Fresh Hell: Career women Joan of Arc and Dorothy Parker hit the stage together (really!) in a new Conni Massing play

Posted on January 16, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Sidney Williams and Kate Newby in Fresh Hell, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photogrqphy.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The new play that premieres in the Shadow Theatre season this week has a premise that’s bound to make you smile.

Conni Massing’s Fresh Hell brings together on one stage two women who not only didn’t meet in real life, having died some 536 years apart, but are unlikely ever to meet in the afterlife, if there is one, either. One wielded a martini in one hand and a pen in the other. The other’s instruments of choice were the sword and the banner.   

Fresh Hell, named for the famous Dorothy Parker line “What fresh hell is this?” (so useful in all exasperating situations) imagines three encounters between that American wit and satirist and Joan of Arc, the sainted heroine of the Hundred Years’ War. 

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Both have been imagined as characters by the world’s playwrights before — but never together. Now, for the first time, thanks to Massing, they’re show-mates. “Where did the play come from?” laughs the playwright. “It’s a bit of a mystery to me, too….”

“I’ve always loved Joan of Arc,” says Edmonton-based Massing whose writing career encompasses theatre, TV, and film. “I think many teenagers fall in love with her; she’s the ultimate rebellious teenager, with an incredible life story…. And I played her in a high school production!” to wit Ponoka Composite High’s production of Anouilh’s The Lark.  

playwright Conni Massing. Photo supplied.

Massing, a conversationalist of puckish wit and good humour, is amused by the memory. “I decided on my own I should bind my breasts because Joan of Arc was flat-chested and I wasn’t. Yes, I took that on myself! I also decided I should wear sparkly blue eye shadow — because I was gonna spend so much time looking up at the sky…. And nobody stopped me from doing this! Clearly they were not monitoring my choices very closely.” What Dorothy Parker, would have made of the production — she was Vanity Fair’s theatre reviewer from 1918 to 1920 before getting fired when her caustic assessments scorched a few influential egos — must remain forever a mystery.

Sidney Williams and Kate Newby in Fresh Hell, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Massing fell in love with Parker later, at university. “I loved the savage wit, the short stories, the famous one-liners — I keep saying to people she’s the great precursor of Twitter.” And the bonus was Parker’s milieu, New York in the ‘20s and ‘30s, when everything was just somehow more interesting.”

So, Joan and Dot, a high-contrast pair if ever there was one. “At some point some years ago I somehow got the idea to put them both in the same play,” says Massing. “And the idea stuck with me. Eventually I succumbed, and started puddling around and researching.” 

Gradually Massing discovered things they had in common. “Which sounds mad, I know,” she says cheerfully. For one thing, “they both worked in a man’s world. For another, “they both faced death,” again and again. For Joan it was on the battlefield. Dorothy tried to commit suicide at least three and maybe as many as five times (unsuccessfully, she lived to be 71). 

And there’s this: “both battled with language.” Parker’s dexterity with the language is legendary, of course, her turns of phrase in reviews, short stories, poems, and off-the-cuff wisecracks, caustically funny and much-quoted. As she said “The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”

But Joan “was very articulate in her own way,” a surprising skill in an illiterate peasant girl. The Joan who emerges from the transcripts of her trial, as Massing discovered reading them, “could duck and weave weaving around the highly educated men of the clergy.” She held her own, to the point that proceedings, “originally in a church where the cheap seats were filled with priests, were made more private, a testament to her general wit, and her conviction.”

The Massing theatre archive includes plays rooted in the prairies (The Aberhart Summer, Jake and the Kid), and ranging widely on the spectrum between light and dark, romantic comedy (The Invention of Romance) and prairie gothic (Gravel Run). Matara (2018) explores in a strange and haunting way the relationship between people and animals, a solitary elephant in a zoo dreaming of home. Still, plucking Dorothy Parker and Joan of Arc from the ether of free-floating centuries to meet in a play is a bold move.   

“There was obviously some fun to be had in putting two very different people together,” says Massing, one who died at 19 and one who died at 71 more than five centuries apart. And they both had “extraordinary event-filled lives.” But how to have them meet? “Dorothy is writing about Joan of Arc, and she’s being funny, rude, dismissive. So Joan is on Dorothy’s mind when (the warrior heroine) is summoned by her. It comes at a moment, in the assault on the fort Les Tourelles in 1429, when La Pucelle has been hit by an arrow and feared dead (later to return to battle). It’s a gap in the action, corresponding to a similar “window of opportunity” in Dorothy’s story. 

Sidney Williams and Kate Newby in Fresh Hell, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photogrqphy

As Massing explains, “Dorothy has slit her wrists, but phoned to the restaurant downstairs and ordered food. Which is how she’s saved…. In the play I’m proposing that both are pulled from the action at a moment of crisis, a pause in their stories” between life and death. 

“There was a period in her mid-‘60s when Dorothy, really not well as alcoholism caught up with her, stopped writing. Then a weird revival, a resurgence (of writerly activity) in the last couple of years of her life…. In the world of my play that rejuvenation is a result of this final encounter with Joan of Arc.” 

Kate Newby as Dorothy Parker in Fresh Hell, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

What made Parker so appealing to Massing as a writer herself was that “she’s so full of contradictions…. She could be so so savage, so mean, but was so generous with money. She spent a lot of time as an activist, involved in civil rights. She left her estate to Martin Luther King. She went on marches, protests, spoke at luncheons. She co-founded the Hollywood anti-Nazi League, and got blacklisted….” 

Of Parker’s brilliant writerly accomplishments — short stories published in prestige magazines like The New Yorker, poetry collections, captions for ads (“brevity is the soul of lingerie”), lyrics for musicals, essays, screenplays (she was the co-writer of A Star Is Born) — one eluded her. She never published a novel. “In her perfect universe she would have published a great novel, had a last drink, and slipped off the moral coil at 50,” says Massing. But she lived on, obsessed with ‘making it’, still trying to figure out how to be successful. “Not a lot of self-love there.”

As for Joan of Arc, who started to hear Voices at 17 and was executed at 19, “I’ll never get over being boggled by her early rise to power,” says Massing. “To be a child, a girl!, in the countryside, and convincing someone to take her to the next level, that led to her leading an army…. It’s so unlikely. She was powered by such incredible conviction. You meet those people now and then, and sometimes their convictions are disturbing. It’s hard to resist.”

The Shadow production at the Varscona brings the playwright together with director Tracy Carroll, a long-time collaborator. And it marks the return to Edmonton after many years of actor Kate Newby, “my dream Dorothy Parker,” as Massing says. Joan is played by newcomer Sydney Williams, notable in the premiere of Amanda Samuelson’s Pressure at last summer’s Fringe. 

Would Massing call Fresh Hell a comedy? She pauses, and laughs. “I’m leery of labelling things a comedy; it sets up an expectation. I hope there are many moments that’ll make people smile, or grin. Or laugh even. At this stage of my life I’ve decided you’re better off calling things a drama. And if people get some laffs, l-a-f-f-s, along the way, it’s a bonus.” 

PREVIEW

Fresh Hell

Theatre: Shadow

Written by: Conni Massing

Directed by: Tracy Carroll

Starring: Kate Newby and Sydney Williams

Where: Varscona Theatre

Running: Wednesday through Feb. 5

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org 

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A coming-of-age thriller: Freaky Green Eyes at Fringe Theatre, a review

Posted on January 14, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Emma Houghton in Freaky Green Eyes. Photo by Brianne Jang, bbcollective

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The opening image of Freaky Green Eyes is a girl poised on a diving board, about to take the plunge.

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In Emma Houghton’s solo show, an artful stage adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s 2003 powerfully dark ‘young adult’ thriller, it’s a striking metaphor for a coming-of-age story. In Houghton’s a captivating performance, Franky takes a deep dive, as they say, into her past, a watery medium where memories have to be stripped of camouflage and re-assembled, in order to float. 

It’s moving from “a known territory to an unknown” thinks Houghton, “from a place where people know you to a place where people only think they know you.” And vice versa, as we discover along with Franky in the course of Chantelle Hans’s production (presented in association with Punctuate! and Fringe Theatre): a place where you know people to a place where you realize you only thought you knew them. 

Beyata Hackborn’s clever design of hanging photos is a veritable underwater memory gallery, set in shimmering motion by Tori Morrison’s projections and Kat Evans’ lighting. There are blurry family portraits, oddly angled photos of pale blank walls and stairs, smudgy close-ups of moments or unidentifiable details, the kind that memory toys with and won’t let go. They seem to appear and fade, change shape. 

And Franky, as conjured by Houghton, hustles through that world, looking for clarity. She populates it, too, with her little eight-year-sister Samantha, her artist mom, and her dad, a star football player turned star sportscaster. She adores him. And he calls the shots; he is the assignment editor, so to speak, of all decisions about family life.  

Houghton captures in such an appealing way Franky’s amusingly deadpan teen wit in describing, in a rush of words, her life. For our benefit she describes the big, expansive “post-modern” house they occupy, thanks to dad, as having “modular units instead of rooms.” At smart 15 she’s both knowing and innocent. Her perspective has been sharpened by a near-rape at a drunken party early in the play. Her inner resistor and ally, Freaky Green Eyes, has been unleashed, sticks up for her, and “saves my life.” Our heroine revels in her new sense of control. 

Emma Houghton in Freaky Green Eyes. Photo by Brianne Jang, bbcollective.

And it’s Freaky Green Eyes who is her inner voice of dissent when the family starts to disintegrate. Her mom, whom Franky accuses of having a “stapled-on smile,” grows ”tense and fidgety.” And she’s away from the family more and more. Is it abandonment, as dad says, or escape, as Franky comes, at some subterranean Freaky Green Eyes level, to suspect? 

“Why are you building a second life?” Franky demands. “Your mother is supposed to worry about you, not the other way around.” 

Franky is used to taking her cues from dad, a veritable repository of sports jargon about team spirit, fight or flight, fight fight fight, and all that. And gradually, the story takes on OJ Simpson contours when mom vanishes altogether. It’s a sinister mystery that Freaky Green Eyes urges Franky to de-construct. 

Emma Houghton in Freaky Green Eyes. Photo by Brianne Jan, bbcollective.

The moments between between Franky and her little sister, between teenager and child, are one of the particular delights of an absorbing evening. In those scenes, where Franky has to play consoling mom in the absence of the real one, Franky and Freaky Green Eyes improvise together, the former with less and less conviction. Houghton is very skilled at this, at differentiating the characters with minimal but telling adjustments in voice and body language. Mom emerges, too, calm but wary. 

To me the lab mic that artificially modulates Houghton’s voice, light as it is, for male characters is an idea that should be revisited. A case can be made for the artificiality of male-ness, I guess, in a memory play. But the effect is jarring, and quite unpersuasively grotesque, which colours the mystery from the start and doesn’t seem owned by Franky.

The show, the production, and Houghton’s performance, though, create a vivid and suspenseful world in which our vision darkens as the domestic mystery unravels. It’s an evocation, scary and irreversible, of the moment on the diving board when we look at our family in a different light, from the outside, as actual people. And we find ourselves, our inner Freaky, in doing it.

REVIEW

Freaky Green Eyes

Fringe Spotlight Series

Theatre:  Emma Houghton in association with Edmonton Fringe Theatre and Punctuate! Theatre

Adapted by: Emma Houghton from the Joyce Carol Oates novel

Directed by: Chantelle Han

Starring: Emma Houghton

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

Running: through Jan. 21

Tickets: tiered ticketing and offer-what-you-will, fringetheatre.ca.

 

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Sad news in Edmonton theatre: Judy Unwin, a theatre pioneer with the public service gene, is gone

Posted on January 10, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Judy Unwin and actor Jason Hardwick. Photo by Jana Hove.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At the start of the new year, there’s very sad news today in Edmonton theatre. 

With the untimely death, at 76, of Judy Unwin, we’ve lost a bona fide arts pioneer, a public-spirited artist who played many roles in the proliferation of live theatre in this theatre town — as an actor, a director, an artistic director, an administrator, a board member, a fund-raiser and donor, a theatre lover and lobbyist. She was even a Fringe theatre reviewer for multiple summers.  Her contributions are many and varied — she had the public service volunteer gene — and extend beyond the stage door out into the community at large. 

From a notable Edmonton theatre family (her father Jack Unwin was an influential director), Judy grew up in the arts. She figures prominently in the early history of civic kids theatre here, and of Walterdale, our venerable community theatre. In her teens she was the ringleted ingenue of the very first Walterdale Klondike melodrama in 1965 and many thereafter, then directed them, then served on the board, then became the artistic director.

When she directed the first Edmonton production of Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God at Walterdale, she learned ASL, and retained connections to the Deaf community all her life.  She was on the board of the Varscona Theatre as it became a theatre consortium. From the start she played a big and practical part in arranging the Sterling Awards. She was someone who stepped up.

Judy was opinionated, stubborn, outspoken, and generous. She was a friend of mine. A more detailed 12thnight appreciation will follow soon. 

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The mystery behind the memory: Freaky Green Eyes, how a novel became a new play, premiering at Fringe Theatre

Posted on January 9, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Emma Houghton in Freaky Green Eyes. Photo by Brianne Jan, bbcollective.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Hi! I don’t know if I have the right email address. I’m a theatre artist from Edmonton, Alberta. I really love your book. And I’d really love to adapt it into a stage show….” 

It took persistence and some ingenious sleuthing for Edmonton actor Emma Houghton to connect directly with the celebrated American writer Joyce Carol Oates. Ah yes, and an undimmed heart-on-her-sleeve fascination with Oates’ dark and mysterious “young adult” novel Freaky Green Eyes. That’s something Houghton, now 30, has retained since the moment, at age 11 or 12, when her mom gave her the book.

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It’s a well-thumbed copy. “It stuck with me; I’d re-read it every three or four years!” says Houghton, over a pre-rehearsal coffee last week. 

How that 2003 Oates novel has become the one-woman play, Houghton’s first play ever — three-and-a-half years and a pandemic in the making, opening Friday at the Backstage Theatre — is a dramatic story in itself. And, as Houghton tells it, in her funny, candid way, it has a looping, absurdist “cart before the horse” streak Kafka would have enjoyed. For starters, you can’t get a writing grant or book a theatre without having the rights to the novel: you can’t get the rights without having a theatre lined up. 

The route through the labyrinth of publishers and literary and theatrical agents into which the intrepid Houghton ventured in the summer of 2019 was full of discouraging delays, run-arounds and obstructionist silences. In the end it was the Ivory Tower that coughed up the prize info. Houghton’s email directly to the famous author, at 83 still a working prof at Princeton, got a response in three minutes flat. “Hello Emma. This sounds like a wonderful idea,. I’ve cc’d my theatrical agent, Best of luck….” 

Two Edmonton theatre companies, Fringe Theatre and Punctuate! Theatre, stepped up to lend their weight, and resources, to Houghton’s debut as a playwright and producer (Freaky Green Eyes is presented “in association with” them). And so did an impressive array of Edmonton and Calgary theatre artists, both veteran and emerging, including director Chantelle Han, designer Beyata Hackborn, choreographer Deviani Andrea. 

Houghton has a history with Edmonton audiences that extends through theatres large and small. “I’ve been onstage here since I was nine,” she grins, remembering her youthful debut as Tiny Tim in the Citadel’s A Christmas Carol. Last week she was musing on the original attraction of the novel for her 12-year-old self. “The story is told first-person, from the point of view of Franky, who’s 14 and reassessing the mysterious recent past. And she’s really strong. It’s a coming-of-age story; she’s figuring out who she is, who she wants to be, how to navigate people and situations — that’s what everyone figures out, constantly, their entire lives.”

“She’s in a lot of hard situations, trying to determine the truth…. Kids get lied to a lot — sometimes for their benefit, sometimes not,” as Houghton says. The children of divorce, for example, are enlisted by each parent as allies, hearing opposing stories  as they move between households. “Kids are constantly getting fractured realities about what is and what isn’t. Really hard for a kid to navigate.” 

Emma Houghton in Freaky Green Eyes. Photo by Brianne Jang, bbcollective

Franky has a sense that “something’s not quite right in the family, and she doesn’t know what, yet.” When Franky’s mom “vanishes,” she is moved to piece things together for herself, assisted by her inner voice Freaky Green Eyes. 

What Houghton has fashioned from the novel, she says, is a memory play, with the flavour of mystery and true crime about it. “Franky is telling the story, showing scenes from the last year; she’s both herself and her own narrator.” And Houghton the actor populates the stage with the characters in Frankie’s life — her mom, her little sister Samantha, her father, a teenage boy, her Aunt Vickie.

Emma Houghton as dad, Freaky Green Eyes. Photo by Brianne Jang, bbcollective.

It’s a plum acting assignment, Houghton agrees happily. If you write yourself a play to perform, why not? The book lends itself to a larger cast, of course, but “I have always wanted to do a one-woman show,” she says.  “It’s my dream.” So she has the fun of conjuring the characters in Franky’s world — some with changes in gesture or voice, some emerging as voice mail messages. For the male characters, Houghton uses a lab mic, a “voice modulator.”

The effect of the pandemic on theatre careers has been profound, and devastating. An 2017 acting grad from the U of A’s BFA program who hasn’t been onstage for three years till now, Houghton “felt on the cusp in my career” when the pandemic hit in March 2020. She was “three years out (of school),” mid-run in the two-hander Actually at Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary when the abrupt shut-down happened on March 12 that year. “I had a bunch of opportunities; I had put time into both the Edmonton and Calgary communities.”

“I came back from Calgary; I broke my lease,” she sighs. “I sat at home not getting calls.” 

For a resourceful artist like Houghton, pandemical isolation has been a call to indie chutzpah. We can look for the launch in June of Scout, a new web series starring Houghton, Gabe Richardson and Hunter Cardinal as three estranged best friends who form a community news network to combat fake news. “All Edmonton writers!” she beams. 

Emma Houghton in Freaky Green Eyes. Photo by Brianne Jang, bbcollective.

“I threw myself into self-production,” she says. “I figured I really needed to make my own opportunities.” Since she’d already started working on a solo stage adaptation of Freaky Green Eyes, she kept at it. The new playwright wrote applications for writing grants, didn’t get them, and still kept at it. Playwright Matthew MacKenzie of Punctuate! Theatre, whose mentoring generosity is second to none,  offered her dramaturgical advice. 

The novel, Houghton figured, was a natural for theatre. It was first-person, for one thing. “We see the world through Franky’s eyes; she’s a fascinating character.….” And something mysterious is going on; perhaps a crime has been committed. Her memories align one way. Her mind, her inner voice, her outward influences are telling her something else. “But she can’t compute it. Eventually she has to de-program herself.” 

Theatre production in all its complications has been an education, and Houghton is an energetic self-educator. “Technically, I don’t fully own the play yet,” she says, “I own this version, for this presentation.” The rights and a flat fee up front came with elaborate specifications, about producing “in association with” Punctuate! (Houghton complied happily, since MacKenzie and Punctuate! producer Sheiny Satanove have been so helpful), about the maximum number of seats in the theatre, the maximum ticket price, the maximum number of performances. Fringe Theatre’s “offer-what-you-will” and tiered ticketing from $5 to $25 at the Backstage Theatre have aligned perfectly. And Houghton has a production that’s primed for touring in every way, including Hackborn’s portable design. 

And a 20-year-old novel has found new life on the stage, as a solo memory play. “I started adapting it pre-pandemic. But I’ve found the story so potent right now,” says Houghton. “The brainwashing of kids, their isolation at home, both parents manipulating the kids in certain ways, hiding things from them, not telling them the whole truth, the epidemic of domestic violence with everyone stuck in a contained space….”

“We’re inside Franky’s head, as she tells this story.”

PREVIEW

Freaky Green Eyes

Fringe Spotlight Series

Theatre:  Emma Houghton in association with Edmonton Fringe Theatre and Punctuate! Theatre

Adapted by: Emma Houghton from the Joyce Carol Oates novel

Directed by: Chantelle Han

Starring: Emma Houghton

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

Running: Jan. 10 through 21

Tickets: tiered ticketing and offer-what-you-will, fringetheatre.ca.

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Wait, there’s more…. Act II of the theatre season is about to begin

Posted on January 4, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Trouble In Mind, Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Stay tuned; face forward. There’s more!

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Intermission’s over, my friends, and Act II of the Edmonton theatre season is about to begin. Freaky Green Eyes, Emma Houghton’s original adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oates novel, premieres in the Fringe Theatre season next week (more about this in an upcoming 12thnight post).

Meanwhile, what looks too good to miss? From a long list of highly anticipated shows arriving onstage here in 2023, here’s a sampling (in no particular order). 

The Space Between Stars: Christine Lesiak, the artistic director of the Play The Fool Festival and a theatre artist of uncommon versatility (her exclusive career trajectory is space physicist-turned-clown), embraces her own unusual skill set in this stage adaptation of Saint-Exupéry’s classic The Little Prince. The mainstage feature at the 2023 SkirtsAfire Festival, The Space Between Stars includes live actors (Lesiak herself, with Sarah Emslie and Sahl Wilkie), puppets, and projections to tell the story of an astronomer and her memories of her son. It remains, to my knowledge, the only piece in #yeg theatre history to have a workshop at the U of A observatory. Tracey Carroll’s premiere production is in an actual theatre, the Westbury, March 2 to 12. 

Listen, Listen: Possibly the quizzical premise of 2023. this new play from Edmonton ex-pat playwright/screenwriter Elyne Quan launches an initiative of commissions created specially for the “comedy-forward” company Teatro Live!. In Belinda Cornish’s production (May 26 to June 11 at the Varscona), Farren Timoteo stars as a Muzak connoisseur on a heroic quest to save the dulcet elevator music he loves from extinction in an uncomprehending world. The cast includes Alex Ariate, Nadien Chu, and Nikki Hulowski.  

Fresh Hell by Conni Massing, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

Fresh Hell: Speaking as we are of intriguing premises, consider the unlikely pairing of American wit Dorothy Parker and French hero Joan of Arc in Conni Massing’s play. They have much to talk and wrangle about, including subjects like living through the darkest of times. The co-stars of Tracy Carroll’s Shadow Theatre production (Jan. 18 to Feb. 5 at the Varscona) are Kate Newby and Sydney Williams. More about this in a 12thnight post coming soon. 

Trouble in Mind: Still remarkably timely 68 years after it was written, Alice Childress’s play-within-a-play has both heft and humour as an indictment of racism, power structures, and biases in the world of theatre. It takes us backstage at rehearsals for an anti-lynching play set in the Jim Crow South. The director is white; the star, a veteran Black actress, challenges the stereotyping of the Black characters. Trouble in Mind, which originally opened in a small Greenwich Village theatre in 1955, would have been the first play by a Black woman to arrive on Broadway two years later, but playwright Childress refused to make the changes demanded by white producers. The Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production is directed by Audrey Dwyer (March 27 to April 16).

After Faust: The opening production of RISER Edmonton 2023, the #yeg branch of the national initiative launched to support indie producers, addresses an intriguing question. We all know what happened to Faustus, who bargained his soul away to the demon Mephistopheles for endless future considerations. What happened to the demon after that? Connor Yuzwenko-Martin’s play is all about that. The Invisible Practice production, performed in ASL by a deaf cast directed by Ebony Gooden, runs Jan. 31 to Feb. 5 at the Backstage Theatre.

Unsung: Tales From The Front Line. Based on verbatim interviews, the immersive seven-actor production created by Darrin Hagen and Workshop West artistic director Heather Inglis, is an homage to the healthcare workers who risked everything, and in a terrible political climate, to keep us safe, and alive, during the pandemic. Inglis directs the production, billed as “living portraits,” a gallery in which we move from frame to frame as we choose. Inglis directs the collaboration between Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, Theatre Yes, and Ground Zero Productions, running Jan. 25 to Feb. 12 at the Gateway. 

Gianna Vacirca in Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, Theatre Network. Photo by Ryan Parker.

Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes: In her 2020 two-hander “comedy drama,” the mainstage finale of Theatre Network’s first full season at the Roxy (April 25 to May 14), the Canadian star playwright Hannah Moscovitch builds on, plays with, and subverts in surprising ways, a familiar trope: the inappropriate affair between a university professor and student. The Theatre Network production (originally slated for 2020) continues a long-standing relationship between Moscovitch and the company (witness East of Berlin, Little One, Infinity, What A Young Wife Should Know). Marianne Copithorne directs a great cast: Gianna Vacirca and John Ullyatt co-star. 

Twelfth Night: Shakespeare’s mysteriously madcap, light-dark, open-ended comedy (a favourite of mine, how can you tell?) is one of the two mobile productions in Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s upcoming 36th summer season. Displaced from Freewill’s home stage by the city’s three-YEAR renovation plans in Hawrelak Park, Twelfth Night hits the road through the city (locations to be announced) in rep with Romeo and Juliet, the former directed by up-and-comer Amanda Goldberg, the latter by Freewill artistic director Dave Horak. A cast of 10 alternates in the two Shakespeares, both in Freewill’s signature boldly contemporary style, in a travelling festival that runs late July to the end of August.   

Civil Blood: A Treaty Story: Set during the dying days of the fur trade, the play by Anishinaabe writer Josh Languedoc (Rocko and Nakota, IN-COR-RI-GI-BLE) and Neil Kuefler weaves a Romeo and Juliet tale of culture-cross’d lovers (a Nehiyaw huntress and a French scholar), into a high-tension dramatic tapestry of settler encroachment into First Nations territories, treaties, Canadian government enforcements. Epic in scale (2022 staged readings at Rubaboo, Flying Canoe Volant, and Found Fest have included casts of 12 and 15), it gets a workshop production May 28 in the 2023 season of new work to be announced by Thou Art Here Theatre Feb. 5.

A Hundred Words For Snow: The solo play by the English writer Tatty Hennessy is a coming-of-age story, an adventure quest undertaken by a 15-year-old who sets out to take her father’s ashes to the North Pole, the top of the world. Climate change, ice, polar bears … it should be meat and drink for Northern Light Theatre’s director Trevor Schmidt and designer Alison Yanota. Schmidt’s production, starring Dayna Lea Hoffman, runs April 21 to May 6 in the Studio Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barn.

First Métis Man of Odesa: Two theatre artists, Canadian playwright/actor Matthew MacKenzie (Bears, After The Fire) and Ukrainian actor Mariya Khomutova, real-life husband and wife take to the stage as characters in their own suspenseful, crazily looping, high-stakes story. In a dangerously volatile world, where pandemics erupt and borders snap shut,  they meet, they fall in love, they get married, they cross oceans, they have a baby. And in the newly expanded version that plays April 22 to May 14 in the Citadel’s Highwire Series, the stakes are raised even higher when a Russian tyrant invades Ukraine. Lianna Makuch directs the Punctuate! Theatre production. 

Romar Dungo and Maxwell Hanic in Boy Trouble, Fringe Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang.

Boy Trouble: I first saw Mac Brock’s play at Nextfest in 2019 and was struck by its humour, its lively and lyrical writing, its insights into the fleeting encounters of the Grindr age in all their toxic masculinity.  The production happening in the Fringe Theatre season (May 16 to 27, directed by the playwright, has been reimagined: same world, the original characters and that same world of casual and mixed connections — but more of them, over more years. And all new text. The production directed by Brock stars Romar Dungo and Maxwell Hanic. 

Chris Dodd in Deafy, Follow The Signs Theatre. Photo supplied

Deafy: This invitation into the challenging world of the Deaf is the creation of the remarkably charismatic Deaf actor Chris Dodd. He stars as a wry, very droll Deaf public speaker with a well-honed appreciation for absurdity. Nathan Jesper lives in three languages — spoken English, ASL, and captions. If you didn’t see the version  at the Fringe, and even if you did, you’ll want to see Ashley Wright’s production at the Citadel Jan 21 to Feb. 12.  

Prison Dancer, Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied.

Prison Dancer: the second of the Citadel’s two new Canadian musicals this season (the first: Almost A Full Moon) is the joint creation of the Filipino-Canadian team of Romeo Candide and Carmen De Jesus. It’s spun from a 2007 YouTube video, an instant viral sensation, which showed a big group of Filipino prisoners dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The musical is energized by the ways in which dance changed their lives. It runs May 6 to 28, the Citadel mainstage finale. 

Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s: There’s been a long pandemical preamble to Teatro Live’s revival of this delightful homegrown 2009 musical comedy by Teatro stars Jocelyn Ahlf and Andrew MacDonald-Smith with music by Ryan Sigurdson and lyrics by Farren Timoteo. It’s a love story set in the lively supper club world of Edmonton of the ’60s,  amongst the singing servers and the musicians, with the sassy proprietor who presides (Andrea House).  Kate Ryan directs the Teatro production running July 14 to 30.

 

 

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Far From The Home I Love: a Fiddler on the Roof for our time. A review.

Posted on January 4, 2023 by Liz Nicholls

Jonathan Hashmonay as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Joan Marcus

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the opening moments of the grand touring production of Fiddler on the Roof that’s arrived at the Jube, a solitary man in a modern red parka walks onto the stage under a weathered train station sign. Anatevka.

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He reads from a book. “Every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant simple tune without breaking his neck. It isn’t easy….” He sheds the parka and a century or more, puts on a cap and a prayer shaw, and sings Tradition.  

There he is, Tevye, in the wonderfully comic and soulful performance by Jonathan Hashmonay the loveable beleaguered Jewish dairyman of the classic musical, in a Russian shtetl in the early 20th century. A fiddler right out of a Marc Chagall painting (Ali Marian Molaei) dances by him and the villagers appear from the mists of time behind him. 

Ali Marian Molaei in Fiddler on the Roof, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Joan Marcus

And in the memorable contemporary framing of Bartlett Sher’s 2015 revival, Tevye returns us to the brute realities of the contemporary world at the end. In a moving final image, again in the red parka, he joins the long line of history and its endless waves of refugees, as the people of Anatevka are forcibly uprooted from their home, fleeing violence to face the dangers of the unknown. This is a revival of the great 1964 Jerry Bock/ Sheldon Harnick musical that really hits your heart with its sense of timelessness. 

Before that, in a performance that’s zestful, funny, and anguished, we see Hashmonay in his serial arguments with the Almighty. “I realize, of course, it’s no shame to be poor. But it’s no great honour either! So, what would have been so terrible if I had a small fortune?” as he sings in If I Were A Rich Man. Gazing skeptically heavenward, he shakes his fist, he shrugs ruefully, he captures the Catskills cadence of Tevye as he kibbutzes with himself, weighing the pros and cons of tradition and change. 

In a household with five daughters with ideas of their own and a forceful, harried wife (Maite Uzal in an impressive performance as Golde), Tevye is up against it. Even his horse won’t cooperate. And Hashmonay gives full weight to both comedy and tragedy, and the ambivalence of a man torn between the old ways and the new.  

Fiddler on the Roof, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Joan Marcus.

The music, with its lush, klezmer flavours, comes at you in a lyrical rush in the production, both in intimate moments and ensemble scenes. Kudos to the choreography, re-thought from the Jerome Robbins original by the Israeli-born London-based Hofesh Shechter. It’s visceral in a contemporary but idiomatic way. The wedding scene, and its thrilling bottle-on-the-head dance is a highlight. So is the choreographic dynamic of the tavern scene in which the Jewish dancing is counterposed to dance from the outsider Russians. Tevye himself is in constant motion. The movement never seems forced, or thought out; it seems to erupt as a chaos, an amplitude, of human energy. 

Yardén Barr, Randa Meierhenry, GraceAnn Kontak in Fiddler on the Roof, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Joan Marcus.

The momentum of the story, which accumulates in the three-hour evening, comes from the three oldest daughters who prove resistant to the demands of tradition as they find their own way in love and into marriage. Randa Meierhenry, GraceAnn Kontak and Yardén Barr as Tzeitel, Hodel and the bookish Chava have great charm and sisterly chemistry. And their shared song Matchmaker Matchmaker, as they dream of romantic happiness, is a knockout. So is Hodel’s delivery of Far From The Home I Love, a heartbreaking lament of displacement.

Randa Meierhenry and Daniel Kushner in Fiddler on the Roof, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Joan Marcus.

None of the three men the girls fall for would be a papa’s choice. The rabbity tailor Motel (the terrific Daniel Kushner), the radical student Perchik (Austin J Gresham), and the completely unthinkable, a gentile Russian (Carson Robinette) — all are a test of Tevye’s traditional paternal authority. The ecstatic song in which Motel discovers a new manly resolve and wins the girl of his dreams, Miracle of Miracles, is a delight. “But like he did so long ago, in Jericho, God just made a wall fall down!”

GraceAnn Kontak’s The moment that Levy’s heart is broken by Chava, the daughter who finds love outside the faith, has a palpable force to it, as he physically draws the curtain across a vision of his little girl dancing. His signature inner dialectic, “on the one hand … on the other hand,” has run out of hands. Interestingly, the character with the least impact on proceedings in the rabbi (Christopher Hager). 

Maite Uzal and Jonathan Hashmonay in Fiddler on the Roof, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Joan Marcus.

The textures of family and village life, the warmth and the harshness of it all, and the constant threat of Czarist authority, are beautifully captured in the production — in its theatricality and stagecraft, its design, and the weave of performances in a large cast. Sometimes the characters are in silhouette, sometimes in 3-D. The dream that Tevye imagines in order to convince his wife to accept Motel as a potential son-in-law is a bold pageant of masked grotesques and stiltwalkers. 

Michael Yearn’s ingenious design, with lighting by Daniel Holder, uses screens and set pieces. And then, in a folk tale sort of perspective, the village, seen in miniature floats in the air, like the fiddler on the roof. 

At this moment in human history, when anti-Semitism is on the rise, and life and whole communities can be displaced at the whim of tyrants, Fiddler on the Roof seems newly relevant. Maybe that’s true in every age. The cast dedicates their curtain call dance and song to the people of Ukraine, whose lives have been ruthlessly upended. The footing of our lives up on the roof remains precarious. 

REVIEW

Fiddler on the Roof

Broadway Across Canada

Created by: Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick from stories by Sholem Aleichem

Directed by: Bartlett Sher (reproduced for touring by Sari Ketter)

Starring: Jonathan Hashmonay, Maite Uzal

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: edmonton.broadway.com, ticketmaster.ca, 

  

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2022: the year in Edmonton theatre, part 2

Posted on December 20, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Peter Fernandes and Kendrick Mitchell in Almost A Full Moon, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Here’s a small sampling, in no particular order, of assorted highlights from a year when live theatre on Edmonton stages rose to the occasion, and did what theatre can do best, conjure worlds through other eyes, argue in a show-not-tell way for other perspectives and alternative possibilities — and maybe kick chronology and probability in the butt.

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And then they sing about soup: 2022 was the year the Citadel premiered a highly unusual new holiday musical, Almost A Full Moon, that dips into the off-centre songbook of indie rocker/singer-songwriter Hawksley Workman for its score. Playwright Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman re-creates the strange, unexpected, possibly magical (and certainly hopeful) way strangers connect and form themselves into families over time, in a haunted season where the past and present are shape-shifters. Tiny moments, tangential thoughts, humble objects are the fabric of Workman’s winter songs. And Corbeil-Coleman constructs Almost A Full Moon that way, allowing them to gather meaning, happy and sad, in a weave of three generations that we, the audience, have the enjoyment of figuring out for ourselves. A different kind of musical theatre. See the 12thnight review. 

Christina Nguyen in Alina by Lianna Makuch. Photo by Alexis McKeown.

Performing a war: Alina. The Pyretic premiere production (directed by Patrick Lundeen) of Lianna Makuch’s gripping new play, inspired by on-location research, does something apparently impossible. It brings the multi-sense assault of a war, the horrifying one in which Ukraine is fighting for a future, to a tiny stage in a rib-rattling barrage of sound aggression (electronic composer Noor Dean Musani and sound designer Aaron Macri), light (Stephanie Bahniuk), and movement (choreographer Amber Borotsik) — and a remarkable solo achievement in first-person storytelling from actor Christina Nguyen. And in its story, inspired by a real person, it conjures the nightmare strangeness of the world transformed unrecognizably by PTSD. An extreme theatrical challenge. See the 12thnight review.

Only in Edmonton you say …

Seth Gilfillan and Josh Travnik in Conjoined: A New Musical. Photo supplied

•2022 was the year that Edmonton theatre hatched not one but TWO new coming-of-age musicals about conjoined twins, no kidding. Two-Headed/Half-Hearted, by Trevor Schmidt (book) and Kaeley-Jade Wiebe (music) at Northern Light Theatre, a coming-of-age prairie saga about sisters (see The Year in Edmonton theatre, part 1) with separate dreams and separation anxiety. The other? Conjoined, a clever, darkly funny rock musical by Stephen Allred and Seth Gilfillan, premiered in a Straight Edge at the Fringe. It explored the implications of sibling rivalry and self-discovery under the problematic conditions when “I” is “we.” The tale of two conjoined brothers, one a dominating over-achiever and the other seething with resentment that might even be murderous, was macabre and fun, ingeniously staged by Allred. Both shows should have a future, if there’s any justice. Read the 12thnight review.

Gianna Vacirca, Oscar Derkx in Evelyn Strange, Teatro Live. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

• A Hitchcockian mystery/comedy with a bona fide multi-disciplinary arts joke, in which a seminal scene happens in a grand tier box at the Met during a production of Wagner’s five-hour Siegfried. The amnesiac title heroine (Gianna Vacirca) of Stewart Lemoine’s Evelyn Strange, revived at Teatro Live in a production directed by Shannon Blanchet, has a ticket in her pocket. And as in the case of many of the Lemoinian protagonists Edmonton audiences have come to know, music figures prominently in Evelyn Strange’s quest for self-knowledge. She needs time; Wagner provides, amply. Read the 12thnight review.

Cliff Cardinal, As You Like It, A Radical Retelling, Crow’s Theatre. Photo by Dahlia Katz.

•A soft opening with a hard centre: No one in the audience in Theatre Network’s new Roxy expected what happened when As You Like It: A Radical Retelling by the Indigenous actor/playwright/provocateur Cliff Cardinal hit the Nancy Power mainstage in May. It came with strict instructions not to reveal the secret of the Crow’s Theatre production, the first show ever in the new 124th St. theatre. Audience response was very divided. Well, theatre goes on frequently about being risky, and you’d have to concede this was a genuinely provocative theatre experiment. Since then (with the prospect of a Toronto run in March), it’s gained a fuller, more revealing title: The Land Acknowledgement, Or As You Like It. All I can say is that I’ll never hear a show-opening land acknowledgment in quite the same way. A ballsy way to start a new era; people left the theatre saying “what the hell just happened in there?”.  Read the short (very short) 12thnight review here.

•Technology is our friend, really. Well, maybe not… Geez. bots can actually write plays. Did we want to know that? Plays By Bots, written by a bot named Dramatron and presented at the Fringe, was by no means a flame-out (we’ve all seen much worse), only a bit flat. Which gave the comic improvisers of Rapid Fire Theatre a deadpan playground to climb all over. The 12thnight review is here.

Stepping bravely forward … 

Michelle Diaz, Matt Dejanovic, Bonnie Ings, Gabby Bernard (above), Jameela McNeil in Tell Us What Happened, Workshop West. Photo supplied.

a. A play that contains a sexual assault that treats the traumatized victim seriously, but is not in the end about the victim: Tell Us What Happened by Michelle Robb, which premiered in Heather Inglis’s Workshop West Playwrights Theatre production, wonders about justice, and what justice might mean in a world lived largely in the anti-nuance, Like/Not Like world of social media. Is the internet, where every impulsive reaction and emoji creates uncontainable ripples, a safe place for social discourse? A brave investigation by a young playwright (Robb was 20 when she wrote it). Read the 12thnight review.

Jade Robinson, Hayley Moorhouse in Smoke, the second cast in the Tiny Bear Jaws production. Photo by Brianne Jang

b. A play built on reactions to sexual assault (and consent) that’s not actually about sexual assault. Elena Belyea’s very challenging Smoke resists definitive answers about the cause of the assault, the blame, and even the “truth,” since the parties have unresolvable, opposing perceptions of what happened. Instead of weighting the smoky ‘he said/she said’ scenario, it seeks clarity about post-fire trauma, and what it will take to satisfy the traumatized person. Because gender and audience assumptions about gender, are factors, Jenna Rodgers’ Tiny Bear Jaws production ran with two alternating casts, one heterosexual one queer.  Read the 12thnight review.  

Davina Stewart and Trevor Duplessis in Cottagers and Indians, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

•Resisting classification: As the cheeky title hints, Cottagers and Indians, a two-hander by the Ojibwa playwright and humorist Drew Hayden Taylor, is surprisingly genial in tone given the stakes of the culture collision it chronicles. Heck, it might even be called a land-claim comedy, a theatrical category of which it might well be the sole occupant. Inspired by a real-life conflict in Ontario cottage country, the play is  set in motion when an enterprising Anishinaabe man revives an Indigenous tradition by seeding lakes with manoomin (wild rice) and thereby meets resistance from well-heeled white settlers who’ve claimed lake-front property for generations. Beautifully designed by Daniel vanHeyst, who figured out how to grow things on the Varscona stage John Hudson’s Shadow production starred Davina Stewart and Trevor Duplessis. Read the 12thnight review.

The Wolves, The Maggie Tree in the Citadel Theatre Highwire Series. Photo by Nanc Price for the Citadel.

•OK, let’s hustle:  Vanessa Sabourin’s Maggie Tree production of The Wolves (an absorbingly insightful Sarah Lappe play that took us directly into the world of teenage girls) re-created the Citadel’s smallest house, the Rice, as a soccer field (designer: Whittyn Jason) with the spectators on either side, close enough to see the stitching on the ball. Sabourin’s warmingly diverse cast was constantly in motion. Read the 12thnight review.

•Newcomer of the year: Alt-folk rocker Lindsey Walker made a striking debut in musical theatre with her score for a haunting new Catch the Keys Productions musical, ren & the wake. In the book created by playwright Megan Dart, we’re at a wake as a daughter tries to conjure their mother from the shards of memory. And each character is equipped with a signature song, lyrical and catchy, by Walker, who’s a find for musicals. Read the 12thnight review.

Evandalism by Henry ‘MC RedCloud’ Andrade

•Memoir theatre: Evandalism was one of the surprises of the year, which premiered in Fringe Theatre’s season (Murray Utas directed). It was a funny, suspenseful, and unexpectedly moving account by and starring Henry Andrade aka MC ReCloud (Bear Grease), of growing up in the lethally tough L.A. street gang scene, and replacing one sort of foster family for another, more dangerous, family. It’s a dramatic, odds-against story:  again and again RedCloud, a Guinness Book record-holder in non-stop rapping, rejects the sentimental, the ideological, the conventional wisdom en route to the discovery of a new family — in the arts. A highly original testimonial. Read the 12thnight review.

Bone-headed move of the year: trophy goes to the City of Edmonton, determined to close Hawrelak Park for three YEARS, in effect evicting the Freewill Shakespeare Festival at a moment when they’ve finally returned to a real and equipped stage from their peripatetic pandemic life on the move.

Expressions we never want to hear in theatre ever again: I’m trying to sever all ties with “the new normal,” “unprecedented,” “supply chain issues,” “deep dive.” Theatre artists, by definition, are already sworn enemies of “it is what it is,” a passive acceptance of the status quo. 

Most useful take-away expression from theatre in 2022:  “Take a pew and button it” from Mamma Mia!. Andrea House delivered it definitely in the Mayfield production. The 12thnight review is here.

We’ve lost part of our history: with the passing of Tom Peacocke,  actor/ director/teacher/ mentor/ administrator/ advocate, we have lost a giant. See the 12thnight tribute to a great man here. 

Did you see The year in Edmonton theatre part 1? You can read it here.

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Spirit of the Season: a new holiday/horror mashup, a one-night one-screen film premiere

Posted on December 19, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Spirit of the Season, The Debutantes and Lazy Kitten Productions. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Five friends in full flight mode escape to a remote cabin in the woods. That always works, right?

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In Spirit of the Season, the indie holiday/ horror mash-up comedy film getting a one-night premiere screening Wednesday night at the Citadel’s Zeidler Hall, the five are fleeing the Christmas season, in all its stressful demands and enforced jollity — a fateful avoidance move if ever there was one. Will the Christmas spirit find them, and pick them off, one by one, in time-honoured horror fashion?

When it comes to the holiday season, you can run but you cannot hide. 

Produced by the sketch comedy troupe The Debutantes and Lazy Kitten Productions, the movie was shot in and around Edmonton a year ago. last year — “very DIY guerrilla film-making,” as co-director Robyn Slack of The Debutantes explains. Spirit of the Season had pandemic origins: in the absence of live shows, “we shot short silly comedy video sketches of our auditions for Hallmark movies…. And they caught the eye of Katie Cutting,” an indie filmmaker and Slack’s co-director (“the one with all the gear, the smarts, the know-how,” he says) who goaded them to find an expansive form. 

What they needed for their venture, “our first time writing something narrative and cohesive,” was a story to frame it. And the collaborators — Slack, Cutter, The Debutantes, and Azimuth Theatre’s Sue Goberdhan, “everyone’s got their finger in the pie!” — found it by asking themselves a question. “What’s everyone’s relationship to the holiday season,” says Slack. whose experience in film before Spirit of the Season was “mostly indie short-form comedy.”. 

At early meetings “there was a broad range of perspectives,” he reports. “I’m on the most pro-Christmas end of the spectrum; I haven’t had any real trouble or major stress. I like it; I think it’s an enjoyable escape and a fun time of year.” 

Not everyone shared this buoyant view, needless to say. “People who have a complicated history with the holiday and a hard time of it at that time of year, people who’ve lost family members, people who’ve come out as trans or queer…. We tried really hard to capture in the film that this holiday means a lot of different things to different people.” 

“Each character has their unique struggle,” says Slack, “everything  from mild annoyance or being exhausted with the consumerism to something deeply traumatic. It’s not a heavy movie; it’s a light comedy, but we try to broach those themes as best we can.” Then, marrying the horror trope to a Christmas theme was “a fun contrast to play with!”  

Creating a holiday movie is fraught with timing demands at every level. Weather ups the ante. And in the fall of 2021, when shooting was to begin in preparation for the big holiday reveal, Edmonton fell short in the one crucial thing you can usually count on here: snow on the ground. In late October, there wasn’t any. “Last year it took a really long time to get a nice layer of snow on the ground. We could have been ready a full year earlier,” Slack sighs.

The shooting happened in a cabin south of the city, west of Leduc, a generous loan from a personal friend of the Cutting family. “We’d go for two days at a time,” working around everyone’s jobs. “The first thing on the agenda every time we got there was to start a fire — before we could do anything.” It was so cold they had to keep the equipment in the car till the cabin warmed up. 

An adventurous spirit proved de rigueur; the film has a whimsical diary. They shot a chase sequence — one person on foot, pursued by one person on GT Snow Racer — in the dead of night, says Slack. “Very cold but very fun.” For one scene, “we baked hundreds of sugar cookies that got smashed,” in an act of seasonal violence. Another was shot on Halloween. 

There’s a practical reason that Spirit of the Season is a one-night only one-screen only event. It is, to be sure, a little late this year to be marketing a Christmas movie. “Now we have a year lead time to apply for marketing grants and find wider distribution,” says Slack. “But we didn’t want to wait a whole other year to show the movie; we’re pretty excited about it.”   

“If you’re the kind of person who goes all in for it, or the kind of person who struggles with the holidays, this may be just the movie for you!”

PREVIEW

Spirit of the Season

Produced by: The Debutantes and Lazy Kitten Productions

Directed by: Robyn Slack and Katie Cutting

Starring: Michael Vetsch, Laena Anderson, David Rae, Glenna Schowaiter, Sue Goberdhan

Where: Zeidler Hall, Citadel Theatre

When: Wednesday Dec. 21, 8 p.m.

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com 

 

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2022: the year in Edmonton theatre, part 1

Posted on December 17, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Rebecca Sadowski and Kaeley Jade Wiebe in Two-Headed/ Half-Hearted, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Kristi Hansen and Sheldon Elter in Sweeney Todd, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

2022: it was a year in theatre that started with a calendar dotted with  hopeful pencilled-in dates. 

After a complicated 2021 of cancellations and postponements (and a late-summer re-Pivot of The Pivot), audiences were, cautiously, ready to be pried away from their screens to venture forth to theatre experienced in 3-D, in person, with other people. We’d had enough of Zoom re-enactments, worthy and ingenious though they’d been; we were hungry to re-discover the excitement of the shared experience. 

It wasn’t a stampede to the theatre in 2022, as it’s turned out (another wrong prediction by yours truly). More of a trickle, then a gradual migration, a drift. And the first official theatre engagement of the new year, Northern Light Theatre’s production of The Hunchback Variations (fascinatingly weird), was postponed till the Fringe, a discouraging COVIDian setback. But still…. we were back in the house seats. 

A beautiful new $12 million theatre arose from the ashes of the old, and on its very footprint (Theatre Network’s Roxy on 124th St.). A venerable theatre acquired it own space (Workshop West moved to Strathcona, into the theatre vacated by Theatre Network in its post-fire exile, and renamed it the Gateway). And a crazily busy improv company, Rapid Fire Theatre, said Yes, as improvisers do, to building a new theatre of their own in the old Telephone Museum in Old Strathcona. It’s in progress. 

Despite the challenges and uncertainties of performance, week to week, whole seasons got announced. And in the spirit of “OK now, where were we?’, long-delayed shows — like the Citadel’s Jane Eyre, Peter Pan Goes Wrong, and Network, Teatro Live’s Evelyn Strange, Shadow’s The Wrong People Have Money, Wild Side’s A Doll’s House Part 2 — finally got their opening nights. The festivals — the mighty Edmonton Fringe, SkirtsAfire, Nextfest among them — returned to live and, in a word, festive, albeit in somewhat carefully incremental dimensions. And the Almost-Fringe as it was dubbed sold more than 95,000 tickets to its 164 shows. 

In the particularly poignant case of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, a brave return to live on a scale, with two big full-cast productions (the perennially popular A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the difficult, rarely produced Measure For Measure), was accompanied by the cloud of the City’s impending closure of Hawrelak Park FOR THREE YEARS — a stunning, and destructive, lack of civic creativity. 

Behind the scenes, rehearsals got more intricate: the versatility of actors in big-cast  productions was tested further as they learned several parts — just in case. In small-cast shows, everyone crossed their fingers.

In the (interminable) late-pandemic of 2022, in show after show theatre artists, unsurprisingly, were drawn to wonder about their place in the world, how art gets created, and why, and whether the rules of engagement that underpin theatre have fundamentally changed forever. The Innocence of Trees, Dora Maar: the wicked one, I Don’t Even Miss You, The Hunchback Variations, The Margin of the Sky, Evandalism (the list goes on…) reflected on it. And at a moment when live human engagement is both longed for and feared, live theatre spoke to that complexity, too.  

It was a year that continued to test the adventurous spirit of  theatre artists and their uncanny ability to speak to the moment. Here’s a small selection, in no particular order, of theatre highlights, to kick-start your own memories.

Emma Ryan and Maralyn Ryan in The Innocence of Trees, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

The Innocence of Trees: Theatre Network officially launched its first full mainstage season in the new Roxy with Eugene Stickland’s light-filled, and enlightening, fantasia on art, and the making of art, and the contradictions that drive the artist. What could be more à propos? The character at its centre is the Saskatchewan-born abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin, troubled in life, whose distinctive signature grid-work canvases hang in major galleries in New York. And she encounters her younger self, chafing at the constraints of her unlovely prairie childhood and the flat lines of her horizons. The play got a richly multi-disciplinary premiere production from Bradley Moss: superb performances from the grandmother/granddaughter pairing of Maralyn Ryan and Emma Ryan, a beautiful Briana Kolybaba design set in motion by Ian Jackson’s projections and Even Gilchrist’s lighting, and evocative live music from cellist Morag Northey. Read the full 12thnight review here.

Elena Belyea, I Don’t Even Miss You, Tiny Bear Jaws. Photo by Brianne Jang

I Don’t Even Miss You: No other play this year captured our predicament — the sense of the familiar gone strange, a world fundamentally and mysteriously changed — the way Elena Belyea’s multi-disciplinary solo “musical” did. Basil wakes up one morning to discover the world has fundamentally and mysteriously changed, overnight, and they are utterly alone. So Basil (the charismatic Belyea) has to create everything — friendships, family, romance, identity, gender  — from memory and the digital ether. They’re starring in their own life “production,” creating it live, moment to moment, with music, dance, video. Is it a solo? Basil shares the stage with the digital companion they’ve brought into being as a buttress against final aloneness. Funny, insightful, heart-wrenching. Read the 12thnight review here. 

Hailey Gillis and Ivy DeGagné in Jane Eyre, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Jane Eyre: Star Canadian playwright Erin Shields, an expert in re-imaging classics for the theatre through a feminist lens, re-created Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel for the contemporary stage — by shedding narration and imagining the world of its spirited strong-willed orphan heroine up against formidable odds as a haunting. Jane carries with her the vivid ghosts of her past. And the premiere production directed by the Citadel’s Daryl Cloran set that world in motion as a kind of movement piece (devised by choreographer Ainsley Hillyard), in which Jane is pursued by the abusers, confidantes, enforcers, interventionists of her past, as they whirl through scenes that frame Jane’s life scene by scene. Hailey Gillis’s captivating performance happened at the still centre of that motion-filled world. And, in a mysterious achievement, Shields’ language seemed both of the period and the now. Read the full 12thnight review here.

Two-Headed/Half-Hearted: This new musical fable by Trevor Schmidt (book) and Kaeley Jade Wiebe (music) — “a prairie gothic song cycle of mythology and mermaids for conjoined twins” as billed —  speaks eloquently to the classic tension between the safety of belonging and the urge to break free and find your own individual self. In the beautifully designed Northern Light Theatre premiere, Venus and Juno (Wiebe and Rebecca Sadowski) presided from an atmospheric prairie altar (I thought of them as a performance art installation). And, as the year’s special achievement in ensemble playing, the twins accompanied themselves jointly from time to time on one guitar. There’s a piquant sense of humour at work in this beguiling piece, and heartbreak, too.  Read the full 12thnight review here.

Maralyn Ryan and Kristi Hansen, A Doll’s House Part 2, Wild Side Productions. Photo by Jim Guedo.

A Doll’s House Part 2: One of the most intriguing questions in theatre gets answered in this powerful, suspenseful (and funny) 2017 play by the American playwright Lucas Hnath. Eighteen years after Nora Helmer slammed the door on her marriage, her husband, and her children at the end of Henrik Ibsen’s 1878 A Doll’s House — “the door slam heard around the world” — she’s back to face the people she left. Why? And what’s she been doing? In Jim Guedo’s Wild Side production, an expert cast of four, led by Kristi Hansen as Nora and Ian Leung as Torvald, made an absorbing evening of it by giving real gave weight and force to four opposing points of view. Read the full 12thnight review here. 

Celina Dean and Mathew Hulshof in The Margin of the Sky, Teatro La Quindicina, Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The Margin of the Sky: It’s fitting that Teatro Live’s last-ever appearance at the Fringe where the company was born should be a revival of this multi-hued 2003 ‘comedy’ about the mystery of inspiration and creation. Stewart Lemoine’s elusive play, that starts with the explosive mind-expansion of hearing a lush piece of orchestral music, follows its characters through a day of chance encounters and impulsive adventure in L.A. as a Canadian playwright (Mathew Hulshof in peak form) struggles to pen a screenplay for his soap star brother-in-law (Josh Dean). It’s an unusual combination of madcap caper and meditation on our horizons and the possibilities of expanding them. Larky and moving. Full 12thnight review here.

Weasel, U of A Studio Theatre. Photo supplied.

Weasel: The most disturbing play of the fall season didn’t have anything to do with serial killers or the ghostly undead. It was Beth Graham’s fascinating, unforgettable and, yes, horrifying exploration of the traumatizing world of theatre itself from the inside out, allegedly collaborative and in reality rigidly hierarchical. Commissioned from the notable Canadian playwright, the U of A’s Clifford E Lee playwright-in-residence, for the actors of this year’s graduating class, Weasel (both noun and verb) unravels the mysterious breakdown into panic and stage fright of an actor. It follows Charlie through theatre school, through auditions, encounters with other student actors and pros. It  takes us into rehearsals with pretentious and abusive directors, and on field trips to see other brutes in operation, including artistic directors of several sizes of company.  

The play itself could use a trim and maybe fewer subplots; it wants to flesh out every aspect of theatre for its cast of 14 (including four actors who play Charlie in a clever sort of interlocking past-present portrait). But it has a powerful reverb of lived-in  authenticity about it in Kevin Sutley’s production.

Sweeney Todd: The production by Plain Jane Theatre of Stephen Sondheim’s innovative and grisly 1979 masterwork did something experimental and bold (as is their wont). In a tiny 60-seat place (CO*LAB) they gave us a vivid small-cast (eight actors, one piano player) close-up of the musical/melodrama/operetta, set in the lunch-room of a meat packing plant. Close? We could almost smell blood. And we could feel the heat from the murderously vengeful barber in Sheldon Elter’s seething performance, with his resourceful accomplice Mrs. Lovell played zestfully by Kristi Hansen. A win for low-budget theatrical ingenuity. Read the 12thnight review here.  

Lianna Makuch in Barvinok, Toronto 2018, Pyretic Productions. Photo by Dahlia Katz.

Barvinok: In the Pyretic production directed by Patrick Lundeen, Lianna Makuch’s play, set in motion by the inheritance of war-ravaged Ukrainian history — across generations, across oceans — takes on the suspenseful configurations of a mystery, a ghost story of sorts, a dream quest. A young Canadian (Makuch) travels to war-torn Ukraine on the trail of her grandmother’s secret, embedded in another time and another war. The story she traces is gathered from real-life interviews by Pyretic’s Makuch, Lundeen and Matt MacKenzie on location with “regular” Ukrainians. And its theatrical storytelling works the way memory works — across translucent windows, in bursts of action, in fragments of dialogue and images, in haunting musical riffs played by a ghostly chorus on vintage Ukrainian instruments (scored by Larissa Polo). Read the 12thnight review here. 

Dora Maar: the wicked one, Workshop West. graphic by db photographics

Dora Maar: the wicked one: In this riveting solo play, elegantly directed by Blake Brooker (it opened the Workshop West Playwrights Theatre season), Beth Graham and Daniela Vlaskalic (The Drowning Girls, Comrades, Mules) explore the high price tag on artistic creation, and the dangerous magnetism of fame, power, and ego. And they do it at multi-planar angles, taking their cue from  Picasso’s Dora Maar portraits. In a performance of charismatic brio, Daniela Vlaskalic is the innovative French photographer, best known as Picasso’s lover, model, and muse, whose attraction to the seductive energy of creation proves her undoing. The actor charts Dora’s fall into darkness, in extended loops that parallel the fate of Icarus who flew too near the sun till his wax and feather wings melted. Read the full 12thnight review here.     

Geoffrey Simon Brown and Émanuel Dubbeldam in Re:Construct, RISER 2022. Photo by Brianne Jang

Re:Construct: This insightful, cleverly theatrical little play by Even Gilchrist (hitherto better known to Edmonton audiences as a designer) was one of the surprises of the year. It’s an insight, a de:construction, of gender and the notions of perfectibility that underpin it — a diary of self-discovery. Which makes it sound much heavier, and less funny, than it is. Re:Construct unfolds in a playful origami way as we’re welcomed to a celebration of Self (complete with cake and candles) thrown by a trans man and his idealized cis alter-ego (Émanuel Dubbeldam and Geoffrey Simon Brown, both delightful). What would it take to reinvent ourselves, and become the voice in our head? Re:Construct tells us it’s possible. And that feels so hopeful. It premiered in a production directed by Sarah J Culkin and assisted by the RISER Edmonton program. (If you missed it, you have another chance: Re:Construct will be at One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo in January). Read the full 12thnight review here. 

And there’s more. Stay tuned for The Year In Edmonton Theatre, part 2, coming up soon.  

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An update on E-town holiday shows: overcoming grinch-itude and getting festive, part 2

Posted on December 12, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Caley Suliak, Ellie Heath, Alyson Dicey of Girl Brain. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Lighten up everyone. If stress and/or seasonal ennui have overtaken your festive spirit and malled it beyond recognition, it’s obvious that you need a holiday show booster. And, like sweaters with antlers and shameless pom-poms on them, holiday shows come in every size and shape in this theatre town.

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Herewith, an updated survey of some possibilities this week. 

•At the Roxy on 124th St., on the Theatre Network mainstage, the smart, high-spirited sketch comedy trio Girl Brain — Alyson Dicey, Ellie Heath and Caley Suliak — will address the peculiarities and absurdities of the season in their own riotous way. Their new show runs Friday to Sunday. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca. 

•BE Merry!, Ballet Edmonton’s annual evening of dance, music, and song (with the title that speaks volumes), returns to the Varscona Theatre stage Thursday through Saturday. The 2022 edition features dance by the company, and performances by jazz pianist Chris Andrew, vocalist Andrew MacDonald-Smith (who’s also the co-artistic director of Teatro Live!), ESO cellist Ronda Metszies and violinist Neda Yamach. The evening’s host is Ballet Edmonton executive director Sheri Somerville, a chanteuse of note herself with a resumé full of Teatro leading roles. Tickets: balletedmonton.ca or varsconatheatre. com.

The Best Little Newfoundland Christmas Pageant Ever, Whizgiggling Productions. Photo supplied.

•The Best Little Newfoundland Christmas Pageant is back for a 13th season, this edition at the Backstage Theatre. It’s the work of the the delightfully named Whizgiggling Productions, named after the Newfoundland expression that means (approvingly) “acting silly or foolish.”

The play, a stage adaptation of a much-loved Barbara Robinson novel that’s an Nfld. classic, takes us backstage at a small-town Christmas pageant. Ah yes, the volatile world of the amateur theatrical, where the fortunes of the annual town Christmas pageant are in grave doubt. Who ever suspected “the worst kids in school,” the Herdmans, would show up for the auditions? Lured by the prospect of free snacks,  they’ve muscled their way into plum roles. The storyline may baffle them completely, but they’ve nailed the spirit of ruthless competition. Will the town’s Christmas tradition survive the assault?

Tickets: TIX on the Square (tixonthesquare.ca). 

And continuing:    

•If you can’t suppress a teeny spasm of sympathy for Mr. Grinch as you slide inexorably into the figgy pudding season, there’s a show for you. Rapid Fire Theatre’s annual Yuletide musical The Blank Who Stole Christmas is both therapeutic and cathartic, in a festive sort of way. A tribute to both the Grinch and that jauntiest of rhymers Dr. Seuss. An intricate achievement in musical comedy construction, it’s both scripted and improvised. 

The gist is that a different guest improviser shows up every night, in costume, to be The Blank, a villain of their own choosing. The Rapid Fire cast of six, who’ve rehearsed their script and their moves, know nothing in advance of the identity of The Blank: a celebrity chef, perhaps, or a rock star? a cartoon personage or William Shakespeare? All will be revealed, on the night. 

The score is by Erik Mortimer, a composer/musician/musical director without whom Edmonton theatre would falter. Kate Ryan of the Plain Janes directs; Jason Hardwick choreographs. It runs at the Gateway Theatre through Dec. 17. Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com 

The benighted Ebenezer (that’s Mr. Scrooge to you) appears in two different guises this holiday season. 

A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

•At the Citadel, A Christmas Carol is big, lavishly costumed, full of music (with a live band). In David van Belle’s adaptation it’s Christmas Eve, 1949. Which unlocks the whole familiar post-war songbook, It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of the Year, Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas and the rest. Not that you’d better wish Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge a Merry Christmas. He’s terrorizing the staff and the in-store Santa at Marley’s, the department store he runs, in a fury that batters everyone around him. And in the iconic role he’s inherited for the first time John Ullyatt is terrifying, and wonderful in the way he charts the tragedy and the last-minute reclamation of the man with permafrost in his heart.

Through Dec. 23. Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com. Catch 12thnight’s preview interview with John Ullyatt here. And the 12thnight review here. 

It’s A Wonderful Christmas Carol: a panto radio Play, Capitol Theatre. Photo supplied.

•At the Capitol Theatre in Fort Edmonton Park (and then the Spotlight Cabaret), It’s A Wonderful Christmas Carol: a panto radio play is a mash-up of holiday faves. A cast of four top comedy undertakes a sort of Dickensian ghost story/panto fusion in which Mr. Scrooge (Dana Andersen) shares the stage with puppets, Minions, Edmonton jokes about the continuing fiasco that is the LRT. The music is live, played by Paul Morgan Donald. See the 12thnight preview here.  

It runs through Dec 17 at Fort Edmonton (tickets: showpass.com/its-a-wonderful-christmas-carol), then Dec. 20 to 23, for brunch shows, at Spotlight Cabaret (tickets: spotlightcabaret.ca).

•Walterdale, Edmonton’s venerable community theatre, opts to raise your spirits with a classic 19th century sparkler, A Fitting Confusion by the Belle Époque French master farceur Georges Feydeau. Zack Siezmagraff, who writes farces himself, directs the high-speed 10-actor Walterdale production that runs through Dec. 17. Tickets: walterdaletheatre.com. 

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