To all of your questions, The Answer is Fringe: tickets go on sale today at noon

Posted on August 9, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

The Answer Is Fringe. Design by Pete Nguyen.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You are now perfectly positioned to answer for yourself the Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. And unlike Deep Thought (in Douglas Adams’ trippy and comical Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy), it won’t take you 7.5 million years. The Answer is Fringe. And tickets go on sale today at noon for this 42nd annual edition of Edmonton’s international summer theatre extravaganza, the continent’s biggest and oldest Fringe.

The Great Question of Fringe tickets (and passes) has several answers. They’re online at fringetheatre.ca; by phone (780-409-1910); in person at Fringe Theatre headquarters in the Arts Barns box office (and during the festival at any festival box office), or the Edmonton Arts Council Shop & Services downtown (formerly TIX on the Square). After many years in a holding pattern, the top ticket price is up by $2 this summer. Fringe artists set their own price, to a $15 max, up from last year’s $13 (100 per cent theirs to keep), and the Fringe adds a $3 service fee. So you’ll be paying $18 tops to see a show.

The best deal for the bargain hitchhiker is the Frequent Fringer pass, ($140 for 10 tickets) and the Double Fringer pass ($280 for 20), maximum of two tickets to any performance per pass. These get snapped up in a hurry. And there are daily discounts, too, determined by Fringe artists (only in-person sales).

For your galactic interstellar travels, you have 185 Fringe shows (at last count) to choose from, in 35 venues, eight of them programmed by lottery and 27 BYOVs (bring-your-own-venues) acquired and outfitted by artists themselves. This counts not as a wild surge from last year’s 162 shows but “incremental growth” (as Fringe Theatre’s executive director Megan Dart puts it).

As you’ll see in the hefty high-gloss $12 hitchhiker’s guide to the Fringe galaxy, a couple of the usual venues are temporarily missing for Fringe #42. But new BYOVs have stepped up, including Rapid Fire Theatre’s new air-conditioned Exchange Theatre (Stage 12), Mile Zero Dance (Stage 32), Boxer Bar (Stage 35), The Rooster Kitchen (Stage 36).

You can find Fringe shows in actual theatres, like the Varscona, the Gateway, the Westbury, the Backstage, and the Studio Theatre in the Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, Theatre Network’s Roxy, La Cité francophone. But many of the Fringe BYOVs have other lives — as bars, cafes, dance studios, night clubs — ah, and in the case of 221B Baker Street (Stage 37), the Fringe garbage container just on the north side of the Fringe Theatre Arts Barn. That’s where  Los Angeles company, The Best Medicine Productions, gives Fringe sleuths a secret map and sets them forth on a quest (à la Found Fest) for clues around the festival grounds in The Sherlock Holmes Experience.

And for your star travels, it’s worthy of note that in honour of the summer festivities the Fringe has installed A/C in Workshop West’s sizzling Gateway Theatre (Stage 6), regarded by most veterans as the hottest venue.

Festival director Murray Utas points out that international artists who haven’t been at the Edmonton Fringe in many a year — Cameryn Moore, the Dead Rabbits, the Coldharts, Australian storyteller Jon Bennett among them —  are back for The Answer Is Fringe. It’s an auspicious sign that the COVIDian imperatives have waned and the Fringe has regained its mojo. “And it speaks to our own community,” he says. “Audiences unafraid to take a creative risk with them,” says Dart, “are part of the Fringe culture.”

Utas has reduced the number of shows in each of the eight lotteried venues from 10 to nine, “a more human-centric policy … so the technician (a pair, that come with the venue) can actually have a dinner break.” The BYOVs are “all artist-driven,” but Utas, a Fringe artist himself, has played match-maker on many occasions by connecting newcomer artists who are “an unknown quantity” with veterans and possible venues. When Anita Charania, Marion Poli and Charlotte Szabo, winners of the Fringe’s Mowat Diversity Award, needed a director for their new musical The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties, for example, Utas contacted the Plain Janes’ Kate Ryan on their behalf. Voilà, a new relationship. The production happens at the Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre (Stage 8).

Most BYOVs, at Utas’s urging, urging are “anchored” by a local. And sometimes it’s the venues themselves who reach out and want to be part of things. Utas always asks them why. “The best answer is ‘I want to support the Fringe’.”

The KidsFringe is back at Light Horse Park (10325 84 Ave.) starting Friday Aug. 18, 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with a lineup of activities and shows curated by Alyson Dicey of Girl Brain, all free, for the under-12 set and their grown-up companions. There’s music on the ATB Outdoor Stage in the park both Fringe weekends, at 9 and 10 p.m., curated by the indie folk/rocker (and musical theatre composer) Lindsey Walker.

And check out the mural wall on 85th Ave., with DJs and emcees, all powered by young street artists, painters, musicians, textile wizards, storytellers. “We believe in the importance of storytelling,” says Dart of the festival, “that can exist in many different forms…. We’re planting the seeds for future generations, of artists and audiences, in ways we don’t even know yet.”

Which brings us to the other Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything Fringe: what to see at the 42nd annual edition of our mighty summer festival. 12thnight.ca can help with that. Stay tuned to this site for encouragement, suggestions, features, and reviews.

And if you’re finding the theatre coverage on my free (so far), independent site 12thnight.ca worthwhile and entertaining, I really hope you’ll be able to chip in to my ongoing Patreon campaign — with a monthly amount to support its continuation. Click here.

We’ll set forth on our explorations in a week.

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‘I had to find my own way in’: Amanda Goldberg directs Twelfth Night at the Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Posted on August 4, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

The Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by 12thnight.ca

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What country, friends, is this? (I, ii, Twelfth Night)

Like Viola, the heroine of the Shakespeare comedy in this year’s Freewill Shakespeare Festival, who steps onto the shore of a strange new world, director Amanda Goldberg has arrived in the topsy-turvy Illyria that is Twelfth Night.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

“There are a lot of firsts for me,” says the former Montrealer, who moved west with degrees in both acting and theatre creation to get a master’s in directing at the U of A (she graduated in 2022). “My first time adapting a Shakespeare. My first time directing a Shakespeare. My first professional directing contract in Edmonton. My first time directing a comedy. My first time staging for a tent (and an intimate one at that, a vintage 220-seat 1947 Belgian spiegeltent at the Edmonton EXPO Centre). My first time working in rep, so only 12 days rehearsal to dig in.…”

Twelfth Night shares a 10-actor cast, and alternates dates for both rehearsals and performances, with David Horak’s production of Romeo and Juliet for this 34th annual edition of Edmonton’s much-loved summer festival.

Amanda Goldberg, who directs Twelfth Night at this year’s Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo supplied.

“It’s an understatement to say it’s been a challenge. But a welcome one and an exciting surprise!” declares Goldberg, the freelance director who’s just come off a season as Shadow Theatre’s artistic director fellowship holder to land the artistic producer gig at the SkirtsAfire Festival. So much for the original Goldberg plan to move back east in August.

Like Goldberg herself, the festival has “had a gear change,” as she puts it. The Cristal Palace Spiegeltent, the small cast size, the addition of new accessibility elements (like ASL interpretation) — not to mention acquiring an emerging director who’s directing Shakespeare for the first time, as she points out. “I think the company has taken risks upon risks. They should be acknowledged, and I hope they will be rewarded…. I’m really grateful to be part of any risks that are taken in this city,” she says.

Goldberg says she didn’t have “an instinctual connection” to Twelfth Night at the outset. “It wasn’t my go-to play…. I had to find my own way in.” And in adapting the play for 10 actors in an intimate space with quirks and oddities (the tent is almost another character, she says, echoing Horak), she found that way in via questions about sexuality, gender, and identity — and the actors themselves.

Many talented non-binary artists showed up to audition, with Viola’s famous ‘I left no ring with her’ monologue. Viola, disguised as the boy Cesario, is sent on a courtship mission from her love-struck boss Duke Orsino to his ever-resistant beloved. And she suddenly realizes Olivia has fallen in love with the messenger instead.

“Not surprisingly a lot of the artists had this natural connection to Viola and her story. And one thing that resonated with me was someone being able to dress in a certain way, and say ‘this is who I am’ and no one questions it; everyone accepts it … a joyful acknowledgement of gender expression.”

“Do I feel Viola is a queer character? No I don’t. But what she experiences is not too far from what queer people experience, the instinct to hide yourself, to get lost in a role you’re playing,” says Goldberg. “She’s a catalyst for other characters in the show to be able to grapple with their own identities. She comes, and she changes everyone’s world.”

“That’s where I dive into gender dynamic: Illyria is a place where people are stuck playing the roles they were dealt; a lot of them are held captive by grief or loss.…. Viola comes in, challenges expectations, and her presence forces the people of Illyria, most notably Olive and Orsino,, to confront what they think of as their deepest desires.”

Three of Goldberg’s actors are non-binary, and half are queer. “And asking these questions, and (seeing the play) through a more queer-focused lens does let us ask questions that will honour this community, I hope. She says “the search for love, trying to change yourself for love….” is at the heart oftTwelfth Night.

Goldberg grew up watching Shakespeare in parks in Montreal, loving the touring tradition that took plays to people where they were. “Shakespeare is a rite of passage for every director, but I’ve never really gravitated to it because I’ve never really seen myself represented in his plays,” she says. “Through adaptation, we’re reclaiming stories with representation from artists of today.”

The casting,  done jointly with Horak for the two productions, wasn’t so much looking for the perfect Orsino or Viola, Goldberg says, but this line of thought: “you’re an amazing artist; how can we fit you into this ensemble?”

In the challenge of adapting a big comedy for a small cast, Goldberg says she found the opportunity to expand characters who show up only once in a while. The servants are “much more present in this world,” notably Feste (Dean Stockdale), the “wise fool.” In the Twelfth Night we’ll see Feste with particular prominence, involved in the courts of both Olivia and Orsino, “always a spy on the wall” and “the only character who knows that Viola is actually Viola, a secret no one else knows.”

The biggest challenge in staging a spiegeltent Twelfth Night? The live music, says Goldberg. “There’s a lot of music, and it’s something embedded into the play, part of the world, part of what characters use to reflect on their heartbreak or grief…. So, getting the music to a place where it fits with this space.”

Goldberg echoes Horak in thinking of the tent as another character. And it won’t be till the show gets its first audiences that the directors will be able to think “what else we can do to incorporate the audience into the show, to allow them to feel part of its secrets?”

Meanwhile, Goldberg’s original plans continue to be de-railed in exciting ways, as she says happily. The perfect job is standing by. With its mandate to showcase, nurture, and enhance the profile of women in the arts, SkirtsAfire is almost eerily in alignment with We Are One, the indie company Goldberg had started in Montreal before she left. It was “really focused on giving the women the opportunity to play challenging roles” and weigh in against the punishing sexual inequality revealed by theatre statistics in that regard. Stay tuned for her plans.    

But first, Shakespeare. “In this city, artists are hungry for something new. It shows other companies and other producers it’s worth it to trust emerging artists to try things they’ve never done before.” And in a way, as Goldberg points out, “that’s why Freewill started. They saw something lacking in the theatre community, they took a swing. And here we are!”

Check out the 12thnight PREVIEW of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival speigeltent summer (and interview with artistic director David Horak) here.

PREVIEW

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night

Directed by: David Horak and 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:  Aug. 8 to Sept. 3, Romeo and Juliet on all odd nights and even matinees, Twelfth Night on all even nights and odd matinees

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com

   

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Ready for your close-up Mr. Shakespeare? The Freewill Shakespeare Festival in a vintage spiegeltent this summer

Posted on August 3, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Christina Nguyen and Jessy Ardern as Romeo and Juliet, Freewill Shakespeare Festival at the Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz Photography

Freewill Shakespeare Festival artistic director David Horak, who directs Romeo and Juliet in the Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

This summer, when lovestruck Romeo says “what light from yonder window breaks?” the light will break from stained glass windows and bounce off bevelled mirrors.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

Starting this week at the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, as announced on the Bard’s birthday, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night will alternate in a beautiful hand-made 1947 Belgian spiegeltent in the parking lot of the Edmonton EXPO Centre (7515 118 Ave.). David Horak directs the tragedy; up-and-comer Amanda Goldberg, soon to be the artistic producer of SkirtsAfire, directs the comedy (you can meet her in a companion 12thnight post).

Freewill has always known how to make big, bold, contemporary choices for their resident playwright in the great outdoors (hey ho the wind and the rain, etc.). And in COVIDian times they learned to be fast and light on their feet. They touched down in parks, community centres, people’s backyards; they even went to the Fringe, with a five-actor Much Ado About Nothing and a three-actor Macbeth in 2021.

Last summer’s edition (A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Measure For Measure) was a finale huzzah in the Heritage Amphitheatre (Hawrelak Park is now shut down for three YEARS) where it all began as a bright idea 34 years ago.

This past winter Freewill was preparing to return to the touring life. The plays were chosen. And, says artistic director Dave Horak, “we were talking to Repercussion in Montreal” about their touring model whereby the company “pops into a park, builds a set in the morning, and stays for a couple of days.”

The Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by 12thnight.ca

That’s when the unexpected offer from Explore Edmonton came: why not Shakespeare in the Cristal Palace Spiegeltgent, after its K-Days trapeze artists, magicians, and improvisers have exited stage left? “If you’re not going to be out in a park, you will be in an interesting space,” as Horak says of the two 10-actor Freewill productions in the close-up environment of a 220-seat spiegeltent. “In the tent, you’re so close; you’re seeing the other people. You’re in a different world, and an old world at that. I’m excited!” As Goldberg says, “we’re adding an experience we don’t normally get in Shakespeare: intimacy.”

Doing a pair of Shakespeares almost in the round and up-close at the Cristal Palace Spiegeltent comes with its own challenges, to be sure. “Comedies tend to need more stuff,” as Horak puts it, “more props, more places to hide and listen in.” And Twelfth Night, a wonderfully strange, sexually adventurous, open-ended comedy, is full of cross-dressing, tricks, misidentifications, subplots set up by characters spying on each other.  The space, says Goldberg, “is another character to play with…. We’re leaning into the silliness of trying to hide there, in plain sight.”

And as for Romeo and Juliet in a tent, well, there’s the famous business of the balcony. Not happening in a tent.  Horak admits this crossed his mind, “but nowhere (in the text) does it actually say ‘balcony’,” he smiles. “Window, yes. Balcony, no. It’s only a convention. When you don’t have one, you have to be more theatrical. The text is so great. And being in a smaller space gives us a chance to really play that text!”

As summer festival mates, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night are an intriguing high-contrast pair. “Two different versions of love,” says Horak. Romeo and Juliet, last seen at Freewill in 2016, starts as a comedy and ends up as a tragedy; Twelfth Night (last at Freewill in 2011) starts as a tragedy and ends up as a comedy.”

“I’m trying to keep the first part of Romeo and Juliet lively and fun for as long as possible; that first scene is full of posturing, male bravado that quickly goes too far.”

Amanda Goldberg, who directs Twelfth Night at this year’s Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo supplied.

With her interest in gender identity and the view through the queer lens, director Goldberg and Twelfth Night seemed an ideal match, says Horak. “What’s the tone going to be? Where’s it going to sit?” They’re questions every Twelfth Night director plays with. And the intimate setting of the spiegeltent is a perfect place to do that. His own strength, Horak feels, is in “intimate, smaller, indie kind of productions.”  

“Everyone comes to Romeo and Juliet with some sort of expectation,” he says of the early Shakespeare that returns at regular intervals in the festival rotation. “I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the play…. My dad was an English teacher, and he always complained about teaching it: Romeo is such a dummy. I think I inherited that.”

Ten years ago, though, teaching R&J (with Mieko Ouchi) at ArtsTrek, the venerable Alberta summer theatre camp, Horak’s view changed, dramatically and unexpectedly. “Having teenagers read it out loud was so interesting…. They really understood these ‘stupid’ teenagers; they really understood the plot, the mopey multi-emo depression, they got it! How quick it all happens: it felt real to them. And I started to hear those scenes in a very different way. I warmed to it.” And the chance to direct it for the first time — and for the first time in Freewill history to pair it with Twelfth Night — grabbed him.

Jessy Ardern and Christina Nguyen in Romeo and Juliet, Freewill Shakespeare Festival in the Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz Photography

The cast of 10 he and Goldberg have assembled is generously endowed with non-binary and gender-fluid talent. And, inspired by that, Goldberg says she found her entry point into Twelfth Night, with “questions about sexuality and gender.” Horak says “I wasn’t hard and fast about it, but I was open to doing something different with Romeo, to having a female-presenting actor in the role.” His production stars Jessy Ardern and Christina Nguyen as the star-cross’d lovers.

“Romeo is a hard part; he’s often presented as a bit of a simp, less interesting than Juliet.” Ardern plays Romeo as a male, “but there’s something about her being female … when Romeo and Juliet see each other, it’s so immediate. There’s something they recognize; in a way they know each other, see each other reflected in each other. I’m hoping that helps us buy that they connect in such a different, fast way,” says Horak.

He was struck by the “sharp timeline” of the play, and he’s been leaning into that. “It all takes place over four days. It’s so compressed; it just shoots like a bullet…. For me, this play is a lot about the compression of time. Shakespeare is making the point that that’s the point: everything happens too fast. Nobody’s thinking.”

In the original, Juliet is 13, even younger than Shakespeare’s source for the play as Horak points out (he’s taken out that age reference). But “even to an Elizabethan audience” that would have been pushing it. Shakespeare’s point, Horak argues, is that the lovers are “too young, operating on impulse….. Everything is too fast; everyone’s making choices way too quick that aren’t thought out.”

Shakespeare is amply supplied with characters who scheme, long-term, like Richard III, or Hamlet who takes ages, thinking, re-thinking, possibly over-thinking, everything. Romeo and Juliet are, decisively, not like that. “They’re ‘I’m in the moment; I’m just moving’,” as Horak puts it. “It’s sometimes a knock on the play; I’m thinking of it more of a feature…. And in the tent, unlike the park, there are no long walks to exit or enter. It’ll happen, Boom!, right before you.”

“The only thing that’s been going on for a long time is the feud (the “ancient grudge” between the Montagues and the Capulets), so long that the original reason is long gone.…”

Matthew Skopyk’s original score reflects speed-up urgency, says Horak. He describes it as “contemporary, grunge-y kind of rock, music that drives things, totally quick, a pulse, a heartbeat!” And as for the setting, designed along with costumes, by Stephanie Bahniuk, “these are contemporary people. With just a touch, a nod, to Europe in the 1800s, not too on the nose, a turbulence in the scene, warring countries, inspired a bit by Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812.” The look has “a kind of elegance that fits the tent.”

As per the first line of the play, “two households both alike in dignity,” Horak says there will be no colour-coding of the Montagues and Capulets in the Romeo and Juliet we’ll see. “The two families have the same social status; they look the same; everything about them is the same. That is the tragedy; they’re the same damn family.”

And, as for the fighting in the close confines of the tent, swords are out (no imminent decapitations of first-row fans). Knives are in. “It’s fast and it’s nasty,” says Horak. “That’s why accidents happen.”

The fun of seeing actors take on different roles on alternating nights is at the heart of Freewill’s rep season. We’ll see Ardern as Romeo one night and the saucy clever Maria in Twelfth Night the next. Scott Schpeley is Mercutio (and Paris) in Romeo and Juliet one night, Orsino, the love-sick count of Twelfth Night (“if music be the food of love, play on),” the next. It’s a great stretch for actors, “a real theatre gym,” says Horak who has first-hand experience as a Freewill actor himself (though by coincidence never in either of this summer’s offerings).

The festive entertainment is enhanced by an assortment of pre-show events, including Malachite Theatre’s interactive introductions to the two plays. There are talks (by Mipre-show for kids and their grown-up companions before matinee performances (you get to spin the wheel of scenes. Matthew Morgan, the Vegas-based clown who’s been production manager of the spiegeltent shows for K-Days, will do his late-night clown drinking game comedy version of Macbeth, Shotspeare. The House of Hush is bringing a Shakespeare-themed burlesque.

There are discussions about Freewill’s celebrated playwright-in-residence. And because Freewill overlaps the Fringe, there’s cross-festival collaboration. On the Tuesday of the Fringe, the signature Late Night Cabaret will cross the river to the spiegeltent. And Aug. 18 to 20, so will the Fringe’s annual Free-For-All (of Fringe show excerpts). And did I mention the food trucks? See freewillshakespeare.com for the full schedule and details.

There is, of course, a risk in opting to “draw people to a different location,” as Horak says. “People have been consuming so much stuff online. But I do think live experiences are going to draw people again…. If people have seen these plays before they’re be intrigued and delighted by these new takes, I hope,” he grins. “If they haven’t seen the plays, they’re still getting Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night.

PREVIEW

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night

Directed by: David Horak and Amanda Goldberg

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

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

Running:  Aug. 8 to Sept. 3, Romeo and Juliet on all odd nights and even matinees, Twelfth Night on all even nights and odd matinees

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com

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What I did on my summer holiday (in NYC)

Posted on July 24, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Some Like It Hot. Photo by Marc J Franklin

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

NEW YORK — Funny how every conversational fragment that free-floats floats your way when you’re in summer holiday mode, walking and people-listening in Central Park in the morning, sounds like it comes out of a show.

New Yorkers talk loud. “It’s the ratio,” declares an elderly gentleman on a bench, to his companion, “so many bad guys, so few heroes.” Or, in a jog-past, “it’s all about motivation” (hmm, actors?). Or “I told them at the meeting, I have to be more out there!”

Then “OK, it blew my mind!” (a passing cyclist on his cellphone in the a.m.) became “you coulda knocked me over (ov-ah) with a feather (feath-ah),” later in the day. It WAS a line in a show, a rather deluxe production number, stunningly performed by the Tony Award-winning J. Harrison Ghee in Some Like It Hot. Based on the 1959 Billy Wilder film, the musical comedy (by Matthew López and Amber Ruffin) with music by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (of Hairspray fame) is a caper about a couple of Prohibition era musicians on the lam after they witness a mob takeout, who pose as women to join a travelling all-girl band.

Some Like It Hot. Photo by Marc J Franklin.

The show (directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon, The Drowsy Chaperone, Aladdin …) rejoices in old-school Broadway glamour and entertainment. OK, the music tends to generic if expertly crafted evocations of ‘50s Broadway musicals, but there’s a 17(!)-piece orchestra to play it. And the visuals are a knock-out: a non-stop array of fabulous costumes and a succession of art deco sets, a farcical chase scene of maximum intricacy, hot dancing that erupts into tap at every conceivable (and inconceivable) opportunity.

Joe (Christian Boyle) and Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee), in the Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon roles, don’t just play the sax and the bass, respectively, but are, yes!, a tap-dance duo, the Tip Tap Twins, one white one Black. Sugar (Kayla Pecchioni, the outstanding understudy we saw ), the Marilyn Monroe role, is Black too. So is band-leader Sweet Sue (the terrific NaTasha Yvette Williams), which ups the stakes for her in this re-worked story of travelling the America of 1933. Yes, Some Like It Hot has been re-tuned for our moment with race in mind.

The most savvy update, and one that relies on a great performance by the non-binary  Ghee, is the way it addresses gender identity and ambiguity in transcending comic sight gags. It’s Jerry’s discovery that he feels at home and more fully alive as Daphne. He blossoms into his true self, and You Coulda Knocked Me Over With A Feather nails it.

It did cross my mind that this might be a case of political correctness weight-lifting.  But it’s negotiated with graceful dexterity by the actor. And it’s matched with Borle’s top-drawer comic chops, and a very funny performance by spaghetti-legged Kevin Del Aguila as the supple millionaire who falls in love with Daphne.

Annaleigh Ashford and Josh Groban in Sweeney Todd. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

Speaking of fulsome bands, we sought out the full-scale production of Sweeney Todd, Sondheim’s gruesome and hilarious 1979 masterwork directed by Hamilton’s Thomas Kail. And it was thrilling, a breath-taking wall of sound from an orchestra of 26 and a cast of 25 led by Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford.

Sweeneys come in all sizes and shapes; theatrical masterpieces inspire creativity. I’ve seen it rock in size small. This past season, the Plain Janes gave Edmonton a riveting 8-actor  one-piano chamber revival, ingenious, up-close, and dangerous, set in the break room of a meat-packing plant. I remember the Off-Broadway Sweeney Todd from The Tooting Arts Club in the south London suburbs that crossed the pond to the Barrow Street Theatre in Greenwich Village a few years ago. Not only did the production (for a cast of eight and a trio of instruments) reproduce the English lunch-counter setting of a real London pie and mash shop, but it actually served up meat pies, created by a former chef of the Obamas.

Gaten Matarazzo and Annaleigh Ashford in Sweeney Todd. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.

There’s a irresistible kind of grand-scale musical and theatrical magnificence about the Broadway production that’s on now — a vast and murky bi-level world with rotating iron-work towers, extraordinary lighting … and all that stunning music. Groban may not be the most menacing of of Sweeneys ever to go on a serial killing rampage onstage, but he’s an impressive singer. His resonant baritone fills the house with Sweeney’s grief and sense of loss. And Ashford’s Mrs. Lovett, the creative capitalist who bakes the deceased into meat pies, is a very funny, original creation, an outstanding  comic performance. And there’s shading, too, witness the touching scene she shares with her assistant Tobias (Gaten Matarazzo).

Here Lies Love, Broadway Theatre. Photo by Liz

After a decade, Here Lies Love, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s disco party musical imagining the life of Imelda Marcos (spun from their 2010 concept album) has moved to Broadway from the Public Theatre. And you’re entitled to wonder in advance how that kind of Off-Broadway immersive theatre could work in a big Broadway house.

How? Ingenious high tech (and an enormous budget). The massive Broadway Theatre, on Broadway and 53rd, was gutted entirely to create a giant dance pit à la Studio 54 for the audience to dance (with instructions from a DJ). Retractable stages and platforms, moveable gangways for actors to arrive up on the mezzanine, screens and neon everywhere in every shape and size, flashing lights, newsreel projections, live simulcasts..… It’s a sensory barrage, to the pounding rhythm of Fatboy Slim’s beats and (in response to musicians union protests) a live band of 12 in addition to tracks. You can buy a ticket for the dance floor (we opted for mezzanine seating).

Here Lies Love, Broadway Theatre. Photo by Liz

It’s the first show on Broadway to have an entirely Filipino cast. But the show has taken some heat for humanizing, or trivializing, a particularly brutal and violent regime, guilty of countless abuses and crimes against the Filipino people. The headline in a New York Times story during previews was ‘Here Lies Love Pairs Disco with a Dictator. It’s a controversial choice’.

The musical’s story of the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos does begin with an innocent country beauty queen, it’s true, with music to match. It charts the inflating ego, and boundless appetite for adulation and acquisition that, once empowered, knew no bounds. And the immersive staging of Alex Timber’s disco production is a way to conjure that world of hedonistic excess. But Here Lies Love doesn’t shy away from revealing the monster unleashed, in a mix of dramatic scenes and news footage. Imelda dumps her best childhood friend in one scene, coldly tries to buy off her nanny in another. Her claims to be helping the poor and supporting the arts are blown apart with news footage. The assassination of political rival Aquino, once a boyfriend, confirms an unrestricted capacity for cruelty.

To me, the disco storytelling, and the performance by Arielle Jacobs, vividly convey the corruptible provincial girl and the narcissistic killer. But the story seems thin when it comes to exploring the transition between the two. Imelda is one, then, boom, she’s the other. There isn’t even a song for the actor to work with, dramatically.

Here Lies Love is a unique theatrical experience, though, created by artists who know exactly what to do with big tech. You might feel a bit perplexed by a story with threadbare patches, but you can’t help but feel involved in its telling.

A couple of shows I saw won’t make it through the summer; the vagaries of the commercial theatre market see to that. An English import, The Life of Pi, Lolita Chakrabarti’s stage re-telling of the Yann Martel novel about a young boy stranded on a lifeboat with a quartet of animals, including a Bengal tiger, is a magical piece of stagecraft from the National Theatre. The seascapes conveyed by Tim Lutkin’s lighting on a mostly bare stage are thrilling in themselves. And the play is a test case for puppet/human interaction.

The puppet characters, including the hyena, the zebra, the orangutan (creations of Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell), are cunningly set forth, in detailed movements by onstage puppeteers you instantly forget about. And (like the boy) I couldn’t take my eyes off the tiger with the enigmatic name, Richard Parker.

Grey House is that most unusual of Broadway offerings, an original horror story. And it’s genuinely creepy, in Joe Mantello’s production. I was originally attracted to it because the great Laurie Metcalfe is in it, as a strange, dishevelled old lady that greets a couple of stranded travellers in a remote mountain cabin — during a blizzard (of course) with no telephone (of course). Metcalfe presides over a gaggle of very odd, menacing little girls, the kind that might move you to wonder if they’re ghosts. Yup, an evening of death and retribution.

The holiday trip included a couple of Brit imports. One, from the West End, was The Doctor at the Park Avenue Armory, a challenging play chiselled by director Robert Icke from Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 Professor Bernhardi. The tricky issue of identity, and the hierarchies of identity, and their intersection with race, religion and class, are worked over relentlessly. And just when you think you might know what you think, you don’t.

With the exception of the doctor, played with riveting intensity by the  formidable English actor Juliet Stevenson, the casting is across gender and race. When the doctor, a secular Jew, bars a priest from giving the last rites to a 14-year-old patient dying of a botched self-abortion, on medical grounds, all hell (including anti-semitism) breaks loose. A white actor plays the priest, whom we later learn is a Black character. And so on.

The play is smart, its characters fiercely articulate, but I found it rather issue-crammed. And Act II, in which the doctor is humiliated and made to re-discover her humanity, seemed to be a whole different play grafted on.

In Good Vibrations, a punk rock musical from Northern Ireland, at the Irish Arts Center, takes up the ’70s story of a real-life Belfast personnage, the ‘godfather of Belfast punk’. Terri Hooley (Glen Wallace) is the stubborn music junkie idealist who opened a record shop in downtown Belfast across sectarian lines. One thing leads to another: promoting, producing, starting his own record label,  gave bands like The Outcasts, The Undertones, and Feargal Sharkey their start — and royally screwed up his own life.

The music bites into a dire period; the band and the actors really commit. As a bonus, we got to see former Edmontonian Ben Wheelwright (who’s graduated from Hogwart’s on Broadway) onstage; he’d replaced one of the Irish actors.

There have been stories of late about the crisis in American theatre, especially the not-for-profit and regional sector (the Public Theatre alone has laid off 19 staff and reduced programming). To be in New York in the summer is to be reminded how much Broadway relies on development in these smaller houses, on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s exciting to see theatre on a grand scale, and it’s a cautionary tale, too.

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And now for something completely different: Edmonton artists in a vintage spiegeltent at K-Days

Posted on July 23, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Stephanie Gruson, The Great Great Spiegeltent Spectacular, Cristal Palace spiegeltent. Photo by Liz

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Magic, as magician Billy Kidd tells us, lives in surprises, in the “not knowing what’s going to happen next.”

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Now, here’s something unexpected (in a good way). Of all the things you might conceivably be doing at K-Days, the one you can’t possibly have anticipated is toasting the diamond anniversary of a vintage 1947 Belgian spiegeltent in the company of immortals.

I went to the Great Great Spiegel Spectacular last night in the Cristal Palace spiegeltent, and discovered a cast of Edmonton artists — some airborne, some bending themselves into improbable shapes, some peeking from behind giant feather fans, others playing instruments. Ah, and many of them at least a century old. At least that’s what the emcee Johnny Marvel assures us. And how can you not believe an authority figure in brocade top coat, velvet pants and thigh-high boots?

John Ullyatt as Johnny Marvel, The Great Great Spiegeltent Spectacular, Cristal Palace spiegeltent. Photo by Liz

The Cristal Palace is, says this fantastical person (played by the fearless and charismatic John Ullyatt), a veritable repository of “joy and love and immortality.” Should you join the troupe and stay within the “glorious pavilion,” time stands still and you live forever; if you leave, well, too bad, time passes and eventually mortality takes over.

Jason Kodie, the leader of the rocking house band Le Fuzz, which operates in both of our official languages, recalls personally entertaining the lumberjacks who cut down the trees a century ago that went into building the beautiful hand-made wood-, mirror-, and stained glass-lined “tent.” And in the atmospheric golden glow cast by the mid-evening sun, as filtered through stained glass, appreciation for old-school entertainment is in the air, in the production assembled and directed by Firefly Theatre’s Annie Dugan. Since there are but 220 or so seats, every smile and wink, every flash off a sequin, is up close.

Our host, who explains the difference between lying and pretending, introduces the opening act under the big top. She’s trapeze artist that Johnny Marvel first encountered whilst touring Latvia in 1963. Sarah Visser certainly wears 60 years lightly as she twirls in the air, catching herself with one heel.

The House of Hush Burlesque duo of LeTabby Lexington and Violette Coquette, who have a beguiling comic chemistry, confidence vs. shyness, bring forth their vintage fan dance, preserved since Edwardian times.

There are contortionists, including a duo (Jordan Patten and Avery Dennington), and a glamorous and infinitely bendable drag artiste named Pepper who performs in vertiginous platform stilettos that are a kind of stage in themselves.

Instead of the presentational pizzaz endemic to circus performers, the hoop artist Eliza Lance has an unusually reflective air. She seems to retain a sense of wonder at being onstage at all, taken aback by her own expertise in a gravity-defying art form.

Grindstone Theatre brings a sample, different every night, of their prowess at improvising whole musicals. The opening song of a yet undiscovered musical set in a forest, an audience suggestion, was the offering Saturday night.      

And sassy motormouth magician Billy Kidd arrives from her home base, Bath in England, to reinvent, and with utmost invention, traditional tricks  like the rabbit in the hat or ‘pick a card from the centre of the deck’. She’s a first-rate comic improviser and she reads minds, as does her companion Charlie the monkey. I can’t say more.

With the spiegeltent, summertime Edmonton and its artists acquire a romantic venue (Dugan calls it “a receptacle of delight”) — with a bar — at a festival that has not traditionally been terribly hospitable to local artists. Kudos to the instigator, Explore Edmonton. And after K-Days, Shakespeare and his Edmonton cohorts move Aug. 8 to Sept. 3 in for the FreeShakespeare Festival, with an alternating pair of plays, Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet under this petite pleasure dome.

There’s daily entertainment in the Cristal Palace spiegeltent at K-Days, some free and some ticketed. The Great Great Spiegel Spectacular runs there at 8 p.m. nightly, through July 30. Tickets, at showcase.com, include K-Days gate admission.

   

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Travel, adventure, discovery: Teatro Live! announces a new season

Posted on July 20, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Teatro Live turns 42 next season with a four-comedy line-up that returns to one of the company’s most popular, widely travelled, plays. And the theatrical journey inside and out- of Stewart Lemoine’s 1997 Pith! is germane to the 2023-34 theme, too: “imagination, adventure, discovery.”

In fact the November to July season opens with “a concert event” devoted to “what it means to travel,” through time and space, across decades and oceans. Far Away and Long A-Gogo!, which runs Nov. 23 to 26 and Nov. 30 to Dec. 3 at the Varscona, takes the final line of Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s to heart, as Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Teatro’s co-artistic director with Belinda Cornish, notes. “Three Teatro faves” will be in the cast, he promises. But the casting hasn’t been finalized yet

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Pith!, which hasn’t been seen here for a decade since its 2013 Teatro revival starring Andrew MacDonald-Smith, is a theatrical tribute to transforming power of the imagination. It’s back Feb. 9 to 25, in a production directed by the playwright, with MacDonald-Smith, now the company’s co-artistic director with Belinda Cornish, returning to the role of the traveller Jack Vail. “Now’s the time for positivity and imagination,” as MacDonald-Smith says.

He’s the insouciant vagabond who arrives in Providence R.I. in 1931 from Venezuela and changes the gloom-steeped life of a widow by engaging her to undertake an imaginary journey. Virginia, the widow in question will be played by Kristin Johnston (who appeared in Teatro’s Deathtrap this past season). The maid role originated by Leona Brausen has yet to be cast.

Cornish directs The Oculist’s Holiday, a 2009 Lemoine romantic comedy catalyzed by a holiday adventure in which a Canadian schoolteacher arrives in Lausanne, meets an American eye doctor, and has her vision of the world changed. “I’m excited, and nervous,” says Cornish. “It’s such a funny play, a beautiful play, a delicate play, just remarkable.” Her production May 30 to June 16, stars Beth Graham, last seen at Teatro in the signature Lemoine comedy Cocktails at Pam’s.

The season finale next July (11 to 28) is Noel Coward’s sparkly, starchy 1930 comedy of romantic dysfunction Private Lives. And, in a unique piece of casting, Teatro’s co-artistic directors will play the sparring couple. “I find it particularly hilarious,” says Cornish, “the idea of artistic directors battling it out in a tear-down drag-out comedy … when does that every happen?” The production marks the Teatro debut of director Max Rubin, Theatre Yes’s new artistic director (along with Ruth Alexander).

“His productions are so clever and funny and thoughtful — every moment is thought through,” she says of Rubin. “And (she laughs) he’s British; he truly understands that sensibility, those restrictive and quirky social mores…. Brits together! Oh, the dry sardonic humour that will be flying in rehearsal.”

“I hope Max really lets us go to it and duke it out… We’ll emerge battered and bloody, but smiling!” The rest of Rubin’s cast remains to be announced.

Meanwhile Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, this season’s finale, continues through July 30 at the Varscona.

Tickets and subscriptions: teatroq.com, with “anti-procrastination savings” if booked before Sept. 1.

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K-Days re-imagined: local artists in a vintage spiegeltent at the EXPO Centre

Posted on July 19, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

The Cristal Palace, a vintage Belgian spiegeltent at EXPO Centre for the summer. Photo by Liz.

Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by West Coast Spiegeltents.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A beautiful 75-year-old “tent” has magically touched down in a parking lot at the Edmonton EXPO Centre.

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With the arrival of the vintage hand-crafted “Cristal Palace” spiegeltent and the entertainment it will house this summer starting Friday,  Edmonton’s audiences and artists have a new way to experience K-Days, a festival prime for the re-imagining. And after that, in August, as announced at Will’s birthday bash in April, the world’s most famous playwright will make his Edmonton spiegeltent debut at the Freewill Shakespeare Festival.

‘Tent’ is a glorious misnomer (as I first knew from seeing a couple of spiegeltent shows in New York). Spiegel is Flemish for mirrors and a spiegeltent, a “magic mirror tent,” is a travelling dance hall lined with mirrors, stained glass, and precious wood.

On a sunny morning this week, I went for a visit, to meet Explore Edmonton’s arts programming manager Fawnda Mithrush whose idea it was to rent a spiegeltent for summer, and tent master Peter Goossens. And there was a dreamy glow to the space; light filters through the stained glass, and glances off the bevelled edges of the traditionally crafted mirrors, and polished wooden floors made of Norwegian pine and French oak. There was a light breeze outside and, as Mithrush pointed out, looking up at the draped canvas ceiling, “the whole place seems to breathe a bit.”

Looking up at the big top at the Cristal Palace spiegeltent, at K-Days.

The Cristal Palace (as it was christened, as a nod to the famous London dance hall) is the 220-seat setting for a whole K-Days mini-festival of dance, improv, comedy, magic, aerial artistry, contortionist acts, drag artists, burlesque, music, even spoken word poetry — locally sourced, produced, performed, directed.

And it’s got history. Built in Belgium in 1947, it was the first spiegeltent, built when wood and glass became available again post-war. And it’s one of three authentic spiegeltents currently touring in North America (there are only 34 in the world), two owned by Goossen’s West Coast Spiegeltents. They’re hand-built by the Klessens, a four-generation family of Belgian spiegeltent builders who have an inventory of 17 tents and still build one a year. Most recently, they’re at work on a 30-metre two-storey spiegeltent with an audience capacity of 1,000 for an L.A. client who tours full musicals.

Inside the Cristal Palace. Photo by Liz

We’re in one of the 14 alcoves, each with a table for six, around the perimeter of the tent. And we’re looking out across the stage (built by the Freewill Shakespeare Festival) that thrusts into the circular, sprung dance floor. “You can see 80 per cent of who’s here,” grins Goossens, Belgian-born and L.A.-based. “You can check them out. And look in the mirrors: I call it Tinder before Tinder.”

He explains the historical pedigree. A spiegeltent comes trailing a venerable tradition dating back to the late 19th century, when these moveable dance halls “travelled from fair to fair, town to town in Belgium, and a little bit in Holland, Germany, and France…. People would come from neighbouring villages and towns,” and competition for band musicians was fierce.

For Goossens, who first fell in love with spiegeltents at a sand castle festival in Belgium (“I thought Wow, how nice they are; oh I really want one!”), there is something particularly satisfying that “the origins were at the fair, and now (at K-Days) it’s coming back to the fair again…. They are living creatures. And we feel we’re just temporary custodians.”

There was a big boost in spiegeltent popularity between World War I and II, then after the wartime devastation (one tent was buried to save it), a real flowering in the ‘50s and ‘60s. as Goossens explains. You’d pay a small entrance fee, and then a collector would come around and get your money  for every two songs you danced. By the 1980s, spiegeltents “almost got lost … just on the cusp where something is old and nobody wants it any more, and the moment it becomes vintage and special.”

The Cristal Palace is a work of art in itself. And “you’d have to be pretty cold-hearted not to be touched,” as Goossens says, when you walk in.

Inside the Cristal Palace. Photo by Liz

Everything about building is hand-worked; everything about moving and setting it up is labour-intensive. Amazingly, no power tools are involved. “We only need a 14-foot ladder, a hammer and a screwdriver.” Ah yes, plus a crew of six, and three to five days. There’s 6,000 pounds of steel in the tent, but “everything fits into each other, the old-fashioned way,” as Goossens puts it. “Even these booths are part of the structure; it’s stronger if you build in the round so we don’t need any staking.”

There are 2,200 un-numbered pieces in all. They defy probability and fit into one semi-, but must be loaded and taken off in precisely the same order, he says. “At every setup we have at least one member of the Klessens family or company to come and guide us.” The production manager at the Cristal Palace, who’s arrived from Las Vegas, is Matthew Morgan, a professional clown and one of the last Barnum and Bailey graduates. He’ll be sticking around after K-Days to do his own Shotspeare comedy under the Freewill banner.

History is in the DNA of the space: you can trace the pattern of popular dances of yore in the hardwood of the dance floor. There’s a sweet spot under the canvas big top, where natural amplification magically takes over (I tested this, and it’s startling). And they’re built to withstand the infamous North Sea storms in Belgium, so spiegeltents aren’t neurotic about weather (there’s heat and A/C). Even the upgrades for changing fire and safety protocols are custom-made in the traditional way

The thing is, you have to really want a spiegeltent. And Mithush really did. The idea of her arts programming job, as she says, was to re-imagine K-Days by attracting “the creativity and passion of local artists … to make artist feel welcome and invited.” And what better way than to offer them “a special place, a bucket list place,” for them to perform in? “It’s a special performance experience for both performers and audiences!” as she says.

The 200-artist lineup assembled by Mithrush, who has wide experience in every aspect of the Edmonton arts scene (including a stint as Freewill’s general manager), dips into the Edmonton talent pool from many angles. There are both free and ticketed shows. In the afternoons at K-Days, free entertainment is led by the Thousand Faces Festival, specialists in interactive international dance and storytelling, most days at 1 and 3. The “happy hour” lineup at 4:30  includes Dorjay’s gospel/pop-rock fam sing-along show July 28 to 30, and Lit Fest’s Memoir Hour: Midway Edition July 27.

At 6 p.m. daily, Grindstone Theatre brings their popular all-improvised musical The 11 O’Clock Number to the tent. And at 8 nightly is the Great Great Spiegel Spectacular, produced by Firefly Theatre and Circus and directed by Annie Dugan.

Emcee John Ullyatt (who’s been the emcee in a Citadel production of Cabaret in his time) and the house band Le Fuzz (Jason Kodie and cohorts) lead a lineup that includes magician Billy Kidd, circus artist The Great Balanzo, drag artists, burlesque performers from the House of Hush, aerialists and contortionists — and “aerial hoop contortionist” Eliza Lance — who will be close enough to look in the eye.

The idea, says Ullyatt, is “a cabinet of curiosities, people collected from everywhere to join the spiegeltent house troupe…. in return for never growing old. “I myself was at the Cristal Palace in 1948,” he says, “so I’m over a hundred years old…. Yup, it’s a zombie story in a way.” Belinda Cornish, of Teatro Live!, is the dramaturge.

“Al the introductions are made up, great fun,” he says. One act might have “descended from golden wings.” One is from another planet, Montreal. “It matches the weird magic of the tent!”

The late show, 11 p.m. at the spiegeltent, is burlesque courtesy of  House of Hush. And it’s nearly sold out already for the run. In fact, Mithrush advises, “buy spiegeltent tickets now; they’re selling fast. And if you purchase in advance, the ticket includes K-Day admission.”

Muralist AJA Louden at work on the EXPO Centre. Photo by Liz

There’s a world outside the Spiegeltent, too. When you emerge,  there’s a spiegeltent garden. You can appreciate Explore Edmonton’s mural project: star muralist AJA Louden is re-inventing the blank industrial walls of the EXPO Centre. There’s a music lineup at Klondike Park programmed by La Cité francophone, and music as well in the Golden Garter  (aka Ballroom 106), including such Edmonton luminaries as Andrea House and Maria Dunn. Or you can take a load off at one of the Pop-Upsicle benches scattered through the site (designed by OneTwoSix Design, winners of Explore Edmonton’s industrial design competition this past winter). Welcome to a new old world.

Tickets and full schedule: k-days.com.

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You can be fabulous right here: Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s at Teatro, a review

Posted on July 15, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Bella King, Josh Travnik, Andrea House, Mark Sinongco in Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

To see the Teatro Live! revival of Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s at the Varscona is to be reminded of something special about this place. In Edmonton you make your own fun.

OK, maybe you have to (as this town’s go-to defensive position has it), but you can be original, funny, and fabulous here. You can be resolutely of this place, create excitement (possibly with multi-syllabic rhymes), fall in love, for example.

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That’s what Teatro has done for the last four decades, charting its own off-centre custom-made course through the urban landscape of comedy, and finding romance with audiences en route. That’s what this clever, spirit-raising, delight-filled showbiz musical, commissioned from four theatre up-and-comers in 2009, is all about, at heart. And that’s what this revival, with a new and impressive cast directed by Kate Ryan, proves in the doing.

Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s (book by Jocelyn Ahlf and Andrew MacDonald-Smith, music by Ryan Sigurdson and lyrics by Farren Timoteo) takes us to the 60s supper club scene in Edmonton, “the golden age of dining and dancing in Alberta’s capital” as billed. It’s where impresario Mitzi Dupar presides, in high style, over her own supper club. Lately Mitzi’s has been feeling the pinch from a surge in competition (“it used to be just us and Teddy’s chopped liver”). Should the surf ’n’ turf be re-priced? What if the drinks went up a nickel, and there were special guests? The bar and the bandstand (with a nook for the bookkeeping) are the keynotes of Mitzi’s world and Daniela Masellis’s design.

Andrea House as Mitzi in Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Embodied with riotous, not to say epic, 60s pizzaz by Andrea House, Mitzi is a glorious grand-scale vision of billowing sparkle who sings, dances, mingles, cracks wise, greets the regulars with showbiz flamboyance, match-makes, kibbitzes with the band (an excellent onstage trio led by pianist/ musical director Erik Mortimer), oversees the drink specials and has a few herself. Breezy exit line: “remember Mr. Mayor, you owe me a cha cha cha!.” The writing by Ahlf and MacDonald-Smith is full of period throwaways and Edmonton references. And like the apt and witty score by Timoteo and Sigurdson, it’s genuinely amusing.

House, an artist of rather awe-inspiring versatility and range herself — singer-songwriter/ actor/ playwright/ producer (don’t know about her mixology skills) — is captivating in this grand-scale and detailed comic performance. To see Mitzi stage-manage her own histrionic death-of-my era scene, plummeting to the ground in the “I’m falling, falling” number is to see a master comic actor at work.

The role was originally conceived for Leona Brausen, also Teatro’s resident costume designer, who returns to kit out the cast in an unfailingly entertaining ‘60s array of brocade, satin, chiffon, floaty floral caftans and natty suits with bowties.

The twin centrepieces of the musical comedy are two knotted romances. Mitzi is having a love affair with the younger man, bandleader/singer Jack, whom she lured from Tommy Banks’ band The Banknotes over at the Embers (mainly by flashing her brassiere, she says). Jack, played with a kind of suave swagger by Mark Sinongco, takes to the stage with effortless charisma; dreams of stardom south of the border dance in his head.

Andrea House, Mark Sinongco, Chariz Faulmino in Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The age difference gives Mitzi’s breezy confidence a ripple of unease, especially with the arrival of a brash, ambitious new singer Tippi Lala (that’s Lala with an emphasis on the second syllable) who has no shortfall in the confidence department. When your burden in life is “enormous personal charisma,” as Tippi puts it matter-of-factly, you just have to roll with it. “I’m very used to be ogled.” Chariz Faulmino’s performance is a lot of fun.

When Jack gets the call he’s been waiting for all his life — Vegas beckons with a replacement gig — Mitzi’s unease goes into crisis mode. Sigurdson’s score and Timoteo’s lyrics embrace both heartbreak and urban panic, and both well within the compass of House, a remarkable singer. Let’s Re-Decorate, a knock-out she sings with her staff, has a witty high-speed buzz of Sondheim (think Company).

Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

You’ll get a big kick out of the musical comedy couple who grate on each other’s nerves: the droll, deadpan bartender Mitch (Josh Travnik) and the primly organized by-the-rulebook manager Numbers (Bella King). Mitzi keeps trying to set them up but they’re not having it — until a terrific, perfectly formed, show-stealer of a number at the bus stop, beautifully calibrated by the actors, when the pair wonder if they just might be a teeny bit attracted to each other. Played by the co-writers in the original, Travnik and King are natural comic scene-stealers, a form of larceny that’ll have you hoping for a sequel.

Mitch’s song about the proper conclusion to draw from Edmonton’s Sunday temperance law — no problem, drink Scotch at home — is a highlight too. And the fantasy dream sequence in which Numbers is rescued from an island by Mitch as an American gallant in a sailor suit occasions a lovely, lush ballad.   

The creators of Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s really know their musical theatre. And the spirit and charm of their musical comedy is the way it’s both an expert homage to Broadway tradition and conventions and a tribute to the artists who stay here, in a small place, and fashion that tradition in their own image. What, you’ve run out of olives for the martini special? Try anchovies, says Mitzi to the bartender, and call it the ‘fish bowl’.

And that, my friends, is why everybody goes to Mitzi’s. And why you should too. It’s a helluva fun evening out, and it lifts your heart to see a new generation of artists infused by by the sense of possibility that brought Everyone Goes To Mitzi’s into being 14 years ago. As Jack sings, “I gotta be here…. The sky’s the limit. And we gotta lotta sky.”

Meet the creators in this 12thnight preview.

REVIEW

Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Created by: Jocelyn Ahlf and Andrew MacDonald-Smith (book), Ryan Sigurdson (music), Farren Timoteo (lyrics)

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Andrea House, Chariz Faulmino, Bella King, Mark Sinongco, Josh Travnik

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through July 30

Tickets: teatrolive.com

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A musical for Edmonton, set in a golden entertainment age: Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s is back at Teatro

Posted on July 14, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Ryan Sigurdson, Jocelyn Ahlf, Andrew MacDonald-Smith and (inside the cellphone) Farren Timoteo, Teatro Live. Photo by Yours Truly.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Fourteen years ago, four young Edmonton theatre artists, emerging talents in their mid-20s, got recruited by Teatro La Quindicina, now Teatro Live!, to do something together, something they’d never done before.

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Jocelyn Ahlf, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Ryan Sigurdson and Farren Timoteo, actors in love with musical theatre, got a Teatro commission to create their own musical. When Everybody Goes to Mitzi’s premiered at Teatro seven months later as the finale of the 2009 summer season, this theatre town had something it had never set eyes and ears on before: a New York-style ‘golden age of musical theatre’ musical actually set in Edmonton AB.

The new musical comedy was an original and high-spirited homage to Edmonton and its flourishing supper club scene of the 1960s, an historic decade when, amazingly, there were 20 supper clubs downtown alone, 13 of them on Jasper Avenue between 100th and 109th Streets.

Bella King, Josh Travnik, Andrea House, Mark Sinongco in Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

In honour of the season finale revival of Mitzi’s that opens Friday — directed by Kate Ryan and starring Andrea House as Mitzi Dupar, club proprietor extraordinaire — the creators got together at the Varscona (three in person and Timoteo by speaker phone) to remember the origins of the musical, their shared love of golden age musicals, and the seven-month countdown to their opening night .

“The team was put together by Jeff Haslam … like a boy band,” says MacDonald-Smith of the Teatro leading man who became the company artistic director. “No, like the Spice Girls,” Timoteo amends.

Haslam, born-again producer, “was inspired by the golden age New York musicals that were about New York, and wanted that for Edmonton,” says MacDonald-Smith, these days Teatro’s co-artistic director (with Belinda Cornish). It was unprecedented. “I remember him having a lot of faith in us,” says Ahlf. The commission’s other given was “a grande dame character” for Teatro’s vivid and spirited leading lady Leona Brausen to play. And it had to be a big romantic leading role… I remember Gypsy came up a lot.”

And so it was that the four, who “moved in the same circles” and had even been in shows together (but weren’t yet the close friends they are today), repaired to Block 1912. They consumed copious coffee, they divvied up the responsibilities, they figured out a real-life romantic conflict: the grande dame and the younger guy; Mitzi, pushing 50, and band leader Jack, late 20s.

“I remember feeling very fortunate at the time to be selected from a big pool and asked to create something …” says Timoteo, the artistic director of Alberta Musical Theatre and a playwright/ director/ actor whose own solo creation Made in Italy will return to the Citadel next season. “Teatro was then, as it is now, a hotbed of emerging theatre talents…. You’d been in the company a bit longer, Jocelyn, but we were all coming up together at the same time.”

“When I think about this now I think what Jeff did was really smart,” says Ahlf (to general assent). “He assembled chemistry.” Which, as MacDonald-Smith points out, honours a distinctly Teatro tradition. Stewart (Teatro resident playwright Stewart Lemoine) would choose the people, then write the play…. Talent first. Even here, we came before the show, and then we came up with the idea of a lead role for Leona.” And then, as per Teatro practice, “we had a cast before we had a show.”

Ah, the talent. Ahlf had more writer experience. She’d collaborated with Lemoine on the comedy The Hoof and Mouth Advantage (about a couple of scammers who open a musical theatre school in the middle of the prairies) and A Momentary Lapse. So when it came to Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s she and MacDonald-Smith would write the book. And they’d be in the show too, playing off each other, in perpetual bicker mode, as a wry bartender and a phlegmatic server.

Sigurdson was the obvious composer designate of the team. Like his trio of collaborators, he’d graduated as an actor from Tim Ryan’s musical theatre program at Grant MacEwan. But his “real background,” as he puts it, was ‘playing the violin and the piano, classical music.” And he’d been picking up gigs as a musical director, sound designer and vocal coach. He’d written “wordless bizarre music” for Lemoine’s Orlando Unhinged (commissioned for Sigurdson’s MacEwan class) and then the Teatro comedy Eros and the Itchy Ant. And he’d even written an original musical Water’s Daughter with Northern Light’s Trevor Schmidt.

“I approached (composing) as an actor: what’s the actor going through? how would I speak this line? therefore, how would I sing this line?” The ‘60s setting made Dean Martin an inspiration, says Sigurdson. “How would Dean Martin sing this? How would Ethel Merman sing this?…. And in the end I wasn’t happy till I liked the song. I problem-solved my way through it.”

What upped the ante, Sigurdson explains, is that the musical-to-be had a commercial theatre resonance to it: stand-alone hits, preferably hummable, were de rigueur. Period musicals, after all, were a major source of jazz standards. As MacDonald-Smith says, “all the songs the Rat Pack sang were from musicals….”

“Much of my career was me trying to catch up,” says Timoteo, who more than caught up (he starred as Frankie Valli in the Citadel’s Jersey Boys this season). “I didn’t grow up around musical theatre at all. I’d grown up with a steady diet and rock ’n’ roll. I’d been in a rock band. And, yes, we did win Battle of the Bands (laughter from all). From the moment I landed at Grant MacEwan I was pretending I’d seen more than just Grease. The truth is I hadn’t.”

“I took a lot of inspiration from my collaborators,” he says. “I’d written rock and pop lyrics. But this was a deep education for me in dramatic lyric writing. They knew so much more about the craft, the mechanics of it…. I learned so much.”

What producer Haslam had provided them was the idea of the supper club scene in ‘60s Edmonton. And what they brought to it was a personal sense of what that setting meant for young up-and-coming musical theatre artists in Edmonton. Like Jack the bandleader in Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s “there was part of me still grappling with whether or not Edmonton was where I wanted to be,” says Timoteo. “I wasn’t necessarily ready to celebrate that….I had to rebel against my musical theatre assumption that I couldn’t be anywhere other than New York. It was a critical part of my life as an artist discovering the beautiful components to the Edmonton experience I maybe hadn’t seen without the help of my collaborators.”

The journey of Jack, who gets a chance to make it in Vegas, is all about that. MacDonald-Smith remembers the bona fide revelation he had when he was in Avenue Q (with his puppet Maurice) in New York. A dream come true, yes, but then “backstage was just the same as any backstage I’d every been in.”

Sigurdson muses, “a New York musical set in New York is about people who went to the destination. An Edmonton musical set in Edmonton is about people who didn’t go to the destination…. Even non-theatre folk, lawyers and doctors,  are faced with that same question: ‘what are you doing here?’” Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s is by way of a group response.

“It’s really a love letter to the Varscona don’t you think?” says Ahlf of their joint creation. “And also a love letter to Tim Ryan,” says MacDonald-Smith of the late great director/ mentor who “introduced me and Farren to the scope of older musical theatre.”

“Jeff wanted to be a New York producer for Edmonton,” MacDonald-Smith thinks. “So smart and such a great education for us to have a commercialist producer perspective,” says Timoteo. “We were held to a high and immediate standard. Songs got sent back. We had seven months and we were being encouraged and pushed in a pretty big way, to write something for the audience they hadn’t really had before…. A major growth moment for me.”

Ahlf echoes the thought, borrowed from the commercial impulse, that “I’m here for the audience…. They’re who we’re making this for.”

The four look back now with a kind of wonder on the fast track that took an idea from book to lyrics to music, en route to opening night. “We wrote everything down, we needed some splat, the ‘vomit blast’,” says MacDonald-Smith. “Then we’d all meet to discuss…. We learned by doing. That’s really what acting is, that’s what we all do! We do it, screw it up and fix it, and find the gold by screwing up.”

“We knew a lot of stuff,” says Sigurdson. “But I don’t know if we knew we knew it.” Now they know. “People were laughing, applauding in all the right places,” says Timoteo, who remembers weeping and mouthing the words all through opening night. “It was a race to the finish. And on that opening night I felt like we won the race…. ”

Now there’s the thrill of watching a cast of hot young Edmonton theatre artists, the same age as the creators were in 2009, take their musical material and run with it. Come Friday Ahlf and MacDonald-Smith can finally see the show they wrote, from the house seats.

“It’s our dream as writers isn’t it?” says Timoteo, “the ultimate writer’s dream, even if it’s just one more time.… And it’s an enormous, delightful, emotional experience to see that it’s back. All these words are going to get said again. All these notes are going to get sung again.”

PREVIEW

Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Created by: Jocelyn Ahlf and Andrew MacDonald-Smith (book), Ryan Sigurdson (music), Farren Timoteo (lyrics)

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Andrea House, Chariz Faulmino, Bella King, Mark Sinongco, Josh Travnik

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday through July 30

Tickets: teatrolive.com

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The Genie and the spirit of showbiz: Disney’s Aladdin at the Jube, a review

Posted on July 12, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Marcus M. Martin as the Genie, Disney’s Aladdin, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Deen van Meer

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Come for the hummus, stay for the floor show,” advises the outsized sprite in Arabian Nights, the opening number of Disney’s Aladdin. He pretty much nails the touring Broadway family musical that’s arrived at the Jube with a sultan’s ransom in razzle-dazzle, sequins, and bling, ba-da-boom one-liners, and manic showmanship.

Welcome to Agrabah, where “enchantment runs rampant,” where “even the poor people look fabulous…. And everyone has a minor in dance.”

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That stage — to start with designer Bob Crowley’s fantasy frames, grillwork cut-out screens, lanterns, pyramids — is a vision of delight, faux Turkish Delight. It’s so saturated with colours and light it positively glows. Lighting is by the great Natasha Katz, who knows everything about the way light hits sequins, fake scimitars, and gleaming dentition. The cast, in sparkly harem pants, turbans, baubles, feathers, draped in floaty scarves (costumes by Gregg Barnes), glows too.

Call it Casbah kitsch if you will. But this splashy, good-natured, relentlessly fun production directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon, The Drowsy Chaperone, Some Like It Hot) is on a scale of keep-it-comin’ that sheds the kitsch label like leg warmers off a showgirl. Nothing succeeds like excess, as Oscar Wilde says; I’m going with that. Finally, tap dance comes to its own in the Middle East, along with the tabbouleh pun.

Adi Roy as Aladdin in Disney’s Aladdin, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Deen van Meer.

OK, there is a boy-meets-girl story, young love across the tracks, in all this, as you already know from the 1992 Disney animation that (in Disney corporate tradition) inspired it . The musical is work of Disney’s go-to composer Alan Menken with lyrics by the late Howard Ashman (supplemented by Tim Rice) and a book by Chad Beguelin. The boy in question is Aladdin (Adi Roy), a buff young street thief with charm, a million dollar smile and no shirt. The plucky Disney girl is Princess Jasmine (Senzel Ahmady), thwarted by her dad the Sultan (Dwelvan David on opening night), who’s set on finding her a suitable husband. She’s got an independent streak and wants to pick her own mate and see the world. Yes, she feels imprisoned, by parental authority and tradition and all that, but as one of her handmaidens says “this is a really really really nice prison.”

Anyhow the princess and the pauper meet by chance at the bazaar where she’s temporarily gone AWOL in disguise from the palace. Their eyes meet…. Anyhow, you know how that goes. It’s the plot, it’s conventional, and I’m just going to leave that with you.

Which brings us to the main event: the Genie. He has employment issues, having spent the last 6,000 years trapped in a lamp. “It’s demeaning, but there you are….” And in the performance by Marcus M. Martin, the Genie is a dazzling and charismatic figure who sings, dances, talks a mile a minute, and is, in effect, the spirit of showbiz — from the vintage Cab Calloway variety through the Catskills and Vegas to the Golden Age of Hollywood.

And his spirit infuses a whole series of big, extravagantly playful, production numbers, stuffed with allusions to everything from Hello Dolly! to West Side Story. And the Act I finale, Friend Like Me, is a show-stopper. The Genie emerges from the lamp singing and dancing (the guy knows how to make an entrance), summoned when Aladdin rubs it, in a cave that so gold-encrusted it makes the Phantom’s boudoir look positively Scandinavian minimalist. As the villain’s assistant says, the Golden Rule is “whoever has the gold makes the rules.”

The Genie leads a gloriously frantic, mismatched, nonstop succession of showbiz-y bits inventively choreographed by Nicholaw, including a whiff of Western, a chorus line with scimitars instead of canes, a big gold-clad tap finish. “Do I look bigger to you?” he asks Aladdin, patting his ample girth. “I know, ‘don’t eat the poutine’.”

Another highlight is High Adventure, in which Aladdin’s trio of pals (Jake Letts, Ben Chavez, and Colt Prattes) attempt to rescue the hero from the Sultan’s dungeon. Their riotous performances, expertly individualized, are Marx-ist, in the Groucho sense, and fun throughout.   

There’s nothing in the Aladdin handbook about when to say when. My cavil with this basic principle is the sound of this touring production, which is so bright, forward, and tinny, at least at first, that you can scarcely hear the lyrics. It’s a shame since they’re shameless, crammed with witty rhymed anachronisms. And it takes some concentration at times to hear which character is speaking, from where.

The lead performances are outsized. This, after all, is a show where the villain, the Sultan’s vizier Jafar (Anand Nagraj), says “I feel an evil laugh coming on….” Even so, your interest in Jafar’s assistant Iago (Aaron Choi), a clown with a voice that could boil the fat off a Broadway producer, who specializes in mugging, could wane, as mine did, especially if you’re getting bling fatigue by Act II.   

The young lovers-to-be, played by Roy and Ahmady, are a likeable and suitably dreamy pair, who are very at home in the pop idiom of Mencken’s songs. They relentlessly turn to face the audience with their smile wattage, but, hey, this is a show that lives to wink. And the ensemble are absolutely top-flight dancers; they have to be to make Nicholaw’s choreography seem easeful.

The real star of this savvy family-friendly show is the Genie, purveyor of the Arabian Dream. And you’ll leave possibly dazed but certainly smiling. When I left the Jube last night I didn’t notice a long silver streamer (courtesy of the show) tangled in my purse strap. The lady behind me inadvertently stepped on the end, and we ended up eyeball to eyeball. “Well, don’t you look sparkly,” she said. That’s what a dose of fun will do.

REVIEW

Disney’s Aladdin

Broadway Across Canada

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca, edmonton.broadway.com

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