Sexy Laundry at the Mayfield, a review

Posted on July 28, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Glenn Nelson and Davina Stewart in Sexy Laundry, Mayfield Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In Sexy Laundry, the hit 2005 sitcom by Vancouver playwright Michele Riml currently onstage at the Mayfield, we meet Henry and Alice, a middle-aged couple whose 25-year-old marriage has gone stale.  

At the instigation of the latter (and with the reluctant participation of the former) they’ve checked into a high-end hotel for a dirty weekend, designed to put the fizz back into the marital cocktail. In this adventure in relationship repair, they’re armed with a self-help guide, Sex For Dummies, from the library.

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It’s the first of a series of antique sight gags — which will later include a whip for her and a TV clicker for him — that add to a mountain of evidence that relationships aren’t the only thing in life that can go mouldy. The Canadian play repertoire has its share of best-before’s too. And it takes very game and spirited actors to dig selflessly into this thinly spread well-trampled turf. 

Kudos then to Patricia Darbasie’s production, and to Davina Stewart and Glenn Nelson, who are real pros, and gifted clowns. Their playground is a strikingly convincing upscale hotel room artfully created on the Mayfield stage by designer John Dinning. And the costumes by Leona Brausen are a plot device in themselves.  

Anyhow, back to Sex For Dummies. It explains why we will be confronted later in the play by other related sight gags — Henry dancing in his boxers, for example, or Alice checking out sexy girth-clenching poses in the mirror — designed to remind us of the comical tribulations of aging. And in Sexy Laundry it’s meant to trigger couples discussions in which Henry and Alice review their middle-aged grievances, disappointments, fantasies and humiliations.  “I’m sharing my needs with you,” says Alice, quoting from the guide. Henry looks understandably glum. 

Gender disparities and stereotyping are the framework on which Sexy Laundry is hung out. Henry the stick-in-the-mud likes to unwind after work with an hour of TV news. Talking? “You married an engineer not a poet.” Alice, talking the talk, wants to “reconnect” and “find what we had.” She worries that he’s more attracted to the TV clicker than exploring her bod — is it the extra pounds? Is sex something you do during commercials? She points out that men, not women, are allowed to age and be sexy. James Bond gets older; “his girlfriends never do.” True, Alice, true. 

Glenn Nelson and Davina Stewart in Sexy Laundry, Mayfield Theatre. Photo supplied.

Their fantasies when they can finally think up any, don’t jibe, needless to say. Hers run to sexy Italian waiters, his to a vision of family dinner in which “the children laugh; they think I’m funny.” And then the kids do the dishes. 

It’s contentment vs self-improvement, appreciating what you have vs making it even better. “Nothing is as good as it could be,” objects Henry, the one with the practical streak. “That’s life.” Will they recapture the spark of yore, and resolve stuff,  in a ‘heartwarming’ way, instead of “throwing away” 25 years of marriage? I leave you to this agonizing suspense. Order a signature Mayfield cocktail. 

Calling a sitcom clichéd isn’t exactly cutting-edge criticism. It’s not that gender clichés haven’t contributed to the rise of the modern sitcom. I’m thinking of the Kramdens in the still very funny classic The Honeymooners. Sutton Foster’s series Younger is all about aging. Think of all the cliché dads on TV. It’s just that Sexy Laundry just strings so many clichés together; it’s a veritable repository, with no real attention to momentum, or how many should be discarded (or upgraded or diverted) in the interests of comic currency. This is a play that doesn’t even bother to conceal how calculating it is.

So Nelson and Stewart have their work cut out for them, forging a time-worn relationship from thin cut-outs and self-help-speak. It takes a plucky spirit to wrest laughter from a scene in which a middle-aged woman says Fuck a lot. Or an engineer who can’t get the damn clicker to work, unlocks dance music by accident instead, and wiggles his butt. Rueful paunch-clutching has its place in the contemporary comedy, who could deny it?, but it isn’t automatically funny. Both actors rise admirably to the occasion. 

As in laundry demos on YouTube, it’s not so much what’s being laundered, as the care that goes into folding it. 

REVIEW

Sexy Laundry

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Written by: Michele Riml

Directed by: Patricia Darbasie

Starring: Glenn Nelson, Davina Stewart

Running: through Aug. 7

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca, 780-483-4051

 

  

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Are we there yet? Sneak peeks of Destination Fringe, at the 3rd annual Fringe Telethon Wednesday

Posted on July 25, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Destination Fringe, edition #41 of Edmonton’s game-changer city-definer of a summer theatre extravaganza, is within sight, live and unpredictable.

First, before the fringing begins Aug. 11, there’s a golden chance for meaningful audience participation. The third annual Edmonton Fringe Telethon happens live on Fringe TV Wednesday, noon to 8 (780-448-9000). It’s hosted by that nouveau-vaudevillian duo festival director Murray Utas and Edmonton Fringe Theatre executive director Megan Dart. And it’s your opportunity to help secure the future of our beloved August festivities.

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There’ll be live music from performers like singer/songwriter/actor Kaeley Jade Wiebe. You’ll see sneak previews of Fringe shows, among them Andrés Moreno’s multi-media puppet show Doni!. And there’s celebratory news. On the eve of Destination Fringe, Aug. 10, starting at 6:30, we’re all invited to “a big ol’ dance party,” says Utas of the all-ages free street party at McIntyre Park. The Halluci Nation, Sudan Archives, Sampler Cafe, and tzadeka & the Murder Hornets take over the outdoor stage for the big community launch celebration (just like the olden days of the Fringe, and not seen for many many years). “There’s no other agenda…. Just come and move your body!”

The Fringe Telethon has a storied history in the last three tumultuous years. In 2020, when the unthinkable happened and the 39th annual Fringe became The Fringe That Never Was, the Telethon was a way for audiences to ensure that Edmonton’s best-ever invention would survive a crushing $3 million loss. For last year’s Together We Fringe, in which our the Fringe returned to live (and turned the big four-oh), the Fringe Telethon returned for a second edition. 

And now, the third annual Telethon, live from Fringe headquarters at the ATB Financial Arts Barn Wednesday. Which is the very day you can start studying up and hatching your Destination Fringe plans for the 164-show roster of Fringe shows running Aug. 11 to 21 in some 27 venues (eight of them programmed by lottery, the remaining 19 BYOVs programmed by artists themselves).  

Tickets go on sale Aug. 3 at noon (online at fringetheatre.ca, at 780-409-1910, and in person at the Fringe central box office (10330 84 Ave.). This year’s queue-busting innovation: e-tickets.   

Show information will be online Wednesday (fringetheatre.ca). And the $12 Festival Guides are ready Wednesday for sale at the Fringe Grounds Cafe, the Old Strathcona Arts Emporium (10309 82 Ave.), Theatre Garage (3711 98 St.), Audreys Books downtown (10702 Jasper Ave.), Glass Bookshop (10242 106 St.), The Tesserae (6421 112 Ave.), and The Sherwood Park Bookworm (120 Wye Road). 

True, Destination Fringe is not as massive in dimensions as the Fringe’s button-bursting 2019 edition (260-plus shows in 50-plus venues). But it’s still expansive and full of possibilities, more than doubled from last year’s cautious 64-show dozen-venue re-entry into the world of live performance. It’s an organic reasonable “re-growth” as Utas puts it. “How do we grow in a way that’s not too big for our resources? 2019 tipped off the rails a few times….” 

“How big do we need to be?” That, for Utas, is a crucial Fringe question, along with “What is the experience we’re creating?” as the audience returns to fringing in this late-pandemic world. And growth will happen naturally in response. 

The annual Fringe Telethon is a way to ensure it keeps happening. Tune in to Fringe TV, and call 780-448-9000. As Utas puts it, “can you imagine Edmonton without the Fringe?” None of us can.

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Four decades of playing without a script: the Rapid Fire Theatre story is now a book

Posted on July 22, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Rapid Fire Theatre. Photo by Andrew Paul.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The thing you’ve just got to love about Rapid Fire Theatre is that everything that makes you anxious (if not out and out crazy) in life is delightful to them. It’s their high-octane fuel, their motivation, their very raison d’être.

[I refer to uncertainty and risk, the not knowing in advance, the sweaty scramble to make improbable things work, the last-minute adjustments to plans that have fallen through, the figuring on your feet when you discover that there actually are no plans and maybe never were, the making of mistakes in front of people, the taking of leaps off promontories that aren’t even on the map.]

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And Edmonton’s premier improv company, an award-winner here, across the country and abroad, has the distinguished history to prove it. A new book about Rapid Fire’s first 40 years of providing spontaneous entertainment and provoking spontaneous bursts of laughter here, across the country and abroad, demonstrates in vivid detail that their own story may be unscripted, but it has a powerful narrative. We Made It All Up: Forty Years of Rapid Fire Theatre is by Paul Blinov, an RFT improv star himself. And it’s breezy, charming, and fun to read.

As Blinov recounts, the Rapid Fire Theatre trajectory started small. And it was in a way that was intertwined with theatre in this theatre town.

It was 1981, and little Theatre Network was ensconced in a very out-of-the-way north end location — OK, dive — in a defunct Kingdom Hall near the old Coliseum. TN Artistic director Stephen Heatley invited improv pioneer Keith Johnstone (founder of Calgary’s Loose Moose Theatre) to town to do a workshop of his improv “invention” theatresports — a fast and furious, short-form, competitive team sport.  

And so it began, Theatresports every Sunday evening. I remember occasionally being one of the trio of judges, holding up a score card and getting booed or cheered. And no matter what happened, or didn’t, onstage, the players seemed to be having a lot of fun (in lieu of making money). In true improv fashion, as Blinov tells the story, it gathered fans and players — actors and comics, high school class clowns, techies and musicians as it went: the Pied Piper effect endemic to the art form. In the chapter titled “The Smell of People Being There” Blinov quotes Wes Borg, a Theatresports geek who became part of the legendary spin-off sketch troupe Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie. “My mom thought it was a cult…. She was kind of right.”

Ah, the addictive thrill of spontaneity, with its high risk of flame-out. The magnetism of improv, for both the performer and the audience, is a fascinating mystery to us ordinary mortals. Is it, in the end, the lure of pure, raw live-ness? No one’s addressed it better than Blinov; he consults a whole range of improvisers to assist. “It was really formative,” as the ever-droll Borg says. “It made me into the poverty-stricken artist I am today.” 

Actor-turned-improviser Patti Stiles, who became the Rapid Fire artistic director later in the story (she’s now a top-drawer Australia-based improv guru and author who does workshops world-wide a la Keith Johnstone), was drawn to the galvanizing effect of improv on an audience. They were embraced and enlivened, she found, in ways that scripted theatre rarely managed. 

Gradually, exponentially, Edmonton’s Theatresports players found themselves an estimable part of a circuit of improv tournaments that included the U.S., Europe and Australia. Rapid Fire’s Improvaganza, running at the Gateway Theatre through Saturday,  is genuinely international in its lineup. And, amazingly, it always has been, almost by definition. There’s just something contagiously cross-cultural and expansive about improv (not least perhaps because of the drop-in spirit and the heartbreaking modesty of financial expectations). And Edmonton audiences have been the beneficiaries. 

When Theatresports became its own company in 1988 and stopped sleeping on Theatre Network’s couch (so to speak, an image that should probably not be pursued), Rapid Fire’s story gathered structure and homes. As you’ll see from Blinov’s account (chapter three, “Some Adulting Had To Happen”) the opposing forces of natural comradely anarchy and the requirements of being a theatre company (having a bank account and knowing how much is in it, paying rent on a place, having an artistic director) are a necessary tension that runs through the Rapid Fire story. 

After all, Rapid Fire takes its cue from the time-honoured improv dictum about saying Yes to creative impulses (instead of ‘well, maybe let’s think about it for a sec, or the more cautious ‘No! What, are you nuts!?’). As an historical imperative that has its dangers, of course. For one thing it urges expansion over cutbacks, and that’s sometimes a nail-biter as every theatre company knows.  

Theatresports on parade. Photo by Russ Hewitt.

Rapid Fire found a home first at the old Phoenix Downtown. Then the improvisers crossed the river to Strathcona and the college-kid part of town, and did hit late-night shows at an ex-firehall-turned-theatre called Chinook. And Rapid Fire was part of the theatre consortium that undertook to save Chinook from commercial re-sale (a shoe store? you’ve got to be kidding!). Enter the Varscona. When Rapid Fire got too big and busy to squeeze into Varscona scheduling after 20 years, they moved downtown for eight seasons to occupy the Citadel’s Zeidler Hall, not an easy space to have improv fun in.  

As Blinov details carefully, but in an easeful way, artistic directors changed; interestingly, four of them (including Stiles, Jacob Banigan, Kevin Gillese, Amy Shostak) who’ve taken their careers elsewhere return regularly to do shows with Rapid Fire. What other theatre company in town can say as much?

There have been crises, to be sure.  A manager embezzled, and then vanished. Debt has threatened to topple the whole operation more than once. But somehow creativity has prevailed, and so has the audience. 

The Coven, Rapid Fire Theatre. Photo by Billy Wong

Spin-offs into sketch comedy, film, and even full-length plays happened under the Rapid Fire flag. A seminal event was the introduction of long-form Chimprov, for which performers got offered a cut of the door. Blinov quotes Banigan: “It was like beer money, gas money. But as a token, it was a big gesture. It meant a lot to suddenly get a little bit of money for the stuff we love to do anyway.” And Chimprov, with its array of small troupes within the larger company, continues to be a staple of the Rapid Fire menu.

Speaking of which, Blinov includes an amusing sample improv “menu” from an early Chimprov format. There’s a choice of appetizers (“Typewriter scene” or “monologue” or “one event from many points of view”). Then the soup course (including “Story Out Of Order” or “Blow It Out Your Ass”), Tonight’s Special, Dessert (“available by enthusiastic request”). 

Rapid Fire’s expertise with experimental long-form improv, especially genres and dramatic storytelling, is noted in improv circles world-wide. This is one well-connected company. And that isn’t unrelated to its close ties, in performers, spirit, and skills, to the theatre community. Which sets Edmonton apart from other improv hotbeds. 

Rapid Fire Theatre general manager Sarah Huffman and artistic director Matt Schuurman

Like Rapid Fire itself, the story gains momentum in the current era (at the 2019 Fringe, Rapid Fire hosted an entire venue devoted exclusively to improv). And it’s not least because of their unsurpassed ingenuity, both technical and artistic under artistic director Matt Schuurman, in improvising vis-à-vis COVID-ian restrictions and workarounds. These days, at 41, one of the longest-running improv companies in the country is expanding their programming and outreach, a Schuurman priority as they reno a home of their own, the old Telephone Exchange in Strathcona.

It’s a great story of creative waywardness and smarts, virtuoso improv skills and zest for experiment. You can get yourself a copy of We Made It All Up at any Rapid Fire show (now at Improvaganza and soon at the Fringe) or on the Rapid Fire website.

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Summer theatre adventures in New York

Posted on July 20, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Jaquel Spivey in A Strange Loop, photo by Marc J Franklin.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

New York City last week — 

It started in a heart-warming cross-border exchange, with trimmings. In the mezzanine of the Lyceum Theatre on West 45th 15 minutes before curtain on a Thursday night performance of the Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning musical A Strange Loop. 

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So there we were, finding ourselves sitting next to an amiable Brooklynite in his 60s and his husband (‘welcome to our row!”). They’d come to Toronto to get married back when it wasn’t an American option, so were  kindly disposed to Canada, and Canadian theatre (and knew of Edmonton from, you guessed!, the Fringe). Somehow inevitably, it turned out he was an emerging playwright — ‘emerging’ isn’t a matter of age, after all — after a career as an IT expert. And he was excited about workshops of “my stuff” in Miami, an upcoming production in a Big Apple community theatre, honourable mentions in 10-minute play competitions….  

Jaquel Spivey in A Strange Loop. Photo by Marc J Franklin

It seemed like a sign, a possible loop of its own. Especially since A Strange Loop is, in its own very meta originality, the defiant manifesto of a playwright in progress. “Big, black, and queer-ass American Broadway,” it’s a veritable loop-de-loop of a musical, about a gay Black man struggling to write a musical called A Strange Loop about a gay Black man struggling to write a musical called A Strange Loop about a gay Black man … himself. 

He’s Usher (the endearing Jaquel Spivey, direct to Broadway from theatre school), who works, in another loop, as an usher at The Lion King. And the challenging, messy, funny/angry musical by Michael R. Jackson happens at intermission, which is amusing in itself. Tormented and exasperated, Usher’s Black queer artist identity is assailed and undermined by his own Thoughts, six of them, the saboteurs within. They’re wonderfully performed by the ensemble in Stephen Brackett’s production, who appear through elevator doors and include Daily Self-Loathing and Sexual Ambivalence. 

Not only is Usher is flailing against the white entertainment status quo, and his own “Inner White Girl,’ as he puts it (not to mention the shark tank of dating sites where low self-esteem is a trail of blood in the water), he’s up against the paradigms of Blackness. And this classic: his parents are not only old-school artist-averse but out-and-out homophobic. 

If he must be an artist (god forbid), at least he should emulate the Black commercialism of Taylor Perry, reigning monarch of the Black gospel show (A Strange Loop pauses to stage an extended sample). And there are other pressures, too, on Usher from “acceptable” Black narratives like police violence or slavery — to give audience allies “something intersectional to hold onto.” 

It doesn’t seem to quite hold together, and the whole thing is a bit repetitive (well, it is about loops). But the playfulness, invention and fierce humour of it are unexpected. And the songs and lyrics have a smart, caustic wit to them. A Black musical comedy set in the conflicted mind of a Black queer artist about Black queer experience, riotous and poignant, is a one-of-a-kind. The run has just been extended through January 2023.  

At the Public Theatre in the East Village, where you need both a mask and a proof of vaccine, Fat Ham, very funny, joyful, and  insightful, is a riotous take on … Hamlet. For a good time, with dancing, great food, karaoke, Elsinore’s always been the place, right?

Fat Ham, Public Theatre

“Who says tragedy has to be tragic?” is the billing. James Ijames 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner takes us into the heart of a Black family who run a North Carolina barbecue joint — at a raucous backyard party where “ay, there’s the rub” really sticks. Juicy, the Hamlet of the piece, is an endearingly morose, exasperated possibly queer Southern college kid, taking Human Resources (the wit of Fat Ham marinates through and through). And he’s played by an endearing actor Marcel Spears who commands a whole lexicon of physical whatever shrugs and eye-rolls, surrounded as he is by the most maddening relatives who lament his “softness.” 

Will Juicy find himself and come into his own?   

He wears a Momma’s Boy T-shirt, a gift from his doting ma (Nikki Crawford), freshly widowed, who’s just gotten married to her late hubby’s bro, Rev. Hamlet’s best pal Horatio is reinvented as an entertaining wise-ass with lurid prophetic video game-type dreams. And the Ophelia and Laertes siblings are re-cast too, with sexual identity crises of their own. 

Bits of the Shakespeare text are expertly woven through Fat Ham. And a Shakespeare play propelled by revenge, escalating in violence and leaving the stage littered with dead bodies, takes on a joyful cast. The Black characters, in effect, just refuse to be in a tragedy. The matinee audience, me among them, had a wonderful time. 

I felt lucky to see the revival of Company (which goes on tour at the end of the month). For one thing, who wants to pass up the chance to see a great cast including Patti Lupone with a 14-piece orchestra to accompany some of the wittiest, most insightful songs in the musical theatre canon? The seminal 1970 Sondheim musical that radically had snapshots made into a group portrait of married life (instead of a story), was famously gender-flipped this season by the Brit director Marianne Elliott. Bobby, the eternal bachelor afraid of commitment, has become Bobbie (Katrina Lenk). And she stands at the perimeter of her circle of friends, couples in the ambivalent marital landscape of the big city — the very one where you can leave the theatre, have dinner outside on a soft summer evening, and discuss. 

I’d be quite prepared to see Company as a period piece, despite what time has done to the waning cultural imperative to be married. But to me, the update works just fine, since Bobbie has the additional impetus, as a woman in her ‘30s, of the biological clock.

What seems timeless in a much different way is American Buffalo, which dates from the decades before the playwright went right-wing batshit crazy. David Mamet’s high-speed go-nowhere 1975 back comedy about the small-time two-bit hustler underbelly of  American capitalism and masculinity, was back. A superb cast — Sam Rockwell, Laurence Fishburne and Darren Criss — bit into the signature Mamet staccato rhythms as a trio of collaborators plotting a heist you know from the start is doomed by their own fundamental ineptitude and venality.  

It happened at Circle in the Square, a Broadway theatre in which the audience is wrapped around a long gangway stage on three sides. The set was a junk shop absolutely crammed, every which way, with stuff. And since the audience was so close (we were four rows away, in the cheap seats), it was the first Broadway production to step forward and extend the mask requirement at least for the summer from the July 1 cut-off where it became optional. Other theatres immediately followed suit.

photo by Alan Kellogg

At every show I saw in New York, incidentally, the audience was masked. No refreshments were allowed in the theatre (the usual dodge for pulling down a mask and never pulling it up again). And the requirement was strictly enforced by ushers with flashlights. “Sir, pull that mask over your nose, too; it’s not doing any good that way. Or you’ll have to leave.” Note to Canadian theatres: confidence-inspiring.  

The Minutes, Studio 54.

The toughest-minded show I saw was The Minutes by Tracy Letts  (August: Osage Country) at Studio 54. Set at a small-town council meeting — the minutes of last week’s meeting aren’t yet ready for distribution — it starts as a funny, deftly detailed satire of the niggling minutiae of American democracy, Our Town division, at work. And the ending, which I mustn’t tell you about, takes down American complacency about its history in a way that is truly shocking. The cast, which included a fair complement of Steppenwolf actors and one Canadian (Noah Reid of Schitt’s Creek fame), was terrific. 

As for many of you, dear readers, it had been a while, two-and-a-half years and a few trip cancellations, since I’d been in New York. And it felt special to be back, in the summer, walking through Central Park en route to the theatre. A lot of favourite little cafes hadn’t made it through COVID, to be sure. But theatre, live and in-person, had.

It had weathered all sorts of punishing setbacks and difficult industry adjustments (the “understudy” lists were as long as the casts). Not only that (judging by a small sample), Broadway theatre was welcoming surprising, challenging fare, and excitingly diverse talent, in addition to the usual Great (traditionally) White Way array of musical blockbusters. You could feel the future expanding, in spite of it all. And that felt fine.

     

 

  

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The Cirque du Soleil is back and the joint is bugged: OVO, a review

Posted on July 14, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

OVO, Cirque du Soleil. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At the outset, a giant egg sits onstage, full of mystery, ready for the hatching. 

With OVO (Portuguese for egg), the Cirque du Soleil, a storied Canadian company fallen on hard times and dormant for two years,  returns to life (and to Edmonton for seven performances). It’s with a show that premiered in Montreal in 2009 under the Grand Chapiteau, and was reworked for short runs in large-capacity arenas in 2016. And it’s in a corporate venue, Rogers Place, where nets normally receive pucks, not acrobats launching themselves to earth from trapezes.

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The egg glows and cracks open to reveal a world of fantastical insects — in perpetual motion, hanging upside down, balancing horizontally suspended by one feeler, scaling vertical walls, twirling lyrically off giant tendrils. It’s a world where the normal rules of propulsion and probability, not to mention the law of gravity, just do not apply. And we see that kingdom from the bug’s eye view, where every blade of grass, every stalk and root, is gargantuan. Under every leaf is an insect waiting for a chance to fly through the air.  

In the production written and directed by the Brazilian choreographer Deborah Colker, it’s the playground for some 52 circus performers of  virtuoso skills, acrobatic and contortionist, limber and bendable beyond beyond any reasonable human expectation. They’re invented by Liz Vandal’s witty fantasy costumes, an entomologist’s delight. And when they’re not airborne and and swinging and whirling and leaping, they do a high-speed insectoid scuttle. They pop up from holes on Gringo Cardia’s set, dominated by a climbing wall on which a striking projection-scape plays — close-ups of grass blades or the veins of leaves.

OVO, Cirque du Soleil. Photo supplied.

The acts are, as you might expect, first-rate. We see a troupe of red ants slither up and slide down a pole upside down, in squish-defying near-misses, as a chorus of grasshoppers watch. A gorgeous dragonfly balances upside down on one “hand” (or is it “foot”)? A sexy spider bends herself into impossible contortions. A whole troupe of death-defying gold-plated scarabs fling each other through the air on trapezes high above the stage. A cotillion of crickets launch themselves from trampolines and perch atop the wall; I thought they were geckoes, who have no notion of what right side up might mean, but then I wasn’t a biology major. A sinister red-and-black fire bug emerges from flames and wraps himself around spinning hoops. A caterpillar pulses in a chrysalis on a pole, spins silk, and emerges as a beautiful butterfly. 

There’s a host bug, a corpulent red-shelled beetle with a gift of the gab (he laughs clicks away at a great rate, and occasionally approaches a human language). There’s a bit of a story, though not a framing one; it’s more a running gag, and it belongs to the clowns. A “foreigner,” a spiny blue fly arrives onstage burdened by an ovo so heavy it leaves him gasping. Yup, it’s one of those romances where the guy brings carry-on baggage. 

He’s immediately smitten by a flirtatious charmer of a ladybug. And their on-again off-again courtship weaves its way through the show between acts. Unlike most of the Cirque canon, the clowning involves minimal audience participation — due to the venue, and no doubt to an ongoing pandemic.    

This isn’t the Cirque’s signature theatre of surreal imagery and mythic resonance, almost always framed by stage observers for us to observe observing. Unlike, say, Varekai, another tent-arena reinvention which arrived at the old Coliseum in 2015 and landed Icarus in a forest of exotic insects and creatures, there isn’t a kind of presiding story. OVO is a stunningly costumed showcase of pretty breathtaking circus acts. 

The visuals are superb. And what a treat to have a live (and lively) band and singer for the music by Brazilian composer/music director Berna Ceppas. The sound is surprisingly good for a vault like Rogers. And if OVO doesn’t have the theatrical punch of other Cirque shows, it’s great entertainment. And no mosquitoes are involved. 

Please, Cirque, can we have a tent show soon in this theatre town?

REVIEW

OVO

Theatre: Cirque du Soleil

Written, directed, choreographed by: Deborah Colker

Where: Rogers Place

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: cirquedusoleil.com, ticketmaster.ca

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Spirits rise: revisiting the Edmonton theatre season, part two

Posted on July 13, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Cathy Derkach, Jenny McKillop, Andrew MacDonald-Smith in Fever Land, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Fever Land, according to that heartbreaking/ riotous comedy by which Teatro La Quindicina returned to live performance last fall, is the kingdom where your spirits rise, vivacity accelerates, and the gray clammy feeling of routine is vanquished.

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It speaks to the season, exhilarating and nerve-wrackingly hopeful, when Edmonton audiences began to return, in person, to the theatre. There were setbacks, to be sure, and apprehension — and for artists and exhausted directors panicky moments when casts of understudies were rehearsing by day for performances that very evening. 

What did we see? Here’s a small assortment, in no particular order, of highlights, part two of our re-visit to the theatre season.  

A selection of performances that linger in the mind: 

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

Hayley Gillis, captivating as the watchful, stubbornly resistant Jane Eyre, who lives with the ghosts of her past in Erin Shields’ theatrical adaptation at the Citadel. 

In Stewart Lemoine’s Fever Land, Jenny McKillop as the wide-eyed not-quite-young junior high teacher whose routine life is cracked wide open by an illicit, and doomed, affair. 

Patricia Cerra, as the competent gainfully employed sister amazed to find herself improvising, against her own better judgment, as she scrambles to shore up their lives against encroaching chaos in Holly Lewis’s The Fiancée at the Citadel. 

Sheldon Elter as the burly Métis oil patch worker Floyd gradually becoming one with Nature in Matthew MacKenzie’s Bears in the Punctuate! production.

Christina Nguyen’s remarkably physicalized display of first-person storytelling under duress as the title character in Lianna Makuch’s Alina. 

Kristi Hansen as a harried, professional, unravelling in perpetual hope, trying to conceive in Belinda Cornish’s Hiraeth.

Alexandra Dawkins and Chris Pereira (front), Coralie Cairns and John Sproule (rear), Bloomsday, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Alexandra Dawkins in Steven Dietz’s Bloomsday as the appealingly impulsive, quick-witted Irish girl with the terrible gift of prophecy.

Elena Belyea in her own Tiny Bear Jaws play I Don’t Even Miss You, heartbreakingly resilient and resourceful as Basil, reviewing their memory reservoir in the time after waking up one morning in a world that looks familiar but is completely devoid of in-person human contact.

Oscar Derkx as the reluctant romantic lead, perfectly of the ‘50s, dragged unwillingly into assisting the title amnesiac to find herself in Evelyn Strange, at Teatro La Quindicina.

Peter Pan Goes Wrong, by arrangement with Mischief Theatre WorldWide, in association with Citadel theatre. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz Photography.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith doing hilarious double-duty as the pompous director convinced he’s the only really serious thesp in the company, and the actor playing Captain Hook in Peter Pan Goes Wrong at the Citadel. 

Andrew Kushnir as the funny, exasperated, anxious perpetually aggrieved local showbiz “celebrity” in The Garneau Block. 

Duos of the season: 

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

Rebecca Sadowski and Kaeley Jade Wiebe, inseparable sisters in Two-Headed Half-Hearted at Northern Light Theatre. Responsible for the season’s trickiest physical challenge: conjoined twins playing the guitar together.  

Farren Timoteo and Andrew MacDonald-Smith, who provoke each other to a hilarious out-and-out brawl in Teatro La Quindicina’s four-door three-actor farce A Grand Time in the Rapids. 

Laugh out-loud scene of the season: Etiquette expert Ted Todd (Farren Timoteo), possessor of “a flexible tenor voice,” doing aerobic vocal warm-ups in A Grand Time in the Rapids.

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

The improbable made compelling, in comedy: This was the season we saw (against the odds) … a land claim comedy: the surprisingly genial two-hander Cottagers and Indians by Drew Hayden Taylor, a Shadow Theatre production. And a comedy, albeit a wistful one, about IVF (in vitro fertilization), Belinda Cornish’s Hiraeth, from Bright Young Things. 

Memorable contributions in set, lighting, and projection design:

Bonnie Beecher’s beautiful lighting, a crucial dramatic participant in the challenge of storytelling in bringing a long complicated 19th century novel to the stage in Jane Eyre along with the storeys-high gauze-backed set designed by Anahgita Dehbonehie.

T. Erin Gruber’s glow-in-the-dark playground of cutouts for the journey through the wilderness in Bears, exquisitely transformed by her lighting and projections. 

Daniel vanHeyst’s lovely lakeshore design of wild rice banks and wooden decks set forth the stakes in Cottagers and Indians.

The Garneau Block by Belinda Cornish, from the Todd Babiak novel, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Arthur Mah.

Narda McCarroll’s glowing design for The Garneau Block, evoking a neighbourhood from its moving parts, open-sided frames set against a stylized city skyline of lights and towers. 

Ian Jackson’s projection-scape of emoji’s and internet flashes for the characters of Tell Us What Happened, who exist as roommates in a real apartment but really live on their cellphones. 

Trevor Schmidt’s stunning prairie shrine, with its bank of cornstalks and ghostly farmhouse facade, lighted with mystery, for the human sculpture of conjoined twins in Two-Headed Half-Hearted. 

Whittyn Jason’s oddball and fascinating collection of … stuff, to immerse us in the minutiae of memory and the inheritance of stories that go into a life in ren & the wake. 

Beyata Hackborn’s striking rainbow of piano fragments — keys, strings, sounding plates — anchored by an accordion at one end, for Metronome, a personal memoire about a life changed forever by music.

With a “home” made of layers of its skeletal frames and un-solid translucent walls Stephanie Bahniuk’s design for Michael Mysterious captures something of the fragility of “family,” and the mismatched human assortment that goes into building one. 

Dylan Thomas-Bouchier, Cheyenne Scott, Tai Amy Grauman, Shyanne Duquette, Todd Houseman in The Herd, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Andy Moro’s striking design for The Herd, dominated by an undulating translucent screen that evokes the prairies, with an open-work lattice through which the past is sometimes glimpsed. An eloquent contributor to Kenneth T. Williams’ play, that takes us into the tension between Indigenous tradition and a present fraught with complex questions for the band chief.      

Mantra of the season: “Let’s Fix It.” It’s about fractious neighbours coming together in The Garneau Block. But it has all kinds of implications for theatre.  

The most startling theatre experience of the season: As You Like It, A Radical Retelling.  

Memorable contributions in small roles: Lora Brovold as the wise-cracking tough-cookie landlady Mrs. Crotch in The Fiancée; Jesse Gervais as the new boyfriend/reluctant father figure in Michael Mysterious, who bends himself into pretzels trying to assert himself without looking assertive. 

The line that most captures our collective experience of the last two years: “it’s no o’clock,” from Bloomsday, at Shadow Theatre. 

Newcomers of the season: There were many. But here are a couple of musical theatre composers who stood out. Neither Lindsey Walker not Simon Abbott are new to showbiz. The former, an alt-folk rocker hitherto, moves into musical theatre with her score for ren & the wake. Composer Simon Abbott, an indispensable part of Grindstone’s improvised The 11 O’Clock Number, wrote satirical, fun, and clever songs (lyrics co-written with Byron Martin) for Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer. 

Listen to the music: 

Matthew Skopyk’s amusing score for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival shows in the park. His score for The Garneau Block captures the speedy rhythms and texture of neighbours intersecting.  

Mathew Hulshof and Kristen Padayas in A Fit, Happy Life, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Adam Kidd.

Erik Mortimer’s witty score, woven with giddy hints of retail, for A Fit, Happy Life, set in an old-school department store. 

Noor Dean Musani, an electronic music expert (aka dj phatcat), moved the protagonist through time and space in Bears, with sound. And his score for Alina, an ominous industrial buzz with eruptions, was an outstanding dramatic participant of that multi-disciplinary solo war story.

Is it all coming back to you? Did you have a look at ‘Celebrating the Edmonton theatre season, part one? Read it here.

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Celebrating the Edmonton theatre season that returned to live, part one

Posted on July 12, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Sheldon Elter and the Bears ensemble, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alexis McKeown.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It began in some trepidation, cautiously, experimentally, with complicated logistics, under constant threat of delays and cancellations. But this was the season that live theatre actually returned to live and in-person. Yes, the pivot pivoted. We put on shoes and masks, and gradually came to really feel the pleasure of it again, of being with other people in the room where it happens.

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In the terrible devastation of The Great Pause theatre artists never stopped being adventurous in their quest to engage audiences and capture live-ness on digital platforms instead of stages. And, as a bonus, that connected us in a new way to theatres across a very big country and around the world. A new live-online theatre hybrid, labour-intensive and costly, gradually evolved. And streamed theatre hasn’t disappeared; it’s been added as option B. Fringe TV, the brainchild of the theatre company that produces Edmonton’s mightiest festival, was indispensable in that.

But this was the season we began again to ‘go out to the theatre’, which had started to sound like something Noel Coward might say. And it felt special (OK, a little weird at first to be with people, but special). The novelty of watching theatre in our bathrobes drinking our own wine had worn off. We knew what we’d been missing.

So let’s revisit a season that began in uncertainty — would opening night happen? would the people come? — but worked its way, after the cumulated pandemic postponements of the last two years, to a June that was full of nights out. Which is why I’m writing a theatre season piece in July, for heaven’s sake.

In between new indie troupes formed, a beautiful new theatre opened on the footprint of the old (Theatre Network’s Roxy on 124th St.), a venerable company got its own theatre (Workshop West at the renamed Gateway), Edmonton’s busy improv comedy company Rapid Fire Theatre turned 40, and got all grown up about getting a theatre of their own (the old Telephone Exchange in Strathcona).  

The Fringe awaits, but I don’t think I saw a single show this season about COVID (thankfully), or that even mentioned it by name. But the pandemic has changed us, of course; it’s coloured our vision. For one thing it’s heightened our sense of isolation, risk, mortality, not to mention our appreciation for connection and laughter. It’s re-angled our stories, and ways of telling (and receiving) them in the theatre.  And since The Great Pause offered time to un-man (using the word advisedly) the portals and re-think the power structures of theatre, it’s made a start on expanding the breadth of stories and storytellers.

Comedy, often undervalued by the high-art hoi poloi in this country, gained new appreciation. Even sheer escapism, the fun oft dismissed as “froth” by “serious” folk, has existential dimensions in a world of constraints and isolationism. 

With one striking exception, satire lost its grip this season, dimmed by the lurid light of … reality. Grindstone Theatre’s original musical Jason Kenny’s Hot Boy Summer, which sold out its holdovers in five “waves,” was a bona fide hit (and the season’s only sing-along). It wasn’t exactly scoriating satire, to be sure, more amiably goofball in tone. But it was of the here and now, spun from the infamous banner “the best summer ever” as proclaimed by the most unpopular premier in Alberta history and his compliant doctor sidekick. 

Farren Timoteo and Andrew MacDonald-Smith in A Grand Time in the Rapids, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Dark comedy got darker. More death-centric. Even clowns, whose specialty is to live in the present moment, felt it at the Play The Fool Festival. Farce, on the other hand, might well be the metaphor for our time with its undercurrent of panic and the escalating sense that the world is teetering precariously on the edge of chaos. Witness the Citadel’s season-opener The Fiancée, Peter Pan Goes Wrong, and Teatro La Quindicina’s sparkling revival of A Grand Time in the Rapids.

It was a season with a generous share of surprises and delights, probing questions and troubling insights. Here’s a small sampling, in no particular order, of some of the season’s highlight experiences, part one. 

I Don’t Even Miss You: Elena Belyea’s play, a sort of dance musical for two played by one, spoke to the moment with eerie precision. In the Tiny Bear Jaws production Basil wakes up one morning to discover that the world has suddenly, overnight, gone contactless. Everything looks the same but they are utterly alone. The Tiny Bear Jaws production, starring the playwright (and a digital companion), captured, in a highly theatrical way, our collective sense of the familiar turned suddenly incomprehensible. What happens when you, like Basil, have to make your own fun, your own lists, your own memories? We’ve all just been there. Read the 12thnight review here.

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

Two-Headed Half-Hearted: Both literally and metaphorically, Northern Light Theatre’s new musical — “a prairie gothic song cycle of mythology and mermaids for conjoined twins” as billed — created by Trevor Schmidt (book) and Kaeley Jade Wiebe (music) is all about the the tension between the comfort of being connected to something, someone and the urge to find and be your individual self. Strange and wonderful, beautifully designed as a kind of prairie altar (by director Schmidt) in the tiny Studio Theatre. Read the 12thnight review here.

Bears: Witty, theatrically playful and imaginative, Matthew MacKenzie’s fantasia on Nature and the Indigenous vision of Man’s place in it got a beautiful homecoming to Edmonton, on the Citadel mainstage in this Punctuate! Theatre production. A stunning conjunction of poetic text, choreographed movement, light, sound, and a wonderful performance from Sheldon Elter as a Métis oil patch worker on a journey through the wilderness. Stunning.  Read the 12thnight review here. 

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

As You Like It: A Radical Retelling. Radical indeed, and inviting controversy in every way. Theatre Network went bold and opened the new Roxy with this new play by the Indigenous provocateur Cliff Cardinal. The production from Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre flings theatre’s oft-repeated claim to be risk-embracing right back in its face. The gutsiest, most audacious, argument-starter experiment of the season. Read the 12thnight review here.

Helen Belay, Patricia Cerra, Sheldon Elter in The Fiancée, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The Fiancée: In an amusingly feminist reversal, the instigators and running crew (so to speak) of Holly Lewis’s deftly intricate and funny farce, set here in the World War II era, are women, two sisters who fling a series of men whirling through seven doors. One (Helen Belay) has gotten herself engaged to three men.The other (Patricia Cerra) improvises ever more wildly to save the day. It premiered at the Citadel, in Daryl Cloran’s crack production. Read the 12thnight review here.

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

Evelyn Strange: Stewart Lemoine’s high-style 1995 comedy thriller, set in the New York publishing world of the 1950s, does something deliciously improbable with panache. It marries a noir-ish mystery of the Hitchcock persuasion to Wagner’s Siegfried. The Brunnhilde that a reluctant Siegfried rescues is a beautiful amnesiac with a ticket to the Met in her pocket. Shannon Blanchet, a former Evelyn Strange herself, made her directing debut with the Teatro La Quindicina revival. Read the 12thnight review here.

(Rear) Jesse Gervais, Gavin Dyer; (front) Christina Nguyen, Thomas Tunski, Amber Borotsik, in Michael Mysterious, Pyretic Productions. Photo by BB Collective Photography.

Michael Mysterious: The 35 numbered, named scenes of Geoffrey Simon Brown’s dark comedy explore in a compelling, funny way what it means to be in a family, to find one if yours is missing, to make one from the human raw materials at hand, or to escape from one to take ownership of your own dreams. Terrific performances from all generations of characters in Patrick Lundeen’s fulsome Pyretic production. Read the 12thnight review here.

Tell Us What Happened: This tense, strikingly fearless play by newcomer Michelle Robb, which premiered at Workshop West (directed by Heather Inglis), explores the consequences of sexual assault, and wonders about the pursuit of justice and emotional reckoning in the world of the internet where emoji language rules and the only mode is escalation. Read the 12thnight review here.

Christina Nguyen in Alina, Pyretic Productions. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb collective.

Alina: Based on real-life on-location interviews, Lianna Makuch’s gripper of a play tells the story of a university kid who volunteers for the front-line war effort during the Russian invasion of 2014. It’s a vivid first-person evocation of the multi-sense barrage of war and the nightmare of PTSD, recounted in the present tense by actor Christina Nguyen, perpetually in motion in a virtuoso physical performance. A highly theatrical barrage of sound, light, and choreography  assembled for a difficult mode of storytelling in a Pyretic production (directed by Patrick Lundeen), and the question: when you go to war, can you ever come back to yourself? Read the 12thnight review here.

The Garneau Block: After a year and a half of pandemical delays, Belinda Cornish’s adaptation of the 2006 Todd Babiak novel finally premiered at the Citadel in Rachel Peake’s production. And with it, a funny, cheering story for us, now, of what it means to be here, to live in a community, pulling together to make something happen. It’s built on secrets kept and revealed, and fully of this place, loaded with heartwarming in-references to locales we know.  Read the 12thnight review here.

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

Re:Construct: Even Gilchrist’s playful, jaunty theatrical de:construction of gender as a coming-out party for the trans Self. A two-person chorus (Geoffrey Simon Brown, Émanuel Dubbeldam) reviews, with the audience’s help, the setbacks and doubts, the oppression of perfectibility, that the world of gender orthodoxies throws at trans people. It’s touching (“I am possible? I could carve myself anew?”) and, here’s the surprise, it’s fun. Read the 12thnight review here.

Metronome: If there was a piece that spoke directly to the salutary effects of the arts on a life, it’s Darrin Hagen’s lovely solo memoir of growing up as a gay kid in small-town Alberta and having his life changed by music. It premiered at Workshop West (directed by Heather Inglis). And Hagen, a multi-faceted artist — drag queen/ actor/ composer/ playwright/ sound designer — was his own best proof, image, and prop. Read the 12thnight review here.  

ren and the wake: a new Catch The Keys musical by Megan Dart and Lindsey Walker (directed by Beth Dart) is a kind of song cycle framed by the idea of memory, and identity as a sort of cumulated inheritance. Alt folk-rocker Walker makes an auspicious musical theatre debut with songs that are both light and eloquent. Read the 12thnight review here.

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

Jane Eyre: Playwright Erin Shield cleverly focuses her new stage adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë novel, which premiered at the Citadel, as a sort of haunting, an artful theatre of memory in the mind of the much-abused orphan heroine who stubbornly retains a sense of self against all odds. She lives with a ghostly pageant of a Dickensian past en route to a tumultuous present, a haunted house, and romance. Read the 12thnight review here.

Part two, revisiting the theatre season, is here.

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The dismantling of decorum: A Grand Time in the Rapids, an ingenious Teatro farce

Posted on July 9, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Farren Timoteo in A Grand Time in the Rapids, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A newcomer — a properly composed English lady, in high heels and a frock — explains at the outset of A Grand Time in the Rapids that she’s crossed the Atlantic and come to Grand Rapids, Michigan “to make sense of my life.”

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Uh-oh. The declaration in itself is a provocation to the farce gods, an international indicator that decorum is at risk and chaos is imminent. Not least because a helpful etiquette expert with a bow tie and an argyll vest (and a bicycle) has already arrived at the door … one of four waiting calmly, closed, ready for action onstage (design: Chantel Fortin).   

Tea will be served, in china cups. And, as the riotous Teatro La Quindicina three-actor door-slammer now creating mayhem at the Varscona confirms, in hilarious fashion, what starts in tea ends in towels. 

Kristen Padayas, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Farren Timoteo in A Grand Time in the Rapids, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Men in bow ties — like fussbudget Ted Todd, etiquette columnist for the Grand Rapids Oracle (Farren Timoteo) — tend to become undone in farces. So do men in suits — like investment banker Boyd Mayhew (Andrew MacDonald-Smith). Ah, and natural repositories of good old British propriety— like the young widow Thalia Cumberland (Kristen Padayas) — are unintentional instigators with their concern for proper behaviour. 

Really, what could go wrong? 

The only farce in a canon of more than 75 comedies by resident playwright Stewart Lemoine, A Grand Time in the Rapids was last revived a decade ago to celebrate the company’s big three-oh. And, now, in Belinda Cornish’s terrifically funny production, it’s a summer frolic for Teatro’s 40th anniversary season. 

You will laugh out loud, a lot (I did, and it felt good). For starters the people around me and I cracked up just hearing Ted Todd’s name, for reasons I can’t even begin to explain. And for all you connoisseurs of relevance out there, A Grand Time in the Rapids is a riotous capture for our sense that the world is spinning, farcically, nearly out of control. One little revelation, one thread pulled at the fabric of good order so to speak, and we could end up in someone else’s clothes. Or none at all. 

But I digress.

Farren Timoteo and Andrew MacDonald-Smith in A Grand Time in the Rapids, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

In the Grand Rapids of 1950, Ted Todd, the alter-ego of newspaper advice guru Aunt Elva, has been enlisted by Thalia to finesse a rendezvous with her new suitor Boyd the banker. The need is occasioned by Thalia’s determination to shed light on a chapter in her past. Ted is a professional analyst of potential awkwardness; naturally, his own presence enhances the awkwardness quotient exponentially.

Timoteo and MacDonald-Smith, master farceurs both, verbally and physically, are a very funny pair onstage — even visually: At the risk of offending reviewer propriety, I will reveal that the one is compact and the other lanky, with voices to match. 

In a performance of maximum comic agility from Timoteo, who is somehow able to propel himself horizontally across the stage, Ted reveals himself to be the possessor of “a flexible tenor voice.” Watching him do vocal warm-ups for his demonstration of selected excerpts from The Messiah, is a physical comedy gem in itself. As in its previous incarnations A Grand Time In The Rapids remains a rare, let’s be bold and say The Only, contributor of Handel jokes to the repertoire. 

As a dry banker whose idea of a romantic date is to take Thalia to see the hydroelectric plant, Boyd finds himself reduced from an authoritative case of mild perplexity to something approaching total disintegration, literally and figuratively. MacDonald-Smith is expert at charting this course.

Kristen Padayas, A Grand Time in the Rapids, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The English propensity to be conciliatory, to maintain the civilities in circumstances of mounting frenzy, is nicely captured in Padayas’s performance, though the accent and cadence do tend to wander a bit. Behaving with restraint, Thalia says modestly to a compliment from Ted, “is easy to do when you’re dumbfounded.” 

Which brings us to the intricacy of Lemoine’s farce architecture: the difficulty of setting a farce in motion whirling through four doors is enhanced in inverse proportion to the size of the cast. Kudos to Rachel Bowron’s evocatively ‘50s costumes and their re-arrangement (and disappearance) in the course of events. 

“It’s completely manageable,” as characters observe from time to time, with increasing desperation, through the evening. Under Cornish’s direction it is until it just about isn’t. What fun. 

REVIEW

A Grand Time in the Rapids

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written by: Stewart Lemoine

Directed by: Belinda Cornish

Starring: Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Kristen Padayas, Farren Timoteo

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave. 

Running: through July 24

Tickets: teatroq.com

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Get down and festive, at an Edmonton festival this week

Posted on July 4, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

003_Playback, Found Festival 2022. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s a festive week in Edmonton live entertainment. The moment, both historically and seasonally, is at hand for you to venture forth and join in. It’s a choose-your-festival week; sample widely: the Found Festival, the New Mythic Works Series, Freewill Shakespeare Festival, the Edmonton International Street Performers Festival.

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*Found Fest returns Thursday with its weird and wonderful array of “experiences.” You can find Found, the 11th annual edition of the festival of unexpected encounters between artists and their audiences, in Old Strathcona through Sunday, with one excursion to Fort Edmonton Park. Check out the zestfully varied lineup in this 12thnight PREVIEW.

*The Thousand Faces Festival, devoted to exploring the mythic, roots of storytelling across cultures, is premiering a new series Friday and Saturday at the Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre. 

The first annual New Mythic Works Series introduces five original short plays by a quintet of hot up-and-comers in this theatre town, selected by Amanda Samuelson and Marina Mair-Sanchez. As billed, all are “inspired by international myths, legends, and folklore.”

Liam Monaghan’s Changeling is a modern take on a medieval Irish myth, through the eyes of a precocious nine-year-old exploring queer identity. In Iphigenia,  Liam Salmon takes on Greek tragedy via a doomed member of the most famously dysfunctional family ever, the House of Atreus. Kijo Gatama (currently performing with the Freewill Shakespeare Festival) bases her Mango of the Dead on an ancient Senegalese folk tale. And Sisyphus, Happy, Calla Wright’s contribution, re-casts the main character as Beff Jezos, as “the billionaire sole survivor of the apocalypse.”  Samantha Fraughton’s Homeric Hymn of Demeter, Kind Of, “re-imaginers the plight of Greek harvest goddess Demeter in a contemporary setting. A lawyer is enlisted to help retrieve Demeter’s kidnapped daughter Persephone.  

Tickets: tixonthesquare.ca. 

Nadien Chu as Titania and Ruth Alexander as Nicky Bottom, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz,

•The Bard continues his double-act al fresco camp-out in the park. The Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s alternating productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the playwright-in-residence’s most popular play, and Measure For Measure, more rarely produced, are on the Heritage Amphitheatre stage through July 10.  Tickets: at the gate or freewillshakespeare.com.

•The annual Grindstone Comedy Festival, back Wednesday through Sunday, is a festive swirl of  stand-up, sketch and improv comedy. And, hey, the creators of Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, satirists by temperament, return with another musical (Thunder)CATS. And this time these born insurrectionists will take on Broadway’s eternal feline musical and mash it up with … well, the plot does involve the planet Thundera and “a throbbing mystical sword.”  Tickets and full schedule: grindstonecomedyfest.com. 

•Edmonton International Street Performers Festival is back Friday in Churchill Square, this year in conjunction with The Works. It’s a veritable repository of madcap ideas pursued vigorously into the street — and onto the tops of ladders and in hula hoops. Those in perpetual mourning about the end of the endless hockey season can find in the lineup, a continuation or a catharsis:. You could call The Hockey Circus Show a wild exploration of the bond between man, puck, skate, stick. Or not. And there is, apparently, juggling. Check out the shows and the schedule at edmontonstreetfest.com.

The Realistic Joneses, Walterdale Theatre. Photo supplied.

Another is Will Eno’s intriguing The Realistic Joneses, opening Wednesday, and running  is a curiously escalating  collision between two couples, both named Jones. John Anderson’s production runs through July 16. Tickets: walterdaletheatre.square.site.

A third is the elaborately titled The Immaculate Perfection of F**king and Bleeding in the Gender Neutral Bathroom of an Upper-Middle Class High School, which introduces a new theatre indie, BodyCube arts collective. It runs tonight through July 9 at the Studio Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barns. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca. 

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Doors will slam, towels will drop: Farren Timoteo goes farcical in A Grand Time in the Rapids at Teatro La Quindicina

Posted on July 3, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Farren Timoteo, A Grand Time in the Rapids, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I love watching actors work hard,” says Farren Timoteo. “It’s one of my favourite things about theatre. I love it when you see them changing too much, running around too much, negotiating crazy entrances and exits and dexterous dialogue….” 

There is, arguably, nothing like farce for providing all of the above. And Timoteo, happily, is in one, opening Friday as the Teatro La Quindicina 40th anniversary season continues at the Varscona. “There’s a big smile on my face,” says the actor (who’s also a director and playwright) on the phone from his car in front of the theatre.

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In an archive of original comedies of every stripe, A Grand Time In The Rapids, a four-door three-actor door-slammer/towel-dropper which premiered a decade ago, is Stewart Lemoine’s sole farce. And the small cast size ups the ante on the formal virtuosity and brinkmanship adrenalin built into farces, Timoteo thinks.

 “What he asks of us,” says Timoteo, “is to create that energy, hijinx, chaos, with no compromise…. To give (audiences) the traditional farce experience with all the fixin’s — even though there are only three of us, and one of us plays two characters. 

It’s Grand Rapids, Michigan in the 1950s. And Timoteo is Ted Todd, an “etiquette expert.” He enters the action by appearing at the door of a young widow, Thalia Cumberland (Kristen Padayas). She’s written to a newspaper advice column, Ask Aunt Elva, for help finessing a tricky matter of propriety in an impending encounter with a new suitor (Andrew MacDonald-Smith). Aunt Elva, the putative chaperone who’s been pushing up daisies for some time, turns out to be Ted Todd, in the flesh. That’s for openers. 

“Negotiating complex circumstances that fly out of that set-up in ways no one could predict”: that, in a nutshell, is what happens next, along with “a great deal of fun,” as Timoteo puts it. “A perfect recipe for chaos and disaster.” A sigh of amusement is audible on the phone. “Such a joy to be part of!”  

This season Timoteo has already “slammed a few doors,” as he puts it. He was in Holly Lewis’s The Fiancée — a six-actor seven-door farce that premiered at the Citadel last fall — as one of the three fiancées to whom the kind-hearted but hapless heroine has found herself engaged, in war-time Edmonton. “It now seems remarkable to me that in the middle of a pandemic we had no COVID cancellations,” says Timoteo, who played a mild-mannered  compulsive list-maker who gets mistaken for a plumber in the course of the escalating chaos “It was so amazing to be back onstage…. We laughed and laughed and laughed.”

Actually, speaking of slammed doors, there’s a certain noble farcical intricacy involved in doing live theatre during a pandemic — stops and starts and re-starts, acrobatic pivots and re-pivots. Timoteo knows this first-hand. He’s the artistic director since 2007 of Alberta Musical Theatre, a company devoted to taking original musicals (mostly fractured, contemporary versions of fairy tales) to kid audiences. This past season, “we did ‘digital touring’” he says. “I missed the magic of transforming school into magic kingdoms…. But we tried to do whatever we could to be in front of students….” 

In the interests of safety Timoteo re-purposed the 2009 musical Hansel and Gretel he co-wrote with composer Jeff Unger for a single, extremely busy, actor (Bhey Pastolero). In “the most elaborate Zoom call you’ve ever seen” the production was live-streamed for school audiences from the company’s Playhouse studio. “We’d come in every day, put up the set and the three cameras, film it live, and tear everything down. Just like being on tour.” 

It was, he concedes, “a remarkable amount of work.” And doing it without a live, physically present audience made the work that much harder. “Interacting with the kids is “such a huge part of what fuels the energy of school tours.”

Timoteo arrives in 1950s Michigan fresh from a spring run of his own warm-hearted, funny multi-character solo show Made In Italy at the Arts Club in Vancouver, after a winter engagement at Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton. “I have never loved doing it more than ever during the last four months … for so many reasons!” Timoteo declares. As for everybody else in theatre, the show had been cancelled more than once. And “there was a moment I thought this is never going to happen. Maybe we’ll never get to do it again.” 

So miraculous did going live seem that in Vancouver, the first time “a little old Italian grandfather walks onstage and acknowledges the audience” in his opening scene of Made In Italy, “it moved me so deeply I teared up,” he says. On the current tour of the show, which goes back to the Arts Club after A Grand Time in the Rapids closes, he’s already done more than a hundred performances.

The Lemoine farce we’ll see at the Varscona has a momentous Teatro lustre all its own. For one thing, it’s directed by Belinda Cornish, who made her Teatro debut in this very play as the mysterious widow Thalia in 2006. For another, it reunites Timoteo onstage with his MacEwan theatre school classmate and pal MacDonald-Smith.

In a coincidence so As Timoteo reports, joining the Teatro ensemble was their dual dream. “We’d sit in my car, for hours and hours, dreaming and talking about theatre .… I don’t know if we realized it at the time, but we were setting goals: I wanna do this, be there…. And, hey, let’s do it together. And we did! They arrives at Teatro direct from the beanstalk, so to speak: an endless Alberta Musical Theatre tour of Jack and the Beanstalk, with Timoteo as the guileless Jack and McDonald-Smith as the giant. “And here we are, all those years later.” 

Their Teatro debuts came in different Lemoines. Timoteo’s was A Momentary Lapse in 2005, a comedy in which he played a young guy with a rebellious streak and a certain unfortunate obsession with fire, doing community service in the form of an educational play. MacDonald-Smith entered Teatro World in The Salon of the Talking Turk, as a breezy over-achieving orphan loose in New York high society in the 1920s. 

The first Teatro show they did together, thinks Timoteo, was Lemoine’s pocket musical What Gives?, as a New York musical theatre team saved from terminal writer’s block by the sudden appearance of a pair of romantic heroines right out of the musical they’re not writing.

Twenty years out of theatre school, and they’re both artistic directors of theatre companies these days, MacDonald-Smith and Cornish co- a.d.s at Teatro and Timoteo at Alberta Musical Theatre. By one of those curious coincidences that dot theatre news everywhere, Timoteo is sending his Alberta Musical Theatre forces on their first live in-person school tour this fall with … Jack And The Beanstalk.

“I feel so lucky,” says Timoteo. “SO grateful…. to have the chance to make people laugh, to share joy and laughter, and give people a good time…. I don’t take it for granted; I’m sponging it all up!” 

PREVIEW

A Grand Time In The Rapids

Theatre: Teatro La Quindicina

Written by: Stewart Lemoine

Directed by: Belinda Cornish

Starring: Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Kristen Padayas, Farren Timoteo

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: July 8 to 24

Tickets: teatroq.com

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