Arnold, Davina Stewart, Doug Mertz

Running: Saturday through Oct. 15

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

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We’ve lost a giant: celebrating the life of Thomas Peacocke, the small-town kid who changed Canadian theatre

Posted on September 18, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Thomas Peacocke as Père Athol Murray in the 1981 film The Hounds of Notre Dame. Photo supplied by TW Peacocke.

Last fall, theatre here and across the country sustained a huge blow with the passing ot Tom Peacocke at 89. It still seems hard to believe. In him the much diluted term “legacy” is restored to its full lustre and strength, in his profound influence on Canadian theatre and generations of its working artists. It’s the moment to acknowledge gratitude for the inspiration: a celebration of his life happens Saturday at the U of A’s Timms Centre for the Arts. In Tom’s honour, I’m re-posting my 12thnight tribute, which ran Nov. 23, 2022.   

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A giant is gone. 

With the passing of Thomas Peacocke last week at 89, we’ve lost at one go an actor/director/teacher/mentor/administrator/advocate who has played a leading, vivid role in building and shaping theatre here in this theatre town and across the country. Making it better, and kicking its butt when it fell short.  

Thomas Peacocke

Larger-than-life in personality, fierce and fearless, loyal and challenging in equal measure, Peacocke didn’t tiptoe through the world. The rumble of his footsteps onstage and off- could be felt everywhere in Canadian theatre. And that distinctive bark-laugh of his has echoed through the years too.

There’s a subtext in the multitude of Peacocke tributes that have flowed our way from east and west: the suspension of disbelief hasn’t come easy. I guess we all assumed Tom was immortal. And in that Canadian theatre is full of working professionals — actors, directors, theatre founders and artistic directors and, hey, the odd critic — who’ve been inspired by him to up their game, that’s not entirely far-fetched. 

The ripples go beyond theatre, of course, from the artist and the mentor to manifold arts initiatives that have a Peacocke hand in them, the countless committees, panels, juries, and boards on which he sat, from the Alberta Motion Picture Development Corporation to the National Theatre School, the National Screen Institute to the Neighbourhood Playhouse School in New York City.

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There are improbabilities — and a play, a Canuck Our Town perhaps — in the story of the prairie kid from Barons, AB (population then and now 365). He grew up in a two-room shack with his dad, the town telephone’s switchboard whose headquarters was the back room. Maybe there’s a segue to theatre — to Willy Loman, Big Daddy, and Père Athol Murray — in that back story, a visceral connection to the real world that gave dimensional heft to his performances on stage and screen. 

Thomas Peacocke as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman at the Vancouver Playhouse. Photo supplied by TW Peacocke.

Peacocke’s sons Chris and TW Peacocke (the former a retired school principal and the latter a Toronto-based TV and film director) remember their dad saying that “the gossip he’d overheard was the reason he got involved in theatre in the first place.” And they figure he wasn’t entirely joking. 

First he got a U of A education degree and taught drama at Vic (the future Edmonton arts high school) in the late ‘50s. Then he got a master’s degree and assistant professor teaching gig at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. It was another Peacock (this one without an ‘e’), Gordon Peacock, who lured him back across the border in the early ‘60s to teach acting —  and to fashion the country’s first Bachelor of Fine Arts professional actor training program — in the U of A’s new drama department. Quickly, the U of A became one of Canada’s top theatre schools. And Peacocke was head of drama at the Banff School of Fine Arts in the ‘70s, too. 

He was a builder, says U of A drama professor Jan Selman, like him a sometime department chair and one of Peacocke’s MFA directing students.“He built it, led it, protected it,” she says of the U of A’s influential acting program. “And Tom never blew his own horn about it, endlessly advocating, getting scholarships, teaching, supporting, mentoring … for five decades of actors. He was hugely important. Can you tell? I’m a fan!”

Thomas Peacocke as Big Daddy in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, 1966. Photo supplied by TW Peacocke.

This is the story of a small-town kid who arrived in the big city — and changed it. There’s a veritable history of Edmonton theatre written in the 11 pages of Peacocke’s crammed resumé. A recurring theme, as Chris points out, was his dad’s efforts to integrate the university and the professional arts community. 

In the late ‘50s and ‘60s, theatre here was a  town-and-gown affair, a mixture of students, amateurs, professionals, in shows at Studio Theatre, Torches Theatre (the U of A’s outdoor summer courtyard theatre headed by Peacocke), Walterdale, the Citadel.… And they were all family chez Peacocke, as TW and Chris describe the expansive household where they and their sister Jill grew up. 

Thomas Peacocke as Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, 1960. Photo supplied by TW Peacocke.

The hospitality was both artistic and domestic. “There were always actors hanging around,” says TW, remembering “fun, late-night piss-ups” and his dad’s “legendary omelette parties.” And “at the end of every production, there’d be a big meal, and mom cooked….. As little kids we knew all the students in all the classes.”

The young Peacockes got enlisted. “I was in The Trojan Women,” says Chris of his single-digit-age self. His bro was in Antigone. Jill was in Thieves’ Carnival. Later TW would gravitate toward film. “Dad helped me make a movie when I was 10. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Chris was Dr. Jekyll; my best friend was Mr. Hyde; my eight-year-old cousin played a whore.” Chris became an educator, and carried the Peacocke sense of priorities, “the importance of fine arts,” into every school where he was a teacher or principal.

The Peacockes presided over an all-ages post-show late-night salon of sorts. Actors everywhere, from every cast in town. “And our friends loved coming over, too; mom and dad engaged them in conversation.” But “you knew you were up against the real thing,” says TW. He and Chris are amused to remember a boyhood friend playing the guitar, and their dad plying the youthful guitarist with questions. “What are you playing? Did you write it? No? No wonder. You don’t play like you mean it!” 

Playwright Wilfred Watson and director Thomas Peacocke, in rehearsal for Oh Holy Ghost, Dip Your Finger in the Blood of Canada, And Write I Love You.” at Studio Theatre, 1967. Photo supplied by TV Peacocke.

What made Peacocke the ideal mentor? “When he was working with you,” thinks Selman, “from that moment he was completely with you, 100 per cent…. It fits with being a really good actor. You felt extremely seen and heard.”

“He was both kind and fierce,” she says. “It was always always about making the work better.” That’s a thought echoed by director Stephen Heatley, a former artistic director of Theatre Network and now the chair of the UBC drama department. He was another of Peacocke’s MFA directing students. “Curmudgeonly but SO fiercely loyal!” says Heatley of his gruff mentor. “He was one of a kind. They don’t build ‘em like that any more.” 

“Tom was always challenging, but in the best possible way,” says Heatley. “He was supportive; he was always pushing me to be better. Such a huge influence on me…. I remember trying to make up a name for some ‘style’ I was proposing for a production, and him just looking at me for a moment and then saying “and what does that mean?” 

As a theatre reviewer, a line of work about which he had his doubts, I can conjure that signature Peacocke look, a bit amused, worldly, quizzical, and a lot skeptical. He wasn’t a hedger. “Liz, I read your review,” he’d say. “And I have to say that I couldn’t disagree with you more!”

Colleen Dewhurst and Thomas Peacocke in Road to Avonlea. Photo supplied by TW Peacocke.

He dismissed jargon like so much lint off a lapel. And you’d be on the spot to account for yourself. “What,” he’d say emphatically (meaning ‘what on earth?’), are you talking about?” I learned a lot from every encounter — about plays, making theatre and writing about it, the state of the culture (not to mention the dismal disrepair of the media). 

With Peacocke mentorship didn’t stop with graduation. Gerry Potter, the founder of Workshop West Theatre, calls him “one of my special teachers and mentors who always supported my learning and later my work in theatre, but was always honest enough to advise on areas that needed improvement.” Potter, like others, says he still uses what he learned from Peacocke; he’s the voice in your ear that doesn’t go away.

“He was a father figure to us,” says opera and theatre director Brian Deedrick. “I consider him my theatre dad. And I bet countless people feel that way.” And Tom’s lively, charming wife Judy, who passed away a year ago was “den mother.” Chris Peacocke laughs. “We have a lot of surrogate brothers and sisters.” 

Opinionated? Deedrick laughs. “You always knew where you stood with Tom! You always knew he’d be dead honest.” So when Deedrick ventured from theatre into directing operas, Peacocke’s was the assessment he most valued and feared. “I did a Turandot in Edmonton, and he left a phone message after the show: ‘you know, kid, that was really good’. And it meant more to me than what anybody else thought.”

Thomas Peacocke directing Francis Damberger in Saturday, Sunday, Monday at Studio Theatre. Photo supplied by Francis Damberger

“Tom was our first-year acting teacher,” says filmmaker Francis Damberger, another Peacocke student and friend. “And since I was from Tofield we used to kid around a lot about small-town Alberta.” Last year Damberger sent Tom a new screenplay he’d written. “He called me a couple of days later cussing. He thought it was really funny and powerful. He was mad because he started it reading, stopped to go to bed, then got up during the night and kept reading till late morning. So, no sleep.” 

“He had a huge influence on my life as he did with so many others,” says actor/ director/ filmmaker/ teacher Larry Reese, who was in The Hounds of Notre Dame with him. He cites “his role as as a humanitarian, mentor, teacher, father figure, and friend, who passionately went all out to inspire and help change lives….” 

Peacocke himself talked about heroism when he got up onstage in Toronto to receive a best-actor Genie Award for his charismatic star performance as Père Murray in The Hounds of Notre Dame. He was funny, people laughed, and then you can hear the silence. “ I’m playing a Canadian hero, and no one’s seen the movie,” he declared. “And that says a lot about our industry. And our country.”

Heroes step up and speak out. And so did Peacocke.  

 

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‘ClownProv’ headliners: Play The Fool is back to send in the clowns

Posted on September 17, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Isaac Kessler and Ken Hall of 2-Man No-Show, Play the Fool Festival 2023. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Two of the country’s most energetic, hyperkinetic clown stars are the headliners of this year’s eighth annual Play The Fool Festival, returning Thursday for four days.

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Toronto’s Isaac Kessler and Ken Hall, who have evidently never seen a fourth wall they didn’t want to bounce off, catapult over, or smash into a zillion pieces, have brought their “clownprov” hit 2-Man No-Show to open festivities Thursday. “And they are incredibly physical,” says Play The Fool artistic director Christine Lesiak, who can’t keep the smile out of her voice when she talks about them.

“They bridge clown and improv,” she says of the pair, who are, basically, the conceptual opposite of talking heads. “They use clown techniques to inform improv.” Their comedy cred, across a spectrum of festivals and Fringes, is blue-chip. Hall, who’s worked with Cirque du Soleil, performs regularly and teaches at The Second City; he’s a star of Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy. Kessler’s 1-Man  No-Show was the artists’ pick at the 2022 Edmonton Fringe. They’ll be onstage with Edmonton musician/composer/musical director Erik Mortimer.

They’ve brought two different formats of 2-Man No-Show. On Saturday night, Kessler and Hall debut their brand new Balls Out edition of the show. As Lesiak explains, the audience is provided with soft balls, and in response to what’s happing onstage, they’re invited to throw them. “A whole new kind of audience involvement,” as Lesiak says, laughing. “A little more hands-on than usual.”

Christine Lesiak in For Science!. Photo supplied.

An expert clown herself with a gallery of alter-egos (including Sheshells and self-help guru Aggie), Lesiak takes the sole honours in the clown/space physicist department of the comedy industry.

Which explains her hilarious hit hybrid For Science!: it applies the scientific method to a series of experiments conducted by a beaming Professor and her lab assistant (Ian Walker).

The raison d’être of Play the Fool is to showcase the species clown, in all its glorious permutations from the cerebral to the physical, the voluble to the silent — the classic red-nose innocent to the more abrasive Euro bouffon, the grotesque satirist to the playful explorer of a brave new world — and (since clowns are natural rule-breakers) every permutation of the above. The high-contrast trio in the 2023 Triple-Bill, running Friday and Saturday night, constitute a tangible seminar in clownly variety.

Terry Knickle aka Tchotchke the Gig in The Problem With Opera, Play The Fool Festival. Photo supplied.

In The Problem With Opera, the red-nosed Terry Knickle unleashes the dramatic tenor within, by creating an opera that hinges on a full-flourish operatic crisis: running out of milk. They are a trained opera singer and music teacher. And much to Lesiak’s delight, the piece, directed by Mark Vetsch (who’s created physical/clown comedy for such theatres as Thou Art Here and the Freewill Shakespeare Festival), hatched from Knickle’s Rookie Cabaret contribution at the 2022 Play the Fool.

The Radical Re-education of Generation Z, Internet Hygiene and Being AFK  is the work of the neo-bouffon troupe Batrabbit Collective., whose Fringe show Rat Academy (which has roots at Nextfest and Play the Fool) was a bona fide hit this past summer. In the multimedia piece by Abby McDougall and Dayna Lea Hoffmann, a representative of Generation Z  explains, with power point (hey, just like TED), the complexities of a life as lived in the interface between the online world and so-called reality. McDougall stars; Hoffmann directs.

The third offering of the Triple Bill, The Routine, is by Vancouver-baed mime Joylyn Secunda. “We don’t see a lot of mime,” says Lesiak, who’s an appreciator of a form as high-precision in its way as magic or sleight-of-hand. “Mime is hard!, and their work is “immaculate,” she says of Secunda.

Friday night’s Festival Spectacular Cabaret, hosted by 2-Man No-Show, includes eight five- to 10-minute pieces. “Always big fun,” says Lesiak. “And all it of is brand new work from artists in full experimental throttle. Michael Kennard, of Mump and Smoot, for example, is testing a new idea. So is Sophie May Healey, whose clown Hysteria Winthrop “is trying out a new thing with an autoharp.” Candace Job’s contribution is “a brand new mask piece.”

The traditional Saturday night Play the Fool finale is always the Rookie Cabaret, by artists trying out a new art form. “Artist-led” and mentored by Lesiak, “they always kill! That’s why it’s the finale.”

Sunday afternoon is devoted to online discussion clowning with an expert international online panel: Ingrid Hansen (SNAFU Productions),  Jacqueline Russell (Wee Witches Productions), Dayna Lea Hoffmann (Batrabbit Collective), Aitor Basauri (Spymonkey). It’s free, moderated by Jake Tkaczyk.

“Life is really heavy these days. It’s grim out there,” as Lesiak says, and we all know it. Hey, Edmonton, we have a picker-upper of a festival.

Festival headquarters is the Backstage Theatre at the Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave. Check the festival website playthefool.ca for times and tickets, and information about masking policy, which varies, show to show, from “mask friendly” (with masks required for the Backstage Theatre lobby, bar and bathrooms) and “mask required” for shows with immuno-compromised performers.

  

   

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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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