Young and in love: a playful rom-com version of Pride and Prejudice at the Citadel

Posted on March 14, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Gianna Vacirca and Morgan Yamada, Pride and Prejudice, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Ah, young love. The play that opens Thursday at the Citadel takes us into the heart of “rom-com-land,” as Gianna Vacirca puts it, amused. “And we’re not watching grown-ups, adults with lots of romantic history, people who really know themselves, make big mistakes in love.” Au contraire.

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Vacirca is sitting in a sunbeam at the Citadel on the Saturday morning of the first preview of Pride and Prejudice this past weekend, reflecting on the version of Jane Austen’s sharp-eyed 1813 comic masterwork we’ll see, in a Mieko Ouchi production. 

It’s an ingenious (and by definition playful) eight-actor adaptation by the American actor Kate Hamill, who’s made something of a specialty of re-moulding  classic novels — Sense and Sensibility, Little Women, Vanity Fair among them — for the stage. High speed? “We’re still working out some of the truly virtuoso costume changes.” And Vacirca plays clever, spirited Elizabeth Bennet, the most independent-minded of five sisters in a household with a double-sided crisis (a surplus of marriageable daughters and a shortage of cash).

“This is an adaptation that really highlights the classic rom-com quality of the novel,” says Vacirca, an artist whose multiple talents extend to acting, dance, choreography, and the creation of bespoke hand-made pasta for her own company bell’uovo.

“It’s very bright,” says the show’s Lizzie. “And it doesn’t ignore how young and naive these people are, people with no experience of love and romance, people who are incredibly awkward and have terrible relationship models…. And they’re in a situation where they’re having to marry to secure their own safety for the rest of their lives!”

“You know when you see a Hamlet, and you’re watching a 45-year-old, and then you read the play and realize he’s supposed to be an 18-year-old? It changes a lot, (with) his age, his lack of experience, his naïveté, when you watch someone with very little life experience make huge mistakes,” declares Vacirca, who alights in the world of Austen direct from the mean streets of Jersey (she was assistant director/ assistant choreographer for the Citadel’s Jersey Boys). The same with the youthful characters in this version of Pride and Prejudice, she argues. “It’s less Regency drama, more modern farce!”

Braydon Dowler-Coltman and Ben Elliott in Pride and Prejudice, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Not, needless to say, that doors will be slammed or plates of sardines will appear and vanish à la Noises Off, as Vacirca points out. “But people are playing many characters; it’s not natural realism. We’re definitely in a heightened theatrical world. Live music. Lots of gender-bending going on….” Partly there’s a point to be made, she thinks, about the way “there is masculine and feminine in all of us.”And partly the playwright “is messing with a story we all know: how do you make it interesting for another time, have another go at it?”

 Among Braydon Dowler-Coltman’s several roles, for example, is Miss Bingley, “the perfect woman,” a nicely ironic touch. Lizzie’s best friend Charlotte is played, straight and with no vocal adjustments, by Garett Ross. “I think people will be surprised how quickly they forget the gender of these folks,” says Vacirca.

“How the actors are approaching the work is from a place of naïveté, lack of experience, raging hormones — in contrast to the beautiful intellectual language, the gorgeous wit and cleverness.” She laughs. “It’s one of the magic tricks of Jane Austen, how people make these humongous mistakes, but they’re able to communicate these humongous mistakes so beautifully.” 

Morgan Yamada, Ben Elliott, Nadien Chu, Garett Ross, Beth Graham, Gianna Vacirca in Pride and Prejudice, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

As for the parental generation, Mrs. Bennet (Nadien Chu) “runs the family like a military regiment of girls.” Vacirca describes her as “a bad clown … Mother Goose on steroids, such a huge personality. All she cares about is marriage; she takes it very seriously. And in many ways she’s very good at her job.” 

Vacirca finds  that Lizzie’s personality, in part, “is based on not being her mother…. When you’re forming who you are, and your only landmark of personality is to not be something, I feel like you can’t help but be cynical, scrutinize everything around you, and say that nothing matters.” 

Gianna Vacirca and Ben Elliott in Pride and Prejudice, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

At the outset her first thought for Lizzie was Beatrice, the witty verbal fencer and romance-avoider of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Vacirca played her in a Thou Art Here production of a few seasons ago, and there are certainly similarities. Like the Shakespeare heroine Lizzie has “a sharp wit, she sees hypocrisies, she hates the double-standard … and can enjoy the beautiful pleasure of eviscerating someone.” But Lizzie is much younger, much more naive. And, hey, she falls for two men in the course of Pride and Prejudice; “she is a human being, very fallible, with a real beating heart.”

For Vacirca, thoughtful and energetically engaged in thinking about whole plays and not simply roles, it’s been a “beautifully varied” year of investigations into the way people behave inside romantic relationships. Ah, and speaking of romantic relationships and marriages, just before New Year’s she got married “at a wonderful party” to the actor Oscar Derkx, currently in the production of Trouble in Mind that ran in Winnipeg and arrives onstage at the Citadel in a couple of weeks. 

After Teatro Live’s season-opener Evelyn Strange (in which Vacirca played an amnesiac searching for her past and finding a future), Jersey Boys, and Pride and Prejudice comes Hannah Moscovitch’s Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes at Theatre Network — a disturbing and nuanced exploration of the relationship between a professor (John Ullyatt) and a student.

Vacirca’s entry point into theatre came via dance, her hard-working single mom “an incredible dancer herself … raised in a very humble farming family. That’s where it all started…. Instead of paying a babysitter, extra-curricular were our babysitters. So I had a lot of ballet, modern dance. Imagine a six-year-old doing Martha Graham!” Then, fatefully, she made a friend, another single-mom kid, and they got Lois Hole scholarships to the Foote theatre classes at the Citadel. “A young Annette Loiselle was my first acting teacher!” 

The Vacirca bent has always been for the the physical. She played sports, including soccer at a competitive level. It was when she got into the BFA acting program at the U of A that “my life changed,” she says. “I could tell I had a very different background than my classmates, less conventional training. And it only made me more comfortable to be experimental with movement in shows…. ‘what if we do this? what if we do that?’” 

Gianna Vacirca, Garett Ross, Morgan Yamada in Pride and Prejudice, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The Pride and Prejudice cast may be decked out in Regency period wear, as she says, but “there are definitely screwball comedy moments. And being comfortable physically is so important.” It means that she isn’t daunted by suggestive stage directions like “she has a heart attack” or “her brain melts out of her ears.” Says Vacirca, “you attack with physicality.” Ditto asides like “getting weak at the knees” or the feeling of wanting to kick yourself after an awkward encounter.

As a choreographer and movement director with directing in her future — “I really like stories; I really like trying to figure out people why they do what they do” — Vacirca finds her theatre analogies in  team sports. “I find acting and making plays is an athletic team sport … needing facilitation, outside coordination, physical energy.”

Theatre, she thinks, is “a huge risk. It’s live, it’s happening before your very eyes. The only other thing that does that is sports…. Theatre and sports are so similar. You have a general idea of the outcome but it really is very different every time.” 

Theatre is “passing a massive ball of energy around the stage for someone’s amusement…. When you have a really good play and a lovely team of creators, it’s as alive and exciting as a big game. And as unpredictable. Even after the pandemic, putting a show on for people is a kind of beautiful pressure.”

“If you believe that everyone is trying to be good but capable of massive mistakes, the best way to treat work is to make the characters as real as possible, real multi-faceted people as opposed to the scorned woman or the victim or the villain….”  

And when they believe, audiences respond and buy in. “Humans have an incredible barometer for what is authentic, genuine, believable,” says Vacirca. “Even if it’s coming at us in a crazy shape we don’t recognize.” 

PREVIEW

Pride and Prejudice, adapted from the Jane Austen novel by Kate Hamill

Theatre: Citadel

Directed by: Mieko Ouchi

Starring: Gianna Vacirca, Karl Ang, Nadien Chu, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Garett Ross, Ben Elliott, Beth Graham, Morgan Yamada

Running: through April 2

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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‘I sing my sorrow and I paint my joy’. Joni Mitchell: Songs of a Prairie Girl at Theatre Network, a review

Posted on March 12, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Joni Mitchell: Songs of a Prairie Girl. From left, Kristi Hansen, Cathy Derkach, Christine MacInnis, Cayley Thomas, Chariz Fulmino. Photo by Ian Jackson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I’m not a weeper, I’m a snarler,” Joni Mitchell in old age tells us in the “theatrical collage” in her honour at Theatre Network. “I put the weeping in the songs…. I sing my sorrow, and I paint my joy.”

The sorrow and joy, the music and the painting, and the philosophical reflections that go into “snarling,” as she puts it in her sharp-edged way, are all part of Joni Mitchell: Songs of a Prairie Girl, named for a Mitchell compilation album for Saskatchewan’s centenary in 2005.

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The creation of Wild Side Productions artistic director Jim Guedo isn’t exactly a play. And you wouldn’t call it a stage biography, a revue, or a song cycle either, though with generous elements of all of the above. It’s an imaginative kind of multi-angled multi-hued composite portrait painted in music and the legendary protagonist’s real-life spoken words — in different eras by five actors. And it’s set in motion, forward and backward, by memory and the passage of time. 

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The portrait of the artist that emerges from the dabs and brush strokes is of a true original, restless in spirit, exploring the corners of the canvas, wriggling out of categories as soon as they’re imposed. An unusually talkative and self-aware artist, Joni refuses to sit still for anything like a conventional linear rendering of her story. “If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing,” she’s said in one of the interviews that yield up the text of the piece. “But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So of the two options, I’d rather be crucified for changing.” 

Guedo’s inspiration is to defy chronology and superimpose five Joni’s of different ages on each other onstage — the Ingenue (Chariz Faulmino), the Free Spirit (Cayley Thomas), the Explorer (Kristi Hansen), the Critic (Cathy Derkach). So the oldest of them (Christine MacInnis, who has valiantly stepped into a large and dauntingly wordy role at the last minute, script artfully placed onstage) can confront her younger selves, and vice versa.

And they all sing together, as solos with back-ups or ensemble numbers, an insightful and well-chosen songlist of 22 from the Joni canon. The actor-singers are accomplished, and so is the excellent onstage band. Friday night’s performance was plagued by persistent (and I’m sure eminently correctable) sound problems, but the show feels musically fulsome. 

Mitchell is a questing spirit, an artist who searches. And together the actors, assisted by her self-portraits, create a sense of experience getting gathered in the service of art. The bright exuberance of Fulmino (Yellow Taxi) co-exists with Thomas as the Joni who wrote Blue, and the thought that “songs are like tattoos/ you know I’ve been to sea before/ Crown and anchor me/ Or let me sail away….” 

To Hansen as the Explorer goes the idea of leaving safety behind, expressed in Don Juan’s Reckess Daughter as “the eagle and the serpent are at war in me … these hectic joys, these weary blues.”  And in Derkach as the Critic, closer in age to the Sage, you can see the lines drawn by anger and socio-political outrage in The Three Great Stimulants, accompanied by Mitchell’s self-portrait as Van Gogh with the bandaged ear.     

Intriguingly, Joni Mitchell: Songs of a Prairie Girl is the second offering in Theatre Network’s inaugural full season at the new Roxy about a prairie-born artist with a starry international career. Like the first, Eugene Stickland’s The Innocence of Trees (an encounter between the older and the younger incarnations of the Saskatchewan-born painter Agnes Martin), Joni Mitchell: Songs of a Prairie Girl gathers the multiple selves of the artist. And it wonders about art, where it comes from, what it’s for, how it’s made.  

Both Martin and Mitchell (who grew up in Saskatoon) capture something of the prairie landscape in their artistic sightlines. It’s the singer-songwriter, a voluble master of the apt and witty turn of phrase, who airs her views directly — on art and the influences and contradictions of the artist in an often hostile world. The big questions of life, love, and art appear, more elliptically and poetically, in Mitchell’s songs. 

The stage designed by Guedo is an inviting memory chamber — candles, cushions, flowers, lamps, a grand piano — framed, and lighted by Larissa Poho, like a painting. And as in Joni Mitchell’s 1995 painting Middle Point (the image of a solitary woman in silhouette gazing out at the sea), you can make out the words Idle, Idyll, Ideal, Idol written on that frame. From time to time the Joni’s lean out to peruse us, or perch on it and look back into the ‘painting’ to watch each other. 

The back wall is a curved and shimmery surface across which a fascinating array of images — many of them Mitchell’s own self-portraits — dissolve into each other, or morph into her landscapes. The multi-media design is Ian Jackson’s, and it’s a beauty. 

The “present” of Guedo’s piece is the Joni who returned to performing in 2022 after seven years of learning to speak, walk, and sing following a near-fatal brain aneurysm in 2015. And her often acerbic commentary is well matched with MacInnis’s forthright air of abrupt judgment and wry amusement/bemusement about the hypocrisies of the world — the absurdities of national identity (is a salmon American or Canadian?) or chronological order (“a terrible idea”), false humility (“I prefer real arrogance”) or parental ideas about propriety, Saskatoon (“where I learned about bigotry”) or the patriarchal music industry status quo.

In the course of the evening with Joni, we learn about an impoverished childhood, a difficult mother-daughter relationship, and a battle with polio age nine (“a rehearsal for the rest of my life,” as she said), friendships across the racial divides of Saskatoon, the wayward streak of the artist-in-progress who habitually struck out for the roughest parts of town — mainly because the music was better.   

A period of abject scrambling destitution in Toronto, and the kind of desperation to survive that would lead a 22-year-old to give up a baby for adoption — these are emotional peaks of a struggle-filled ascent from obscurity to celebrity. “Human nature … it’s all I had to work with.” You have to wrap your mind around Mitchell’s insistence she only took up music instead of pursuing her real love, painting, in order to cobble together enough to live. And as for folk music, she says, it just happened to be the currency of the time.

Mitchell’s imagery, both in her spoken insights and her lyrics, has a surprising wit to it. She says she emerged from the three-year period after the adoption feeling like “a cellphone wrapper on a cigarette package.” Her philosophical studies, pursued in solitary during a hermit period in B.C., include the thought that Nietzsche gets a bad rap, and “the Western mind has been playing half a deck for a long time.” 

She spars at length with her younger selves about the tension between sensuality and clarity, the heart and the intellect in art. Apparently it’s a continuing concern, and the balance, as she explains (she’s a gift-of-the-gab explainer), gets adjusted at every age. 

Mitchell’s life story, told in a non-linear way in the artist’s own words, is the context for the songs. And the presence onstage of the older Joni as a watchful observer, amused or skeptical, gives the whole enterprise the theatrical resonance that it’s happening in her mind.  She is her own most insightful critic. 

The show is a fascinating way of marrying an articulate multi-dimensional artist’s life and work. Both are ongoing, and both invite the audience to react in a personal way. “And there is a song for you/ Ink on a pin/ Underneath the skin/ An empty space to fill in….”

Check out 12thnight’s PREVIEW Q&A with creator/director Jim Guedo here.

REVIEW

Joni Mitchell: Songs Of A Prairie Girl

Theatre: Theatre Network in association with Wild Side Productions

Created, directed, and designed by: Jim Guedo

Starring: Cathy Derkach, Chariz Faulmino, Kristi Hansen, Christine MacInnis, Cayley Thomas

Running: at the Roxy through March 26

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca

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‘Musicians gone wild’: the Mayfield’s upcoming five-show season

Posted on March 7, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The air of creative nostalgia floats over the upcoming 2023-2024 season at the Mayfield Theatre announced by artistic director Van Wilmott Tuesday.

The five-show line-up capitalizes on the strength, stylistic versatility, and expertise of the theatre’s musical forces  — “music is a huge part of what we do at the Mayfield,” as Wilmott says. The season launches a new series,  Musicians Gone Wild, designed to celebrate seminal eras in pop culture history. Part one Rock The Canyon, a creation of Wilmott with playwright Tracey Power, takes audiences to fabled Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, in the late ‘60s early ‘70s the incubator of a generation (or two or three) of superlative popular music. 

“The story of Laurel Canyon,” as Wilmott puts it, is a whole genealogical narrative, a veritable commune threaded with starry names —The Byrds, The Turtles, The Doors.… “that begat Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Crosby Stills and Nash.” Ah, and the recurring motif of an instrument, the Rickenbacker 12-string guitar (inspired by A Hard Day’s Night), and the invention of the “California sound, reverberating through time in a gallery of hits.

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The production, which runs Sept. 5 to Nov. 5, has a cast of 10, “all musicians.” Wilmott, who likens the Laurel Canyon era to Paris in the ‘20s, says the idea isn’t impersonation, but the capture of a time and its music — as Joni Mitchell has it, “pouring music down the canyon.”

The longest run of Mayfield seasons is claimed by the holiday show. Canada Rocks: The Reboot, which runs Nov. 14 through Jan. 28,  featuring “celebrated Canadian artists” of every era. Fearless prediction: it’ll be the only show of the season where Don Messer shares a stage with Leonard Cohen; ditto Stan Rogers with Justin Bieber. Says Wilmott, the new revue revisits (updates and refines) the idea of the Mayfield’s 2018 Canada 151. It’s a big bash in honour of all things Canadian, starting with the music but including our collective personality quirks and cultural motifs, street hockey to cod-kissin’.

One Night With The King is an Elvis tribute show, in which the story, the legend, and the short, storied career come together. The Mayfield production Feb. 6 to March 31 2024 stars Matt Cage, whom Mayfield audiences saw as Elvis in the Mayfield’s 2019 Million Dollar Quartet. 

The Mayfield’s spring musical returns us (no matter our age) to our collective alma mater, Rydell High, and the year of 1959. Grease, which premiered in a Chicago night club in 1971, has been part of the cultural DNA ever since. It takes Wilmott back to the summer of 1993, when he was visiting from a Calgary gig, “the first time I ever set foot in the Mayfield,” he says. In the cast were a mother and daughter duo of actors, Maralyn and Kate Ryan. It’s the latter, the artistic director of Plain Jane Theatre, who directs the Mayfield production that runs April 9 to June 16.

Wilmott has a particular fondness for the evergreen 1979 comedy that runs at the Mayfield in the summer of 2024. “I’m a sucker for On Golden Pond,” by the American playwright Ernest Thompson, which taps the rich reservoir of family and intergenerational dynamics. And as film and TV adaptations attest (Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn and Jane Fonda for the former; Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Glenne Headly  for the latter) — the juicy roles have always attracted stars. The director and cast of the Mayfield production (June 25 to July 28) are yet to be announced. 

After that, in August, “we get out of the way,” says Wilmott, because of the mighty Fringe and “respect for its artists.”

Upcoming this current season, there’s Rock of Ages — a good-time jukebox musical with a redeeming air of self-mockery about its eminently danceable gathering of ‘80s hits (along with a Queen’s ransom in hair products). Kate Ryan directs the Mayfield production April 4 to June 11.  

And June 20 to July 23 at the adventurous dinner theatre, Clusterflick: The Improvised Movie undertakes exactly that improbable feat. Three of the most deluxe improvisers anywhere — Mark Meer, Ron Pederson and Jacob Banigan of Gordon’s Big Bald Head — will improvise an entire movie before your very eyes, inspired by cues from the audience.

Mayfield subscriptions and tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca.

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Joni Mitchell: Songs of a Prairie Girl, a ‘theatrical collage’ of a legendary artist, at Theatre Network

Posted on March 4, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Chariz Faulmino (left), Cathy Derkach, Cayley Thomas, Kristi Hansen, Alison Wells (front) in Joni Mitchel: Songs of a Prairie Girl. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“We’re captive on the carousel of time/ We can’t return, we can only look/ Behind,  from where we came….” The Circle Game, Joni Mitchell, 1966

The show that opens Thursday on the Theatre Network mainstage is a  multi-dimensional portrait, in music, of a multi-dimensional artist whose creative muse is rooted in the prairies.

Joni Mitchell: Songs Of A Prairie Girl, named after her 2005 compilation album in honour of Saskatchewan’s centenary, is a non-linear telling of the story of the legendary Fort Macleod-born/ Saskatoon-raised singer-songwriter — in her own music, her own visual imagery, her own words. And, like Mitchell herself, Jim Guedo’s theatrical creation has evolved in the decade and a half since. 

First, it was for a revival of the piece at the National Arts Centre’s Prairie Scene in 2011. And more recently — Guedo’s “pandemic project”as he’s said — a “complete rewrite” because of more recent dramatic turns in Mitchell’s story, the devastating brain aneurism that felled her in 2015, and her surprise return in 2022 to the Newport Folk Festival.   

In the course of Guedo’s two-act music-filled production, five different singer-actors (and a three-piece band) capture the creative powerhouse from five angles, in different phases of her life: the Ingenue (Chariz Faulmino), the Free Spirit (Cayley Thomas), the Explorer (Kristi Hansen), the Critic (Cathy Derkach), and the Sage (Alison Wells).

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12thnight caught up with Guedo, a multi-faceted artist himself — he writes, he directs, he designs, he’s the head of theatre at MacEwan University — to find out more about his inspiration for Joni Mitchell: Songs of a Prairie Girl. 

Why Joni Mitchell? Is your long-standing attraction to the artist traceable to your Saskatchewan DNA? The lyrics of a certain song?  A sensibility?

Joni Mitchell once said that there’s a style, a rhythm, an energy to a ‘flatlander’. She observed that Neil Young had that same artistic ‘gait’. I’m originally from Battleford Sask., and I spent my youth in and around many of the places of her youth. And I connected especially to her drive to express herself through words, art, and music.   

Joni Mitchell gave the project her blessing for its 2005 debut. How did that connection come about?  

It was a matter of going through all the standard labyrinth of agents, assistants, and go-betweens to get my ‘pitch’ to her.  In a sense I storyboarded a proposal, with the hook that it would be a theatrical collage, like beads on a necklace. Showcasing her words, her art, and her music. When we spoke, she made a few requests for additional material put into the show, as she’d hoped the compilation album of Songs of a Prairie Girl would’ve been a double album.  I obviously agreed…

Could you expand on your theatrical idea of five actors to capture different aspects of the artist?  

Like a haphazard photo album, Songs of a Prairie Girl now travels back and forth in a on-linear chronology to illustrate moments from Joni’s life – so we experience the friction of the mundane and the transformative moments abutted up against each other. By telling a life story out of order, like flipping through random photographs, the audience assembles the chronology. But eventually, in performance, we experience it surreally, without the traditional touchstone of one actor playing a titular role but many Joni’s.

The play is non-linear; is the song list non-linear too?  

Yes. It’s more of a fluid, stream-of-consciousness through-line that flits emotionally from point to point, song to song.

Do the ‘characters’ interact onstage?   

Yes, the conceit is what it would be like if you could interact, spar, or commune with all the younger versions of yourself?  While dealing with an audience?

Can we call it a musical?   

That’s a good question.  It’s not a traditional musical in any sense.  It’s not a ‘bio-pic’. It’s a musical collage.

Since Joni’s life has changed radically, health crisis and all, and then changed again, including a recent return to performing (with more to come), what have you changed/expanded in your show?   

The project has been constantly updating over time, but especially in the last two or three years. Especially after her appearance at Newport. The hook into the show had to adjust since just a year before her re-emergence she told Cameron Crowe that she’d never sing or perform again. Then she does a set and plays a guitar solo!

This experience starts before that, but on the cusp of a transitional moment in her journey when she inches back into life.

Speaking of both sides now, Joni Mitchell has famously said that her life as a visual artist is as important as her musical life. Is that provocative view taken up in the production?  

She constantly champions her role as an artist first, a singer second.  And how the vagaries of fate led her to become ‘Joni Mitchell’ the musical icon as opposed to the art school student bent on planting her flag as a visual artist.

She’s an artist of major international stature, and her lyrics and imagery have tangible, powerful Canadian connections….Thoughts about Joni Mitchell’s impact on the world of music?  

I’m biased, but she has been the most important, influential artist that has touched me.

Side question if you’re in the mood: do you have a favourite Joni Mitchell song, one speaks to you louder than the rest?    

Too many to choose from:  I’d say Court and Spark as an entire, unified album.

PREVIEW

Joni Mitchell: Songs Of A Prairie Girl

Theatre: Theatre Network in association with Wild Side Productions

Created, directed, and designed by: Jim Guedo

Starring: Cathy Derkach, Chariz Faulmino, Kristi Hansen, Cayley Thomas, Alison Wells

Running: at the Roxy March 7 to 26

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca

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On a journey through the universe: The Space Between Stars headlines SkirtsAfire 2023

Posted on February 28, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Sarah Emslie (left) and Christine Lesiak, The Space Between Stars, SkirtAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“You — you alone will have stars as no one else has them.” 

— The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry

And the space between them is yours to claim, too, as theatre artist Christine Lesiak has discovered in “the strange and wonderful adventure” of creating the play premiering on the mainstage of the SkirtsAfire Festival (Mar 2).

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The Space Between Stars is Lesiak’s “radical adaptation” of the haunting and soulful 1943 novella The Little Prince by the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. One of the most translated volumes in the world, it follows the journey through the universe of a small grave visitor from a tiny planet, with its three volcanoes and one arrogant flower. The narrator, a pilot who’s crashed his plane in the Sahara desert, is remembering his wonderful encounter with the mysterious little boy, and the Little Prince’s bemusement at the absurd behaviour of grown-ups at every port of call. 

In an eerie resonance of his literary hit, Saint-Exupéry, a pilot himself, met a mysterious fate. On a reconnaissance mission from Corsica in 1944, his plane went missing — vanished into a fathomless universe.

The impulse to adapt The Little Prince for the stage isn’t Lesiak’s alone, as she’s quick to point out: makers of theatre, dance, music, opera, computer games have found it irresistible. “It’s a cultural touchstone,” as Lesiak says. “But the adaptations I’ve seen skimmed over the essential sadness and feelings of loss. And for me, that’s the undercurrent of the whole story.”

Christine Lesiak, The Space Between STars, SkirtsAfire Festival. P{hoto by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

The Space Between Stars, with its nexus of astronomy, cosmology and mythology, happens at an unexpected intersection: it marries Lesiak’s own rare and surprising skill set as a space physicist and theatre artist (with a specialty in clowning!). There can’t be many. For her part, though, Lesiak says “the essential soul of the artist and the scientist are the same…. They both require wonder, curiosity, the willingness to be wrong, to take a risk.” Ah yes, and “obsessive commitment.” 

Christine Lesiak, creator (and star) of The Space Between Stars. Photo supplied.

Lesiak arrived here in 1993 from New Brunswick to join the U of A space physics department. Her specialty: magnetospheric physics. Ah, not stars per se,” Lesiak points out. “But who does not stare at the stars? When you’re a kid out camping, who doesn’t lie back on the grass and stare up at the sky and try to find The Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt? And marvel at the insanity of the vastness…. The light we see left the centre of our galaxy 26,000 years ago.”

The road to clowning can hardly be considered inevitable for physicists. But since her arrival Edmonton audiences have been enchanted by Lesiak’s clown performances for Small Matters Theatre (For Science!, Sofa So Good). And she’s the artistic director of the international Play The Fool Festival of clown theatre and physical comedy. 

“This has been a long time coming,” Lesiak says of adapting The Little Prince for the stage. Her attraction to the book goes back to her New Brunswick childhood. “I read it in French… My teacher was crying at one point (the universal reaction of every adult to the beauty and sadness of the little book), and I was super-confused by that!” she laughs. 

Sarah Emslie and Christine Lesiak, The Space Between Stars, SkirtAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jane. BB Collective.

Many enchanted encounters, in both our official languages, followed. “It’s such a profound read, and every time I read it, something new emerges….” And in 2016, Lesiak workshopped an adaptation of the novella she called The Object of Constellations, the grand finale project of a U of A master’s degree in theatre practice. Its academic premise: “the application of clown techniques, creation and practices into immersive and site-specific performance.” The Object of Constellations, an immersive installation, moved its audiences through the multiple domes at the U of A’s astronomy observatory. 

The Space Between Stars, heir to that earlier creation, is a bona fide play, says Lesiak. “The desert is a metaphor for space. The pilot lost in the desert becomes, in the play,  an astronomer (Lesiak) “who’s a different kind of explorer, lost in her own universe …. And our little prince, this mysterious, precocious, other-worldly, almost magical little philosopher becomes a more concrete, earthbound human. Her son.” The boy is portrayed in a variety of ingenious ways — “projections, object manipulation (by Sarah Emslie onstage), voice-overs.” 

playwright/actor Christine Lesiak. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography 2017

“We needed a way to navigate through the universe … to show space onstage,” says Lesiak of a theatrical challenge that is both simple at heart and dauntingly elusive. “In the original version, the night sky was a character, and we’ve gone through many iterations to make that happen.” The question Lesiak and her designers constantly volleyed amongst themselves: “is it even possible to do this?”

For one workshop, pre-COVID, the creative team led by designers T. Erin Gruber, an expert in projections, and Daniela Masellis, used the modelling software at the Telus World of Science. More recently Gruber has made use of the brilliant Space Engine software:  “for 30 bucks you too can roam through the universe.” 

“In this world,” Lesiak explains, “the characters the Little Prince visits (on his asteroid universe tour) are really elements of the astronomer’s self.… I’ve written myself a challenge for sure. It’s so technically complex … definitely a dance with projection as a character!” 

“It’s very much a story about a child helping remind a grown-up what it’s like to see through eyes of wonder, to be wonder-struck…. For me, that’s why this is a sneaky clown story.” Lesiak quotes her clown mentor, the great Jan Henderson. “The clown is not about being the child we were but being the child we still are after all our experience…. “We’re not a culture that’s very good at encouraging our adults to be ‘childish’.”

In the novella, “the pilot and the Little Prince have very different views on what ‘matters of consequence’ are…. The same conflict is at the heart of The Space Between Stars. 

PREVIEW

The Space Between Stars

SkirtsAfire Festival 2023

Created by and starring: Christine Lesiak, with Sarah Emslie and Sahl Wilkie

Directed by: Tracy Carroll

Where: Westbury Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barn, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: March 2 to 12

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

 

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From the mean streets of New Jersey, a jukebox musical with two dozen hits and a real story. Jersey Boys at the Citadel, a review

Posted on February 17, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Jason Sakaki, Kale Penny, Farren Timoteo (front), Devon Brayne in Jersey Boys, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The history of the jukebox musical is riddled with synthetic duds (like robbing a cash machine, and finding Monopoly money). The stand-outs that rise above are few and far between. Jersey Boys is one.

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Judging by the Citadel production that opens this week, it remains irresistible, thrilling (and the sort of night out you’ve been waiting for).

The story, says one Tommy DeVito at the start of the musical that traces the rise and fall of the ‘60s pop group the Four Seasons, is really four versions of a story by four guys. But they all go back to the same starting point, “10,000 years ago…. And a few guys under a street lamp singing someone else’s latest hit.”

The thing that you’ve  gotta love about Jersey Boys — besides that amazing string of (two dozen) irresistible No. 1 hits of course — is what sets it apart from its fellow jukebox musicals. It has one, a real story I mean. Not some cockamamie made-up narrative on which to hang a bunch of songs (Mamma Mia! I’m looking at you) or a bunch of songs just hot-glued together (We Will Rock You springs to mind).    

Farren Timoteo (front) in Jersey Boys, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

And in Julie Tomaino’s deft Citadel production of the enduringly popular 2005 Tony Award-winning Broadway hit directed by the Canadian Des McAnuff (it ran for 12 years), you get an affecting story about dreams, unexpected success and the pitfalls of fame that’s as rough-edged as the close harmonies are smooth. Music biz clichés and all, it earns its songs. And these are delivered, in a captivating way, by a cast led by Farren Timoteo, Kale Penny, Devon Brayne and Jason Sakai as the four guys from the mean streets of blue-collar New Jersey who would become the Four Seasons — named after a Garden State bowling emporium.      

Here’s an intriguing cultural phenom: at the crammed preview I was kindly allowed to attend this week, a sizeable student club brigade whose parents weren’t even born in the ‘60s, went nuts over Sherry, Big Girls Don’t Cry, Walk Like A Man, and the rest. Along with the all-ages crowd they roared their approval in an ovation that felt anything but dutiful. And that youthful response felt almost as cheering as the impromptu moment after a Jersey gig that an Italian street kid named Frankie Castellucio revealed his stratospheric range.

He’s played by Timoteo, a startlingly multi-talented and engaging Edmonton theatre artist — actor/ director/ playwright/ musician/ artistic director — who lands the signature style, with its distinctive falsetto swoops, in an uncanny way. It’s a performance that captures, too, a certain vulnerability, a genuine sense of wonder in making music, getting noticed, getting juiced by making an audience happy.

It’s a hard-scrabble Italian neighbourhood in the blasted wastelands of North Jersey that Tommy DeVito, thug-turned-musician-turned talent scout, introduces at the outset. Kyle Penny’s performance as the bad-ass Tommy, who takes full credit for discovering Frankie (“I’m the Michelangelo…”), is full of cocky swagger. There are three ways up and out of that scene, Tommy tells us. You can get arrested (he himself rotates in and out of Rahway), or get “mobbed up,” or … become a star.” All three are part of the pungent story of Jersey Boys.

Kale Penny, Farren Timoteo, Daniela Fernandez in Jersey Boys, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Soon Frankie, hairdresser-to-be, would be Frankie Vally, married to a feisty Italian chick Mary Delgado (Daniela Fernandez) who tells him it has to be spelled Valli (“y is a bullshit letter and you’re Italian”). And, armed with close three-part harmony and that helium falsetto floating on top, along with the song-writing expertise of Bob Gaudio (Sakaki), the boys from Jersey would soon  be singing their own hits. And the world would be singing Shereeee, Sherry baby right along with them.

The laconic bass player Nick Massi, played by Devon Brayne, tells another side of the story. And so does Gaudio, in Jason Sakaki’s performance a wry straight-shooter with a certain under-aged innocence about him. He has a built-in hype detector (“I’m a one-hit wonder again.”)    

Farren Timoteo in Jersey Boys, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The trajectory is set forth, in smart, exposition-concealing fashion, by the joint librettists Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice. To this, costume designer’s Leona Brausen’s vivid array of ‘60s frocks, bowling shirts and jackets is indispensable. The early scenes are full of vivid characters: tough-cookie women (there’s no shortage of outrageously inflated cartoon Joisy accents and bum-wiggling cartoon gaits in the ensemble), trips to “the Rahway Academy of the Arts” as Tommy puts it, Mob bosses (Sheldon Elter as Gyp DeCarlo) and lackeys (Billy Brown as Joe Pesci, yup, that Joe Pesci), loan collectors (Andrew MacDonald-Smith as Norm Waxman).

And amongst a selection of setbacks en route to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — including “come back when you’re Black” and the struggle to get the airplay that underpinned recording — they meet record producer Bob Crewe. He’s played in style by Vance Avery, who claims ”the best ears in the business” and exhorts the lads to solve their identity crisis.

Jason Sakaki, Farren Timoteo, Kale Penny, Devon Brayne in Jersey Boys, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Act I is the climb to Top-40 stardom — tough guys doing sweet harmony — with a repertoire of impossibly contagious hits built into your ribcage, who move with that kooky but utterly signature boy group choreography of synchronized leans and bent arms (director Tomaino is the choreographer). It’s in Act II that Jersey Boys turns into the kind of jukebox musical where the songs are actually related to the story. Things are getting strained — money, promises broken, mob debts, domestic strife under the pressures of constant touring. Working My Way Back to You and Bye Bye Baby, for example, get additional resonance from being part of the storytelling. And Tomaino’s cast really bite into the crack that opens between performance and “real life.”

There’s sadness (and a perfunctory entrance by a Catholic priest) in the tragic story of Frankie’s daughter. And that wedding reception staple Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You,  and especially the audience uproar it creates as Timoteo sings it, is a big moment in the story of a comeback after a slide, with the desperation that implies.

Brian Kenny’s impeccable sound design and a band led by Steven Greenfield, make the singular style happen before your very ears. The set, jointly credited to Gillian Gallow and Beyata Hackborn, is a metal grid and catwalk, that transforms from an evocation of industrial North Jersey to the flashing proscenium of concert performance.

And the Great Jukebox returns the band to Frankie Valli’s favourite moment, from the sadder-but-wiser perspective of years on the road: “four guys under a street lamp, when it was all still ahead of us.”

REVIEW

Jersey Boys: the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons

Theatre: Citadel

Created by: Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice (book), Bob Audio (music) Bob Crewe (lyrics)

Directed and choreographed by: Julie Tomaino

Starring: Farren Timoteo, Devon Brayne, Vance Avery, Kale Penny, Jason Sakaki, Daniela Fernandez, Sheldon Elter, Billy Brown, Samantha Currie, Andrew MacDonald-Smith

Running: through March 12

Tickets and info: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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Getting the jump on time: Love Is For Poor People and The Exquisite Hour, a Lemoine double-bill at Teatro Live!

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Rachel Bowron in Love Is For Poor People, Teatro Live!. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“So, tonight we’re going to be remembering my glorious future….” declares the glamorous and worldly star ‘Her’ we meet in Love Is For Poor People.

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In the new Stewart Lemoine that premieres Friday as half of Teatro Live’s winter double-bill, the brain-teasing proposition at play, as Rachel Bowron explains, is a stage memoir of a long, lavishly rewarded, event-filled life, romantic history, and career — before most of it has happened. “A toast to all that will soon be what once was.” 

“Very Lemoinian, I think,” laughs Teatro leading lady Bowron of this knotty little time puzzle. She thinks of the piece as “a nod to the styles of Elaine Stritch’s At Liberty and Bea Arthur’s Just Between Friends, with their fascinating up-front collages of reminiscence and confession. And this one has the Lemoinian twist that, as ’Her’ explains at the outset, there are considerable advantages to getting the jump on time, and doing pre-emptively autobiographical memoirs of long full lives richly lived. Before they’ve actually happened and the star is old. “This is a fun show,” says Her. “But I don’t seriously think you’d want to see me doing it at an advanced age.” 

Rachel Bowron is 'Her' in Love Is For Poor People, Teatro Live!. Photo by Ryan Parker.In a career full of juicy roles in Teatro comedies — most recently the formidably charming winery bistro hostess in last season’s Caribbean Muskrat — Love Is For Poor People is Bowron’s first-ever solo play. That it happens to be the “first ever single-character show” in Lemoine’s long canon of comedies feels like a special occasion, too. “Freeing, and also terrifying,” says Bowron of having the stage to herself. “There’s something very fun about getting to play with the show on my own! A great exercise for my brain….”

And not only that, Bowron, as the costume designer for the double-bill, got to try on her own old-school Hollywood glam shoes. “They’re pretty uncomfortable,” she says cheerfully, which is a kind of certificate of merit for showbiz footwear.

It’s an assignment in high contrast to the costuming requirements of the other half of the Lemoine double-bill. For Teatro’s first foray into the winter season in a decade and a half, Love Is For Poor People is paired with the moving and insightful The Exquisite Hour, one of Lemoine’s most beloved and oft-produced comedies. His only two-hander, which premiered in 2002, has an intriguing proposition about time, too. 

Mat Busby and Jenny McKillop in The Exquisite Hour, Teatro Live!. P{hoto by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

It happens in the real time of the title, when a mystery woman arrives in the backyard of an unassuming “supervisor of merchandise receiving” one summer evening and asks him politely for an hour. “Are you satisfied with what you know?” And the unexceptional life of Mr. Zachary Teal, unspooling regularly day to day, will never be the same, its horizons exploded by a sense of possibility. Teatro faves Mat Busby and Jenny McKillop star in the revival directed, like its companion piece, by the playwright. So… Bowron’s challenge has been costumes that are”well put-together but unexceptional. Plain without being drab.” Mr. Zachary Teal would never stand out in a crowd. 

Should the exuberant Bowron ever decide to do her own personal stage memoir, à la Stritch, it might start with her declaration that “I was such a shy kid. And as soon as I went into theatre that melted away.” She was such an ardent convert that post-Vic (Edmonton’s arts high school), and a Grade 9 debut as the Winkie general in Wizard of Oz (“I got to wear a red trench coat!”), she immediately repaired to Grant MacEwan’s musical theatre program and “had a lot of fun.” From musicals like On The Town and Nine, she’s carried around the wisdom of director Tim Ryan ever since: “make it work, figure it out.” 

Bowron got her first Teatro gig as “back-up to the Jellicles” in a fund-raiser. “Yup, that checks out, slinging licorice (at the concession) and Cats,” she laughs.  And in 2010, her official Teatro debut was a declaration, par excellence, of non-shyness. In The Hoof and Mouth Advantage (by Lemoine and Jocelyn Ahlf), the premise of a couple of  down-at-heels Depression Era vaudevillians opening a theatre school in the middle of the prairie hinterland, produced a show-stopper: the performance by Bowron. The “a monster child with a bow in her hair,” as she puts it, was Oiseau, a song-and-dance exhibitionist in a party dress. The capper? By the end, Oiseau’s revelation was that she wasn’t actually a little girl; “she’s a lot older than she thinks she is … like 30.” Bowron is amused by the memory.

“I met Leona Brausen and Cathy Derkach, comedy forces,” says Bowron of this turning-point production. “And I thought ‘OK I want to stay here’.” And she saw “some heavy-hitters, in performances and shows,” like Happy Toes and Evelyn Strange. “So exciting, so smart, the Lemoine one-two punch of being hilarious and poignant. His sneak attack in beautiful smart shows: I wanted to be around that,” she says of the company.

And so she has. Music has often been part of Bowron’s Teatro appearances. In Angels on Horseback, a kind of real-time party, she and Ryan Parker played a very funny self-regarding cover band called Medley. In Eros and the Itchy Ant, she was a piano teacher rattled by questions of artistic interpretation from a baker (Parker), curious about a Grade 1 piano piece. In a laugh out loud scene in A Lesson in Brio, Bowron was a singer-songwriter at an open-mic night in Lloydminster. 

Lately Bowron has been expanding her theatrical repertoire with costume design, mentored by Teatro’s brilliant resident costumer Leona Brausen. She was Brausen’s assistant, “fulfilling her design,” with Teatro’s venture into digital streaming. And then assumed the full design assignment with a hilariously rapid-fire succession of costumes and wigs in A Fit, Happy Life in 2021, in which Kristen Padayas played high-maintenance customers, one after the other, of a department store bed salesman.

In last summer’s revival of Lemoine’s only farce A Grand Time In The Rapids, Bowron’s vivid ‘50s-style costumes, got rearranged (and sometimes disappeared) in the course of impending chaos: a true test of designer skill. 

“It was learning by osmosis, always asking Leona questions, and watching how her brain works,” says Bowron of this new venture of her theatre career. ” And it’s a testament to how invested (the ensemble) is in making a safe place to start giving it a whirl, helping us grow in myriad ways.”    

That’s the thing about the like-minded members of Teatro ensemble, says Bowron happily. Check: sense of humour, aesthetic, response to comedy. “We make each other laugh. The weirdest, smallest thing someone says, or a poem we somehow all know, launches us into some obscure musical theatre song. A melding of theatre nerd minds!” 

And there’s this: tucked into Chantel Fortin’s set for Love Is For Poor People are bottles here and there. Her is very fond of champagne; it punctuates her reminiscences at crucial moments. All the bottles are Veuve Cliquot, “and they’re all from the office.” 

PREVIEW

Love Is For Poor People/ The Exquisite Hour

Theatre: Teatro Live

Written and directed by: Stewart Lemoine

Starring: Rachel Bowron, Mat Busby, Jenny McKillop

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday through March 5

Tickets: teatroq.com

  

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A knock-out production of The Royale at the Citadel, a review

Posted on February 10, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s got a powerful, bruising story to tell, lifted from early 20th century history, where boxing, celebrity and racial hatred in America deliver a maximum sucker punch. 

But it’s the theatrical right hook on which that story gets told that makes Marco Ramirez’s The Royale a knockout, as you’ll see in the terrific production directed by André Sills at the Citadel.

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It’s a drama set in the 1905 boxing circuit, amongst fighters, trainers, promoters. And not one real physical blow lands, person to person, though we feel the reverb and flinch every time. A lighted boxing ring floats in a shadowy dark world, designed by Whittyn Jason and lighted with the tones of a previous century by Steve Lucas. In foot stomps, rhythmic claps, and choreographed moves and reactions (movement director Shakeil Rollock), an ingeniously stylized conjuring of those punches, the pugilist’s ballet as a commentator has said, the story of Jay ‘The Sport’ Jackson comes to life. 

Or maybe the chamber we’re in is the mind of the gifted, cocky Black boxer, an aspirationally natty dresser (costumes by Rachel Forbes) who dreams of being the heavyweight champion of the world in 1905.  The atmospheric sound design created by Dave Clarke suggests that, with its echoing reverb. And so does the memory-scape way characters appear and disappear from darkness.  

Played in Sills’ production by Austin Eckert in a performance of charisma, nervy bravado, and reserves of angst, Jay ‘The Sport’ Jackson is clearly a fictional allusion to an historical celeb. Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight world champion, got the title by luring a legendary white title-holder out of retirement for “the fight of the century” in 1910. For that groundbreaking victory and step forward, as history tells us, a terrible price was paid. In a segregated racist America it unleashed a horrifying backlash of violence across the country.

Mohamed Ahmed and Troy O’Donnell in The Royale, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The Royale populates a whole world ingeniously with five characters, acted with  commitment and nuance by Sills’ cast. It opens with a match: Jay Jackson, the rising star of Black boxing (“toes like Jack Nimble, fists like John Henry”) vs. a young challenger, in his first pro fight. As Fish, who lands a job as Jay’s sparring partner afterward, Mohamed Ahmed captures a wary kind of grace and natural dignity, in a fine performance. 

Troy O’Donnell is vivid as Max, the motor-mouth promoter (boxing’s “only interracial promoter!” he claims) and referee, an exuberant, self-justifying and more than slightly sleazy hawker of hype. Max claims his progressive bona fides, but his run-of-the-mill racist streak gets regularly outed in throwaways about the status quo. “It ain’t like he’s a bigot,” Max declares of Bixby the white champ with whom Jay is hot to land a title bout. “His driver’s a Negro.” Or, when push comes to shove: “How would you like it if I asked Jay to get in the ring with a goddam grizzly bear?”

Be patient, he keeps reminding Jay. How many ‘coloureds’ ever get their picture on page five of the tabloids. “Why not the front page?” demands Jay.  

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

Jay’s trainer Wynton, played with compelling authenticity, weight, and  knowing worldliness by Alexander Thomas, sees right through all the persiflage. It’s his story of being a youthful fighter, scrabbling blind-folded for coins thrown by white standers-by, that gives The Royale its title. In the theatrical terms of the play, Wynton’s coaching instructions, blow by blow, apply both to moves in the ring and at press conferences, a fight that in the end is harder to win. “Whatever you choose to do, you do it alone.” 

It’s when Jay’s sister Nina arrives in his mind from outside the ring, with warnings about the dangerous backlash that will happen if he wins and fells a white cultural icon, that real tension is unleashed. Jameela McNeil really bites into the role in a memorable way as she accuses him of being “so caught up in playing David to Goliath, in being the one fish swimming upstream….” that he’s forgotten the danger to his family, his race. In an audacious theatrical gambit, she has a double role that in itself is a gut-puncher.

For a Black hero, it’s a deck that’s stacked, a fight that’s fixed, in a ring that’s circumscribed. And the price of moving history even a little bit forward is scary. Is winning ever more than a draw? This is an evening in the theatre that leaves you off-centre, on your wrong foot. Don’t miss it. 

REVIEW

The Royale

Theatre: Citadel

Written by: Marco Ramirez

Directed by: André Sills

Starring: Austin Eckert, Mohamed Ahmed, Jameela McNeil, Troy O’Donnell, Alexander Thomas

Running: through Feb. 19

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com   

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Now we know what we’ve been missing: fun. Ronnie Burkett’s Daisy Theatre is back at Theatre Network with Little Willy

Posted on February 9, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Little Willy photo supplied by the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It was one of those nights out in the theatre that make you know what you’ve been missing. Fun. Surprise. A feeling you’d have to call wonder — when you wake up the next morning and can’t quite believe what you saw the night before.

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Last night, in a theatre that’s come through fire to rise again, a Canadian artist of dazzling originality returned to us. And, in a vision of delight, Ronnie Burkett brought with him to the new Theatre Network a large and rambunctious ensemble of diminutive but larger-than-life actors we’ve met before, and loved, in other theatrical circumstances. 

The string-puller extraordinaire, who presides from above the stage, lets the company loose, in all their living breathing gesturing  mouthy little 3-D selves, in a bawdy semi-improvised cabaret. With Little Willy, Toronto-based Ronnie Burkett, bona fide son of the prairies, returns to a theatre where he has a history dating back more than three decades. And in this latest from the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, the Daisy Theatre seems to have acquired a hanger-on. It’s William Shakespeare himself, backstage with his famous “very large canon” (Burkett has never met an entendre he didn’t want to double) in his perfect doublet-and-hose. “Bill?? Bill! Get out here….” 

Little Willy, The Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Photo supplied.

The ensemble, who’d arrived at the theatre to premiere Esmé Massengill’s latest musical All Hands On Dick, discover the theatre has advertised Shakespeare, as Canadian theatres are wont to do. There are negotiations. Debbie the Witch has kindly offered to play all three witches in The Scottish Play and been hustled off the stage (“fuck off Debbie!” we chant).

In the end the company scrambles to have a go at Romeo and Juliet. And all the leading ladies of the company, flamboyant femmes d’un certain age exquisitely dressed by costumer Kim Crossley, know a juicy ingenue role when they see one. They clamour to be Juliet.  Collegial, ha! 

Who will play Juliet? The battling divas of The Daisy Theatre in Little Willy, chanteuse Jolie Jolie and Esmé Massengill, in Little Willy. The Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. Photo supplied.

Esmé Massengill the“monster diva” (pronouns “me/myself/I”) arrives onstage as snarly and imperious as ever. She’s aggrieved by the sheer inadequacy of our Edmonton-in-winter response to her starry presence, and her “biblical showgirl costume.” She and the ancient French chanteuse Jolie Jolie have a musical duel, composed like all the clever songs by John Alcorn. And the histrionic classicist Lillian Lunkhead, half of a travelling brother-and-sister act fresh from their two-hand Othello in Didsbury, is keen to revisit a youthful triumph as Juliet.  

The plump prairie matron Mrs. Edna Rural from Turnip Corners AB, (the self-styled “silly old biddy in a Sears housedress” and one of Burkett’s most enduringly popular characters), has the Nurse’s role. And in a scene that’s both comical and tender, she sets her ample self down in her favourite armchair to show off her new Naturalizers from the Bay, and to remember her own 62-year history with the undemonstrative Stanley Rural (“He died. (pause) I think.”), by way of guiding Juliet toward womanhood. 

Schnitzel the non-binary fairy we first met in the improvised Daisy shows in Tinka’s New Dress, has a particular purchase on the balcony scene, and can’t see any reason not to be either/or (or both) about Romeo and Juliet. Actually, the balcony scene is a tour de force of complex puppetry with both marionettes below and hand-puppets up there on the hand of “god” above.     

It’s a clever, hilariously wayward entertainment. In a riotous scene the superannuated Vegas entertainer Rosemary Focaccia in a fringed dress and white boots, delivers a showstopper song and dance number of extraordinary brio. How her back-up orchestra of eight union musicians arrives onstage is something for you to enjoy in the moment. Suffice it to say that a willing and charmingly amazed audience member, Katie, came up to the stage to assist on opening night. 

The cast list will vary night to night, as determined by the satirical inspirations of Burkett, who’s a fearless improviser. And so will the length, from 90 minutes to two hours he says at the outset. Naturally “the republic of Alberta” and its notorious backward slide to the right, can expect to take some shots (and Burkett, who’s from Medicine Hat, takes pleasure). Ditto the bereft downtown, the sorry decline of the Bay, the state of Canadian theatre, assorted Edmonton theatres….

On opening night, among other characters, we met the “volunteer stage manager” who’s a librarian by day, and the adenoidal indie singer-songwriter Indy Fret who offers to provide acoustic music for the Capulet’s party. Retired major general Leslie Fukwah puts in an appearance, gorgeously appointed in his late mama’s gown. And Jesus Christ, what’s he doing here? Jesus Christ, I mean. But first, as per Daisy tradition, there’s a striptease by Dolly Wiggler who doffs ’em Elizabethan style, to a particularly amusing Alcorn song.

The marionettes created by Burkett are, as his fans will instantly remember, gorgeously  sculpted, and kitted out in the kind of detail-to-scale — in every glove, pleated skirt, beaded flapper frock, librarian’s cardigan, boot — that leaves you kind of breathless. And perhaps the most astonishing thing about the complex virtuosity that breathes life into marionettes — from the most minute flick of a wrist, tiny shrug, inclination of chin, knee-bend, bum wiggle — is the magical way that extraordinary technique simply disappears from view as you believe the characters. 

With its 14-year-old heroine, R&J is an apt and very funny playground for Burkett’s special fascination, as both artist and artisan, with aging:  eye bags and cheek sags, the way boobs hang and shoulders hunch, the dance moves that creak with time. And his affection for the faded, and sometimes tawdry, old-school showbiz makes for a complex tone, a mix of amusement, mockery, and sweet admiration. 

In these parlous times, the sheer riskiness of inviting game and willing guys from the audience, ready to be shirtless novice puppeteers, turns into one of the funniest scenes of the whole evening. And an uproarious let’er rip good time in the company of a  provocateur becomes a joyful one too. Little Willy is not just an acknowledgment of but an homage to the audience. Burkett not only plays for us, he plays with us, lets us in to the playfulness at heart of it all.

And, as little Schnitzel tells us, with touching gravity, we’re bonded for life. There’s genius in that. 

REVIEW

Little Willy

Theatre: The Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes

Created and performed by: Ronnie Burkett

Where: Theatre Network at the Roxy

Running: through Saturday

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca 

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Behind the red door: a Forever Home for Rapid Fire Theatre

Posted on February 8, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A Forever Home is for dreaming in. For feeling you have a place in the world, imagining your potential, getting creative. 

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At 42, Rapid Fire Theatre, Edmonton’s premier improv company and its longest running, is experienced at sleeping on other people’s couches, so to speak. They are, after all, an agile ensemble of performers who pack light and specialize in making it up as they go along. They’ve always known how to make do — with other people’s spaces and stuff, corners of other people’s lobbies, back shelves in other people’s bar fridges. 

They had Theatresports matches in the old Theatre Network when it was an ex-Kingdom Hall dive near the Coliseum. They spent 20 years of late nights in the old Varscona, another eight downtown in the Citadel’s Zeidler Hall. And for the last year they’ve been in the black box warehouse space now occupied by Workshop West (the Gateway).  

And now, as I got to see last weekend, Rapid Fire has a home sweet (forever) home of their own, specially designed for improv. In the ‘hood that is their natural habitat, the lively Old Strathcona entertainment district. With their own red door, and their inspirational welcome sign, a light-up mantra in red neon, hanging over their own bar: Let’s Make Shit Up.

They’ve moved into the Strathcona Exchange Building, a historic old telephone exchange-turned-phone museum on 83rd Ave. that we all recognize from its summers as a Fringe venue — less than 50 steps from the Next Act, the Strathcona theatre bar. Telus still uses part of the building for phone and internet digital services. 

It’s a February Sunday afternoon, a scant year after the entire interior of the old building has been gutted, and a fleeting 14 months since RFT signed a long-term lease (20 years, with two 10-year renewals) with Telus. Which has got to be some sort of land speed record for re-builds. Phase 1, which includes a 160 to 170-seat mainstage theatre specially designed for improv, is a $3.5 million re-fit designed by Group2 the architecture/ interior design firm responsible for Theatre Network’s new Roxy on 124 St. 

And I’m on a RFT Forever Home tour with artistic director Matt Schuurman and general manager Sarah Huffman. They positively revel in the historical antecedents of a building that dates back more than a century — intriguing in itself since they’re a hip improv company that’s all about the immediate unscripted moment. 

Huffman has a special connection. It was only when she got her RFT job a year ago, just after the fateful signing of the lease, that she discovered that her grandfather had worked on creating a phone museum in the building. 

‘City Telephone Exchange’ is carved over the front door. “I love the idea: communication, bringing together, exchange,” says Schuurman an improviser himself, and a videographer and projection artist. “I love the fit! It’s literally what we do….” 

As a Fringe venue the Phone Exchange involved worming your way into the “theatre,” and there were lots of wrong turns. The old building was a cramped, much-divided space with low ceilings and dingy grey-brown carpets about which nostalgia is futile. We’d race up the stairs inside the front door, and squeeze down a skinny hallway to get into the makeshift “theatre,” do an abrupt U-turn since you were on the “stage” by then, and clamour up improvised bleachers.

The lobby of Rapid Fire Theatre’s Forever Home.

A revelation happens up the stairs: the startling sight of a pleasingly airy, spacious, high-ceilinged, light-filled lobby, with windows giving out on Old Strathcona. Where did all the space and light come from? Walls are gone. “We ripped out the ceiling and got an extra three or four feet (of height) that way,” says Schuurman. 

Minus the gross carpet, the floor turned out to be chic cement inlaid with rock. Schuurman points out a series of smallish plugged circles embedded in it. That’s where wires from the phone operators of yore in the basement exchange came out. You imagine them all down there, head sets on, just like in Bells Are Ringing, the 1956 Judy Halliday musical revived by Plain Jane Theatre a few years ago. 

Rapid Fire Theatre lobby.

The box office is at the entrance end of the lobby. Against a brick wall at the other, there’s a bar (bi-level for wheelchair patron accessibility) and its adaptable glowing pep talk. Turn off two letters and “Let’s make shit up” becomes “Let’s make it up.” Or how about just leaving “sh”? 

The Rapid Fire ensemble, about 45 performers strong at the moment, really need, and use, a lobby: hanging out translates into new improv teams, new long-form concepts, new festivals. “It’ll be so great to have people in here, a space people can enjoy before, or after, performances,” says Huffman. 

Rapid Fire artistic director Matt Schuurman and general manager Sarah Huffman, and The Nose.

In the middle of the floor awaiting a wall mounting is a giant nose, acquired from a World of Science body exhibit auction. “Our performers were ‘we have to have the nose!’,” reports Schuurman. “So someone is making glasses and a moustache for it, and it will really be OURS.” 

And they’ve kept a round window in the floor, an outsized glass manhole cover with a view to the subterranean caverns where the telephone operators of old did their work. “We’re not sure what we’ll use it for. A lighting installation maybe?” says Schuurman. In any case, Rapid Fire is the only theatre in town with a “cable vault” and a wall hanging of phone switcher units, “another little nod to the origin of the space. Even the (configuration) of the sound proofing is based on old cable diagrams.”

a wall hanging from telephone exchange history.

An attractively curvilinear wall, slatted with foam and fabric for soundproofing and acoustics, separates the lobby from the theatre. “There’s a continuous flow to it,” says Huffman of the undulating impulse that leads you into the house. 

RFT artistic director Matt Schuurman and general manager Sarah Huffman in the deluxe new all-gender theatre bathroom

And that’s where we’re going, after a moment to ogle the local gender-inclusive washroom, all stalls, with locally designed showbiz lighting. The re-fit has happened under the watch of an “accessibility consultant.” And, unique to Edmonton theatre, there’s a dedicated “mindfulness” room, “for anyone who needs, for whatever reason, a quiet time away from a crowd,” says Schuurman. 

The main theatre in Rapid Fire Theatre’s Forever Home. Photo by yours truly.

The theatre itself, with 160 to 170 soft seats, some red some charcoal (and all with cup-holders), is a beauty. Six rows gently curve around a shallow moon-shaped stage, a proscenium modified with a thrust. It’s low, only about six inches high, a gilt-edged invitation to step off and into the audience, and vice versa.

It’s a theatre that satisfies the deal-breaker requirement for improv: closeness, intimacy with the audience. Improv plays with the audience. The audience is part of the show, and performance is a constant interaction, an exchange of cues and people between stage and the house seats. It’s not a passive entertainment. The new improv theatre is everything the long narrow Zeidler — the long narrow ex-cinema at the Citadel — wasn’t. 

At the back of the house you’re only six rows from the stage. Behind that is a drinks counter and bar stools, defined by “cage-match” mesh, a motif that honours Rapid Fire’s flagship improv entertainment Theatresports (Schuurman calls it “the wrestling match of theatre”). From the stage you’ll be able to see the expressions on faces in the back row of the audience. 

There’s room closest to the stage for two rows of “loose, detachable seats, removable for for wheelchair access, or cabaret tables, or in the case of kids shows, cushions on the floor. Flexibility is a big asset: RFT is the busiest theatre in town with a rotating roster of some 300 performances a year, some weekly, some one-off.

So what can an improv theatre company get up to in a 14,000 square-foot space, 7,000 or so on each floor? Phase 1 is all about the public spaces (it’s a Junos venue in March). Outside the scope of that budget for now — fund-raising is ongoing — is a big empty future green room on the east side of the space, fixtures and furniture to come. It looks bigger that the Shoctor green room at the Citadel, but then it might need to hold three dozen or more festival participants from time to time. Dressing rooms, including one that’s barrier-free and suitable for pre-show smudging, await completion too.

The classes and public workshops that are Rapid Fire’s bread and butter will happen in the 7,000-plus square feet of basement, says Huffman. So will a second stage, a smaller flexible black box rehearsal and performance space, capacity less than 100 (take note, Fringe). And for the first time Rapid Fire will have offices, lighted through the glass brick along the west side  of the building.   “Maybe we’ll start with a folding table,” grins the latter. 

Yes, the improvisers with a four-decade history of making it up have dreamed big plans. And now they’re home.

 

 

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