Rising Sun Theatre throws a magic/music bash

Posted on September 22, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

magician Ron Pearson, photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Magic and music: some of this theatre town’s top-drawer talent in both are featured in Rising Sun Theatre’s benefit bash at the Gateway Theatre Oct. 1.

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Ron Pearson, a virtuoso magician/illusionist with a theatrical bent (Minerva: Queen of the Handcuffs), is on the playbill. So is singer-songwriter/actor/playwright Dana Wylie, whose clever solo memoir Makings of a Voice was the headliner at the 2021 SkirtsAfire Festival.

Dreamer’s Cantata, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo supplied.

And the cast of Dreamer’s Cantata, the new Plain Jane Theatre revue that premiered at the Fringe this past summer — Larissa Poho, Bella King, Alanna McPherson, Steven Greenfield — will present songs from that show, dedicated to the witty challenges served up by contemporary musical theatre creators who are all women or gender-non-conforming.

singer-songwriter Dana Wylie. Photo suppied

Rising Sun, co-founded in 2004 by Gerry Potter, is a not-for-profit company with a distinguished history of providing opportunities for cognitively disabled people to practise the art of theatre.

Potter, the founding father of Workshop West Theatre, explains that the all-ages troupe collaborates in the creation and performance of original work. “Ideas, scenes, characters” are developed collectively through improv and discussion. And the ensemble, which numbers a dozen or more, is led by an assortment of Edmonton’s theatre professionals — directors, choreographers, designers, storytellers, composers.

“It’s fun work,” says Potter, who started by directing the Rising Sun shows and is now in the double-role of producer and board member. “There’s a lot of undiscovered talent among people labelled as intellectually disabled…. Very often they’re strong on imagination and emotional intelligence; they sense what’s going on” even when words aren’t their go-to mode of expression. “The professionals learn as much as the (casts).”

Some of Rising Sun’s usual granting sources, at both the city and provincial level, have alas disappeared; hence the need for a benefit. But the evening (which includes snacks and silent auction items) places a high priority on … fun.

Further information about the Oct. 1 event: risingsuntheatre.ca. Tickets: eventbrite.ca

 

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Mad as hell: Network launches the Citadel season. A preview

Posted on September 18, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Jim Mezon as Howard Beale in Network, Citadel/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The word “prescient” has been floating over the Citadel for weeks now, threading through rehearsals for the play getting its Canadian premiere Thursday on the Shoctor stage. 

It’s attached to a (very) dark comedy satire about our complicated, toxic relationship with the media — and the media’s complicated, toxic relationship with news, truth, and showbiz.

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Network, the Citadel 2022-2023 season opener directed by Daryl Cloran, started life as a movie  (with an Oscar-winning screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky) that is, amazingly, nearly half a century old. Fully 45 years later, Network was turned into a West End and Broadway stage hit starring Bryan Cranston as an inflammable TV anchor, in a 2017 stage adaptation by the Brit playwright Lee Hall and directed by the Belgian avant-gardiste Ivo van Hove. 

And now, after a couple of years of COVID-ian delays, Network’s first post-Broadway production, a high-tech 16-actor collaboration between the Citadel and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, is close at hand.

Prescient: there’s that word. “It’s so prescient in so many ways!” declares Jim Mezon, the veteran Shaw Festival star actor/director who inherits the role of UBS network anchor Howard Beale, owner of the echoing cry “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this any more.”

“All you have to do is open the paper (or, more probably, look at your assorted screens) and there’s another news story that has a direct relationship with this play,” says Mezon who was “a young actor in Winnipeg when he saw Network for the first time. “It had a huge impact on me, in so many ways. From that initial shock of seeing what that medium could and might possibly do….” 

“Fifty years ago, and a lot of it has come true. What does that say about us as a species that we’ve allowed that to happen?” He muses, “I don’t think we’d thought of it in those terms till Chayefsky showed up and wrote it….” It’s like (Chayefsky’s) Hospital, a dark and stinging satire of medical practice, that way, Mezon thinks. “These institutions are minefields.” 

Nadien Chu, Network, Citadel Theatre/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

“For something written in the ‘70s, before cellphones and social media, it really is amazingly prescient,” says Cloran. “So accurate in depicting our very complicated relationship with the media….” Fifty years of technological complication in defining and delivering “news” have ensued, and the internet has pretty much squelched television in that regard, but “the story of Network has only become more relevant, more timely.” 

“The show is very specifically set in the 1970s; all references to current events are ‘70s. But you don’t have to work very hard to find contemporary equivalents, for sure,” notwithstanding the proliferation (and splintering) of media platforms. As if to illustrate his point, rehearsals started on the very day a TV anchor controversy erupted; ITV and the sacking of Lisa LaFlamme. As Cloran points out, public reliance on big networks may have diminished now “and we engage with the screen in multiple ways … but there are just more screens; the corporate manoeuvring is exactly the same.” 

Network chronicles the fortunes of veteran TV news anchor Howard Beale at the hands of corporate executives; he’s the guinea pig for the lurking question of just how far media will go for ratings, likes, and clicks. When ratings tank, Howard Beale gets the boot. And when he has a spectacular nervous breakdown on live TV and threatens to commit suicide on television in front of millions, ratings soar.

As Mezon reflects, where is the line between news and entertainment, between “reporting” the news and creating it?  Network is all about that. From the corporate point of view, “how can we use a situation to our advantage and get better ratings? — at the expense of the truth, at the expense of a person’s mental well-being. Howard Beale is clearly unbalanced, a man who’s having severe mental problems. And he’s exploited because they’re going to increase ratings….” 

Braydon Dowler-Coltman in Network. Photo by Nanc Price

“So much of Howard Beale’s initial rants is about the individual standing up to the corporation,” as Cloran says. “People unthinkingly ‘consuming’ the media: they think what the media tells them to think; they eat what the media tells them to eat … not dissimilar now.” 

How do you sustain a character who’s on fire with rage? Mezon, who’s played some of the biggest roles in the canon at Shaw and across the country, says “the anger Howard has inside him is recognizable to me, from other parts I’ve played” — Captain Shotover in Shaw’s Heartbreak House, Undershaft in Major Barbara, Peer Gynt among them (“the biggest mountain I’ve ever climbed”). 

“It’s easy for me to enter into that anger, to understand where it’s coming from…. Howard Beale isn’t calling for revolution; he’s calling for people to acknowledge they’re fed up. They need to say ‘I’ve had enough’ instead of just accepting another blow. They need to get mad. Once you’re mad enough, we’ll figure out what to do.” The energy output required is high, true, Mezon says. “But the adrenalin you get from it is really satisfying!”

 As Cloran said in announcing the Citadel season, this first post-Broadway incarnation of Network was deliberately pitched to the rights-holders as reimagining the big-budget techno spectacle to be do-able for regional theatres across the continent. It’s a big, complicated production, though, full of screens, cameras, live footage. “I’m directing a stage play and a movie at the same time,” says Cloran. He’s experienced in film and video editing for theatre, “but this is the most techno-filled production I’ve directed.” 

Network, Citadel Theatre/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

He explains that there are three cameras, and video operators onstage the whole time (“we’ve had them all through rehearsal”). “In staging a scene there are so many choices. When do we want the audience to look at the stage? When do we want the audience to look at the screen? When do we want them to be overwhelmed by images, and when do we want the intimacy of people talking to each other onstage?” Some scenes are staged with the actors’ backs to the audience; we see their faces, in close up, on screens.

That variation in distance and scale of performance, for theatrical and film sequences, makes for a demanding acting challenge, as Cloran says. “We often have those conversations: ‘who am I acting to? what’s my primary focus here, the 700 people out there, or the camera?’” One thing’s for sure, he says. “We’re aware of the audience. They’ll definitely feel they are present at a live event, and we know they’re there.”  

“I think people are going to be surprised by what they see…. As people have popped in to rehearsal, everyone’s been pretty thrilled. It’s a great, complicated, interesting story, but also the way we tell it is pretty fantastic.” 

PREVIEW

Network

Theatre: Citadel and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre

Written by: Lee Hall, adapted from the 1976 movie with screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Jim Mezon

Running: Thursday through Oct. 9

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com 

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Workshop West announces a new season devoted to Canadian plays and their creators

Posted on September 16, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Workshop West 2022-2023 season. Photo by db photographics.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Workshop West Playwrights Theatre bookends its upcoming 44th “Persistence of Vision” season, announced Thursday, in a way that has always characterized a theatre company devoted to the development and showcasing of new Canadian plays and their writers.  

The season, the first in their new home The Gateway in Strathcona (formerly Theatre Network’s Roxy on Gateway), opens Oct. 27 to Nov. 6 with a second outing of Dora Maar: the wicked one, by Beth Graham and Daniela Vlaskalic. “A play about love, obsession and surrealism” as billed, it chronicles the tumultuous relationship between two artists. One is the brilliant photographer of the title through whose lens the story is told. The other is the older groundbreaking artist who captured her on canvas in many of his paintings, Pablo Picasso.

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Directed by Blake Brooker of Calgary’s One Yellow Rabbit, the production, a collaboration between GAL (Vlaskalic and Graham’s own company) and Calgary’s Hit & Myth, premiered this past spring at the delayed edition of the High Performance Rodeo. As Inglis points out, “a second production is a very important thing in working to create a Canadian theatre canon.” 

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

The solo piece, by the playwriting pair who created the hit The Drowning Girls and Mules, stars Vlaskalic as Picasso’s muse, whose own artistic fortunes were muted in the relationship with the older more famous artist. It reunites, on home soil so to speak, the co-playwrights now separated by Canadian geography (Graham in Edmonton, Vlaskalic in Toronto) who went to theatre school as actors at the U of A. 

Not only is the play, set in Paris in 1935, at the intersection of two art forms, it resonates in a new way now, when “women’s autonomy to choose their own path through life” has been threatened, witness the overthrow of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. As directed by Brooker, “it’s a lovely, elegant, well-produced” show, Inglis says.  

The finale of the season is the world premiere of a new play by Edmonton up-and-comer Liam Salmon whose queer rom-com Fags in Space delighted audiences this past summer.  Subscribe or Like (May 24 to June 11), which breathed its first public air at Workshop West’s Springboards in March, is at its title suggests an exploration of what the playwright has called “the digital frontier,” where selves are re-invented in the seductive kind of “performance” invited by social media.  

Subscribe or Like, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by db photography

We meet a couple of disaffected millennial underachievers whose stab at fortune and fame, as they see it, is to launch their own online video channel. Heather Inglis directs the Workshop West production, which stars Gabby Bernard and Geoffrey Simon Brown. “The third character is the internet,” says Inglis of the play, inspired by a real-life 2018 example south of the border, of a prank video channel, “a sort of freak show of grotesque challenges.” 

“There’s a large multi-media component to the production,” says Inglis of the contribution of star videographer and digital designer Ian Jackson to “our largest enterprise of the season.” 

Unsung: Tales From The Front Line, Jan. 25 to Feb. 12,  is a premiere too. Created by Inglis and co-curated with Darrin Hagen in a collaboration with Ground Zero Productions, it is drawn from interviews with real-live Edmonton health care workers, the beleaguered (and much-abused) brigade who have saved our bacon over and over in the last two and a half years.

Inglis calls it “an immersive performance installation,” a creative documentation of real real-life stories, to be experienced by audiences on the move as “living portraits.” And in this Unsung resembles Viscosity, a 2015 Theatre Yes initiative by Inglis (then the artistic director of that indie collective) which captured real-life stories of oil patch workers.  

Says Inglis of Unsung, “they’re local hero stories (designed to) honour some of the amazing things real health care workers accomplished” on our behalf under circumstances that were, to understate the case, a challenge — medically, psychologically, politically. 

The audience, she explains, will “experience an experimental use of space that’s been at the centre of my artistic practice at Theatre Yes.” The production features seven actors, telling stories that represent “a variety of voices and demographics.” It’s for Hagen (Metronome), this season’s dramaturge-in-residence and  a seasoned researcher himself in addition to his playwriting archive, to edit the interviews into monologue form.    

The Shoe Project, SkirtsAfire Festival and Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by db photographics.

The season includes a second Edmonton iteration of The Shoe Project, a national initiative to give voices to Canadian immigrant and refugee women. Playwright Conni Massing mentors 12 women as they write the stories of their arrival in Canada and their adaptation to a new way of life — all focussed through the shoes they wore. This year’s edition, a partnership with the SkirtsAfire Festival, is presented live to audiences March 11 and 12.

Workshop West’s signature Springboards New Play Festival, which returned to action last season in March after a decade to inaugurate the company’s new home, happens March 21 to 26. And, as central to WWPT’s identity and mandate (“it connects audiences directly to that,” says Inglis), it features readings of new plays at every stage of development, along with workshops, talk-backs, cabarets. 

The season title is multi-dimensional, as Inglis explains. “Persistence” has been essential to the survival of live theatre in the pandemic world. And as for vision, the lineup is a nod, says Inglis, to “what it means to refract ourselves — in painting, videography, social media, photography…” and beyond.

 

   

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A cultural inheritance, a quest, and a haunting: Barvinok launches a tour here

Posted on September 16, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Blood of Our Soil, Pyretic Productions. Photo by Dahlia Katz.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“The universal desire, the need, desire, to understand who you are, where you came from….”

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That’s what drew Ukrainian-Canadian playwright Lianna Makuch across the ocean to her ancestral homeland. And that quest was her creative inspiration, too, as a theatre artist — witness the play that returns to Edmonton Thursday in its latest iteration to launch Pyretic Productions’ Alberta tour. “It reflects my own journey,” says Makuch of Barvinok, Ukrainian for periwinkle, a beautiful, resourceful, stubbornly indestructible flower. “I had never really thought my Ukrainian identity could shape my artistic career. Creating this story allowed me to understand….” 

To be Ukrainian-Canadian is to be haunted by a war-ravaged past, centuries of bloodshed, as Makuch mused over pre-rehearsal coffee in the sunshine couple of weeks ago. Barvinok has its roots in a secret — carried across two continents, and kept for a long time — and a life-changing discovery. 

In 2013, the year before the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, Makuch, a Ukrainian speaker who grew up immersed in the culture, came across a hand-written book in her dad’s basement. It was a 1944 diary in which her paternal baba recorded a nightmare flight, on foot, from her war-torn homeland. There was a reverberating eloquence to the writing of this smart, artistic, but uneducated woman. “What spoke to me especially,” says Makuch, “was this, ‘how can our land not be fertile when so much blood, both Ukrainian and foreign, has seeped into it?…. It shows that our enemies must love our land more than we do, for they fight for it ceaselessly.” 

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

A playwright, and a play (then called Blood of Our Soil) was born in that discovery. Creating new work wasn’t a radical departure, of course, not for a graduate actor in Edmonton. “I’d done some Fringe stuff, as you do …” smiles Makuch, who has a  BFA from the U of A. She was an “apprentice performer” on Mump and Smoot’s Cracked tour, “a really valuable experience as a theatre creator.” 

But the diary was a powerful confirmation, and motivator. Makuch and her Pyretic cohorts director Patrick Lundeen and dramaturge (and fellow playwright) Matt MacKenzie went on location in Ukraine in 2017, to research. 

They found the house of Makuch’s grandmother, still surrounded by periwinkles, “the flower that can withstand anything,” as Makuch says. They visited her grandfather’s village, and the grave of her maternal grandmother, who’d been abducted by Germans. They drove over country back roads with potholes big enough to swallow a car, and they arrived within 5 km of the front line of the war in eastern Ukraine — another brutal Russian invasion in a war that has never really ended. 

Thanks to a 2016 Latitude 53 exhibition of portraits of wounded Ukrainians, Makuch had found a “fixer”/contact who connected Pyretic to a network of veterans. And they met up in person on that trip. Lundeen whose purchase on the Ukrainian language amounted to Merry Christmas, went to board games nights with actors and veterans. “A lot of people thought we were journalists at first and were, understandably, wary,” says Makuch. “When they found out we were theatre artists, the reaction was very very different….” 

The first part of Makuch’s play in 2018 was “verbatim theatre,” she says. “In the second part, more episodic, we met characters…. And there was definitely more opportunity for development.” So the next year, the collaborators went back to Ukraine to workshop the play at the Wild Theatre in Kyiv, with Ukrainian actors and an audience mostly of diplomats, veterans and activists. “People were so appreciative, so grateful to not be forgotten,” Makuch says of the role of the Ukrainian diaspora. The take-away was that “people didn’t want to be seen as victims.” 

The Edmonton premiere in the fall of 2018 took that into account. And Barvinok, as it was re-named in honour of Ukrainian resilience, played Tarragon’s Extra Space in Toronto after that. “Every time the play has been done it’s been its own iteration,” she says of a play she’s re-written and Lundeen have since re-staged for the Westbury Theatre and the tour. “The story has evolved; the heart of it is the same.”

The first half of Barvinok we meet Hania, like Makuch (who plays her) a Ukrainian-Canadian trying to understand her cultural inheritance. “A single speaker,” says Makuch of the first act, “with old world folkloric music assembled by Larissa Poho,” and played by the six-member chorus on traditional Ukrainian instruments like the bandora and tsambaly, in addition to accordion, guitar, and violin. In Act II, the ghostly chorus become individual characters. 

The ending has inevitably changed, in new context if not in text. World events, and a horrifying escalation of brutality have seen to that. Climactic lines of 2017 are still in the play. “We are like passengers sitting on our suitcases waiting for the train to come … and the rest of the world, Europe, just watches. They send their best, though.” Makuch sighs. “But they resonate even more in our new world.” 

“I’m not a soldier. Creating theatre is what I do, and I’m using what I do to tell a human story.. The news has its place. But with theatre you have the opportunity to tell a human story, to (evoke) emotional  empathy.” And a film version is in the works, thanks to funding by the Shevchenko Foundation. 

All performances of Barvinok at the Westbury are pay-what-you-will, on a tiered ticketing system.… “I don’t want to cost to prevent anyone from attending,” says Makuch. “And there are many Ukrainian newcomers to the city….” A portion of ticket sales will be donated to Ukraine support.

PREVIEW

Barvinok

Theatre: Pyretic Productions in association with Punctuate! Theatre

Written by: Lianna Makuch

Directed by: Patrick Lundeen

Starring: Lianna Makuch, Gabriel Richardson, Maxwell Lebeuf, Kristen Padayas, Alexandra Dawkins, Tanya Pacholok

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

Running: through Sept. 25 

Tickets: pyreticproductions.ca   

 

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Facing the fall-out: A Doll’s House Part 2 launches the season at the Varscona. A review

Posted on September 9, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The stage is dominated by a door, a giant door. The room has the outlines of wainscoting and six sealed windows — all bleached out, painted over, uninhabited.

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There’s no human clutter: a couple of chairs, an end table, the only decor a box of Kleenex, a wry touch. So many things in life end in tears. This play isn’t one of them.

A Doll’s House Part 2 will, however, stick with you; it’ll open doors you won’t easily be able to close. Just when you think you know what you think, there’s more for you to think about. Which is another way of saying that the Wild Side production that launches the Edmonton season is an absorbing, funny, surprising evening in the theatre. And the four expert actors in the ensemble production directed and designed by Jim Guedo make a meal of it — creating characters who are alert, thinking on their feet, listening, asserting, countering, defending their points of view, airing their grievances.  

So, back to the door. The insistent knock at that door in the opening scene of Lucas Hnath’s play, the young American playwright’s Broadway debut in 2017, reverberates backward in time, 150 years or so, to the equally insistent slam of that door in the closing moment of Ibsen’s 1879 portrait of a suffocating marriage in A Doll’s House. One of the repertoire’s most intriguing, lingering questions, what happened next?, is about to be answered, and in modern language.

Nora (Kristi Hansen), who walked out the door 15 years before, leaving marriage, husband, and children behind, wants back in. What’s she been doing? Why is she back? 

And as Hansen stands on the threshold, you see that Nora isn’t crawling back. Far from it. She’s looking supremely unapologetic and confident, self-assured enough to be playful with the old family retainer Anne Marie (Maralyn Ryan). “You want to know what I’ve been up to, but I want to know what you thought I was doing — what did you imagine?” she cajoles. “Come on — keep guessing — this is fun.” She speaks for the audience in that. 

The language of the play is contemporary, and so is the lexicon of Hansen’s body language — the way she tilts her head and leans in to a conversation, the hand gestures, the grimaces and skeptical eye-rolls. 

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

“I feel like I’m being set up,” says the stalwart Anne Marie. In Ryan’s compelling and funny performance she’s shrewd and far from bowled over by the success story and feminist pep talk she hears from the Nora who’s been knocking at the door and now wants something. Soon Anne Marie will be saying “fuck you, Nora, fuck you,” and you’ll know you’re not in Victorian era Norway any more even if the costumes say otherwise.    

Anyhow, I don’t want to tell you too much; there’s fun in this fast and furious “sequel” in your discoveries, along with the characters, scene by scene. But you learn pretty quickly that Nora has become a very successful writer — of radical women’s novels that argue against marriage. And she’s back to get husband Torvald’s help in the legal predicament in which she’s found herself blackmailed.  

In the terms of modern feminism — an era that Ibsen’s play has often been credited with kickstarting — Nora’s arguments about inequality in marriage and divorce, and individual fulfilment, have enduring cred, of course. And the world hasn’t exactly remade itself since Nora walked out. But in A Doll’s House Part 2 she’s confronted by the human consequences of that abrupt exit of 15 years before, and she won’t have an easy time of it with the people she left behind. 

Kristi Hansen and Ian Leung, A Doll’s House Part 2. Photo by Jim Guedo.

Heath’s play gives Torvald (Ian Leung) the chance to say everything he didn’t get a chance to say when Nora up and walked, slamming the door behind her. Leung is, like his cast-mates, a terrific actor. And in his empathetic performance Torvald is surprisingly likeable, and his point of view has real and unexpected weight. 

Nora’s grown-up daughter Emmy (Chariz Faulmino), who’s meeting her mother in effect for the first time, is a surprise, too. As Faulmino’s bright, sharp performance makes crystal clear, she’s her mother’s daughter, smart, alert, with a smile that never dims and a fine-tuned bullshit detector. But her goals are completely the opposite of Nora’s. And Nora, who tries wheedling as a manipulation technique, is more than a little taken aback when Emmy calls her on it. “I actually think in a lot of ways things turned out better because you weren’t around.” 

Anne Marie’s argument about class hierarchy and the limited options she had when she abandoned her own offspring to raise the Helmer kids, is a zinger too, not easy to counter.

In the push-pull of debate in Guedo’s fine-tuned production, the opponents are worthy, and the consequences of choosing your own individual needs not dismissible. “It’s really hard to hear your own voice,” says Nora near the end of the play. Especially, as she acknowledges, if there are other people in your world. “The world didn’t change as much as I thought it would.” A Doll’s House Part 2 is about that. 

REVIEW

A Doll’s House Part 2

Theatre: Wild Side Productions

Written by: Lucas Hnath

Directed and designed by: Jim Guedo

Starring: Kristi Hansen, Ian Leung, Chariz Faulmino, Maralyn Ryan

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Sept. 18

Tickets: varsconatheatre.com

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Knock knock who’s there? Nora’s back, A Doll’s House Part 2

Posted on September 6, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Kristi Hansen and Ian Leung, A Doll’s House Part 2. Photo by Jim Guedo.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“And it’s crucial there be a door. A very prominent door to the outside….” playwright stage directions, A Doll’s House Part 2 by Lucas Hnath

It’s the door that Nora Helmer slammed as she walks out on her husband, her children, and her stifling marriage at the end of Henrik Ibsen’s radical 1879 masterwork A Doll’s House: “the door slam heard around the world.” There’s an insistent knock at that door 15 years later in the opening moment of A Doll’s House Part 2. Yup, Nora is back.

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In Hnath’s smart, funny, suspenseful 2017 play, she’s back to face the people she abandoned — and the questions that have been hovering in the air for a century and a half. How did that door slam work out? What’s Nora been doing? The Jim Guedo production that opens Thursday at the Varscona gives us the chance to find out — and in contemporary language. 

The last we heard from Wild Side Productions was the sound of a door closing too, — a scant week into the run of Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children, shut down abruptly, along with all live theatre, on the night of March 12, 2020. They’re back (for the first time ever at the Varscona), after a couple of slotted returns, including one last spring, foiled by the pandemic. “The best-laid plans got bumped and bumped, for everyone,” sighs Guedo, the head of theatre at MacEwan University. “Licensing firms have been generous about extending the rights,” but that grace period is coming to an end. The moment is now. 

“I love the audacity of it!” Guedo says of Hnath’s hit Broadway debut that reunites him  with Kristi Hansen, the veteran actor he’s directed in seven productions in the last two decades (since a student production of The Recruiting Officer at the U of A). “The audacity to re-visit people’s assumptions about the dark brooding Norwegian … in contemporary language.”

“It’s a displaced play,” says Guedo, who compares it, in that aspect, to Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good (a contemporary play about convicts putting on a play in an Australian penal colony in the 1780s). “It (takes) a play in another period to talk about that’s happening now. What’s changed and what hasn’t.” 

And look around, as he points out, it’s not like the patriarchy has gotten the hook and left town. “140 years later, Roe v Wade, the conservatorship of Britney Spears… not much has changed.” Hansen echoes the thought. “The state of marriage, divorce … how different is it, really?” 

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

Playwright Hnath doesn’t just give the floor to Nora (Hansen). The people she walked out on — her husband Torvald (Ian Leung), her now grown-up daughter Emmy (Chariz Faulmino), the family retainer Anne Marie (Maralyn Ryan) — get their say, too, about the consequences of that door slamming.  

And they’re not pushovers. After all, as Hansen points out along with Guedo, they’ve had 15 years distance to summon their arguments about freedom and responsibility. “In a way, the play is about that,” says Guedo. “There is a cost to what happens,” says Hansen. “Nora comes face to face with that. The pain isn’t theoretical.” 

“Everyone gets their point of view and has their side heard” — the husband who didn’t get a chance to work on saving the marriage, the kid abandoned as a baby who grew up and meets her mother for the first time, the servant who takes on the responsibility of child-raising.   

In one of his first interviews, Hnath, who was originally en route to becoming a lawyer, revealed that in one year he read plays by Caryl Churchill, Sam Shepard and Tom Stoppard, the Greeks. And that stopped him in his track: he decided to go into theatre instead. “When I read that, I knew he was a playwright for me!” says Guedo. “There’s a bit of Shaw there, too,” he says of discussions of marriage in A Doll’s House Part 2. “Shavian, but with American red meat in it. Which is why it gets messy, funky, and lively.” 

Guedo has had two and a half years to think about the play and its four-sided geometry. As he’s discovered, the playwright started with the Torvald scene. The husband “gets to say everything he wasn’t able to say at the end of A Doll’s House. He didn’t handle it very well at the time; he’s just had the rug pulled out from under him, and he wasn’t at his best. This is his chance to give his side of the story.”

Chariz Faulmino and Kristi Hansen, A Doll’s House Part 2, Wild Side Productions. Photo by Jim Guedo.Wild Sid

Heath sent that draft to Ibsen and feminist scholars, and asked for their responses. “A lot of them were worried it would just turn into ‘he said she said’, Helmer vs. Helmer,” the Scando version of Kramer vs. Kramer.” But the arguments on all sides have heft. “The thing I love about the play is that it’s funny, but it’s also a play of ideas, and it turns on a dime. It’s not just one thing…. Everyone gets an opportunity to talk about the cost, the collateral damage of walking out the door. Without it re-litigating the past, Nora has to take some direct hits.” 

A Doll’s House Part 2 (one of the most produced plays in North America in 2018) is “a play that needs to be seen!” of his m.o. in choosing Wild Side projects. “And actors want to work on stuff that’s hard!” 

The arguments play out in an intricate text, that on paper, is full of ellipses, slashes, silences that mean different things, overlapping dialogue, punctuation marks that are clues. “Very precise, very fun to dig into,” says Hansen, who directed the Fringe production of Ellie Heath’s highly theatrical memoir Fake n’ Bake this summer. “It’s got to feel spontaneous but it’s been marked and tracked within an inch of its life,” says Guedo. 

After leaving the co-artistic directorship of Azimuth Theatre she shared it with Vanessa Sabourin in January 2021, Hansen has been digging into freelance work — as an actor and  as a researcher. “You get to say Yes way more!” One of her pandemic gigs has been as a technician/researcher at Moment Discovery, a tech-art collective that explores the digital tracking of human movement in light and sound. “We use technology to make art,” she says, to simplify for the layman (me). Her short film Are You Inspired? was commissioned by Catalyst Theatre as part of the  National Arts Centre’s Transformation Project. 

This season and next she’s the Associate Artist at the Citadel, in charge of the RBC Horizon Emerging Artist program, focussed on “incrementally opening doors and creating mentorship opportunities for under-represented folk,” as she puts it. “It’s all about “connecting (talented) people.” The Maggie Tree, the indie collective she co-founded with Sabourin, brings a production of The Wolves to the Citadel’s Highwire series in October.   

Guedo reports that he’s spent much of the pandemic shutdown time “completely rewriting” the Joni Mitchell musical he created with her blessing in 2007, in honour of the Saskatchewan centennial (it was revived at the National Arts Centre in 2011). Not only the zeitgeist but Mitchell’s own health narrative, which has taken her back to the Newport Folk Festival recently, have dramatically changed.

Meanwhile, a play that’s been on his mind for years will finally hit the stage in Edmonton. A Doll’s House Part 2 “is not just a debate…. if they’re trial lawyers they’re also the defendants. Nora isn’t coming back for a reckoning, or a rehash. This is not a Nordic noir Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.” 

“In rehearsal it’s badminton or ping pong. But it’s going to feel like champions playing tennis.” 

PREVIEW

A Doll’s House Part 2

Theatre: Wild Side Productions

Written by: Lucas Hnath

Directed and designed by: Jim Guedo

Starring: Kristi Hansen, Ian Leung, Chariz Faulmino, Maralyn Ryan

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Sept. 18

Tickets: varsconatheatre.com

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It’s time to play: a peek at the new Edmonton theatre season

Posted on September 2, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

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

Karen Hines, Pochsy Plays. Graphic art: Ryan Bartlett, film stills Peter Moller.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Destination Fringe, with its 95,000 or so tickets sold, was a hint (we deal in big hints here in #yeg. People know what they’ve been missing; they want live in-person theatre experience and the sharing that goes with that.

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Theatre artists, along with companies of every personality and aesthetic, have gone through every kind of contortion and experiment to stay nimble, and survive. 2021 was half over before The Pivot pivoted back to live. And now they’re returning to action on stages all over town. Yes, there’s a theatre season starting, an achievement in itself. A Doll’s House Part 2 opens next week at the Varscona, Two Pianos Four Hands at the Mayfield, then Network at the Citadel.

Season announcements from Theatre Network and Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, both in new homes this season, await. But, to whet your appetite, here’s a little selection (in no particular order) of intriguing shows to look forward to — from what we know so far. 

Of this place: After a couple of COVID-ian delays Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, an original homegrown musical comedy set in the flourishing supper club scene of ‘60s Edmonton — “the golden age of dining and dancing in Alberta’s capital” —  is the grand finale of the upcoming November to July season at Teatro Live! (the new moniker of Teatro La Quindicina). Commissioned by Teatro where it premiered in 2009, it’s a love story (with singing servers and a take-no-guff chanteuse proprietor), and a love letter to an under-appreciated era in our collective entertainment history. It’s the creation of company stars Jocelyn Ahlf and current co-artistic director Andrew MacDonald-Smith (book), Ryan Sigurdson and Farren Timoteo (music and lyrics) . Kate Ryan directs the revival that runs next summer (July 14 to 30 2023). 

Kewpie clown: Pochsy IV (work in progress). We first met her in the ‘90s, a toxic, poisoned kewpie attached to an IV pole, sweetly singing. “Everything’s falling apart but everyone’s falling in love.” And we followed Pochsy, smudgy-eyed and sugar-voiced, through a series of Karen Hines’ macabre and queasy clown shows, a veritable repository of marketplace jargon, pop culture sentimentality, and gallows humour. After her disappearance 15 years ago Pochsy is back — from the Great Beyond? you’ve got to wonder — with a new show as the headliner at the 2022 Play The Fool Festival (Sept. 22 and 24 at the Backstage Theatre).

There is no vegetarian special: Plain Jane Theatre is revisiting the Stephen Sondheim masterpiece Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Nov. 11 to 20), in a small-cast small-scale up-close version led by Sheldon Elter as the demon barber of Fleet Street and Kristi Hansen as his inventive partner Mrs. Lovett whose meat pies are uncommonly delish. It runs Nov. 11 to 20 at tiny Co*Lab downtown, transformed for the occasion into the lunch room of a contemporary meat packing plant. Kate Ryan directs.

And they’re back, two high-profile indie companies who’ve been biding their time: 

(a) Wild Side Productions, with the stellar play they’ve had to cancel twice. Lucas Hnath’s funny, insightful A Doll’s House Part 2, is a contemporary sequel, of sorts, to the final scene in Ibsen’s 1879 masterpiece where Nora closes the door on her marriage, her home, her children to find a life of her own. The door opens 15 years later. Jim Guedo directs (Sept. 7 to 18 at the Varscona). More about this production in an upcoming 12thnight post. 

The Wolves, Citadel theatre. Photo supplied.

(b) The Maggie Tree, with Sarah DeLappe’s Pulitzer-nominated The Wolves, set in the world of teenage girls on a soccer team. We’ll be up close, very, since Vanessa Sabourin’s 10-actor production happens, amazingly, in the Citadel’s Rice Theatre (Oct. 8 to 30), part of the Highwire series.

Timeless timely: Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind, set at rehearsals for a play about lynching in the Jim Crow South — white director, white writer, Black star — would have been the first play by a Black woman to arrive on Broadway in the 1950s. But the playwright refused to make the changes demanded by white producers. It lingered in obscurity for the next 70-plus years, until its recent revivals on Broadway and at the Shaw Festival. It’s on the Citadel mainstage, directed by Audrey Dwyer (March 27 to April 16 2023). 

The war that’s never stopped: Named after the Ukrainian word for periwinkle, a delicate flower of remarkable persistence, Barvinok (formerly Blood of Our Soil) launches an Alberta tour with an Edmonton run at the Westbury Theatre (Sept. 21 to 25). Inspired by her discovery of her grandmother’s 1944 journal, an account of a nightmare war-time escape across Ukraine, Lianna Makuch’s play, researched on location in Ukraine, where war has never stopped, counterpoints the contemporary quest of a Ukrainian-Canadian to understand this traumatic inheritance. Patrick Lundeen directs the Pyretic production. Look for more about this play in an upcoming 12thnight post.

Fresh Hell by Conni Massing, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

The Odd Couple: Dorothy Parker and Joan of Arc, who have probably never even been in a sentence, much less a show, together, will co-habit the stage this season.Conni Massing’s Fresh Hell, scheduled and re-scheduled at Shadow Theatre, finally arrives at the Varscona. Kate Newby and newcomer Sydney Williams (recently impressive in Pressure at the Fringe) co-star in Tracy Carroll’s production (Jan. 18 to Feb. 5  2023).

Custom-made: Weasel, a new play by actor/playwright Beth Graham (Pretty Goblins, The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble), the U of A’s playwright-in-residence, commissioned specially for the university’s graduating class of actors, launches the Studio Theatre season. (Oct. 13 to 22). Directed by Kevin Sutley, Weasel, noun and verb, is all about theatre and actors.    

Who holds the matches? Botticelli in the Fire: Sex and art, and the rising forces of repression,  make an explosive combination in this 2016 one-act by the star Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill. At the centre of a lively mix of the historical and the contemporary is the queer Renaissance painter, working on his masterpiece The Birth of Venus, against a landscape of escalating danger. Sarah Emslie directs, Common Ground Arts Society’s Mac Brock produces, as part of Fringe Theatre’s curated season (April 25 to May 7 2023). 

Kristin Johnston in Enough, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Seat backs and tray tables up: The phrase ‘up in the air’ gets a workout in Enough, a 2019 two-hander by the Scottish writer Stef Smith. The characters are female flight attendants, bonded far above the earth, with an aerial perspective on their lives, disintegrating on the ground. Trevor Schmidt’s Northern Light Theatre Canadian premiere, starring Linda Grass and Kristin Johnston, runs at the Studio Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barn (Jan. 19 to Feb. 4 2023).

Almost A Full Moon, a new musical by Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman and Hawksley Workman, Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied

Song cycle into musical: Almost A Full Moon, a Citadel commission, is the joint creation of Canadian playwright Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman and indie rock star/ composer Hawksley Workman. Grown from a workshop production at Sheridan College’s Canadian Musical Theatre Project (where Come From Away came from), Corbeil-Coleman weaves a holiday musical from three generations in three different time periods, using the songs of Workman’s title Christmas album of 20 years ago (with Workman additions).  Daryl Cloran directs the Citadel premiere Nov. 5 to 27.

Making it up: The grand finale of the upcoming Mayfield Dinner Theatre season (June 20 to July 23, 2023) is a bold venture into something entirely new and unexpected (not to mention different every night) at that theatre. Clusterflick: The Improvised Movie unleashes the forces of deluxe improv comedy on the Mayfield stage. Taking their cues from the audience the expert international improv trio Gordon’s Big Bald Head — Jacob Banigan, Mark Meer, and Ron Pederson — will improvise an entire movie before your very eyes. So you never know in advance whether you’ll be seeing an action movie, a sci fi fantasy, a classic horror flick, a rom-com….    

All The Little Animals I Have Eaten by Karen Hines, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Passing the Bechdel Test: Karen Hines’ comedy All The Little Animals I Have Eaten, which premiered at the 2017 High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, ups the ante: in 15 scenes four women in a tony bistro do not discuss men, babies, romance; they play dozens of characters, including Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. The Shadow Theatre production directed by Alexandra Dawkins runs March 15 to April 2, 2023 at the Varscona.

On the street where you live: London Road (Feb. 8 to 12) takes musical theatre somewhere it never goes: true crime, a verbatim text, and lyrics culled directly from the everyday speech of direct interviews. Based on the the 2006 murders of five sex workers on the same Ipswich street, this unorthodox 2011 English musical chronicles the effects on a community — in its own words. Jim Guedo directs the McEwan University production that runs Feb. 8 to 12 2023.

And, starring as… themselves: In First Métis Man of Odesa, theatre artists Matt MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova, a real-life married couple, take to the stage to play characters in their own story. It’s a kind of high-stakes cross-continent pandemic love story escalating in complications, urgency and terrors as it goes along. The Canadian actor/playwright (Bears, After The Fire)  and the Ukrainian theatre star meet across the world, fall in love, get married, become pregnant, and race against time and slamming borders to be together in Canada for the birth of their son. Now that the stakes have rocketed this year, as the news reveals daily, they’ve added an Act II to their story. The Punctuate! Theatre production directed by Lianna Makuch is part of the Citadel’s Highwire series (April 22 to May 14 2023).

  

 

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Kiss the cod: Come From Away at the Jube, a review

Posted on August 31, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Come From Away, Broadway Across Canada touring production. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Come From Away wasn’t Away long, in real time. And yet, the world has changed in such unmistakeable ways since March 2019, when the American touring production arrived here, bringing a story of Canadian-ness back to its country of origin. 

A cataclysmic pandemic has united the world and divided the people in it. America has drifted into chronic violent fractiousness; the idea of Canada as an oasis from that aggressively divisive individualism has been tarnished. “Freedom” doesn’t mean what it did. And neither does “human connection.”

So would we see an unusual and irresistibly warm-hearted Broadway hit about the sheer spirit of human generosity and kindness through different eyes?. I wondered about that. Read on.

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You know the real-life story of the musical created by Toronto husband-and-wife team Irene Sankoff and David Hein. In the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist attacks on New York, 38 international flights were diverted to Gander, Newfoundland as American air space closed for the first time ever. A little town of 9,000 in a country America had barely noticed before, on “an island between there and here” as the opening number has it, welcomed 7,000 stranded passengers to the The Rock. And the townsfolk housed, fed, and clothed the fearful, frustrated strangers for five days in a newsworthy demo of hospitality. 

Based on Sankoff and Heine’s real-life interviews with the townsfolk and the passengers, it was developed as a student workshop in Michael Rubinoff’s Canadian Musical Theatre Project at Sheridan College, timed to the 10-year anniversary of 9-11. And the route that included inaugural runs at Seattle Rep and the La Jolla Playhouse took Come From Away to Broadway in 2017, then the West End. And it’s been a massive success ever since, scooping up raves, sold-out houses, Dora Awards, a Tony for director Christopher Ashley, and multiple Oliviers along the way.

Come From Away, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

Come From Away is, in so many ways, an unexpected come-from-away to the Broadway hit playbook. There’s no star (except a whole community) and no real villain (except the state of the world). It is (as many have pointed out in amazement) a musical about nice people being nice. Even beyond all that, it eschews spectacle and special effects for smartly stylized, inventively ‘low-tech’ stagecraft. No, you will not see a 747 land onstage. And the 12-member cast play both the Newfoundlanders and their unplanned visitors, with just a change of accent or hat or jacket.

Beowulf Boritt’s design is framed by a stand of bare tree trunks, and a back wall of wood that turns out to be slatted when slivers of light glint through. Howell Binkley’s lighting design is a stellar, transformative participant in the storytelling. The cast reconfigures a set of mismatched chairs, to suggest the interior of a plane or a school bus, a school gym, a cockpit, the Legion…. 

The piece, like its Newfoundland characters, has a sturdy sense of self, and a kind of distinctive, self-deprecating homespun sense of humour that undercuts sentimentalism. On the fateful day that 7,000 people from everywhere in the world suddenly arrived, the daily rituals of small-town Gander life are in place.  “Everything starts and ends at Tim Hortons,” explains the mayor, wonderfully played by Kevin Corolan. 

True, there are hints of a darkening post 9-11 world in the suspicious treatment, both from the townsfolk and the passengers, of a Muslim chef. But I still find that there are scenes that over-gild Canadian worthiness. A couple on the rocks, both named Kevin (Nick Duckart and Brandon Springman), are a bit leery about revealing their relationship in a small town in a foreign country. When it happens, inadvertently, it turns out that everyone in the bar has relatives who are gay. So, no problem! What a progressive place small-town Newfoundland is. 

But mainly, the characters are idiosyncratic individuals with little stories of their own. Stand-outs include Julie Johnson as Beulah the teacher with the primary school organizational skills; she bonds with the New Yorker (Danielle K. Thomas) who’s also the mother of a firefighter. James Earl Jones II is very amusing as the wary New Yorker sent on a mission to acquire barbecues from backyards, incredulous that people help him ‘steal’ their own grills.

Kristen Peace as the unstoppable SPCA worker who rescues a rare chimpanzee from the hold of a plane, and Julia Knitel as a rookie local reporter who lands the biggest story in the world on her first day, are both excellent. And as American Airlines’ first-ever female pilot, Marika Aubrey nails the show’s big solo Me And The Sky, in which she discovers by the end that her love affair with flight has changed forever on 9-11. But it’s an ensemble show, and the actors are agile and convincing.  

It’s a terrific touring production that doesn’t feel road-weary after four years of travelling. And it ends in a party at the Legion. Did I tell you about the expert eight-piece band? It assembles a global assortment of instruments — including accordion, harmonium, whistles, Irish flute, Uileann pipes, fiddle, guitars, mandolins, bouzouki, bodhran and other drums — that lean into the Celtic folk-rock flavour of the score.

So, in this late-pandemic moment, a world catastrophe later than 9-11, when the idea of inviting a stranger home for dinner and a shower is wildly fantastical, what happens to Come From Away? Real-life lumberjack shirts and ballcaps notwithstanding, it takes on the dimensions of a fairytale. When the sulkier of the two Kevins says that being in Newfoundland is like going back in time, he’s so right, back to the once upon a time.

A packed house leapt to their feet on Tuesday’s opening night, ready to kidnap the band and party on. As I left, a lady behind me said to her companion, of the ritual Newfoundland initiation, “I’d kiss the cod. Would you kiss the cod? I would!”

REVIEW

Come From Away

Broadway Across Canada touring production

Created by: Irene Sankoff and David Hein

Directed by: Christopher Ashley

Where: Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through Sunday 

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca

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Teatro Live! new season, new calendar, new name

Posted on August 30, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Ya turn 40, ya make changes…. 

Teatro La Quindicina goes into its new decade with a newly streamlined moniker (with a built-in exclamation point), a new logo, a new and Fringe-less yearly calendar, and an expanding gallery of creators for its ’40s.  

What doesn’t change is devotion to comedy (and elasticizing the boundaries of that term), and a buoyant mandate, as its genial co-artistic directors, on phones in different locales in Vancouver, explain: “live theatre that is a riot of fun.”

Born at the very first Fringe in 1982, Teatro La Quindicina got its oddball christening in an impromptu whim, named for the  high-class bordello (often mistaken for a theatre) in Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt. “Everyone calls us Teatro anyhow,” says Andrew MacDonald-Smith, who shares the artistic directorship with Belinda Cornish. The pair are in Vancouver, both in the Arts Club cast of the production of Peter Pan Goes Wrong we saw at the Citadel in March.

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“It’s been a beloved and whimsical name and we adore it,” says Cornish. “But we still have to spell it, write it out phonetically.” And even then, as decades of Sterling Award galas have proven, people stumble over the name. Certain media outlets have spelled it wrong for years. MacDonald-Smith laughs. “We listen carefully to our audience.”

The 2022-2023 Teatro Live! season opens Nov. 18 to Dec. 4) with a production of Ira Levin’s classic comedy thriller Deathtrap, directed by Nancy McAlear. That’s not a radical departure: the Teatro archive is dotted with mid-century offerings like Sleuth, Rope, The Bad Seed. What follows in February is a double-bill by Stewart Lemoine, Teatro founder and resident playwright/muse. The Exquisite Hour, an affecting 2002 two-hander comedy in which a modest bachelor of regular habits has a rare vision of time and its possibilities when a stranger walks into his yard and asks him “are you satisfied with what you know?”. It’s paired with a new Lemoine, Love Is For Poor People.  The playwright directs.

In May, the month when Teatro’s seasons have opened for the past decade, Listen, Listen, a new comedy commissioned for the company from playwright/screenwriter Elyne Quan, premieres, directed by Cornish. And the season finale in July — Teatro Live! is keeping that summer slot — is a revival, much delayed by the pandemic, of an original Teatro 2009 musical comedy that is very much of this place. Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, created by MacDonald-Smith and Jocelyn Ahlf (book), Ryan Sigurdson (music) and Farren Timoteo (lyrics), is a love story set in Edmonton’s flourishing supper club scene in the 1960s. Kate Ryan directs the five-actor three-musician production.      

“Ten years ago, the company shifted to a summer season,” says Cornish of programming that was the obverse of the usual theatre calendar here by running May through October. “And it was really successful for us…. Summer-time, delight, celebratory mood were a good fit.”

But that niche is no longer unoccupied; there’s more theatre happening in the summer here than hitherto, as she points out. And besides, the rationale is further reduced because “we’re stepping away from the Fringe,” as MacDonald-Smith points out. Teatro’s 2022 Fringe show, a revival of Lemoine’s The Margin of the Sky, was the company’s last appearance ever at the summer festival where it was born in 1982. Among other reasons, as he explains, is this: the sheer impossibility of a professional Equity company even remotely breaking even at a festival where the ticket price is about a third of a normal ticket during the season. When the other productions in the season don’t have to subsidize the Fringe show, “we now get to create on a larger scale.” 

So, as the Teatro Live! season announced Tuesday reveals, the same number of productions “but they’re threaded through the year” and programming by Teatro Live!’s Varscona Theatre co-habitants, Shadow Theatre and assorted indie companies.

“When you hit a milestone year, you ask what’s next? How do I want to grow?” says MacDonald-Smith. “We’re keeping the essence,” he says of the Lemoine plays that have been “the centrepiece of the company for its entire life.” But he and Cornish are expanding the repertoire by formalizing “a new program of commissions specially written for Teatro.” Quan’s Listen, Listen is the first of the initiative.

True, Teatro La Quindicina seasons have included comedies from other writers from time to time (interestingly, always women, including Cornish, Jocelyn Ahlf, and Jana O’Connor). The idea, explains Cornish, is essentially a commission “to write a Teatro play … what a fun thing for a playwright!” 

The Teatro aesthetic “has a specificity,” she says. “We’re a comedy-forward company. But within that, there’s a lot of room (for writers) to play in, a lot of space for creativity while being true to their own voices.” Witness “the breadth of Stewart’s own work, from beautiful delicate plays like The Exquisite Hour to colossal epics like The Book of Tobit,” screwball comedies to pocket musicals to mystery thrillers. 

Says MacDonald-Smith “we’re supporting playwrights to have a wonderful time writing a play.” 

Teatro Live! subscriptions: teatroq.com.

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The Fringe, and fringers, are back! The curtain comes down tonight

Posted on August 21, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If Fringe director Murray Utas is looking a little dazed — a rarefied combo of surprise, delight, and fatigue — who can blame him?

It’s the last day of Destination Fringe, the 41st annual edition of Edmonton’s 11 day-and-night summer theatre binge, the first and biggest on the continent. And the 2022 edition marks, he says, “the culmination of two-and-a half years of being on high-alert and high-functioning…. ”

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Proposing, planning and re-planning, re-thinking and re-thinking the re-think: “Honestly I feel like I’m a Fringe play,” Utas laughs. Improv isn’t the word. “No, it’s busking! You have to put on the show AND gather the crowd….

Would it happen? Would the people come? Would the community embrace our favourite summer festival once more? Impossible to know for sure in advance. But, yes, yes, and yes. By Sunday morning, with a full day and evening of shows to go, the Fringe had sold 94,493 tickets to its 164 indoor shows (a figure that will be tuned up by the end of the evening). By Sunday afternoon 22 per cent of performances had sold out compared to 2019’s 20.7 per cent. And the return to artists, who get 100 per cent of the ticket sales, is pushing $1 million.

These are not, of course, the dizzying figures of 147,000-plus tickets of the gargantuan 2019 Fringe, with its 258 shows and $1.4 million pay-out to artists. But Destination Fringe, with it 164-show universe in 27 venues  was on a deliberately smaller scale for this late-[pandemic world of ours (and dramatically up from last year’s 65 shows). “We were listening…. We’re intentionally growing incrementally.” 

Most of the Fringes on the circuit have reported a drop of 20 to 30 per cent in ticket sales from 2019. But since there are fewer shows, Utas predicts, “the house percentages are almost exactly the same as 2019. Which means more revenue per show. “It brings out the socialist in me,” he grins.  

Utas and Fringe Theatre executive director Megan Dart call the 2022 edition, with affection, Almost Fringe. “We had to ask ‘what does it mean to an engage an audience now?’ It’s not like anything was missing. But there was a lot of ‘I don’t know how that’s going to go’…. Coming here, I couldn’t predict how things would work.”

Fringe 2022 comes at the end of two-and-a-half years of “complete and utter reinvention on the daily,” says Utas, from the moment of “the creative switch” in March 2020 when live theatre abruptly shut down.   

“There’s nothing normal about the world we’re in,” as he puts it. “There’s no normal on the other side of what we’ve been through. But at least if there’s no normal we can see what is there.” 

“There’s a lot of new at the festival this year,” and Utas is happy about that. “New plays, new musicals by the next generation, new theatre artists, new curators for music and cabaret.” And new initiatives from the Fringe itself, like the Youth Empowerment Program that gathered seven participants and mentored them, in everything from performance to production. 

What has surprised him? “Stamina,” he says instantly, by which he means something both artists and administrators have lost their grip on in the fallow period. More of the work than ever is new. “Many artists (who had Fringe slots) have been waiting since 2020,” says Utas. “A good majority of them asked if they could do a different show than they’d originally had in mind.” The answer: “Of course! Times are very different.” 

“Artists have recovered enough to want to create; I think that’s why we saw so much new work.…”  

There have been changes. Thanks to a last-minute federal grant, the Fringe threw a big free street party the night before the festival started, as in the olden days of Fringe, to welcome the community back. The KidsFringe came back in a big way, all shows free, “packed every day opening to close. We printed 2500 passports (for kids to stamp), and we had to keep printing more.” Utas thinks they under-estimated the variety of outdoor entertainment for the crowds that gathered. He’ll know for next time. 

The 85th Avenue corridor, long static, came alive with mural painting led by Matt Cardinal and an assortment of DJs. “If you make room,” says Utas, “you have to stay far enough out of the way, and it can go places you never imagined.” 

“And, really, isn’t that the Fringe itself? You jam a little, you open up creativity, people come, and it happens! Nothing but good news…. This felt like community. And that’s a beautiful thing.” 

   

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