A strange and seductive vision: Undiscovered Country, a Fringe review

Posted on August 17, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Chris Bullough in Undiscovered Country, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Undiscovered Country (Chianti Yardbird Suite, Stage 7, replacing four of Neurotic Erotica’s time slots)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A man in a hat, a guitar, a vision of country (the music and the place)….

Tyler Wainwright, the “90s country rock legend” we meet in Chris Bullough’s hypnotic solo show seems to be gazing inward. What does his mind’s eye see? Does he know he’s onstage?

The opening song from Tyler Wainwright’s “forthcoming independent release” is a soliloquy of sorts, almost whispered. Apparently meandering, at a pace that lulls you into a false sense of security, it charts a course from the macro to the micro — an image of “a desert somewhere with a saloon in it” — past the piano, and the bird’s nest in it, past molecules to electrons, and “a song that will save us all.”

Undiscovered Country is what happens when you let an actor/playwright/ songwriter — an artist with a sense of outrage and a sense of humour — loose on the blighted urban landscape and a world grown toxic. You get the long shots and the close-ups, and imagery that sticks, from a character who’s grizzled and slow-talking in the classic ways in Bullough’s performance.

“Thought I’d treat myself to a new truck,” he tells us, as he recounts meeting a stranger with advice for him on that very subject. What ensues is a long, slow-moving escalation of a story — the pace is kind of mesmerizing — into a fantastical vision and an ecstatic connection with its own dark comedy about it. There’s more of Sam Shepard than Ian Tyson in Undiscovered Country.

The pace is seductive, and the tone is introspective. Till it’s not. The  songs reference the great country tropes: they start in nostalgia that sidles up to you, they tap a sense of betrayal, and they nudge them a little off-centre, in rhyme and images. “Put your moon boots on the ground now,” Slow Down tells us. “You’ve gotta let it go, turn it around….”

In a city, ours, our man finds changed, he “can hear the cracks in the concrete.” In the countryside, he rhymes “polluted and looted.” The mode is lyrical, the melody lovely, and the lyrics linger. “Hide me away in a clear-cut forest,” he sings in a country ballad. “Float me away on a river polluted.”

Strange, original, powerful.

Undiscovered Country isn’t in the printed program; it replaces four of Neurotic Erotica‘s performances at Stage 7, starting Friday at 11:30 p.m.  Check fringetheatre.ca updates for times.

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From historical footnote to new musical: Amor de Cosmos, and the race to opening night at the Fringe

Posted on August 17, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Cody Porter in Amor de Cosmos: a delusional musical, Joe Clark Productions, Edmonton Fringe. Photo cupplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

New musical theatre at the Fringe —  and there’s lots of it — has a certain wild but valiant improbability about it. So many bits and pieces, so little time. And it’s a big country.

This is the story of a one-person Fringe musical in which the sheer unlikeliness of the real-life character we meet — unlikely in life, unlikely for a musical — is matched by the sheer unlikeliness that we’d be seeing Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical in Edmonton at all, a last-minute replacement at the continent’s biggest Fringe. Composer and singer-songwriter Lindsey Walker is on the phone to tell the tale.

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Amor de Cosmos chronicles the peculiar story of the nutbar 19th century Canadian politician who became B.C.’s own personal Father of Confederation, the province’s second premier — until he slid from leftie reformer mode to the reaches of the Right, and was declared legally insane. A cautionary tale for Alberta perhaps? Amor de Cosmos (the self-appointed moniker of William Alexander Smith) was an historical footnote, till writer Richard Kemick snatched his bizarre career from Canadian history obscurity. “There’s a lot of good and a lot of bad in him,” as Walker describes the character at the heart of their musical.

Musical theatre isn’t the usual showbiz terrain for either Walker or Kemick. The former is  is a busy folk-rocker singer-songwriter. The latter is a writer of short stories, poetry, non-fiction, not (until now) plays. They’d met and hit it off  working together at WordsWorth (a Calgary writing camp for young artists). And a phone call during the pandemic sealed the deal. They did what artists in experimental mode do: they decided to take their new creation to the Fringe.

They didn’t get into the Edmonton Fringe with their musical, but they got a Toronto Fringe slot. “We did a Canada-wide casting call,” says Walker, a singer-songwriter who entered the world of musical theatre last season with ren & the wake (book by Megan Dart). “We found a young Toronto actor (Anton Gillis-Adelman) who was en route to theatre school in the U.S.” And since he was in Toronto,  writer Remick was in Rossland, B.C. and Walker and director Cody Porter were in Edmonton, rehearsals were online.

“In the end, Toronto was a satisfying experience,” Walker says,. “A tricky sell there, though, even when you get good press and good reviews (which they did).” Toronto, after all, has a lot of big summer theatre options, including the Mirvish theatres, and the Shaw and Stratford Festivals.

“I wish we could go to Edmonton,” Walker remembers saying, wistfully. “And, lo and beyond, my wish was granted!” with Fringe director Murray Utas standing in for the fairy godmother.

A last-minute Edmonton slot opened up when Ruby Rocket Returns! dropped out. By then Amor de Cosmos was at the Hamilton Fringe, which ended July 30. “The set and costumes were with Richard there. The lead actor couldn’t do Edmonton. And I was on my way out of town, getting ready for concerts on the weekend.” Ah, and Amor de Cosmos was a 90 minute musical, squeezing into a 60-minute time slot.

Cody Porter in Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical, Joe Clark Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Funny how theatre people, and not just improvisers, are apt to say ‘Yes’ instead of ‘what? you have GOT to be kidding’ to propositions from which the cautious among us would turn and run like hell. Walker said Yes to writing songs and lyrics for Kemick’s pandemic idea of a multi-character solo musical based on a bizarre 19th century politico. Then director Cody, a notable Edmonton actor who’s a different age from Gillis-Adelman, said Yes to the last-minute challenge of learning a big role that takes the lead character from early adulthood to twilight years — in a solo musical written entirely in iambic pentameter. Writer Kemick will be here to stage manage; he could hardly say No.   

And the team set about making Amor de Cosmos fit all the hour-long time slots at the Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre. Two weeks and a bit later, the musical is ready to open at the Edmonton Fringe. And Walker, who’d thought she’d be spending a relaxing August seeing shows and going to folk festivals, her natural musical habitat, has a certain sense of wonder about the whole crazy process.

“It’s been a bit of a blur. But a fun challenge to write through the voice of each character,” says Walker. “We’re telling the guy’s story, not celebrating him.”

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

    

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Stick-handling success: Kenneth Brown looks back in Life After Life After Hockey, at the Fringe

Posted on August 16, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

He couldn’t have realized it at the time. But In 1985 at the three-year-old Edmonton Fringe,  Kenneth Brown created something that would turn his life upside down (and put its stamp on Edmonton’s summer theatre extravaganza too).

The play was Life After Hockey, a lyrical ode to the mystical, quintessentially Canadian, bond between man and ice and puck. It was an instant hit. A life-changer for the young playwright/actor/director. Thirty-eight years later, Life After Life After Hockey, Brown’s new show (directed by Sean Quigley), premiering at the 42nd annual Edmonton Fringe this week, is all about that, an original theatrical reflection (complete with music by singer-songwriter Dana Wylie and guests) on remarkable success and where it leads.

In the next 17 years Brown would play Rink Rat Brown, a hockey-obsessed Canuck prairie kid more than 1,200 times. He criss-crossed the country; he played in every region, Yellowknife to Port Harvey, east to west and back again. “Every place in Canada big enough to have a theatre,” he laughs. “I exaggerate, but only slightly.” From 1986 to 1988, the show went on three different national tours — “big, $200,000 tours” — and one international tour, too. How many Canadian theatre artists star in their own work at the Helsinki Festival. On skates?

“The year we toured Europe, the (Tom Radford) film of Life After Hockey played the Fringe.” And Wayne Gretzky himself did the voiceover of the hockey god from on high, responding direct from the celestial spheres, “Dear No Backhand,” to Rink Rat’s humble fan question, “Dear 99….” This, incidentally, got me my first and only sports interview, in which the Great One expressed the view that hockey and theatre were very much alike: “it’s ‘practice practice practice’.”

After Brown himself hung up his stage (roller)skates, Life After Hockey has played four countries in three languages, in an assortment of productions. And there are still two or three productions a year. “Completely out of the blue,” as Brown says, amused, “I got an offer from New York to make Life After Baseball. Really.”

“I think of it as only tangentially about hockey,” he now thinks. “It’s really about our culture. What we remember, preserve, and adore about this country.” And as for the character himself, Brown, a National Theatre School grad, says he’d “originally thought of Rink Rat Brown as “a Commedia character.” He’d been trained in masks at the National Theatre School. “And I aimed to create the Canadian Arlecchino.”

Kenneth Brown as Rink Rat Brown in Life After Hockey. Photo supplied.

Our Arlecchino turned out to be an indelible hockey aspirant dreaming of the big time under the starry prairie sky. “My big mistake,” sighs Brown, “was to name him Kenny Rink Rat Brown…. I hate the name Kenny; I used to beat up my older brothers when they called me that. And for years afterwards, people would phone and ask for Kenny Rink Rat Brown.”

Life After Hockey in 1985 wasn’t Brown’s first encounter with the Edmonton Fringe. He’d been “an observer,” he says of “dropping in on Edmonton” in 1981 on his way back west from the National Theatre School in Montreal with his first wife Heather Redfern (a theatre artist too and now the artistic director of The Cultch in Vancouver).

He and Redfern loved what they saw. “We were in hog heaven,” he says of living in a co-op a block away from the Fringe in Old Strathcona. The Fringe was steps away. In 1983 he played guitar in a George Rideout Fringe show. In 1984, he wrote and starred in Floundering, a stage adaptation of Günter Grass’s doorstopper novel The Flounder, a measure of Fringe elasticity if ever there was one. He took Dickens, Fielding, Shakespeare in hand in original chamber adaptations. He wrote experimental solo fantasias; he wrote a trilogy of plays (Spiral Dive) that followed a young Canadian pilot through World War II. The Brown archive is four dozen-plus plays long.

A theatre-maker who, he says, “was never going to be a leading man” in Canadian theatre he says (“too short, too weird”), “the Fringe phenomenon” was an ideal playground. “It was the perfect opportunity for Edmonton (artists) who wanted to create new theatre … a definitive event really.” And that’s the spirit he carried into his job teaching in the new Grant MacEwan theatre program Tim Ryan had started.

An inspiring teacher and mentor by all accounts then and since, Brown was all about urging, by example and by pedagogy, his theatre students to create and perform their own work (Sheldon Elter’s Métis Mutt is a striking example). And there was a festival for it, in Old Strathcona. It was a striking synchronicity, and for 40 years Edmonton audiences have been the beneficiaries.

And then came the 1985 Fringe, and the hockey hit that would, on the plus side, give him a theatre career with a national profile, a theatre company (with a budget),THEATrePUBLIC, a young company spin-off (RIBBITrePUBLIC) — not to mention the chance to play shinny with Rocket Richard. But there was a price in life, as Brown addresses in Life After Life After Hockey.

“It’s about “that meteoric rise, in profile and financial fortune. And how hard it was…. I went from being a young, hopeful optimistic guy,” he says ruefully of his younger self, and the trap of success. “It was a runaway train. I wouldn’t see my daughter for weeks.…” It cost him two marriages. “And I do blame the play.”

“And all that time I kept writing Fringe plays,” says Brown. He wrote, acted, directed, dramaturged, produced at the Fringe, “sometimes as many as five and often three or four shows”  a summer for the last 40. It’s an amazing, exhausting record.

And it could be coming to a grand finale at The Answer Is Fringe. “It’s me looking backward,” says Brown cheerfully of Life After Life After Hockey. “Dana Wylie and I are doing tunes. There’s a surprise appearance by one of my ex-wives. There’s poetry by Pierrette (his life partner and a former Edmonton poet laureate Pierrette Requier). A celebration of wonderful creative people…. This is not just me mall-walking”

“I’ve always been fascinated by flying,” says Brown, as his Spiral Dive trilogy and Letters From Wartime attest.  His new “hobby” (his word), flying gliders, is drawing his attention away from 10-hour rehearsal days. There are metaphorical implications for a theatre artist. “The act of staying airborne as long as you can, there’s poetry in that,” he says.

Brown isn’t saying he won’t be back at the Fringe. But “next year: a lot more flying and a lot less learning lines.”

Life After Life After Hockey runs at the Edmonton Fringe, La Cité francophone (Stage 13) Friday through August 27. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

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The zigzag story of a Fringe artist: for Dammitammy Productions the answer to every question has been Fringe

Posted on August 16, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

SCOOBIE DOOSICAL, Dammitammy Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo by BB Collective

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Seven summers ago, Fringe audiences up for a word-of-mouth gamble (and who isn’t?) found themselves at a show smiling at characters who never took off their bathing caps, start to finish.

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The Unsyncables turned out to be a sleeper hit, a funny underdog comedy with its own kooky sense of humour. We saw a ragtag, aspirational amateur synchronized swim team up against a snobby well-heeled swim club with their own fancy pool to rehearse in. There was choreography, of course, in this off-centre theatrical ode to friendship; there was pop music.   

What we didn’t realize at the time, if I may speak for my fellow audience members, is that we were watching an original theatre talent at work, who did what musician/ composer/singer-songwriter turned playwright and director people do in this town. She gravitated to the Fringe.

The Unsyncables, Dammitammy Productions, Fringe 2016. Photo by BB Collective

That would be Rebecca Merkley. And The Unsyncables was our first sighting of her company, Dammitammy Productions. There is something quintessentially Fringe about Dammitammy (starting with its name, Merkley’s amusing penance for exhorting her high school friend Tammy,  to try harder at badminton, dammit Tammy!).

What’s followed that Fringe debut has been a non-stop series of strikingly varied theatrical experiments — musicals, plays, revues, cabarets, circus/cabarets, category-resistant entertainments — a series that even the pandemic couldn’t stop. Witness Letters to No One of 2021 (cold readings by actors from each others’ stash of the letters they didn’t send, to people who pissed them off, or wounded them, or they didn’t get a chance to say sorry to). Or a Nativity radio play (They Wanted To Do Chekhov).

Merk du Solapocalypse was looney and spontaneous showbiz free-association — old-school vaudeville, satire of stand-up comedy, circus acts that end before they start — as a way to capture the insanity of 2021, and re-connect with a shell-shocked audience it could hardly be equalled, the meta of meta.

At The Answer Is Fringe, which might well be the mantra under which Merkley operates, Dammitammy has two shows. The inspiration for SCOOBIE DOOSICAL dates from the Before Times, says Merkley of her new “musical spoof.” Spun from the wacky late-‘60s cartoon, with its teenage characters and talking Great Dane, it’s “an homage to my pandemic buddy, my dog,” she says sadly of the late Smalls. “There are a lot of Scooby Doo parodies. A lot of fan fiction. Lots of plays. But I don’t think anyone’s done a musical.…”

“I loved the cartoon. This is my brand of comedy: so dumb. I love the tackiness of it!” Merkley says. “Silly and ridiculous suits my brain.” And then she sets about exploring (or creating) depth from that springboard.

SCOOBIE DOOSICAL isn’t the first time Merkley has spun a musical from that sort of bouncing ball. Rivercity the Musical in 2017 lifted the  characters from the Archie comics, who never seem to graduate. She gave four inventive comic actors 10 characters, a classic triangle of romantic entanglements, goals, musical theatre songs from wistful ballads through patter songs, choreography.

As for Scoob et al, the cartoon itself invites “California surf music,” says Merkley. “I totally strayed from that,” she says of a score she describes as “musical theatre with a contemporary level of pop and rock…. I love Sondheim. And one song in particular, Lights By A Cat is an intentional soft rip-off of Into The Woods.” In fact, she figures that “the whole thing is a soft parody” of that Sondheim fairy tale for adults musical.

Merkley’s cast, who play “trees, squirrels and ghosts” as well as assorted humans, is led by Bella King (last seen in Teatro Live’s Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s) as Shag the dog. The characters are “real people. We nod and wink, and there are full cartoon gags, but then we leave the cartoon…. I wanted more from the characters, more depth and a back story.”

Merkley the director has been having the actors write diary entries as their characters. “And then we check in with them; it’s almost a therapy session,” she laughs. “How their day was, all that…. It’s just for us.”

Rebecca Merkley, creator and star of Jesus Teaches Us Things, Dammitammy Productions. Photo supplied.

And Jesus is back for the Fringe. In Jesus Teaches Us Things, a cross (so to speak) between stand-up, improv, and musical theatre which premiered in 2022, he’s the substitute teacher in our grade 2 class at Christian Bible Academy. And in Merkley’s exuberant, very funny performance, he’s a showbiz veteran, a charismatic big-hair old-school rocker who knows how to make an entrance (“we will we will save you!”).

The interactions with the audience are hilarious and largely improvised; Merkley is quick on the uptake. “I’m actually a shy person,” she says. “But as a character I’m so safe. So for me it’s really rewarding…. Acting is hard but it’s it’s also simple; it’s not getting in the way of (the character).”

Both SCOOBIE DOOSICAL and Jesus Teaches Us Things have roots in the hair-pin turns of Merkley’s own narrative. Theatre officially happened the moment she auditioned for a Grande Prairie community production of Oklahoma! on a friend’s nudge, and landed the character role of Ado Annie. “I’m a Dodger, I’m the funny side-kick character. Ingenue? Boring!”

She starting writing songs early (“at five, I wrote my first song in pencil crayon. Pretty cute! Embarrassing, but I still have it! And I got better.” Piano lessons didn’t take (“I’m an ear person). Guitar was a much better fit, for performing and composing. Adding stories was a natural.

There’s major gospel music content in her Creston B.C. childhood, in a Christian family near the very locale where her play Bountiful, about the polygamous Mormon fundamentalist encampment nearby, is set. The route to Edmonton and Grant MacEwan’s musical theatre program, includes bible college, a youth ministry, and a falling out with the church. So, hey, she brings a lot of background knowledge to playing a stand-up Jesus who sings Journey songs and is stuck in the ‘80s musically speaking. She credits the enhanced musical content to Christine Lesiak of Small Matters Production (For Science!).

In the show she plays with the audience in a good-natured warm-hearted way (Jesus even takes questions). Hecklers? No problem. At one late-night performance, getting static from someone drunk, she flipped a “hey, Judas, it’s been a while” at him, and the crowd roared. “It’s all about connection, community,” she says.

Which brings us to the Fringe. Merkley’s first Fringe experience was watching, she says. Then she acted in a couple of Fringe shows, Coraline the Musical and Jessy Ardern’s Harold and Vivian Entertain Guests. And now, the winner of this year’s Gerald Osborn Playwriting Award, she’s creating, producing, directing Fringe shows herself.

“For me, the Fringe has been huge. And some of the best theatre I’ve seen has been there. Theatre that doesn’t rely on big sets, big budget, that’s that’s non-pretentious…. Even if I had a lot of money, I’d be doing the Fringe.”

SCOOBIE DOOSICAL runs Aug; 19 to 26 at Walterdale Theatre, Fringe stage 4. Jesus Teaches Us Things runs Aug. 18 to 27 at La Cité Auditorium, Fringe stage 14. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

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Finding a home at the Fringe: part 2, Dead Rabbits Theatre

Posted on August 15, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Creating (way) outside the mainstream, and finding a place, a home, an audience, and inspiration in Canada at the Fringe: a story of two original pond-crossing theatre artists. Part 2: Dead Rabbits Theatre (“Tiger Lady”). 

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Before we get to the lady and the tiger, here’s a Fringe story. It hinges on one of those unpredictable moments that turn out, in retrospect, to seem prophetic and pivotal. “Listen, there is this amazing festival in Edmonton…. You must go there.”

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That’s what the Polish-born English theatre artist Kasia Zaremba-Byrne, the head of the acting program at St. Mary’s University in London, heard in 2016 from an English company that had been touring, and won awards, on the American Fringe circuit. So she started a company. And, to shorten these origin story segués even further, the London-based international touring company Dead Rabbits Theatre got themselves “a funny poster,” and set forth across the Atlantic.

The company was born at the Edmonton Fringe that year, with “the first show we ever made.” Playful, tragi-comic, theatrically ingenious, The Dragon was based on an anti-Stalinist 1943 folk tale/satire. “We didn’t know anyone,” then word got out. “ It was a fantastic experience for us. We were ecstatic!”

My Love Lies Frozen In The Ice, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied.

“We went again to Edmonton in 2017,” Zaremba-Byrne says, with  My Love Lies Frozen, created from the true story of a 19th century expedition, male of course, to the North Pole — told from the perspective of the woman they left behind at home. And again, the Dead Rabbits had a wonderful time. “We loved the volunteers; we loved speaking to people there. Everyone was really kind.”

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

COVID has been cruel, to say the least, to international touring companies. So Tiger Lady was two years in the making before its Edinburgh Fringe debut of 2022 (which came with a Fringe First citation). It’s based on the true story of a young Kentucky orphan girl in 1913. As Zaremba-Byrne describes, Mabel Stark, the world’s first female tiger-tamer, escaped through her aunt’s window at night, joined the circus, “and fell in love with a tiger.”  She discovered the story, by accident in a book, and was struck by “a wonderful life that suggests life turns on the smallest of things and how strange and unpredictable it is.”

Quirky name notwithstanding, the company began in “a quest to make theatre that connects people through play, through music, through movement, through the joy of life,” says the Dead Rabbits artistic director and founder. “And to share stories of the way of the underdog….”

Not coincidentally, “quite a few are from the woman’s perspective.” says Zaremba-Byrne, who often finds her inspiration in true stories. “True stories hold quite a lot of magic moments…. Life, as they say, is stranger than fiction.”

As a professor of acting, she’s well-connected to young talent, and keeps in touch long after they graduate, she says. “The shows are made partly from the stories, and partly from (the actors’) ownership of the characters.” The roles are custom-made. And the question “so are you the playwright?” is “complicated,” she laughs.

“It’s a collaboration. I like to say the company is the playwright…. We work a lot through play, through finding pleasure, finding fun.” And the signature Dead Rabbits mingling of dark and light, comedy and tragedy in the shows “reflects life, because life is chaotic. We try to find the play between them, to find the cares of life inside.”

Zaremba-Byrne herself “works a lot in movement” (she trained with the French theatre artist Philippe Collier). “And a lot of my work is driven by the visual, by music…. Sometimes I get enchanted….” Her husband Alex Byrne, who has a theatre company, too — the much-travelled NIE (New International Company) with offices across Europe — “sometimes helps with the writing.” Though her English is excellent and expressive, Zaremba-Byrne’s first language is Polish.

In The Dragon we saw what inventive theatre artists could do with a clothesline, ladders, sheets and atmospheric music and lighting. Ditto My Love Lies Frozen in the Ice. That kind of bare-stage theatricality, says Zaremba-Byrne, speaks to “the principle of being simple…. It’s a way of connecting with the audience,” inviting them to participate imaginatively in the storytelling.

“It’s part of the magic.” And that kind of theatrical magic is pure Fringe.

Did you see Part 1, Cameryn Moore (“muse: an experiment in storytelling and life drawing”)? It’s here.

Tiger Lady runs Friday through Aug. 27 at the Fringe (Stage 1, ATB Westbury Theatre). Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

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Finding a home outside the mainstream (at the Fringe): part 1, Cameryn Moore

Posted on August 15, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Creating (way) outside the mainstream, and finding a place, a home, an audience, and inspiration in Canada at the Fringe: a story of two original pond-crossing theatre artists. Part 1: Cameryn Moore, “muse: an experiment in storytelling and life drawing”. Part 2: Dead Rabbits Theatre, “Tiger Lady”

Cameryn Moore, muse: an experiment in storytelling and life drawing, Little Black Book Productions. Photo by Hassan Ghoncheh

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Part 1

For Cameryn Moore, life and art have a complicated mutual-support relationship. And the Fringe is its enabler.

If Moore hadn’t discovered the Fringe, in Montreal, would she still be a phone sex worker? Or a stand-up? A journalist writing ‘creative non-fiction’ or an artist’s life-drawing studio model?

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Would she ever have discovered herself as a theatre-maker, a playwright, a solo performance artist/creator with seven solo shows in her artistic inventory? Ah, or the creator of muse: an experiment in storytelling and life drawing? That unique artistic “event” (as she describes it) invites audiences to use (or bring) art supplies, draw her in a variety of nude poses, watch and listen, ask her questions. It’s at the the Edmonton Fringe starting Aug. 19 (Stage 5, Acacia Hall).

Cameryn Moore, “muse,” Little Black Book Productions. Photo by Hassan Ghoncheh.

“Ah, people are writing, and doing, their own plays!” That was the sense of possibility Moore unlocked in 2009, “my entry point to solo performing.” True, she’d taken dance in college in California, and as a director and choreographer started a dance company for plus-size dancers in San Francisco and Boston. “Everything after that was me saying ‘I want to try this’ or ‘I’ve heard abut this’ or ‘I went to the Fringe and saw this!’.”

Life provided the raw material, as Moore (an exuberant conversationalist, with one of those great multi-angled showbiz voices) describes. “In 2008, when everything crashed, I got laid off from my job as a marketing assistant in a (Boston) publishing house, and a friend said ‘you should do phone sex; you have a great voice.” So she did, and thought: “wow, there’s so much more to this than anyone knows…. Performance seemed like the natural way for me to explore and share it.” Six months into that seven-year gig (“grocery money, and my only income from 2009 to 2016)”), she’d turned those real-life experiences into Phone Whore, which toured the Canadian fringe circuit. In the show “I got four phone calls from clients, pretty challenging calls, and the audience eavesdropped on them.”

“Traditional theatre” Phone Whore may be, at least in structure, as Moore argues. “Nonetheless it engages with the audience in a very active sort of way … It asks them to sit with what’s happening onstage, a one-hour slice of life, and have their own feelings.”  By all accounts, audiences and critics found it a powerful, raw, mind-blowing experience.

Nerdfucker, too, a tense and surprising heartbreaker of a play which came to the Edmonton Fringe in 2016, engaged with its audiences in an unusually direct, active way. Moore doesn’t seem to be a four-wall kind of theatre-builder. It opened in a striking way, with the half-dressed character startled to see us, as she waits with us for her “genius” lover to arrive. And we realize she’s been cruelly used by him for a new gaming concept, which makes us complicit.

“Nerdfucker and Phone Whore are my best plays so far, traditional format, definitely with the most impact. And they’re the ones I love the most,” declares Moore who has taken her plays, including Slut Revolution, to the Edinburgh Fringe, and won “risk-taker” awards there.

Moore moved to Europe in 2017 from the U.S. when Trump was elected, and has continued her work (as noted puckishly on her website) of “global sexification and outreach.” And since moving to the U.K. didn’t work out (“they’re as xenophobic as any other country; they just have a nicer accent”), she picked Berlin because it was “more friendly to English-speaking immigrants.”

On the Fringe circuit and in Europe she subsidizes her theatre income (“who makes money doing theatre?”) by doing Smut Slams, an open-mic experience in which people are invited to come up onstage and tell their own sex stories.

 “A performer/performance artist is quite different than a playwright/performer,” Moore says. In muse she is neither. “And I am not a (visual) artist. Nope. No visual arts experience at all. My only experience is as a live model. I started when I moved to Berlin “and needed grocery money, very motivating.”

Muse: an experiment in storytelling and life drawing, Cameryn Moore. Photo supplied

Muse isn’t a play. It’s not scripted. And Moore doesn’t play a character. Since the audience can ask her questions (or not) as they draw her (or not), the shows are more like conversations, and they’re not repeatable. “The only thing that happens the same is the same time marks for the poses: five poses for one minute each, three poses for three minutes each, and a six, seven, eight and 10 minute pose.” And Moore says “I have stories in my (laughter) non-existent pocket I tell to kickstart the conversation…. I talk a bit; it’s stream-of-consciousness.”

“I will say, that muse, arguably, is the fringiest show on the Fringe.”

And in the end, “audiences walk out so surprised — with themselves,” Moore says happily. “My production crew in Winnipeg started listening to what people said when they came in, a non-scientific sample.” When they’re invited to take drawing materials and asked ‘would you like to draw today?’, “80 per cent of them will say something like ‘I’m no good at this. I’ve never done this, I haven’t done this since second grade’. They talk down on themselves….”

“When they leave they talk about how they feel. People feel differently about themselves. It’s just beautiful.” And this, Moore says, “is the over-arching sense of what I do: creating safe places for people to explore something, to be vulnerable. We are told that telling stories is for performers and making art is for artists. I’m making space where that’s not so. And the results are joyful and fascinating and wonderful.”

And in its way that gets to the heart of the Fringe.

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More to think about at The Answer Is Fringe

Posted on August 15, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Edgar Perry, The Coldharts, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Answer Is Fringe, as Edmonton has known for 42 summers, even before we knew we knew that. Here are some further thoughts on what you might see at The Answer Is Fringe. Don’t be daunted by the wealth of possibilities; be curious!

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Hold that thought (or how I got haunted, and came back for more): You know the Fringe has its own special reverb and continuity when you see instalments of a trilogy, years apart. With Edgar Perry, Brooklyn’s duo Coldharts, specialists in American gothic, return to their continuing fascination with the eerie stories and haunted life of horror meister Edgar Allan Poe. The tie that binds the three shivery plays is William Wilson, Poe’s unnerving story of a boy pursued by his own doppelganger.

Says Katie Hartman, “ten years ago when we set out to make the first piece, Edgar Allan, both Nick (Ryan, her Coldharts partner) and I wanted to play Edgar Allan Poe. Our solution was to take that idea and run with it: we had the opportunity to create a world in which there are two Edgar’s on stage, embodying different aspects of the historical character’s personalities, which were also heightened aspects of our own personalities.

Each instalment, Edgar Allan, Eddie Poe, and now Edgar Perry, “is  structured around a distinct period of Poe’s life when he was attending an educational institution. Each piece also highlights a different aspect of his canon…. In Edgar Perry, the setting is Fort Moultrie where Poe was first an enlisted soldier and then at West Point Military Academy where Poe’s studies in engineering and mathematics would greatly influence his works of proto-science fiction.”

He shoots he scores: In Life After Life After Hockey, the playwright/ actor/ director/ producer Kenneth Brown, the seminal artist who’s been part of 40 Fringes and the careers of generations of theatre artists, loops us back to his definitive prairie hockey play, a bona fide Canadian theatre hit, and the indelible character Rinkrat Brown — and the price tag in life (and love) of success. There’s music, too, played live by singer-songwriter Dana Wylie, and special guests. 12thnight had the fun to talking to him, as you’ll see in an upcoming 12thnight post.

Emerging playwright/ all-star veteran cast (a natural Fringe pairing): Jezec Sanders’s new thriller The Cabin on Bald Dune happens in an isolated cabin on an island (send a shiver?), where two women have repaired to  plan a business venture. April Banigan directs Kristi Hansen and Jenny McKillop in the DogHeart Theatre production.

All-star veteran playwright/ young cast (also a natural Fringe pairing): The Canadian playwright is Stephen Massicotte of Mary’s Wedding and The Emperor of Atlantis fame. The play is his much-awarded 2010 The Clockmaker, never staged (I think) in Edmonton till now. It starts with the Kafka-esque proposition that the mild-mannered title character is brought in for a crime he has committed — possibly in the future. The young indie company Shattered Glass Theatre is producing it. Sarah Van Tassell directs.

Multi-Vs, Honor, Affair of Honor and Magpie Theatre. Photp supplied

En garde in the multiverse: Affair of Honor, a Vancouver company devoted to “stunning fight and movement-based theatre,” affords you a rare (“very rare,” says producer April Killins) view of all-female stage combat in theatre. In Multi-Vs (a collaboration with Magpie Theatre), two strangers Nathania Bernabe and Jackie T. Hanlin are hurling themselves through time and space, (and an “infinite slew of universes.”

Ay Candela, Cuban Movements Dance Academy. Photo supplied.

Set in motion: In Ay Candela, the ever-adventurous Cuban Movements Dance Academy, whose dance-theatre productions are a fusion of powerful, dramatic movement and Cuban cultural history (Power of the Drum),  reimagines Chicago —the 1926 Maurine Dallas Watkins play that Kander and Ebb adapted for their musical — in dance, against the backdrop of tense racial relations in pre-revolutionary Havana.

From the top, a-five, six, seven, eight: The repertoire has its fair share of aspirational musicals, about stage-struck ingenues dreaming for the big time. The Noteworthy Life of Howard Barnes takes the opposite tack. Howard is an average bloke who discovers, to his dismay, that his life has become a musical. How can he exit stage left? And so begins Howard’s quest through the musical theatre repertoire. The Canadian premiere of this affectionate send-up of the American musical arrives at the Fringe courtesy of an Edmonton indie company, Light in the Dark Theatre.

Rebecca Merkley, creator and star of Jesus Teaches Us Things, Dammitammy Productions. Photo supplied.

Jesus H! He’s back, and you can forget those soulful gazes into the mid-distance. This is showbiz baby. Jesus headlines not one but two Fringe shows this year. In Randy Brososky’s Sweet Jesus – The Gospel According to Felt, he’s returned as a googly-eyed wiseacre puppet from beyond the grave to check up on the world. In Rebecca Merkley’s Jesus Teaches Us Things, which premiered last year, put your hands together for the big-hair dude who’s the Sunday school substitute teacher at the Christian Bible Assembly, rockin’ out to Journey and Queen.

Saluting the next generation: The cast of NextGen Theatre’s revival tof he wrenching 1998 Trevor Schmidt play Tales From The Hospital includes two of the original actors (Elizabeth Allison-Jorde and Linda Grass), along with two young artists (Janelle Jorde and Sophie May Healey). And over at Theatre Network, the young artists of the Summer Academy have taken Shakespeare’s prankish comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor in their youthful hands, an interesting match of ages since the original tilts towards middle-aged married people and a randy aging knight. The inspiration of Ellen Chorley’s cast is to imagine Falstaff as a faded ex-boy band star angling for a spot on a Merry Wives tour.

For annotated show listings, schedules, and tickets check fringetheatre.ca

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A hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy: what to see at The Answer Is Fringe

Posted on August 14, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Deanna Fleysher and Brooke Sciacca in The Method Prix. Photo by Sulai Lopez

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Starting Thursday you can take ownership of The Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Yes, in an amazing summer telescoping of time, the Fringe is back in Old Strathcona, with the 42nd annual edition of Edmonton’s 11-day-and-night theatre bash.

The Answer Is Fringe. Design by Pete Nguyen.

The 185-show Fringe universe of 2023 is yours to explore. What looks intriguing? Artists are taking a chance at the Fringe, and so should you. You never really know in advance what you’ll discover. After all this theatre town is where “fringe” was reborn as a verb. But just to get you started on your travels through the Fringe galaxy, here’s a preliminary trail mix of shows that caught my eye —whether for the premise, the play, the cast, the company, the playwright, the director, the form, the general unlikeliness and over-all weirdness…. I haven’t seen them either; we’ll be hitchhiking together. Stand by, 12thnight companion pieces, and more suggestions, are coming.

The Method Prix. Nearly a dozen Fringes ago we caught a brilliant original taking big risks in Butt Kapinski. A jaded, smudgy-eyed private dick, snarling in classic idiom, mingling with the assorted burnouts and sad cases in the seedy part of town (that would be us, the audience) to shoot a film noir. A “drag clown” of apparently unlimited fearlessness, L.A.’s Deanna Fleysher is back with a new show, billed mysteriously as “an interactive drag comedy special.” In The Method Prix, the legendary director Vincent Prix is shooting a movie starring a “Hollywood wild child” *(Brooke Sciacca) and needs a co-star: that would be us. It could be our big break.

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

Tiger Lady. The London-based Dead Rabbits Theatre, who revealed wonderful theatrical ingenuity in My Love Lies Frozen in the Ice and The Dragon, are back for the Edmonton Fringe where, amazingly, they made their start. Their new show, for a cast of six, is spun from the true tale of circus star Mabel Stark, the first-ever female tiger-tamer in 1920s. Find out more about the Dead Rabbits in an upcoming 12thnight post.

Sea Wall. Bright Young Things, an Edmonton indie theatre that leans into the classic mid-20th century repertoire — Coward, Rattigan, Ionesco, and one year, Sartre (not normally a summer party guy)—is back at the Fringe. And, surprisingly, it’s with a beautifully formed one-man play by star Brit playwright Simon Stephens (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) specially written for the Fleabag hot priest actor Andrew Scott, about the way our lives and happiness are poised delicately, treacherously, on a point. “It was written specifically to have no set, and to be performed in natural light where possible,” says director Belinda Cornish, “which is really rather perfect for the Fringe.” Her production stars the exceptional ex-Edmontonian actor Jamie Cavanagh (East of Berlin, Armstrong’s War,Venus in Fur).

Forest of Truth, Theatre Group GUMBO, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Forest of Truth: Searching for something entirely kooky, possibly weird, quintessentially fringe-y, maybe even hallucinatory? I didn’t see Osaka’s Theatre Group GUMBO the last time they were here, Are You Lovin’ It? in 2019 (but heard reports of awestruck bafflement). Judging by the preview at the Fringe launch this week, this could be the one that embraces your perplexity. It’s billed as “a fantastically distorted love comedy.” And the costumes look fabulous. OK, I’m in.

Cameryn Moore, “muse,” Little Black Book Productions. Photo by Hassan Ghoncheh.

muse: an experiment in storytelling and life drawing: It isn’t a play. It’s not scripted. It’s a conversation between a nude model, Berlin-based theatre artist Cameryn Moore (Nerdfucker), and the audience. We’re invited to draw her (some art materials are available, or you can bring your own) and ask her questions. Or not. Look for the 12thnight interview with this risk-taker in an upcoming post.

Ingrid Hansen and Stéphanie Mori-Roberts in The Merkin Sisters: Deux, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

The Merkin Sisters: Deux. The last time they were here, this duo of unusually hairy sibling performance artistes (Ingrid Hansen and Stéphanie Morin-Robert) ricocheted hilariously through the rarefied self-important world of the artsiest High Art with every kind of lunatic “theatrical” device. These fearlessly playful subversives are back with Deux, a new pièce de résistance (with original music from their recently released “dark-pop comedy album” in which they collaborated with Canadian comedy songstress Shirley Gnome). .

The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied.

The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties. Billed as a playground for musical theatre, cabaret, burlesque, stand-up, sketch and spoken word poetry — all about sex from the womanly perspective — this new theatre piece is by the three artists, from three different countries (the U.K., Canada, and France), who perform it. Aniqa Charania, Marion Poli, Charlotte Szabo, the winners of the Fringe’s Mowat Diversity Award this year, met at the Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow. The original music leans into the ‘40s three-part harmony swing/boogie-woogie style of the Andrew Sisters. And Kate Ryan of Plain Jane Theatre, a theatre that specializes in off-centre musicals, directs.

Rat Academy, Batrabbit Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023

Rat Academy. Dayna Lea Hoffmann’s season included two juicy starring roles, in the satire All The Little Animals I Have Eaten at Shadow and the coming-of age story A Hundred Words For Snow at Northern Light Theatre. How can you not be intrigued to see this terrific multi-faceted actor in cross-species clown mode? In Rat Academy with Katie Yoner she’s a rodent, in tough in a rat-free province, survival coach to a lab rat escapee.

What Was Is All: With this new folk-rock musical, Nextfest returns to its cross-festival initiative of last summer, by producing shows at the Fringe. One is this new “folk-rock/ country-bluegrass” musical by the team of Jacquelin Walters and Michael Watt. It started life in 2022 as a 45-minute song cycle /concert; it played Theatre Network’s debut Another F!#@$G Festival. And now it’s full-fledged musical theatre, with 20 songs, a live band, an un-Fringe-y sized cast and a mysterious book about six townsfolk, alive and dead, and a stranger — with a whiff of the supernatural. Billed as “a darkly comic tragedy.”

Bathsheba and the Books. The premise of this David Ellis Heyman comedy is pretty irresistible: comedy based on the Old Testament, which historically just hasn’t been a laughter magnet. Did you know that it was put together by the biblical hottie of the title? Director Davina Stewart has assembled a top-drawer four-actor cast led by Aimée Beaudoin as the woman of the hour, er, the millennia.

Chris Cook in Fiji, Shatter Glass Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied.

Fiji. “This is the type of show where it’s hard to know how much to reveal beforehand,” says Michelle Robb. A playwright herself (Tell Us What Happened), she turns producer with Gavin Dyer for the Fringe. By a London-based trio of playwrights, it’s billed, intriguingly, as “a true crime-inspired love story” that starts online; the producers call “a dark funny gem.” This North American premiere marks the the directing debut of the fine actor Lora Brovold. And they’ve attracted a starry bunch of theatre pros, including actors Vance Avery and Chris Cook, sound designer Dave Clark and designer Tessa Stamp. One of the secrets of the success of the Edmonton Fringe is the way Edmonton’s seasoned theatre pros are drawn to be there. 

The Approach. The Edmonton indie Trunk Theatre has consistently opened up our theatre to the contemporary repertoire across the border and the pond. The Approach, a 2021 play of exquisite nuance by Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe, has three women, estranged friends and former roommates, reconnecting, in a variety of perms and combs, over coffee. Amy DeFelice directs a strong Edmonton cast: Kendra Connor, Julie Golosky, Twilla McLeod.   

Cody Porter in Amor de Cosmos: a delusional musical, Joe Clark Productions, Edmonton Fringe. Photo cupplied.

Amor de Cosmos: a delusional musical. Everything about this new musical sounds loopy and appealing. How can you not be attracted to the prospect of a one-actor musical with original music by  singer-songwriter Lindsey Walker (ren & the wake)? And a book by Richard Kelly Kemick written in iambic pentameter? About the bizarre career, and implosion of a real-life Canadian politico, in fact the second B.C. premier, who in a couple of years veered wildly from left to right wing and was declared legally insane? Actually the story of how Amor de Cosmos came to be at the Edmonton Fringe, a last minute addition, with a much shorter time slot and a different actor (the game Cody Porter), is pretty crazy too. Stay tuned for an upcoming 12thnight interview with the engaging Walker. She calls it “good mayhem.”

Scoobie Doosical.  Zoinks. A new musical from the presiding muse of Dammitammy Productions Rebecca Merkley, who writes, composes, directs. It isn’t the first time she’s written a musical based on a cartoon: Rivercity the Musical is spun from the Archie comics. The Scoobie characters are based on the goofy cartoon, but that’s just the start. Meet Merkley in an upcoming 12thnight post.

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

This won’t hurt I promise. The unceasing, ever-morphing anxieties of the modern age have always been meat and drink to Tiny Bear Jaws, witness plays like Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable, multi-disciplinary ‘musicals’  like I Don’t Even Miss You, or the sketch comedy of Gender? I Hardly Know Them. Elena Belyea is a a true original, and a witty writer. This new piece is billed as “a standup hybrid.” I don’t know what to expect, which makes it irresistible. Geoffrey Simon Brown directs.

The Fringe annotated listings, schedule, and tickets: fringetheatre.ca

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Fast and furious: Romeo and Juliet in a spiegeltent at the Freewill Shakespeare Festival. A review

Posted on August 13, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Jessy Ardern and Christina Nguyen in Romeo and Juliet, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewiecz

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Crazy kids. Access to lethal drugs. No hobbies except hanging out, mixing it up, getting into brawls (and turning iambic pentameter into actual speaking).

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That’s downtown Verona for you, in David Horak’s indeterminately contemporary, very speedy Romeo and Juliet. It’s the second of the two productions the Freewill Shakespeare Festival has brought to the beautiful, vintage Cristal Palace Spiegeltent at Edmonton EXPO Centre. And it moves along at a clip that, especially up close in a 220-seat spiegeltent, feels dangerous — an experience enhanced by Matthew Skopyk’s sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll original score with its ominous industrial shudders and sheen.

They may not have summer festivals with green onion cakes.  But one thing they do have in fair Verona is a distinctive civic culture, marked by “canker’d hate,” a lethal feud between a couple of haut-bourgeois families. That “ancient grudge” between the Montagues and the Capulets is so long-standing it counts as a bona fide tradition — some things never get old — and so flammable it can erupt into violence when someone says “I bite my thumb at you.” It’s the Veronese F-you! apparently. Hey, it’s only fun taunting people till someone loses an eye, or a cousin Tybalt.

The circumstances set forth dramatically in the first scene by Horak’s agile 10-actor cast, constantly in motion on and off the stage, let you stop wondering why Romeo and Juliet don’t try dating before they, you know, get married. And that’s just a matter of minutes (I exaggerate only slightly) after they meet, a compression in the story of the star-cross’d lovers that’s a keynote of Horak’s adaptation, which favours action over speech. The world from which they impulsively try to carve a little place for themselves (as per that song in West Side Story) is too dangerous, fraught, stressful for them to have a relationship first.

The parental generation, in both families, is more of a back story than a presence in this Romeo and Juliet. It’s conflated mainly into the figure of Lady Capulet, a formidable cold-eyed authoritarian in Brett Dahl’s performance, who strides in and out of rooms like a hot knife through butter. Even indoors, nobody just saunters in Verona; it must be something in the water.

Jessy Ardern and Christina Nguyen in Romeo and Juliet, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

The lovers (Jessy Ardern and Christina Nguyen) do have youthful chemistry. They fall for each other instantly at the Capulet’s big masquerade bash (fanciful choreography by Glenda Stirling) that the Montague lads have crashed on a gang dare. And you do get the attraction in this production. Both Ardern and Nguyen have the same light, contemporary cadence and timbre in delivering the verse, for one thing.

In the performance by the resourceful Ardern (Maria on alternate nights in Twelfth Night), gender isn’t bold-faced. Romeo is played as a boy, but the actor doesn’t lean into macho signals in voice or posture.  Nguyen’s performance as Juliet isn’t of the wistful, poetical femininity lineage either. The impulses of the pair work the same way at the same speed.

The “yoke of inauspicious stars” is worn quite lightly. The so-called “balcony scene” is playful; R and J are having fun with the luscious poetry of it. And so, more unexpectedly, is the production’s original way with the scene when Romeo leaves Juliet for his banishment after their night in bed. The stakes are high: death if Romeo doesn’t get out of town pronto. As he reacts to Juliet’s exhortation to stay longer, “come death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so!”, they’re both laughing.

No one has told them they’re in a tragedy; till then it’s a hot adventure. Nguyen’s quick-witted Juliet doesn’t really dig into the verse till the prospect of spending the night in the Capulet family tomb, “this palace of dim night,” hits home.

The more dimensional relationships in Horak’s production are between the lads, Romeo and his pals. Scott Shpeley (Orsino in Twelfth Night) is a volatile, dangerously excitable Mercutio, in a performance that’s charismatic, both verbally and physically. He doesn’t even get to linger on the famously weird and fantastical Queen Mab speech, shortened in this adaptation. And after the fatal fracas with Tybalt, and Romeo’s inept intervention, his furious exit line, “a plague on both your houses,” burns through the play like a brand.

Nadien Chu in Romeo and Juliet, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

Kris Unruh (a frolicsome Olivia in Twelfth Night) is the conciliatory, more reasonable follower Benvolio. Peace-makers, including Friar Laurence (Troy O’Donnell), don’t get much traction in Verona.

The casting in a two-play rep season, in which Romeo and Juliet shares its cast with Twelfth Night, is intriguing and resonant. The wonderfully nutty comic gravity of Shpeley’s performance as Orsino in the comedy alternates with the lethally manic Mercutio, who brings it in Romeo and Juliet. Alternating with wry, sly Feste in the comedy, Dean Stockdale is an unhinged and violent Tybalt. And Nadien Chu, sensationally funny as the extrovert boozehound Lady Toby in Twelfth Night, is the warm-hearted chatterbox of a Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, the only parental figure who counts in the Veronese landscape.

In the end, this Romeo and Juliet doesn’t really have much tragic impact, exciting though it is to watch, especially up close. It’s not what you’d call heartbreaking; it’s too schematic for that. But it feels explosive in the intimate setting of the spiegeltent. The fighting (choreographed by Janine Waddell) is visceral and sweaty in a way that the romance doesn’t get into, in this streamlined, intelligible adaptation of a story with an ending we know in advance. It’s all about capturing what it feels like to be young and in the moment.

Read the 12thnight review of Twelfth Night here. 

REVIEW

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Romeo and Juliet (running in rep with Twelfth Night

Directed by: David Horak

Starring: Jessy Ardern, Christina Nguyen, Brett Dahl, Scott Shpeley, Kris Unruh, Dean Stockdale, Graham Mothersill, Nadien Chu, Troy O’Donnell, Yassine El Fassi El Fihri

Where: Cristal Palace Spiegeltent at Edmonton EXPO Centre, 7515 118 Ave.

Running:  through Sept. 3, Romeo and Juliet on all odd nights and even matinees, Twelfth Night on all even nights and odd matinees. Check out freewillshakespeare.com for a full schedule of extra pre- and post-show events.

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com

Posted in Reviews | Comments Off on Fast and furious: Romeo and Juliet in a spiegeltent at the Freewill Shakespeare Festival. A review

You’ve got the music in you: a joyful new Twelfth Night at Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Posted on August 12, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Kris Unruh as Lady Olivia in Twelfth Night, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“O spirit of love! How quick and fresh art thou,” declares a love-struck Duke, glancing heavenward in the early moments of Twelfth Night, the first of the two alternating plays (along with Romeo and Juliet) in this the 34th annual edition of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival.

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And, yes, the draped canvas big top ceiling of the Cristal Palace Spiegeltent does seem to be alive and breathing in response. Is it empathy for the humans below slipping and sliding through the mysteries of love in this open-ended cross-dressed, strangely multi-toned comedy?

Shakespeare has taken up residence for the summer in a “high fantastical” tent that (yay!) isn’t really like camping at all. The Cristal Palace Spiegeltent is a vintage hand-made “theatre” lined with precious wood, stained glass, bevelled mirrors. Outside it, Freewill has fashioned an urban garden (a nod to their al fresco roots), where Malachite Theatre plays with you en route to the show. And inside this magical space, in Twelfth Night (a fave of mine, as you might guess from the name of this theatre site), people will don disguises and unlace alter-egos they didn’t know they had; they’ll suddenly fall in love, bewilder themselves, confuse everyone around them.

Kris Unruh and Christina Nguyen in Twelfth Night, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz.

Amanda Goldberg’s high-spirited production leans into the light side of Shakespeare’s bewitching gender-fluid dark/light comedy. It puts on its party clothes on the beautiful wood keyhole stage (designer: Stephanie Bahniuk) that we get to surround on three sides — at close range since there are only 220 seats. And it sings and dances, borrowing its fulsome supply of music, played live by the characters, from the pop repertoire of REM, Radiohead, the Police (sound designer: Aaron Macri) — instead of the famously melancholy songs of the court minstrel Feste which tend to philosophical ruminations about the wind and the rain.

Speaking of which, “the rain that raineth every day,” the spiegeltent triumphantly shrugged off opening night’s downpours (it’s gale-proof). It was the characters inside who caroused up a storm.

The stage is dominated at one end by a silvered smudgy almost-mirror almost-window that neither reflects nor reveals, but captures shadows. Characters look towards it and, tellingly, fail to see or recognize themselves. Or they appear and disappear above it, in hiding or surveillance mode. All part of a story that starts with a tragic shipwreck, theatrically set forth in Goldberg’s inventive stagecraft.

Dean Stockdale and Troy O’Donnell as Feste and Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

Feste the musical Fool played with mischievous amusement by Dean Stockdale (they/them) is there from the start. They’re a wayward spear-carrier (so to speak) with a mandolin instead of a spear, who shows up everywhere. You know from their repertoire of wry glances and knowing grins that they’re street experts in human folly, and the assumptions we feed ourselves.

Viola, the inadvertent instigator — a wide-eyed explorer in Christina Nguyen’s performance — washes up on shore bereft at the loss in the storm of her twin bro (Yassine El Fassi El Fihri). Amusingly, the actors look nothing alike. In Viola’s decision to put grief on hold and don boy clothes to get a job at the court of Duke Orsino (Scott Shpeley), nothing will ever be the same in Illyria.

Cesario, Viola’s new self-creation, gets sent by the persistent Orsino to woo the implacably resistant Lady Olivia on his behalf. Viola falls in love with the Duke; Olivia falls for Viola in disguise as Cesario….

It is a measure of the decisively comic tilt of this Twelfth Night that Olivia, supposedly mired in grief, seems pretty well primed for romance from the start, and ready to party in Kris Unruh’s funny drama queen performance. No mourning black for her. The platform heels and feather-trimmed hot pink party dress are a tip-off that Olivia doesn’t exactly have to be pried from melancholy. She’s fun, but I wonder if this choice doesn’t detract a bit from the disconcerting sense of self-discovery and transformation that’s in Twelfth Night.

Orsino gets a genuinely original comic performance, impeccably timed, from Scott Shpeley. His fierce unsmiling focus, occasionally paused by distracting glimmers of thought about the attractions of his young page, is a portrait of obsession that gradually gets frayed around the edges. A highlight moment is watching him stride briskly through an aisle, all business, wielding a double bass the way other people carry purses. He’s en route to the stage — and a musical number in which REM gets to share an insight with Shakespeare: “O no I’ve said too much/ I haven’t said enough” seems particularly tuned to a production that emphasizes the perplexing nature of gender, love, delusion and self-knowledge.

Brett Dahl and Nadien Chu in Twelfth Night, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

Olivia’s rambunctious household is dominated by the exuberant dissolute Sir Toby Belch, here in a gender switch played as Lady Toby by the entirely riotous Nadien Chu. She arrives in every scene, glass first, clutching booze in a different fanciful vessel. The sight of Chu in a pink helmet attached to two beers will not be soon forgotten. Ditto her trotting gait on high heels which tips her forward (presumably to avoid potential spillage).

Chez Olivia there’s another suitor for the mistress of the house. That would be the lanky dimbulb knight Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Lady Toby’s drinking companion. A beat behind every conversation, he seems, in Brett Dahl’s comical performance, perpetually hung over, possibly stoned, getting increasingly sulky by his lack of success, dimly aware from time to time he’s getting fleeced in his marital venture.

The smartest person in the room is invariably Olivia’s pert maid Maria, as played with delightful crunchy skepticism by Jessy Ardern. It’s Maria who devises “a sport royale” to take down Olivia’s pompous, brisk, self-important martinet of a steward Malvolio, by feeding his secret fantasy that his boss fancies him.

Troy O’Donnell is excellent: Malvolio is ripe for a fall. You want him to receive his comeuppance, but you’re taken aback by the cruelty of his punishment and the cheery non-concern of his tormentors. O’Donnell has played Malvolio at Freewill before, but never I think in quite the startling condition of yellow-stockinged undress that leaves Olivia, along with all of us, aghast. Comedy can be so cruel.

The scene in which Maria’s trick is executed is particularly hilarious since there’s really no way for its perpetrators to hide for purposes of voyeurism. O’Donnell makes a meal of Malvolio’s monologue in which he deduces his way into utter delusion. And Goldberg’s staging makes lively use of the aisles and wooden pillars of the spiegeltent as the trap is sprung.   

The Act I finale of the production has the entire cast dancing solo to the wisdom of Radiohead: “I wish I was special. You’re so fucking special.” But by the end of the production,  there’s been a group pairing off. Twelfth Night productions in modern times have often wondered about a romantic spark between the sea captain Antonio and Sebastian. It says something about the comic drive of this Freewill production that even the goofball Sir Andrew will not be going home alone. Lady Toby and Maria leave together, arms linked, martinis in hand.

As the finale ensemble has it, citing the New Radicals, “you’ve got the music in you. Don’t let go.” This new Twelfth Night is a joyful, all-inclusive way to hang on, be your true self, or find a new one. “Nothing that is so is so,” says Feste at a point of maximum comic chaos. Words to live by in a world weighed down by “it is what it is.”

Read the 12thnight Romeo and Juliet review here.

REVIEW

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Twelfth Night (running in rep with Romeo and Juliet)

Directed by: Amanda Goldberg

Starring: Jessy Ardern, Christina Nguyen, Brett Dahl, Scott Shpeley, Kris Unruh, Dean Stockdale, Graham Mothersill, Nadien Chu, Troy O’Donnell, Yassine El Fassi El Fihri

Where: Cristal Palace Spiegeltent at Edmonton EXPO Centre, 7515 118 Ave.

Running:  through Sept. 3, Romeo and Juliet on all odd nights and even matinees, Twelfth Night on all even nights and odd matinees. Check out freewillshakespeare.com for a full schedule of extra pre- and post-show events.

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com

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