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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What I learned at this year’s Fringe: thoughts of a Fringed brain

Posted on August 21, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I want to go to the beautiful place and enjoy the view and then come back. I think we all do.” — Leo in Stewart Lemoine’s The Margin of the Sky 

You can’t go off to the Fringe and be there for a week and come back without learning things, and having an odd sense of heightened reality. It’s bound to happen. Here are some assorted thoughts from time well spent…. 

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Most remarkable story that isn’t in a show. The Margin of the Sky, the final production of Teatro La Quindicina’s 40th anniversary season, is the last time you’ll ever see a Teatro show at the Fringe. The company was born there in 1982, the very first Fringe, before anyone even knew what exactly that was. Then Teatro was a troupe of high-school friends who gave themselves a kooky name, and took a comedy called All These Heels (one characters was a Hungarian concert pianist with an eyepatch, played by Leona Brausen) by one of their number, Stewart Lemoine to “A Fringe Event.” And now? Teatro is a professional theatre company, with subscribers, fans, a season, a theatre with a red velvet curtain, Equity contracts…. And they bid farewell to the Fringe in 2022 by reviving a 2003 Lemoine comedy about what creative inspiration means, and where to find it. It begins a hold-over run Tuesday as part of Teatro’s 2022 summer season. 12thnight review here.

Rebecca Merkley in Jesus Teaches Us Things, Dammitammy Productions. Photo supplied.

Funniest clowning: Jesus. In Rebecca Merkley’s Jesus Teaches Us Things, the man himself is a riot. The guy loves a crowd, and since he’s had a couple of thousand of years to tune up his act, he does a big opener: you should see what he can with a glass of water. 12thnight review here.

Audience participation: always tricky. When it goes wrong, the audience wants to shrink into nothingness in their seats. When it goes right, it’s a party. See above, for a stellar example; Jesus takes questions. Another is White Guy On Stage Talking. In one scene we make a group list we made with the two performers (Jake Tzakcyk and Megan Sweet) of “things we’d sell your soul for.” See below. 12thnight review here.

Even veteran artists, who’ve had two years of pandemical isolation to brood on their art, tried something new for this Fringe. 

Andrea House, Brittany Ward in Salsa Lesson. Photo by Jae Hoo Lee,

(a) The magical reinvention of a classic story as an original musical: in Salsa Lesson, actor/playwright/singer-songwriter Andrea House gives a story — a narrative of the middle-aged plateau and unexpected new horizons — breath-taking dimensions. The story, ruefully funny, is in House’s own invented “mom-rap,” a kind of hip-hop/ spoken word poetry cross. And the songs, mostly in Spanish, give the everyday,” with its hopes and disappointments, and its yearning for love, a heightened lustre of passion. Enchanting. 12thnight review here.

(b) The magical reinvention of a long gone era as an original cabaret: The Pansy Cabaret tells a story no one knew, even Darrin Hagen, a queer historian, and playwright and actor, composer and musician). What he discovered was the true history of the “Pansy craze,” a vivid queer culture that flourished a century ago and vanished in the decade after Prohibition, erased by homophobia. Drag queen Lilith Fair re-creates it in great style onstage, with a fascinating selection of  beautifully sung vintage Edwardian music hall songs, accompanied by Daniel Belland at the grand piano. The warning to the a world sliding ever farther right couldn’t be more clear. The Fringe holds it over starting Tuesday. 12thnight review here.  

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

New musicals of every shape and size, many of them by young artists: Fringe 2022 was an unusual proliferation. Such a complicated, challenging form: storytelling through and with music, songs that have lyrics and performers with an unusual range of skills (see Salsa Lesson above). The largest scale new musical I saw? Chris Scott’s amazingly ambitious The Erlking — horror, mythology, satire, folk tale. The smallest? Conjoined, witty, funny, clever, and macabre — and infused with real musical theatre savvy. It’s a stagecraft challenge, too, for co-creator Stephen Allred’s production: two conjoined brothers, the A-type one who dominates, the other who seethes with resentment, and hatches murderous thoughts. 

(Thunder)CATS, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

Satire: it’s a helluva lot easier to just make fun of Cats than it is to actually create a funny raunchy full-bodied alternative musical — by marrying the “now and forever” Broadway musical to an 80s TV cartoon. That’s a lot of sexy feline dancing, cartoon battles, a hot band, copious Lycra, the whole kit-and-caboodle. …. In (thunder)CATS, The Grindstone team of Byron Martin and Simon Abbott (with Curtis den Otter) did that. 

Most creative sex scene: the Romeo and Juliet clinch of two puppets from found objects, a sock and bunched-up panties, on a stage strung between two audience volunteers, in SNAFU’s “spicy puppet cabaret” Epidermis Circus. It’s held over at the Fringe starting Tuesday.

White Guy On Stage Talking. Photo supplied.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen at the Fringe? It’s a question fringers get asked regularly. For me, White Guy on Stage Talking, I think. See above. Twenty-one performance art scenes that theatricalize, in a scrambly, amusingly cheap-theatre way, pretty much everything that makes you crazy or anxious or outraged about modern life. It’s for your brain to put together. The runner-up in weirdness is about creation, too. The Hunchback Variations is all about artistic failure, the continuing and possibly inevitable failure, in 11 minutely adjusted “variations” of the efforts of two of history’s most famous Deaf artists, to create a famously elusive stage effect, from Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

Ellie Heath in Fake n’ Bake, Edmonton Fringe 2022. Photo supplied.

The solo confessional: these require a special kind of theatrical ingenuity to answer the unspoken question ‘why am I on a stage telling you about my life?’ Ellie Heath’s Fake n’ Bake, the story of a life sucked into a vortex of addictions then restored, inhabited a playful stage world. Jon Paterson’s How I Met My Mother is a personal invitation into a theatre named after the mother who saw him through his bad-ass teen years. Paterson, a Fringe veteran of 25 years standing, tells the story of a theatre artist in search of redemption who reinvents himself, improbably, as a care-giver for his mother who’s declining into dementia.  

Alanna McPherson, Chelo Ledesma, Bella King in Dreamers Cantata, Plain Jane Theatre Company. Photo by db photographics

Welcome discovery: I hadn’t known about Georgia Stitt and her Alphabet City Cycle till I saw Dreamers Cantata, one of my favourite Fringe shows. Such clever, challenging funny and insightful songs, part of the Plain Jane Theatre Company’s new revue Dreamers Cantata, curated from contemporary musical theatre innovators. Beautifully delivered by young triple-threats who sizzle. See below. 

Most startling, possibly unwelcome, discovery: Wouldn’t you know it? Bots can actually write plays (Plays By Bots, written by a bot named Dramatron and acted by the improvisers of Rapid Fire Theatre, was pretty funny, in a deadpan sort of way. Geez. Is nothing sacred?

New talent: young artists I hadn’t seen before (a long list, among them Sydney Williams (Pressure, by up-and-comer Amanda Samuelson), Miracle Mopera and Kyra Gusdal (Mules), Alanna McPherson along with her castmates Bella King and Larissa Poho (Dreamers Cantata). 

The starting continuity of the Fringe presence in this theatre town: Kevin Sutley directed the 2006 premiere of Mules, starring the co-playwrights. And he directed this 2022 Fringe revival, with young artists. Jana O’Connor, the new head of Lit Fest, was the stage manager of the 2003 premiere of The Margin of the Sky. She’s one of the quartet of actors in Teatro La Quindicina’s Fringe farewell revival of the Stewart Lemoine comedy. 

Theatre is lucky; we have some great piano players in this town: Daniel Belland (The Pansy Cabaret), Simon Abbott (thunder)CATS), Michael Clark (Conjoined), Steven Greenfield (Dreamers Cantata) among them. Just sayin’. 

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A last weekend at the Fringe: how did THAT happen? See some shows!

Posted on August 19, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

How on earth did it happen? Amazingly, it’s the final weekend of Destination Fringe. So much theatre, so little time.

True, the Fringe has been unfailing creative, non-stop, about not vanishing during The Great Pause. But at the start of the 41st annual edition how could we be sure it would still be there for us, in that big jostling summer extravaganza way we’ve known? Would The People come?

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The People have come. By Friday mid-afternoon, 86,000 tickets for 164 indoor shows had been sold. And somehow, suddenly, here we are, realizing that the curtain comes down Sunday night in 27 venues. Which means there’s still time to set forth and see some shows. 

For your last weekend of fringing, have a look at 12thnight.ca reviews (they’re all grouped under Fringe 2022). And have a peek at reviews of shows I enjoyed last Fringe (The Disney Delusion for one). Or plays like Even Gilchrist’s high-spirited, funny and poignant Re:Construct, which premiered earlier this very season. 

Buy yourself a green onion cake and let the  Fringe grapevine wrap itself around you; listen to the buzz. Hit the Late Night Cabaret, a showcase for Fringe artists letting their hair (farther) down. Or Die-Nasty, a serial improvised soap set at the Fringe. Or Gordon’s Big Bald Head: The Sincerest Form of Burglary, a trio of virtuosos who will improvise any Fringe show, picked at random from the program, based on the title and the show description.

Or just experiment, take a risk! See what you find. After all, there are shows for every taste, and tastes you didn’t even know you had. Hell, if you just can’t make the first move, give yourself over to the Fringe Randomizer to pick one for you, fringetheatre.ca/festival/randomizer. Geez, here’s irony. I gave it a whirl and it just picked Performance Review for me. 

No matter what, see a show, see several, see many this weekend. Get your mind blown. That’s what the Fringe is for. 

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And there’s more … Fringe holdovers next week in two locations

Posted on August 19, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Epidermis Circus, SNAFU. Photo by Jam Hamidi

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Oh no, it’s true. The Fringe ends Sunday. But if your GPS went wonky and you haven’t managed to arrive at Destination Fringe yet, or your might-have-seen’s haven’t quite materialized, regrets are premature. You’ve had a reprieve.  

Some of the most intriguing shows and performances at the 41st annual edition of the Edmonton Fringe are held-over next week, in two different curations in two different locales. 

KK Apple and Kerry Ipema in Six Chick Flicks or a Legally Blonde Pretty Woman Dirty Danced on the Beaches while writing a Notebook on the Titanic. Photo supplied.

The Holdover Series is presented by the Fringe itself, and it includes four shows, each with two performance in the Westbury Theatre (aka Stage 1) Wednesday through Saturday Aug. 24 to Aug. 27. The Pansy Cabaret, Guys in Disguise’s re-creation of the remarkably vivid queer and drag culture of a century ago in New York, is one. See the 12thnight review here.

Six Chick Flicks is a high-speed send-up of six faves, in 60 minutes, by two dexterous women. The 12thnight review is here. Epidermis Circus is the ingenious work of Victoria’s SNAFU, in which puppeteer Ingrid Hansen creates the entire cast of puppet characters from her own hands (and other body parts), plus mirrors and cameras. See the 12thnight review here. 

The fourth show in the Holdover Series, iHuman Studios Fringe Remix featuring Sample Cafe is an original, created specially for the occasion.  It’s a showcase for the participants of the Fringe’s now Youth Empowerment Program, and includes a live visual art installation featuring the Fringe’s new street art wall. It features Creeasian x Sampler Cafe, broken-beat specialists who’ve performed through the Fringe in the Indigenous péhonán series.  

For the full schedule, information, and tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

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

At the Varscona Theatre (BYOV Stage 11 in Fringe lingo), Teatro La Quindicina’s season finale revival of the Stewart Lemoine beautifully unusual 2003 comedy The Margin of the Sky Wednesday is held over Aug. 23 through Sunday Aug. 28. There’s additional poignance attached to the run. The Margin of the Sky is the last time Teatro will ever be at the Fringe, where the company was born in 1982. Curtain time each night is 7 p.m., with an extra 2 p.m. matinee performance the Sunday of the run. Read the 12thnight review here. Tickets: teatroq.com.

Ghouls Ghouls Ghouls, Send in the Girls Burlesque/ House of Hush. Photo supplied.

Held-over at the Varscona, too, is Ghouls Ghouls Ghouls, an original Fringe creation that marries burlesque to the ghostly tradition, by the combined forces of Send in the Girls Burlesque and House of Hush. There are two performances, Aug. 25 and 26, 9:15 p.m.  Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

[Grindstone’s holdover plans have fallen through, reports that theatre.]

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Gathering dreams: Dreamers Cantata, a new revue from the Plain Janes. A Fringe review

Posted on August 19, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Alanna McPherson, Chelo Ledesma, Bella King in Dreamers Cantata, Plain Jane Theatre Company. Photo by db photographics

Dreamer’s Cantata – A New Revue (Stage 11, Varscona Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What would we do without the Plain Janes? 

In addition to their excavations in the corners of the musical theatre repertoire where the forgotten or neglected, the over-produced or under- appreciated are gathering dust, this indie theatre company seeks out the new, the hip, the innovative. And we’re the beneficiaries.

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For this new revue, they’ve sought out witty, challenging work from contemporary musical theatre songwriters who are all women or gender non-conforming. Some names we know, others not (I speak for myself here on the ‘not’).  And in the selection they’ve curated, linked by wispy dreamer’s logic, characters  dream of the free-floating possibilities that can change a life. Some are hopeful but wary, or ambivalent, Others unleash full-throttle yearning, or rueful consideration of the gap between the dream and the Monday morning reality. 

Some dreamers, as we’re told in the narrative (by Ellen Chorley) are visionaries or fantasizers, others are shit-disturbers,  or off-centre thinkers who see things from unexpected angles. Or they’re just plain out to lunch. 

A revue is a particular kind of challenge: lifting a song off its original moorings in a musical and leaving it to the actor to make it live. A quartet of strong singers, including Larissa Poho who plays violin and ukulele and pianist Steven Greenfield, really know how to deliver them. Bella King sings Georgia Stitt’s The Wanting of You, from her Alphabet City Cycle, with such expressive force it makes your eyes water. “I wear it everywhere I go/ Just like a coat that doesn’t know/ That it’s supposed to keep me warm.”

Alanna McPherson bites into Stitt’s Blanket in July, the fury of a woman passed over, harboring tigerish thoughts, in a witty set of images, about her rival: “She is your great Aunt’s mildewed fur! She is the dashboard with a ding….” 

Poho has a fine time with Shaina Taub’s sassy shrug of a love song Might As Well. “Do you know you spend seven years of your life in the bathroom…. so I might as well spend some of the time with you…”). And Greenfield, from the keyboard, tucks into The Red Queen from Elizabeth Swados’s Alice in Concert.  “Time to purge,” he sings on the subject of life clutter. “Off with their head!” 

There’s  a lyrical song about roots (Sing Me Home) by Edmonton jazz artist Mallory Chipman, beautifully delivered by Poho. Waitress, by the surprising singer-songwriter Sarah Bareilles, serves up two high-contrast songs. King does a killer version of When He Sees Me, a captivating song about the fear of stepping outside the carapace of solitude to take a chance on love. And McPherson’s version of What Baking Can Do, a witty double-entendre of a song about setting forth your secret ingredients but disguised and with the edges crimped, is a delight.  

I loved the fun of Freedom from The Mad Ones — girls out on the open road driving, no destination, no map, car windows down, singing loud — delivered by a spirited trio.

There’s a downside to revues, of course. When you get to discover songs this unusual and smart,  you become a dreamer, too. They leave you wanting the whole musical.

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Insights honed to a knife edge: Horseface, a Fringe review

Posted on August 18, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Alex Dallas, Horseface, PKF Productions. Photo supplied

Horseface (Stage 14, La Cité Auditorium)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At the heart of this whip-cracking solo show is a smile — wide, tight-lipped, ambiguously ulterior. This is what seething looks like when it’s smiling.

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In this funny sharp-eyed solo memoir by and starring Alex Dallas — Fringe audiences will remember her from the late lamented feminist comedy troupe Sensible Footwear — she is fuming. But since she’s English, which means operating under the mantra “don’t make a fuss,” there’s an air of cordiality — with homicidal top notes. Even as a little girl, Dallas recalls, she had recurring nightmares about wolves encircling the house “out there in the dark, biding their time.” And the older she got the more she understood what they meant.

The wolves are men — teachers, colleagues, boyfriends, friends of friends, strangers, university professors, celebrities at the Toronto Film Festival. “My mother never told me I would become prey,” she says, revisiting her childhood household, with its paternal secrets and stiff upper lips. And at the age of 64, she’s fed up and furious.  

Manspreading is the recurring trigger (euww, there’s a phrase I wish I hadn’t used) for this spirited review of the outrageous presumption of the predatory male. She unspools back to a seminal moment, at single-digit age, and the paunchy old school teacher who calls a little classmate friend “a stupid lump of a girl, a horseface.” The show was born at that moment; young Dallas stood up and told the bully to fuck off, and got ejected from class for her pains. 

It starts young, the closing in, the groping, the lewd come-ons, the assaults, the near-rapes — in metal work class, in restaurant kitchens in 5-star hotels, on public transportation, at Labour Party rallies for heaven’s sake. And Dallas is unsparing about reviewing the humiliating compliances required, in her ‘20s, to be “a cool girlfriend” and “pixie dream girl, funny, bubbly….” An expert storyteller, she makes of this chronicle, decade by decade, a wincing sort of black comedy. No wonder she’s “obsessed” with true crime. 

Anger isn’t very often a sustaining drive on the stage. But Dallas has a brisk, fierce delivery, contained in a crystalline English idiom (that smile is dangerously amusing). Which gets us back to manspreading and a recurring question in Horseface. Is it ever OK to kick a man in the balls?

Depends on the circumstances, that’s all I’ll say. 

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