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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So what happens next? Die-Nasty does A Christmas Carol part 2

Posted on December 10, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

So what happens to the Cratchits, the Fezziwigs, and Old Scratch himself after that fateful make-over Christmas, anyhow? Don’t tell me the question has never crossed your mind.

Tonight at the Varscona Theatre is your only chance to find out. A Christmas Carol (Part 2) will reveal all. And since it’s entirely improvised by the Die-Nasty cast with special guests, even the actors don’t know how things will turn out. 

Will Tiny Tim, who seems to have had a major growth spurt (he’s played by lanky Tom Edwards), go to college and become a drama major? Do the Fezziwigs retire to Vancouver Island and take up organic Christmas tree farming? Does Mr. Scrooge take up ghosting himself? The future is mysterious.

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The cast features Cody Porter as the old skinflint, with Rebecca Bissonnette as the invaluable Mrs. Dilber, whose recipe for gruel is second to none. Joleen Ballendine guests as the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. Bob and Emily Cratchit are played by Jason Hardwick and Kristen Throndson. Delia Barnett is “the last Fezziwig.” And Ellen Chorley is Charles Dickens (who has a lot to account for since he never got around to writing the 10-year sequel). 

The evening at the Varscona (Die-Nasty’s first annual Holiday Fundraiser as billed) includes a silent action that includes theatre tickets. And tickets are on a variable ticket pricing system, starting at $15. They’re available at varscontheatre.com.  

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Die Harsh, a new Christmas musical satire from the Hot Boy Summer team

Posted on December 9, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

No wonder Byron Martin and Simon Abbott write musical comedies together. 

It was a partnership meant to be. In a case of extreme showbiz (and seasonal) compatibility, their favourite Christmas movie of all time is … Die Hard. And so it comes to pass, in this the season of decking the halls … Die Harsh: A Christmas Musical, the latest from the Grindstone Theatre team of musical satirists that brought the world a couple of hits, Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer and thunderCATS.

Their motives weren’t exactly obscure. “Something fun for a Christmas show,” says Martin of the inspiration of a year ago, while they were working on Hot Boy Summer.  “Something that would connect with our audiences.”

Simon Abbott and Byron Martin, co-creators of Die Harsh the Christmas musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

As an iconic action movie Die Hard was ripe for the plundering and mockery by ‘cheap theatre’ and a pair of artists whose muse leans into parody and black comedy. “We’re telling it from Hans Gruber’s perspective,” explains Martin of the sexy German villain role that rendered Alan Rickman free of any mortgage problems forever. Malachite Theatre’s Benjamin Blyth, an actor/director with blue-chip classical theatre cred, especially in the Shakespeare repertoire, takes on the anti-hero role, and plays Alan Rickman playing Hans Gruber. “He really understands the stakes,” says Martin, and laughs.

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Any questions about the plot? Sound familiar? Alan Rickman cum Hans Gruber leads a gang of international terrorists who seize an office tower during a Christmas party, and take hostages. And oh yeah, there’s a cop. And everyone sings Have Yourself  A Merry Little Christmas (just kidding).

Edmonton audiences haven’t seen Blyth before now in musical roles. “I do karaoke every week with him,” Martin says. “People don’t realize: that’s how you really get cast in shows!” 

Blyth’s cast-mates include Evan Dowling and Sarah Dowling, a real-life married couple playing a married couple, “a reality TV move,” as Martin allows. Mark Sinongco (the singin’/dancin’ Tyler Shandro of Hot Boy Summer), and Paul-ford Manguelle (thunderCATS) are also in the show. 

Martin and Abbott, who are in Grindstone’s weekly improvised musical The 11 O’Clock Number, create the book and the lyrics together in their collaborations. Abbott, who’s an expert keyboardist, is the composer;  Martin directs. As in Hot Boy Summer, the  music of Die Harsh deliberately isn’t confined to one certain style, as Martin describes. Hans’s intro song? Another Year Another Heist. The song list extends from vintage musical theatre rock in the vein of Sweet Transvestite from Rocky Horror to go-for-the-gusto German polka in Hans’s flashback to his first heist. There are “real heart-job rock ballads,” says Martin. “And the FBI does a cane dance.”

Martin is still amazed by the way Hot Boy Summer escalated, gathering sold-out audiences in venues that ranged from 240 seats at the Faculté St.-Jean to 350 at the Orange Hub, in runs that extended again and again. With Die Harsh his idea is to start small since he considers the show to be still in development. There’s no set, “so everything’s on the actors…. We’re improvising and seeing what sticks.” Beverly Gan of The House of Sew is designing costumes.

“It’s really silly; it’ll be interesting to see how the audience reacts,” says Martin mildly. He’s at the stage of rehearsing a comedy when directors tend to ask themselves “is this funny at all?” Of one thing he’s certain, though, and he takes it seriously. “It’s a ton of fun!”

Die Harsh: a Christmas musical opens Dec. 20 at Grindstone’s tiny bistro/ theatre home base in Old Strathcona. “A small stage, and a cast of five,” with Abbott playing keyboards live. So far it seems to be on a Hot Boy-ish roll. The opening run through Dec. 30 sold out immediately, “even before we finished writing it! Yes, it’s nerve-wracking!” Martin has already added 16 shows, including eight in the first week in January. And for some of the shows Grindstone is partnering with three local restaurants, including Biera, Boxer, and Greenhouse for an urban dinner and theatre experience.

Hey, a Christmas musical with a bona fide anti-hero. “We’ll be back, and bigger next year,” says Martin. As the Grinch and Ebenezer know, that’s how holiday traditions start.

PREVIEW

Die Harsh: a Christmas Musical

Theatre: Grindstone

Co-created by: Byron Martin and Simon Abbott

Directed by: Byron Martin

Starring: Benjamin Blyth, Evan Dowling, Sarah Dowling, Mark Sinongco, Paul-Ford Manguelle

Where: Grindstone Theatre and Bistro, 10019 81 Ave.

Running: Dec. 20 to 23, 27 to 30, and Jan. 4 to 8

Tickets: grindstonetheatre.ca

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Overcoming Grinch-itude and getting festive: holiday shows on E-town stages this week

Posted on December 6, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Could this be you? “You’re a monster, Mister Grinch, Your heart’s an empty hole, Your brain is full of spiders, You have garlic in your soul….” 

If your holiday spirit has been eroded by spending time in a mall (and/or hearing that song from the Mariah Carey canon ever since your Halloween pumpkin went to the Great Composter) you need magic, and you need real music. And soon.

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Both are available this week, my friends, in a variety of permutations grand-size and small-ingenious. 

•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

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

•At the Westbury Thursday through Sunday, as part of its ongoing international touring, it’s Bear Grease, an Indigenous adaptation of the iconic musical/movie that’s just back from a run at Calgary’s Grand Theatre. The run at Fringe Theatre marks the return of the co-creation by the husband-and-wife team of MC RedCloud (Evandalism) and Crystle Lightning to its point of origin in Treaty 6 territory. 

Bear Grease was the 2021 Fringe’s hottest ticket. And it’s been playing to sold-houses on both sides of the border ever since. In the immortal words, of the original, rock n’ roll is here to stay: this is the decolonized version. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

•Magician Keith Brown, whose show sold out its run at last summer’s Fringe, hits the Backstage Theatre Friday for a one-night only variety show. And he has talented showbiz friends. Keith Brown & Friends includes musician Jay Gilday, Brian’s fellow magician Jay Flair, and physical comedian/clowns Dayna Hoffman and Max Hanic. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

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

•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. 

•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). 30

•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. 

•If you haven’t seen The Innocence of Trees yet, there’s still time (but barely, it runs through Saturday night) and you shouldn’t blow it.  Theatre Network’s beautiful production, which opens their first full season in the new Roxy, is a fantasia, and a meditation, on art and artists. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca. See the 12thnight preview, an interview with playwright Eugene Stickland, here. And the 12thnight review here.

And next week, stay tuned, there’s more: Whizgiggling Productions brings back The Best Little Newfoundland Christmas Pageant … Ever! for its 13th seasonal outing Dec. 16 to 18 at the Backstage Theatre. Tickets: TIX on the Square (tixonthesquare.ca). And the sketch comedy trio Girl Brain is at Theatre Network’s Roxy Dec. 16 to 18. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year: A Christmas Carol at the Citadel, a review

Posted on December 2, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

John Ullyatt and Sheldon Elter in A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The ‘hap-happiest season of all,’ as the familiar song has it, can officially begin. A Christmas Carol is back onstage at the Citadel for the 23rd year.

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Daryl Cloran’s production is thrillingly big, bigger than last year’s incarnation (with a cast of nearly three dozen, including 15 kids), lavishly costumed, full of music (the live band is onstage). And when you hear John Ullyatt as Ebenezer Scrooge — making his Scroogian debut — tentatively say “joy,” like a man exercising extreme caution tasting an unfamiliar fruit in case he has to spit it out, you’ll know something that’s at the heart of Dickens’ indelible ghost story of 1843. Life’s damages take their toll; change is hard; the journey towards human interconnectedness isn’t the autobahn. 

As you’ll see again in this the deluxe fourth annual iteration of David van Belle’s cleverly idiomatic, quick-on-the-uptake post-World War II adaptation, its setting adjusts to the  contours of our moment in history. It’s Christmas Eve in 1949 a century and a continent away from the original with Mr. Scrooge as the flinty and furious boss of Marley’s department store. And like the very familiar secular holiday songbook it unlocks, it’s imbued with nostalgia for an age that’s gone (and possibly never was), “tales of the glories of Christmases long long ago,” as that catchy song has it. 

In 2020, the show song that struck us to the quick in pandemical times was the wistful Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas (“if the fates allow…”). In last year’s return to live, I’ll Be Home For Christmas took on new colours, along with the notion of home. This year? The sheer bustling togetherness of The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (“There’ll be much mistletoeing/ And hearts will be glowing/ When loved ones are near ….”).  On opening night, I found the sound mix in early scenes a little band-heavy, a temporary excess of enthusiasm perhaps. But the music is used more skilfully, and judicially, than in the production’s earlier incarnations.

True, this adaptation doesn’t reach the debtor’s prison/workhouse/annihilation by starvation stakes of the Victorian original. But the entrenched inequities of the 20th century, and our own, are traumatic. And the sense of humanity struggling to find some sort of footing in the sharp crevices of the world is recognizable to us now. 

The Cratchits in A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The Cratchits are a single-parent family up against it. Post-war there’s no Bob Cratchit. Mrs. Cratchit (Alison MacDonald) is the  beleaguered store manager in Scrooge’s tyrannical grip at Marley’s. “Cratchit!” barks Scrooge, who allows that she might have a first name but doesn’t know it.  Christmas Day off? Don’t be silly. Health benefits? Forget it. Tiny Tim (the adorably grave 10-year-old Elias Martin, who knows something first-hand about living with disability) is a fragile figure, on a slippery slope to oblivion.   

One image that struck me with new force this year was the two scary children introduced by the Ghost of Christmas Present as a final warning: Want and Ignorance. In van Belle’s conception, they’re not the offspring of poverty; they’re the insatiable, vicious products of affluence — the wanting more and more, ignorance armed with a gun. It’s been a year for that. 

The central inspiration of Cloran’s stagecraft, and Cory Sincennes’ handsome design (lighted beautifully by Leigh Ann Vardy), is the revolving department store door at Marley’s. It sends characters onto the Maclab’s thrust stage and sets them in motion, into the world of post-war retail over which Mr. Scrooge presides with brute force. Since he lives over the shop, physically and metaphorically, it’s his HQ. And it’s the starting point of the ghostly intervention that will send him on a tour of his past that is a journey of last-minute redemption from solitary damnation. 

John Ullyatt as Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Ullyatt, a wonderful actor, digs into the role of Mr. Scrooge with an energetic fury that goes beyond exasperation into the realm where anger is the obverse side of pain. The musical exhortation to “be of good cheer,” a mainstay of retail practice and seasonal orthodoxy, ups the ante, but the ante was already high. “Scram! Get outta here!” he shouts at an a cappella choir, all dressed up from Victorian Christmas Carols past (like the Citadel’s hit Tom Wood adaptation of 19 seasons standing) past. “Dressed up like it’s Old-Time-y London… you look ridiculous.” 

“Wrap it up!” he hollers at the in-store Santa, in a dubious retail marketing decision based on his observation that the customers waiting in line aren’t actually shelling out for something. “Fire her!” Mr. Scrooge tells Cratchit vis-à-vis a new employee who has arranged a display that doesn’t front-rack the colour red, as required by company policy  (red increases sales by 5.4 per cent). 

“Why should I subsidize the lazy?” he snaps at two businessmen collecting Christmas money for the poor. “You don’t work you don’t eat.” 

In ways that are sometimes difficult to define, the performance has a different tone and energy from that of Ted Dykstra, who originated the role in the production’s 2019 premiere and occupied it twice more. For one thing, acid-flavoured irony isn’t its keynote. Ullyatt’s performance makes of Scrooge’s tour of his past a veritable archaeological expedition to a trapped self, through layer after layer of inflammable dust and protective granite, uncovering “consequences” (his go-to expression) as it goes. 

John Ullyatt and Lilla Solymos in A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The lyrical nostalgia of White Christmas, the signature song of The Ghost of Christmas Past (hauntingly played by Lilla Solymos), is anathema to him. “Does your mother know you play with candles?” he snaps at the ghost, who wears them on her shoulders. Even his astonishment has an ashen-lipped stricken look to it when the Ghost takes him back to the abuses inflicted on his impoverished boyhood self.

Christina Nguyen (centre) in A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

The Fezziwigs’ Christmas dance party, which returns Scrooge to his Jazz Age self, is again a highlight (choreographed by Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks). Julien Arnold and Ruth Alexander as the host and hostess  pretty much define the outgoing high spirits of Christmas generosity. Even thinking about Mr. Fezziwig’s red pompadour hairdo makes me smile. And Sincennes’ costumes seem even more gorgeous, and detailed than we saw in 2021. 

It’s an irresistibly rambunctious highlight scene. And Ullyatt’s watchful Scrooge, taken aback as he is, manages a rusty semi-smile that vanishes as soon as it appears. The excellent Braydon Dowler-Coltman returns to the role of Scrooge’s younger self, Ben to his friends. He’s eager to present as ambitious and positive to Belle (Daniela Fernandez) and is nearly, but not quite, able to conceal an undercurrent of obsession about success, and money.   

The ebullient Ghost of Christmas Present, a born performer (“I don’t teach baby, it’s all show and tell”), is played with great showbiz zest and good nature by Sheldon Elter, who replaces Ullyatt this year in that role (and in an extremely festive green satin suit with red trim). 

The script has acquired a tiny resonant scene that’s a counterpart to the Act I moment when Scrooge rebuffs a lost immigrant family clutching a map and needing directions. “Learn. To. Speak. English,” he tells them. In Act II The Ghost of Christmas Present speaks to a couple of kids in their own native language. “I’m good at reminding people of home,” he says to an incredulous Scrooge, who seems equally perplexed by the ghost’s language skills and his kindness.

Is it my imagination that the script seems to have been tweaked in other ways, too, that particularly suit Ullyatt’s timing and cadence? In any case, on Scrooge’s ghost-led tours, his performance beautifully calibrates the incremental consequences of Scrooge’s choices en route to the damning knowledge of the misery he’s caused. “I don’t know what to do…. I think it’s too late.”  

And his discovery of a new self that’s been there along, buried inside the layered fortress of the old Scrooge, gives a particular bounce to the Christmas morning scenes. The possibilities of joy in generosity and human connection are giddy: you’ll see what full-body delight looks like. Scrooge, amazed by himself,  is testing his new limbs by giving gifts. “I’ll change; I am changing,” he declares. And that matched pair of verb tenses is telling. 

The little scene in which Uncle Scrooge arrives at the home of his ever-hopeful nephew Fred (Oscar Derkx) and his wife (Patricia Cerra) is wonderfully negotiated by the actors. “I didn’t know how to be part of a family,” says Scrooge finally, humbly, throwing himself on their forgiveness. 

And family, in both the domestic and the worldly sense of the larger human network, is what it’s all about. The packed opening night house understood that perfectly as they roared to their feet. 

REVIEW

A Christmas Carol

Theatre: Citadel

Written by: David van Belle, adapted from the Charles Dickens novella

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: John Ullyatt, Julien Arnold, Ruth Alexander, Sheldon Elter, Daniela Fernandez, Alison MacDonald, Elias Martin, Oscar Derkx, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Graham Mothersill, Priya Narine, Patricia Cerra, Lilla Solymos, and ensemble

Running: through Dec. 23

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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