A comedy thriller inside a comedy thriller: Deathtrap at Teatro Live! A review

Posted on November 19, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Ian Leung and Geoffrey Simon Brown in Deathtrap, Teatro Live!. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If there ever was a play that judges success when the audience gasps together, then laughs at its own collective surprise, it’s the one that opens the season at Teatro Live! (the newly renamed Teatro La Quindicina), a company devoted to snapping the elastic of the concept ‘comedy’.

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That’s the fun, potentially, and the intricate challenge of Deathtrap, the vintage 1978 hit by Ira ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ Levin. It’s both a comedy thriller and a parody of comedy thrillers: a case of cracking a chestnut and finding another chestnut inside. 

And the production directed by Nancy McAlear, in her Teatro debut, is the fun that can happen when a cast of top-drawer pros apply themselves expertly to a devious play-within-a-play, possibly within-another-play, a classic of its kind that’s expressly designed to be conniving, calculating, misleading — and also make people laugh.

The Deathtrap setting is pure murder mystery à la Dame Agatha: an isolated country house, full of old-school stage weaponry, on a dark and stormy night. The handsome two-storey set is by Chantel Fortin, lighted from a variety of atmospheric sources by Alison Yanota. The characters themselves place it in the lethal world of old-school Broadway theatre, or at least on the Connecticut outskirts, since its two principal characters are playwrights. 

Ian Leung in Deathtrap, Teatro Live!. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

Sidney, the elder of the two, and the owner of the house, is a has-been writer of stage thrillers, fretting away in perpetual writer’s block. His last hit, The Murder Game, was 18 years ago; there are only flops on his resumé since. Ian Leung, an actor who really knows how to get the gravitas into a comic performance, puts the stakes back into writer’s block. Even his beige patterned sweater (costume designer: Leona Brausen, apt as ever) has the mothball flavour of word block about it. 

In Leung’s performance Sidney exudes the cynical pomposity and world-weariness of the veteran who has basked in the limelight and can’t reconcile himself to outsider status.  He name-drops and sneers; his studiedly casual insider throw-away references to Hal Prince, David Merrick, Michael Caine or George S. Kaufman, aren’t random at all. And the arrival on his desk of a brilliant first script by a young playwright protegé, a brilliant thriller called Deathtrap that Sidney recognizes as a sure-fire Broadway hit  (“even a (famous) director couldn’t hurt it,” he sighs), sets the ever-oiled always idling machine of his jealousy in motion. 

Ian Leung and Kristin Johnston in Deathtrap, Teatro Live!. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography

An invitation to the young man ensues. And Sidney’s sour jokes with his wife Myra (Kristin Johnston) about offing the young man and claiming the play as his own seem to be making her ever more apprehensive in the very first scene.  “What’s the point of having a mace if you don’t use it?” he says to her, a (possibly) light-hearted reference to Chekhov’s famous dictum about introducing a gun in Act I.  

Then the young theatre aspirant arrives with the only copy of Deathtrap (Sidney calls it “an enormously promising … first draft”), a script no one else has seen. This is the moment, early in Act I, that I have to stop telling you about the plot.  Except perhaps to suggest that the off-the-rack advice to “write what you know” should be offered cautiously when it comes to comedy thrillers involving murderous intent and whole walls of weaponry. In that vein, the standard practice of workshopping a play “on its feet” takes a shiv too in Deathtrap. 

Anyhow, Clifford is played with a very amusing wide-eyed comic bustle by Geoffrey Simon Brown — all lanky physical exuberance (he seems to bound, on springs, across the room and up the stairs), flamboyant deference (there’s a theatrical oxymoron for you), and the kind of irrepressible good cheer that is bound to grate on Sidney and bring out the pompous in him. So do Clifford’s breezy assessments about the shallow, “arthritic” conventions of comedy thrillers (Deathtrap is nothing if not self-referential). Clifford, as Brown’s performance captures to a T, doesn’t deflate easily.

Gianna Vacirca has a riotous time with a preposterous Dutch psychic character, Sidney and Myra’s neighbour with an outsized accent, who arrives head-first sniffing the floor and furniture and detecting “pain.” She has a stake in showbiz circles, too, as references to Merv Griffin or The Amazing Kreskin attest.

A thriller with five characters about a thriller with five characters does shortchange Myra. But Johnston captures a certain period cadence, and her mounting nervousness, carefully calibrated, ups the tension in McAlear’s production. And Corben Cushneryk, whose ‘70s hair sits solidly on his head like a helmet, is a theatre-loving lawyer who’s just there to notice things. 

In a theatre town the opening night audience, full of theatre people and playwrights, had a fine time of it Thursday. After all, it’s full of nods to theatre conventions, jokes about directors and producers, collaboration (a theatre favourite, that one), writing credits and  plagiarism, the archive of venerable thrillers from Sleuth to Dial M For Murder. Will it lag in Act II, characters ask each other about Deathtrap. Well, yes, it does, a bit. But how can you resist that entertaining kind of self-knowledge? Sit back, relax, get tense, and gasp away. 

REVIEW

Deathtrap

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Ira Levin

Directed by: Nancy McAlear

Starring: Ian Leung, Geoffrey Simon Brown, Kristin Johnston, Corben Kushneryk, Gianna Vacirca

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Dec. 4

Tickets: teatroq.com

 

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A life transformed by hip-hop: Evandalism opens the Fringe Theatre season

Posted on November 17, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Henry RedCloud Andrade in Evandalism, Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Henry Andrade (aka MC RedCloud) has a story. It’s personal, it’s dramatic, it’s hopeful, it crucially involves hip-hop.

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And, starting Friday on the Westbury stage, he’s sharing it from the stage in a one-man storytelling performance/show directed by the Fringe’s Murray Utas.   

In Evandalism, which opens the first Edmonton Fringe Theatre season in three years, RedCloud, born and raised in L.A., tells his own story of being a kid there, growing up Indigenous Mexican (Wixárika). 

Exuberant and personable in conversation (and onstage as we saw in an excerpt at the Fringe’s season launch), RedCloud explains that “I was a product of my environment.” And that environment had a lot to do with gangs. “My brothers, cousins, uncles, even my dad, were in and out of jail my whole life. Everybody in my family was, in one way or another, affiliated with gangs…. I don’t want to give away too much of the play (laughter), but I was slipping into the gang life with its own culture; I got initiated into a gang in the 6th grade.” 

“Music, dance, and especially hip-hop, really helped me take a big turn in my life,” says RedCloud. I really fell in love with this art. It helped carry me.” And so did the whole movement in which Indigenous people, including Chicanos and Mexicans, are “re-discovering pride in our culture, our roots and our ancestry, our language … taken away during colonization.”

“We’re a generation of people exploring our roots together!”

Henry Andrade (aka MC RedCloud) in Evandalism, Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo supplied.

Showbiz is a theme that runs through RedCloud’s history (which includes more recently roles in the TV series Yellowstone. Theatre has always attracted him: “A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Grease … we did ‘em all in high school. As I got older I started to get typecast as the gangster or thug.” 

It was in hip-hop and rapping that RedCloud really made his mark, bringing the themes of his Indigenous heritage to that field, with a whole discography and, as the Fringe program mentions, a former Guinness World Record for longest freestyle rap (at 18 hours one minute 14 seconds). 

Lightning Cloud Presents Bear Grease, at pêhonân, Edmonton Fringe 2021. Photo supplied.

The divergent paths in the RedCloud biography cross in Edmonton, where he lives with his wife, actor/ musician/ hip-hop MC Crystle Lightning (a Canadian Film Award winner for Trickster) who’s from the Enoch Cree First Nation.  And Evandalism isn’t the first time RedCloud and Edmonton Fringe have cohabited the same sentence. He and Lightning premiered their co-creation Bear Grease, an Indigenous version of the iconic musical/movie blockbuster that was instantly the Fringe’s hottest ticket in 2021. It’s been touring on both sides of the border ever since. And it’s back at the Fringe’s Westbury Theatre (“where it was born”) Dec. 8 to 11 after another Calgary run. 

Evandalism, as RedCloud describes, is the result of the workshops he takes to young people in schools and Indigenous communities “to share my story.” He credits the idea of the show to the Fringe’s Utas, a fomenter of new work who insisted “this story has got to be an actual performance.” 

It’s a story of transformation, and “there’s hope and happiness at the end…. I want people to see that I’m happy and I love life,” says RedCloud. When asked for the Fringe Theatre blog about what advice he’d give his younger self, he says “Oh, f*cking chill out. Chill out…. Everything’s going to be okay.”  

It’s a mantra of hope. “I beat the dragon and married the princess and got the castle!” 

PREVIEW

Evandalism

Theatre: Edmonton Fringe Theatre

Created by and starring: Henry RedCloud Andrade

Directed by: Murray Utas

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

Running: Friday through Nov. 26

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca, or at the box office “offer what you will.”

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Two sparring playwrights in a vintage thriller: Deathtrap opens the Teatro Live! season

Posted on November 16, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Ian Leung, Geoffrey Simon Brown in Deathtrap, Teatro Live!. Photo by Ryan Parker Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The twisty comedy thriller that opens the Teatro season on the Varscona stage Friday is a classic, Ira Levin’s vintage 1978 Broadway hit Deathtrap. 

But the production that launches the Teatro La Quindicina of old into its 40s, though, is all about announcing the new. There’s the streamlined new name and logo, Teatro Live!, with its own built-in exclamation mark! and foolproof spelling. There’s the stepping away from the summer- and Fringe-centric into a more conventional seasonal calendar for their shows, one that takes winter into account and leaves August out.  

And with this Teatro Live! revival of Deathtrap, a whole coterie of artists are making their debuts with the company, starting with director Nancy McAlear. Of her five member cast, four are Teatro newcomers. Ian Leung and Geoffrey Simon Brown (who are, incidentally, both playwrights themselves) star as the play’s two playwrights, the road-weary veteran and the bright up-and-comer, with Kristin Johnston as the former’s wife and Corben Kushneryk as Deathtrap’s lawyer character.

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The sole Teatro “veteran” in the cast, in the role of the next-door clairvoyant with the weird accent, is Gianna Vacirca, most recently seen this past season in her own Teatro debut as the title mystery woman in Evelyn Strange.

In itself a 44-year-old comedy thriller of Broadway provenance (by Levin, of Rosemary’s Baby fame) isn’t a new departure for a company whose mission in life is exploring and expanding the spectrum and reach of comedy. In addition to the plays of founder and resident playwright Stewart Lemoine, the Teatro production archive, after all, includes such vintage thriller offerings as Sleuth, Rope, The Bad Seed. 

With its two playwrights, its play(s)-within-a-play, and its intricate cross-hatching of revelations and reversals, Deathtrap is lethally resistant to commentary. Speaking of traps, everything, potentially, is a spoiler. But you find out pretty quick that Sydney Bruhl’s last Broadway hit was 18 years ago, followed by a series of flops. “Nothing recedes like success,” as he famously says of his flagging career. When Clifford, a bright young playwriting protegé shows up at Sydney’s isolated country house with the only copy of a script he’s written, a sure-fire hit called Deathtrap, Sydney’s extended “dry spell” might well be over. And the plot does what thriller plots do: it thickens.  

We caught up with Leung and Brown, the production’s Sydney and Clifford, to find out what it’s like to be playing wary playwrights — and multiple layers of deceptions and clues.

The pair arrive in their first Teatro production — specifically, in a bourgeois Connecticut country house full of (possibly) ornamental weapons — from very different theatrical locations.  For Leung it’s an arrival from a contemporary Ibsen sequel, Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House Part 2, in which he powerfully played the abandoned husband Torvald. Brown was half the cast of Even Gilchrist’s Re:Construct, a playful deconstruction of gender from the optic of being trans in a world of orthodoxies (it’s been picked up for the High Performance Rodeo in January). 

“So many challenges for an actor in this play,” says Leung of Deathtrap, “so many layers,” including the trickiness built into “the actor knowing much more than the character does … the problem of not knowing how much you know at every point.” He laughs. “It’s like that game where you make the little ball roll through a maze into a hole…. It’s called Deathtrap for a reason. Everyone in it is in a trap of some kind in their lives.”

Actor/playwright Brown is most associated with off-centre experimental theatre (and the innovative artist-run collective Major Matt Mason), witness such plays as Michael Mysterious, The Circle, and Night, a drive-by theatre experience which ran at twilight in Rundle Park in 2021. But he’s been in “scripted theatre-y shows” before now, as he says, though not recently. Brown is the author of a 23-actor adaptation of A Christmas Carol,  a hit at Theatre Calgary n 2019 and 2020. He’s even been in the ultimate murder mystery chestnut, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap at Vertigo Theatre in Calgary. 

“It feels … nice to be able trust the structure, to be able to lean on that,” Brown says of Deathtrap. “Maybe it’s where I am in my career, but I sympathize with my character wanting mentorship, trusting this older playwright. I just think how much I looked up to my mentors…. If they’d been menacing or duplicitous, I’d have been very vulnerable to that.” 

Actors are trained to make feelings and motivations expressive, available to the audience. Thrillers are all about the finesse of concealing, gauging how much and when to reveal — “how not to give away too much,” as Brown says. “It’s ‘what are you feeling?’ versus what you making someone else feel? And trying to be aware of both those things at the same time.”

Which sounds awfully complicated. But Leung thinks that the when and how much of clues and red herrings of Deathtrap are set up for actors in Levin’s script. “It’s a thriller where the characters play with each other as much as they play with the audience.”

Do they consider it a comedy? Like Leung, Brown calls it instead “a thriller with laughs, but first and foremost a thriller…. And it also pokes fun at the form and the fact it’s a play. It’s aware of what it’s doing and it kind of lets you in on the joke.”

Leung agrees. “There’s humour and wit mixed in….” He quotes one of the characters who analyzes the premium thriller form as “a juicy murder in At I, unexpected developments in Act II. Sound construction, good dialogue, laughs in the right places.” 

He’s having fun. “For me, it’s a new company; also I’ve never worked with anybody in this cast before. And they’re all wonderful to work with!” 

“How many laughs, how many gasps will go through the crowd?? wonders Brown. “I can’t say too much about it.” He laughs. “Just ‘I am in it. And it will be good’.” 

PREVIEW

Deathtrap

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Ira Levin

Directed by: Nancy McAlear

Starring: Ian Leung, Geoffrey Simon Brown, Kristin Johnston, Corben Kushneryk, Gianna Vacirca

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave. 

Running: Friday through Dec. 4

Tickets: teatroq.com

 

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Is that a giant ice cube I see before me? Titanical the Musical at Spotlight Cabaret, a review

Posted on November 14, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Aimée Beaudoin, Tyler Pinset, Jamie Hudson, Jeff Halaby in Titanical The Musical, Spotlight Cabaret. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“How are we doing … emotionally?” the Unsinkable Molly Brown (Aimée Beaudoin) asks us at the outset, from the stage of the Spotlight Cabaret. 

Well, pretty darn chipper, actually.

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The joint is packed on a Sunday evening for Titanical The Musical, Spotlight’s latest show-with-trimmings. The cocktails have arrived. The soup and salad instalments of an amazingly elaborate (and delicious) four-course dinner have been served. And the Spotlight’s co-proprietors, Beaudoin and Jeff Halaby, musical theatre triple-threats  with a gift of the gab, who preside like genial, amused hosts at a festive house party, are hanging out having fun with the audience. 

Any birthdays? Anniversaries? Weird Tinder dates? Before we set sail on the Titanic (hey, what could go wrong? it’s big), know that Molly Brown is willing to share her Valium. Ah, share and share alike: that’s the thing about the art of cabaret; it’s built on audience interaction,  sans fourth wall. 

In a theatre town with a curious shortage of cabarets, the Spotlight  owns a niche — with chandeliers. It’s a smallish and elegantly appointed second floor venue in Strathcona up the stairs in a brick building across the street from Meat and the Next Act, a couple of doors down from the new Pip. As billed online it’s “a restaurant, bar, rooftop and live venue that features dinner theatre, burlesque, drag, improv, comedy, and live music.”

As you’ll glean from the title Titanical The Musical is a song-and-dance spoof, a vaudeville version, with laughter on its mind (written by Beaudoin and Halaby) of the inflated eminently spoofable movie melodrama. You know, the name you can’t even think of without hearing Celine popping a gusset on the high notes in your mind’s ear for at least three days.  

An extremely busy and able-voiced cast of four (including the co-writers, plus Jamie Hudson and Tyler Pinset), kitted out in an amusing scramble of Edwardian duds and shameless accents, tuck energetically into a song list of hits of every stripe and quite a few decades — pop, rock,  hip-hop, a bona fide cabaret chanson: Estelle, Styx, Lorde, Christopher Cross, Luther Vandross, The Proclaimers, the Bee Gees.…  The sound is first-rate, the work (along with the arrangements) of Aaron Macri. 

Jamie Hudson and Tyler Pinset, Titanical The Musical, Spotlight Cabaret. Photo supplied.

And the songs are fitted, with the odd nip and tuck and a view to comedy, to the big Titanic themes — you know, the upstairs-downstairs class struggle, eye-watering romance across the class divide, a love triangle, rebirth across the sea in the land of opportunity where there’s liberty “for most people,” the variation on Murphy’s Law about using the word “unsinkable” too many times. 

“You worry too much,” the callow controlling rich bloke Zane (Halaby) tells his poor but aspirational fiancée Rose (Hudson) who wonders about the lifeboat shortage because she’s a university graduate. Love’s young dream Jack (Pinset) introduces her to the pleasures of life with the common people below deck: “cholera, open sores, religion, moonshine …”. 

Get a grip, Liz; telling you the plot is the height of insanity. OK, there’s a love story, count on it.  “You make life without money sound so dreamy,” declares the conflicted Rose, as they sing Sailing (“takes me away to where I’ve always heard it could be …”) together. And, ah, the Big Moment on the railing? Bowie’s Under Pressure. Staying Alive finds its natural home in comedy.    

All of this is interrupted from time to time with vaudevillian annotations, running gags,  assorted sight gags, blithely peripheral moments of comedy at the bar or at an audience table. Hudson is the strongest singer of the four; Pinset has a daffy round-eyed charm as the dazed Jack. Halaby and Beaudoin are naturally adept improvisers.

Putting the Titanic on the Spotlight’s tiny half-moon stage is pretty amusing in itself. But then the show director Trevor Schmidt, whose Northern Light Theatre shows play the small Studio Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barn, is an expert on matters of cheap-theatre ingenuity in small spaces. I particularly enjoyed the jolly encounter between the  fateful iceberg (Halaby) and a plucky small boat (Beaudoin).

It’s musical comedy at the kind of close quarters that are part of the joke (choreographed by Sarah Dowling). Audience participation — as we all know from shrinking into our theatre seats praying for invisibility — is a tricky thing. Have no fear: the Spotlight treats the audience gently, with casual good humour. It’s a party with strangers. And it runs through New Year’s Eve. 

Tickets: 780-760-0202, spotlightcabaret.ca.

 

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From Plain Jane, Sweeney Todd in close-up: feel the rage. A review

Posted on November 12, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Sheldon Elter (centre) in Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You don’t want to think too hard about the dark smudges on the tiled wall. Or that loud industrial metallic grinding noise. Or the Please Remove Your Rubbers sign. 

We’re in the spartan break room of a meat-packing factory (designer: Trent Crosby). The bell clangs; the whistle shrieks. And the eight-member cast of Plain Jane Theatre’s chamber-sized revival of Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street arrive fresh from the killing floor — an ensemble still in work smocks and hairnets — to tell a story. A story in which blades and meat figure prominently.

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We’re awfully close on three sides at CO*LAB (a tiny and infinitely adaptable 60-seat downtown arts space). Is it mere fancy to realize that they seem to be eyeing us, appraisingly?

For a decade and a half the Plain Janes have been exploring the musical theatre repertoire in theatrically ingenious (and of necessity) low-budget ways — reclaiming neglected or forgotten gems, re-polishing the tarnished, de-cluttering the over-produced. OR in the case of Kate Ryan’s exciting minimalist production of Sweeney Todd, bringing us into direct contact with an extraordinary masterwork. A year after the great man’s death, Stephen Sondheim’s innovative, grisly (and funny) 1979 marvel of a musical/melodrama/operetta is set before and among us, in a small-scale version with an orchestra of one. That, not incidentally, would be Shannon Hiebert, pianist cum musical director; she has to be, and is, exceptional.  

Eight actors and one piano player and no microphones, in a 60-seat house: it feels personal. 

Built into the Janes archive, too, is a history of match-making: introducing emerging artists and challenging multi-talented theatre veterans in unexpected ways. Both happen in this Sweeney Todd. It’s led by the multi-talented husband-and-wife pairing of Sheldon Elter and Kristi Hansen, as the murderous barber Mr. Todd, a dab hand with the razor, and his resourceful sidekick/accomplice Mrs. Lovett who bakes the deceased into meat pies. And the cast includes young singer-performers; theatre newcomers scouted by the Janes include Erin Selin and Aran Wilson-McAnally as the piece’s young beleaguered lovers.  

Sheldon Elter as Sweeney Todd, Plain Jane Theatre Company, Photo by Mat Simpson

Elter, a charismatic actor/musician of startling range and intensity, arrives on Fleet Street, blade in hand, from an original movement piece (Bears), an Indigenous drama (Where The Blood Mixes), and Shakespeare (King Lear and Queen Goneril at Soulpepper). He extends an already impressive skill set further still, to take on some of the most difficult music in the repertoire as the celebrated 19th century serial killer, in the penny dreadful tale of a raging barber bent on exacting vengeance on the corrupt judge who’d exiled him unjustly 15 years before. 

In Elter, the seething rage of Sweeney’s glare might melt the buttons off your coat at close range. And his fists have a built-in clench; you feel he’s barely holding himself back from flattening someone. He is, as the actor powerfully conveys, a tortured soul, raddled through and through with a sense of injustice that’s become his life-force obsession. You can’t take your eyes off him, and you really shouldn’t.  

Elter is a dexterous singer. True, his lower range is more of an ominous subterranean rumble, but that works too. This is a score that counterpoints the jagged intervals and cross-cut rhythms of Sweeney’s rage (“there’s a hole in the world/ Like a great black pit”) with the unexpectedly lyrical, as in Sweeney’s love song to his razors (My Friends). 

Most recently the star of A Doll’s House Part 2, Hansen crosses a wide patch of theatrical real estate from re-worked Ibsen to arrive at Mrs. Lovett, that exemplary capitalist — Make Something Fleet Street? — with a business plan to not waste the raw materials at hand. Hansen has a long list of distinguished musical theatre and comedy credits, and she’s an agile singer. Still, her singing here will surprise you: she tucks apparently easefully into the macabre black comedy with carnivorous comic zest and outsized good cheer. 

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

The moment that transforms Sweeney’s despair at missing his chance at Judge Turpin’s deserving throat (Epiphany) into rampaging serial murder (“we all deserve to die”) is the very moment that Mrs. Lovett has her own bright idea. And the result is the shared brainstorming number A Little Priest (“we have shepherd’s pie peppered/ with actual shepherd/ on top”), exploring new possibilities in meat pie fillings and arguably the funniest song in the whole musical theatre canon. We hear Sweeney laugh. It’s a highlight.

The throat-slitting rampage — more, more, faster, faster — is stylized (perhaps too much?) to the point of lurid lighting flashes, the swipe of Sweeney’s razor, and the period emptying of metal buckets of blood. 

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

Under Ryan’s direction Elter and Hansen embrace the heightened performance style of melodrama. And so, in a more restrained way, does deep-voiced Vance Avery as the respectable, loathsome and lustful Judge Turpin, that representative of the powerful, privileged upper class and scourge of the working man. His designs on his captive ward Johanna (sweet-voiced Selin), Sweeney’s long-lost daughter, make our fists, right along with Sweeney’s, clench ever more tightly.  

Josh Travnik’s performance as Beadle, the Judge’s vile fixer, is neither gleeful nor greasy, repulsive qualities more usually associated with this vivid character. Here, cold-eyed and expressionless, he seems to be upwardly mobile, aspiring to the upper-crust imperviousness of his boss.

The young lovers Selin and Wilson-McAnally, are fine singers, if not quite the last word in swooning romance. Jacqueline Hernandez, recruited from the world of opera, rises to the joint assignment of the flamboyant Italian scammer Pirelli, and the mysteriously persistant Beggar Woman drawn over and over to Sweeney’s barber shop. Mark Sinongco is genuinely affecting as little Toby, Mrs. Lovett’s bakeshop assistant, in the lovely, unexpectedly affectionate Not While I’m Around. As she admits,  Mrs. Lovett’s maternal side is a little rusty.  

And the whole thing builds dramatically, with revenge as its out-of-control engine, to a tense and horrifying conclusion. It takes theatrical savvy to make that happen with lighting, a few simple props, a setting that’s only suggested, and a doorway, even if it’s to the Great Beyond. Intimacy can be chilling in the theatre. And the Janes have given us a rare chance to savour a great work again, in a moment when rage is building all around us in the world, in frightening ways. 

REVIEW

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Theatre: The Plain Jane Theatre Company

Written by: Stephen Sondheim, book by Hugh Wheeler based on the play by Christopher Bond

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Sheldon Elter, Kristi Hansen, Vance Avery, Josh Travnik, Erin Selin, Aran Wilson-McAnally, Jacqueline Hernandez, Mark Sinongco

Where: CO*LAB, 9641 102 A Ave.

Running: through Nov. 20

Tickets: at the door or  tickettailor.com

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Almost A Full Moon at the Citadel: Canada has a new holiday musical, full of snow, stories, and soup. A review

Posted on November 11, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Almost A Full Moon, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In Almost A Full Moon, the oddly joyous and insightful new holiday musical premiering at the Citadel, generations jostle together on the stage.  

Wispy stray people, strangers, somehow find each other, get connected, and become families. Stories both happy and sad unspool backwards into the past in search of their own echoes. And every humble object and tiny moment — soup ladle to tree ornament,  song to kiss to phone call — gathers meaning.

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This is a holiday musical with its own kind of charm that knows that time acts all weird at Christmas (or maybe that’s when we notice). The past won’t stay put, and neither will the present: it’s a haunted season. The musical created by playwright Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman, with music by Hawksley Workman (especially his hit Christmas album of 20 years ago), is all about that. And it’s actually constructed that way, taking its cue from the quirky, distinctively oblique angles of Workman’s songs themselves. 

Would anyone but Workman have written A House Or Maybe A Boat, where the vague urge to build something solid mingles with smell of clementines at Christmas? Or an ode to a brand of notebook (“Claire Fontaine/You seem to bring/ The best out of me…”)? The images of the Workman songbook glint off Corbeil-Coleman’s characters. They bring the particular inspirations of this off-centre material to their uncertainties and their memories as it occurs to them to wonder, sometimes in song sometimes not, if they’re in love, or what they’re meant to do in life … or whether they’ll be home for Christmas.  

In a sense, the play, commissioned by the Citadel and directed by Daryl Cloran, is a story about how stories, like families and like happiness, have to be constructed, from the bits and pieces of human experience, including memory. The narrative is assembled, artfully, before our very eyes. Magic is something to be arrived at, by human agency; it takes work. It’s like theatre that way. 

And in the intersection of short, telling scenes and time periods in Act I — identified without exposition in tiny fragments of dialogue and in costumes designed by Jessica Oostergo — you wonder how it will fit together. It took me a while to catch the drift, but that feels active and intriguing, like putting together a human, intergenerational puzzle. 

Amanda Mella Rodriguez and Felix de Sousa in Almost A Full Moon, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

An amusingly precocious take-charge little boy (Felix de Sousa as Phillip) insists on striking up a friendship and a sledding date with his droll and phlegmatic new neighbour (Amanda Mella Rodriguez as Tala) in the snow (First Snow of the Year). Both young newcomers are talents to watch. 

Two fearful soldiers (Luc Tellier and Kaden Forsberg) from a war long gone arrive by parachute (Bullets), literally dropped by danger into friendship. In a diner on Christmas Eve, an airline stewardess (Patricia Zentilli) on the lam from “the tyranny of family” strikes up a conversation with a musical stranger (Kendrick Mitchell) escaping from his own family, and leaves him with a notebook (Claire Fontaine) containing a family recipe. 

Alicia Barban and Kaden Forsberg in Almost A Full Moon, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

In a way Almost A Full Moon could hardly be more quintessentially Canadian. Winter’s big. There are moments in both our official languages (and others). Snow is everywhere. In Kimberly Purtell’s lighting design it falls from the sky in vertical icicles of lights. Cory Sincennes’s set design is dominated by a self-contained three-doored wall-less room that is, like Christmas, both inside and outside — with a frost-covered floor and a snow-covered tree. It’s surrounded by unmarked cardboard boxes where the past is contained, and is set down in the enveloping darkness of a big stage. 

That’s Mimi’s home turf, a mysterious foreigner in Act I and the family grand-matriarch in Act II. She’s played with an amusingly un-sentimental edge by the excellent Lyne Tremblay, who has a line in epigrammatic wisdom. Love, she says in answer to a grandson’s query, is “everything that’s left after the party.”

Chariz Faulmino, Lyne Tremblay, Luc Tellier, Patricia Zentilli, Kendrick Mitchell in Almost A Full Moon, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Mimi presides over the making of “magic soup,” as per Workman’s title song Almost A Full Moon. It’s a multi-generational family tradition of making something delicious by throwing in a mismatched assortment from every left-over on hand, which is something like a cooking up family if you think about it and try to ignore the parsnips. Anyhow, improvised soup, an unusual through-line for a musical, recurs in every holiday crisis; like charades (but way less stressful), everyone can join in.

You could make a dramatic case for having the winter gathering room surrounded by a dark world; people arrive in families from vast distances in time and space. But human exits do take a while under the circumstances. Set pieces — diner, bedroom, radio station, car —  mysteriously arrive and then disappear, in a way that could probably use a tune-up.

Under Cloran’s direction, though, the piece is in constant motion. And the musical numbers, accompanied by a seven-piece band (musical director and orchestrator Ryan DeSouza) don’t feel placed or delivered in a studied inert way. The songs feel spontaneous, like thinking or reacting, sometimes by characters who are actually writing them, or testing them out on an onstage audience. And Cloran’s 10-actor cast are all good, confident singers.

The audiences has the fun of see the same characters in different times at different ages, as love stories begin to emerge from the weave of memories. Corbeil-Coleman writes Sébastien, one of the two soldiers who was an aspiring actor in civilian life, in a particularly amusing way. And Tellier, who has natural comic chops, slides right into it, as the character writes a romantic letter in French to Marie-Ève (Alicia Barban) for his tongue-tied lovestruck buddy Reuben. The playwright gives the most comic opportunities to De Sousa and Peter Fernandes as the younger and older Phillip; they’re first-rate. And Mella Rodriguez and Chariz Faulmino as the younger and older Tala have their funny moments, too, and also provide a moving insight into the immigrant experience of arriving in Canada with luggage full of grief. 

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

As in romantic comedies with their built-in array of obstacles, the prickly, tentative coupling of Clementine and Lewis takes some doing to resolve. The latter has a career (he’s a rock star); the former is adrift and afraid of commitment. Performances by Zentilli and Mitchell capture that romantic uncertainty. Workman’s lovely Wonderful and Sad drifts into the play in a skilful way, as a love-lost duet between sadder and wiser Lewis and the older Phillip: “Where have I gone? How long ago did I leave?”

The beauty of Canada’s new holiday musical is the way it wraps itself around a season that seems designed for happiness but can be weighted with sorrow. Maybe worst of all is the compelling need for it to be special, and the feeling that you’re somehow letting the whole human team down by not being festive enough. 

Almost A Full Moon isn’t unaware that a sense of loss can come down the chimney at Christmas time. “No one is different, everyone’s alone,” as Workman tells us in the title song. “We’ll make enough soup to feed everyone we know; we’ll make enough to feed everyone we don’t.” But Corbeil-Coleman unwraps a sense of hopefulness too in this new musical. A family, after all, is something that can be created, from scratch if need be. Strangers can join. It’s heartwarming stick-to-your-ribs knowledge for the holidays. 

[Meet the playwright in this 12thnight preview here.]

REVIEW

Almost A Full Moon

Theatre: Citadel

Written by: Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman

Music by: Hawksley Workman

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Alicia Barban, Felix deSousa, Chariz Faulmino, Peter Fernandes, Kayden Forsberg, Kendrick Mitchell, Amanda Mella Rodriguez, Luc Tellier, Lyne Tremblay, Patricia Zentilli

Running: through Nov. 27

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com 

 

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Newly rock-ified and fast on its feet: Jesus Christ Superstar arrives at the Jube. A review.

Posted on November 9, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Jesus Christ Superstar, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Evan Zimmerman for Murphymade.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s a rush down the aisles, a veritable runners’ stampede onto the stage at the start of the Broadway Across Canada touring production of Jesus Christ Superstar that exploded into the Jube Tuesday. And it reimagines for us, in a stunningly physicalized way, a 50-year-old Andrew Lloyd Webber/ Tim Rice musical that feels newly rock-ified and fast on its runner-clad feet.

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Is the unstoppable crowd heading pellmell towards the light? the great band? the pounding rhythm of the famous opening guitar licks? In this revival, the 2017 Olivier Award-winning production from the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London, it’s the irresistible allure of celebrity-in-the-making that propels them. It’s a theme that links stardom to religious and political movements through a canon of hit musicals that includes Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and Evita. 

Nowhere is that link more audaciously set forth than Jesus Christ Superstar, which started life as a single in 1970, then a concept album before it hit Broadway in 1971, and the West End and theatre immortality thereafter. It gives the story of the last seven days in Jesus’s career a showbiz rethink, through the eyes of his betrayer,  railroaded into infamy. The early controversies that surrounded this rock opera are long gone (even the Vatican relented in 1999). But what we see is the history of a rising rock star who overcomes his humble origins to achieve mega-wattage in the galaxy … by a spectacular early death, made possible by not just some Judas but the Judas. 

This revival is by no means the second, third, or 103rd coming. What gives this production directed by Timothy Sheader, its mesmerizing momentum (90 minutes goes by in a flash) is, for one thing, its stunning stagecraft and rock concert accoutrements. 

No desert scenes with the odd palm tree or hippie tickle trunks of costumes here. The cast are in runners and agelessly draped work-out sweats and leggings (set and costume designer: Tom Scutt). The stage is backed with towering multi-level metal grid-work, with windows like an eerie modern tenement (the band is visible in one or two). And it’s dominated by a raked cruciform shape and dramatic high-beam arena lighting, which bathes tableaux in light or picks out soloists from the darkness, lights up hand-held portable crosses, or glints off the metallic palm fronds the ensemble are waving, a witty reference to Bic-flicking fandom. 

Weapons are microphones. The menacing high-command brigade of Jews led by Caiaphas arrive on the raked cross with shoulder-height staffs; they flip them to become microphone stands. When Jesus is roused to anger at Judas’s dismissive treatment of Mary Magdalene, he grabs the mic from him. Judas’s own end has to do with his microphone cord, in a memorable image.

The other outstanding feature of the production is the compulsively physical choreography by Drew McOnie for a cast of 26. They are, it must be said, an ensemble of powerful singers (more about this in a sec). And incidentally, the sound, for once at the Jube, is impeccable, so you can hear Rice’s witty lyrics as well as the big rock rearrangements. But in many ways, this is Jesus Christ Superstar reinvented as a movement piece. 

You eye is drawn over and over to hands, lots of hands over eyes or pushing back. Bodies flung robotically to the side or down, jerked into cultish frenzy by forces beyond themselves. It adds up to a powerful insight into how crowds work, how groups become mobs.

The ever-louder crowd of supplicants demanding miracle cures encircles Jesus closer and closer; it’s stressful work being a superstar. With the addition of white choir smocks, the energetic acolytes of Jesus become the bloodthirsty rabble that call for his crucifixion. And blood they get, in a strikingly gruesome evocation of Jesus battered and beaten, lashed by glitter. There is a heavy price exacted for celebrity, and it’s about to be paid.  

Jesus Christ Superstar, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade.

Judas, “your right hand man all along,” has been on the money about this. He predicted in his opening number Heaven On Their Minds that things will end badly since Jesus has started to believe his own press, so to speak. “You started to believe the things they say of you.”

The performances are compelling. As Jesus, Jack Hopewell, an actor of delicate frame, is mild-mannered in a pop star sort of way, with a line in homilies — “save tomorrow for tomorrow/ think about today instead” — and (understandable) anxiety issues. That is, until he’s provoked to anger by the venal mob in the temple and really lets loose a high rock tenor. He’s often carrying (and sometimes playing) a guitar. 

Judas, as played by Elvie Ellis, is the more passionate figure — as a performance full of edgy, furious, exasperated angles both physical and musical, conveys eloquently. He’s being set up for the label of eternal villain, as the enabler of his friend’s superstardom ambitions, and he knows it. The money he gets for betraying Jesus sticks to his hands, indelible silver stains, an inspired image.  

Faith Jones, the possessor of a silky and lustrous voice, plays Mary Magdalene. She delivers the detachable hit I Don’t Know How To Love Him in an appealingly simple way. And then she melts back into the ensemble.

The villains are striking, especially Isaac Ryckeghem as Caiaphas, he of the rib-rattling bass voice, and Erich W Schleck as Herod, here a ruthless high-camp satyr with a major codpiece whose followers are served up as bodiless heads on golden platters. 

Jesus Christ Superstar, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

The show’s big moment of silence, memorable because it’s the only one, comes at the Last Supper, inventively staged by Sheader. And the ending, which leaves Jesus and Judas together in a light that’s almost companionable, is the capper to an exciting and breathless production. Even if you think you know Jesus Christ Superstar, catch this one if you can. It rescues the piece from the stable where warhorses live, and sets it running again, wearing its 50 years lightly.

REVIEW

Jesus Christ Superstar

Theatre: Broadway Across Canada

Written by: Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice

Directed by: Timothy Scheader

Starring: Jack Hopewell, Elvie Ellis, Faith Jones, Isaac Ryckeghem, Nicholas Hambruch, Kodiak Thompson, Joshua Bess

Where: Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca   

 

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Up close and chilling: a small-scale Sweeney Todd for our time, from the Plain Janes

Posted on November 7, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Sheldon Elter and Kristi Hansen in Sweeney Todd, Plain Jane Theatre Company. Photo by dbphotographics

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd/ He served a dark and vengeful god….”

Starting Friday in a small and intriguing downtown space (CO*LAB), up close enough to smell blood, Plain Jane Theatre brings us a small-cast chamber revival of Stephen Sondheim’s grisly and glorious 1979 musical masterpiece.

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In the 60-seat house we’ll be virtually eyeball to eyeball with “the demon barber of Fleet Street,” the escaped convict of 19th century penny dreadful melodrama fame — a tonsorial pro who returns in a murderous rage from unjust exile to exact his revenge on the corrupt judge who’s destroyed his family and his happiness. There he’ll be, Sweeney Todd, with his trusty razors and his resourceful accomplice Mrs. Lovett, who — waste not want not — bakes the corpses of his murdered clients into meat pies.

As Sondheim himself explained in Finishing The Hat, the first part of his wonderful two-part musical diary, he was a big fan of horror stories and horror film scores, like Bernard Hermann’s for Hangover Square. And Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was inspired by chancing upon Christopher Bond’s version of the period melodrama in a little black box London theatre, played for comedy. 

As director Kate Ryan says of her eight-member Sweeney Todd cast — led by the husband and wife team of Sheldon Elter and Kristi Hansen as the unwholesome couple — “we can really lean into the characters of a piece that Sondheim had always intended to be intimate, small, connected to the audience….” One location, minimalist, small chamber musical dimensions: “it totally works in a Janes sort of way. ” 

Intimate, small … two adjectives that, along with ‘minimalist’, are music to Plain Jane ears. The Broadway premiere, directed by Hal Prince, had a cast of two dozen or more and the massive factory design onstage. But since then there have been ingeniously small-scale stagings, including John Doyle’s 2005 staging in which the cast (led by Michael Cerveris and Patti LuPone) also played instruments, and an eight-actor 2014 English production that happened in London’s oldest pie-and-mash shop.

As Ryan explains, the setting of the Plain Janes Sweeney Todd is contemporary, the lunch room in a meat-packing plant. “We wanted a place near blood, inspired by stories of meat!” she says cheerfully. Says Hansen, “the workers have decided to tell the story,” and they grab what’s at hand to assist them — hats, gloves, hairnets, blades.

In this enterprise they have a real-life meat consultant in the person of Sweeney Todd himself. Elter worked in the meat department at the IGA in Peace River from the time he was in Grade 7 to his second year of college. “It was a good job,” he says with a grin. “Lots of blood, bone dust, cuts, stitches….” And the young Elter was on an upward career trajectory. “I started as a cleaner, moved up to grinding hamburger,” and first aid courses later, “eventually I started to learn how to cut meat.” The bosses wanted to send him to a certification course, but in the end (luckily for theatre audiences) “becoming a butcher wasn’t really what I wanted to do with my life.” 

In this late-pandemic “I knew I needed to challenge myself,” says Ryan of the first complete Sondheim she’s directed in a career of bringing musicals of every size, shape and profile to the stage. “And I always knew that at some point I needed to work on Sondheim…. The work is always ongoing. You never feel like ‘Oh, we nailed that!’. I knew we’d be constantly learning about this piece,” incidentally one of only two of his musicals initiated by Sondheim himself (the other is Passion), as she points out. 

“His characters and their relationships are complex, messy, driven by huge passionate desires…. What Sondheim has done for all of us is to celebrate all sides of the human experience, the dark, complex, demanding sides. Sweeney Todd is a piece about obsession, revenge. And how we all have those feelings in us.” 

“AND he’s funny, witty, he’s made us laugh at ourselves, our faults, anxieties, doubts,” says Ryan of the particular achievement of Sondheim in “riding the line between horror and hilarity” in Sweeney Todd. “And he puts it in a strong, strictly structured musical platform. It’s cathartic but it feels safe.” Ryan revisits “safe,” and laughs. “Safe, but it’s so hard, so musically difficult!” 

She particularly appreciates the collaboration with musical director Shannon Hiebert, who spends most of her time in the opera world. And the cast includes a mix of veteran musical theatre talents (like Josh Travnik as the Beadle and Vance Avery as the Judge) and newcomers, some with opera specialties. “We’re all learning from each other,” says Ryan “I love when worlds collide!” 

“I love the idea of overwhelming the audience,” says Hansen of the intimate CO*LAB venue where that collision happens. “The show is swirling in the space. And we are an ensemble of storytellers.”

Elter and Hansen have been in Plain Jane musicals before now (It’s A Bird, It’s A Plane It’s Superman for the former, Fiorello! for the latter). Sweeney Todd was gold star “bucket list,” says Hansen. “And “a chance for us to get to do this together” was the capper. 

They’ve been in casts together, Freewill Shakespeare Festival productions in the park among them. But not since Romeo and Juliet in 2006 have they been in leading roles directly with each other. They’re amused by the idea of Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett as the natural follow-up to their Romeo and Juliet.

Elter comes to Sondheim after a Dora Award-winning performance in Where The Blood Mixes in Toronto (“one of the most incredible, rewarding experiences of my career!”), and the pairing of Queen Goneril and King Lear at Soulpepper. Hansen is the producer of the Maggie Tree production of The Wolves just ended at the Citadel. 

Like Ryan, they’re struck by the aptness of Sweeney Todd and the Industrial Revolution setting of the original tale for our own moment in history. “Hard-done-by people struggling to live,” says Hansen of the rapidly receding sense of the human community. “‘It’s man devouring man, my dear’,” says Elter, quoting Mr. Todd’s interjection in Mrs. Lovett’s show-stopper A Little Priest.

“There’s something indelibly wrong right now, a society pushing back in human rights,” says Ryan. “The (new) industrial age has dehumanized people, and has turned us against each other.” Is authority inherently corrupt and self-justifying? “We’re seeing our own systems that protect us are turning against us. Even in Canada…. Something needs to change; voices need to be heard.”

“What happens if they’re not, if there’s no action? What drives us to the razor?”  

“It’s not a case of the good guy wins,” as Ryan says. “Anyhow, who is the good guy? Who are these people? There’s a Sweeney in all of us. There’s a Lovett in all of us.” 

PREVIEW

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Theatre: The Plain Jane Theatre Company

Written by: Stephen Sondheim, book by Hugh Wheeler based on the play by Christopher Bond

Directed by: Kate Ryan

Starring: Sheldon Elter, Kristi Hansen, Vance Avery, Josh Travnik, Erin Selin, Aran Wilson-McAnally, Jacqueline Hernandez, Mark Sinongco

Where: CO*LAB, 9641 102 A Ave.

Running: Nov. 11 to 20

Tickets: at the door or  tickettailor.com

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On the right track, baby: Vegas Live at the Mayfield, a review

Posted on November 6, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Larissa Poho, Nick Sheculski, Sam Jamieson, Melissa MacPherson, Devra Straker in Vegas Live, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Vegas. The time-honoured holiday fixer-upper for when you want to take a load off, shed your inhibitions and quite a few layers of your clothes, stay up way late, drink giddy drinks, get married, beam come-hither smiles at strangers, use your Westjet points.  

The fun of the big, lavish, flashy, full-sequined, full-body holiday revue that’s singing and dancing its Spandex pants off at the Mayfield is that Vegas Live has given the ‘old Vegas’ of the ‘50s the hook. 

The Rat Pack is nowhere to be seen. Elvis is apparently on research sabbatical. The only lounge lizard is inflatable and prehistoric (shhh, it’s a surprise). And whenever a vintage Vegas is invoked, Vegas Live updates — as in contemporary versions of The Temptations’ Get Ready or Smokey Robinson’s The Tracks of My Tears (Jahlen Barnes). Or else it’s in the key of playful mockery. In a brief appearance Wayne Newton (Brad Wiebe) keeps nodding off mid-song, and has to lie down onstage, a musical corpse with his own pillow. 

Compiled and written by the Mayfield’s team of mystery man Will Marks and Gerrad Everard, the show is a tribute to the Las Vegas of now —  an entertainment capital that’s a destination for some of the world’s hottest contemporary stars in rock, pop, country, soul, funk.… And its larger idea of having a wide cultural embrace does not go amiss in this place (we’re looking at you Alberta) and these parlous, marginalizing times.    

Vegas club owner Bobby (Nick Scheculski) enters at the start, in fishnets and full Frankenfurter mode, “just a sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania.” And he sets the tone with a worldly shrug: acceptance, welcome to all, come as you are, “embrace your inner monologue,” “send your gender on a bender.” The theme song, so to speak, reprised in Act II, is Lady Gaga’s “I’m on the right track baby, I was born this way,” and Pamela Gordon nails it.  

Bobby’s onstage companion and fellow narrator (Melissa MacPherson), sweetly dazed, libidinous, and no respecter of boundaries (including taste), has evidently embraced her inner stoner chick. You may tire of this chirpy character in the course of the evening and even perhaps fantasize about nailing a sequined tarp over her. She is, however, a veritable archive of old and mouldy nudge-nudge jokes in a new package.

Pamela Gordon (centre) in Vegas Live, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson.

Anyhow, an ensemble cast of 10 with major musical endowments (including taking a turn or two on banjo, trombone, trumpet, violin) throw themselves into a huge repertoire in every style. And they’re accompanied by an expert five-member band (musical director Van Wilmott). The sound, as always at the Mayfield, is impeccable. 

The visuals are striking. All of the above co-habit, in assorted permutations, a glitzy two-level set, one of the Mayfield’s biggest ever, designed by John Dinning. It speaks to the improbable, a Vegas specialty: a fantasy showroom framed by a glowing translucent neon proscenium that changes colours, translucent walls, gilt palm trees. And there’s an upper-level balcony stage surrounded by flashing lightbulbs (lighting design by Leigh Ann Vardy) across which Matt Schuurman’s ever-inventive projections dance, sometimes in abstract designs, sometimes in shadow play. 

And the songs (and Ivan Brozic’s costumes, all glitter and Spandex) keep coming.  

Kudos to choreographer (and, with Wilmott, co-director) Robin Calvert, whose inspirations are detailed, and amusing in every scene. Justin Timberlake’s Can’t Stop The Feeling probably has the show mantra wrapped up, “Ain’t nobody leaving’ soon so keep dancing….” Honourable mention to Garth Brooks (Brad Wiebe): “ain’t goin’ down ’til the sun comes up.” There’s even a barroom brawl as the Act I closer. This is a very busy, versatile cast.

Highlights, to pick a few, include Devra Straker digging into Cher’s If I Could Turn Back Time, Gordon having her way with Alan’s Morissette’s You Oughta Know, Sam Jamieson with Britney Spears’ Toxic, Sheculski with Hozier’s clever Take Me To Church, amusingly staged with a six-member robed choir. 

The most audacious choice, arguably, is Elton John’s The Circle of Life, from The Lion King though, to be fair, that musical has actually played Vegas in a shortened form. To me, setting Pink’s open letter Dear Mr. President (“how do you sleep while the rest of us cry?”) to projections of the current war in Ukraine is a misstep: it exhorts a Bush presidency long gone.

No one has ever accused the Mayfield of being stingy with music; this is a fulsome song list and like Vegas itself an evocation of the shiny spirit of showbiz. And there’s going to be a part 2 next year. What happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas. As Hozier tells us, “I’m a pagan of the good times.”

REVIEW

Vegas Live

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Created and compiled by: Van Wilmott and Gerrad Everard

Directed by: Van Wilmott and Robin Calvert

Starring: Jahlen Barnes, Trevor Coll (Gabriel Antonacci Jan. 10 to 22), Pamela Gordon, Amelia Hironaka, Sam Jamieson, Melissa MacPherson, Larissa Poho, Nick Checulski, Devra Straker, Brad Wiebe

Running: through Jan. 22

Tickets: 780-483-4051, mayfieldtheatre.ca 

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Face the dusk: off the couch everyone, and into the theatre this weekend

Posted on November 4, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Daniela Vlaskalic in Dora Maar: the wicked one, GAL Productions with Hit & Myth. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Our outdoor colour scheme has gone monochromatic; something weird has happened to the evening lighting. There is an obvious fix: face the gathering darkness, arise from the couch and go to the theatre.

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There’s been a heartening proliferation of new plays so far this month (with more to come). And three of them are ending their runs this weekend, so it’s the moment to show some hustle. 

•At Workshop West, a new Beth Graham and Daniela Vlaskalic play, Dora Maar: the wicked one, gets an exceptionally  charismatic performance by Vlaskalic as the French photographer — a brilliant innovator in her own right, who finds her wings melted by a relationship with the most famous artist in the world, Pablo Picasso. As Dora Vlaskalic single-handedly conjures the exuberant, glittering world of Paris in the ‘30s, on the brink of a cataclysmic darkening toward the end of the decade. And then, the artist who inspired and documented Picasso’s great anti-war painting Guernica found herself tumbling into obscurity. A riveting story, elegantly staged by Blake Brooker in a GAL/ Hit & Myth production. The 12thnight review is here, and an interview with the co-playwrights and director Brooker here. It runs through Sunday. Tickets: workshopwest.org.  

Davina Stewart in Squeamish, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

•At Northern Light Theatre, Squeamish, a creepy solo thriller, has its doubts about the much-vaunted quest for self-knowledge. It’s a bona fide 90-minute tour de force, starring Davina Stewart as a therapist sitting in the shadows tells the story of her own first-hand experience of the aftermath of a funeral. And it escalates — from unsettling to disturbing to horrifying. Aaron Mark’s play is an experiment in seeing what words, storytelling, can do to your equilibrium. 

Read the whole 12thnight review here (and an interview with Stewart, director/designer Trevor Schmidt, and stage manager Liz Allison-Jorde here). It runs through Saturday at the Studio Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barn. Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com.

Steven Greenfield, Andrea House, Elena Porter in The Wrong People Have Money, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

At Shadow Theatre, Reed McColm’s The Wrong People Have Money — the title, admit it, a phrase we all regularly use and sigh — spins a comedy from a university class assignment that gets co-opted by big money. The proposition: relocating Greenland a couple of thousand miles south in the Atlantic to a more hospitable tourist-friendly location. The fun is in the comic performances, led by Julien Arnold as the star professor, Andrea House and Steven Greenfield as his go-fers, Linda Grass as the mysterious and glamorous capitalist, and Elena Porter as a lawyer with ethical concerns that are ignored by everyone in the play. Read the full 12thnight review here, and an interview with the playwright here. It runs through Sunday at the Varscona. Tickets: shadowtheatre.org, 780-434-5564.

AND…

playwright Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman. Photo by Hannah Endicott-Douglas.

A new Canadian holiday musical starts previews Saturday at the Citadel, the theatre that commissioned it, in a Daryl Cloran production. Almost A Full Moon is by the notable playwright Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman, a triple-generation story set to the songs of Hawksley Workman’s 2001 Christmas album of the same name. 12thnight talked to the playwright here. It runs through Nov. 27. Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com.

At the Mayfield, Vegas Live! is up and shaking its sequins (through Jan 27), with a new holiday Will Marks/ Gerrard Everard gathering of hits from the pop, rock, soul, country repertoires. Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca, 780-483-4051.

The Thousand Faces Festival turns the big one-o with CanNatyam: Classical Dance, a showcase of five styles of Indian classical dance, tonight (Nov. 4) and Sunday at La Cité francophone. Tickets: TIX on the Square (tixonthesquare.ca). 

At Concordia University’s CUE Theatre, the run of Meg Braem’s Chrysothemis, a student production directed by Patricia Darbasie, ends on on Sunday. See history’s most famous dysfunctional family, the House of Atreus, from the perspective of Electra’s older sister Chrysothemis, the obscure sister who didn’t even get her own Greek play — till now. Tickets: TIX on the Square (tixonthesquare.ca) or at the door.  

 

 

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