Ten years of SkirtsAfire: amplifying the voices of women and non-binary artists

Posted on February 25, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Janira Moncayo, Teneil Whiskeyjack, Christine Sokaymoh Frederick in Ayita, SkirtsAfire 2022. Photo by Noelle Steinhauer

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s been a decade, amazingly, since Annette Loiselle and a couple of her actor friends, Sharla Matkin and Nadien Chu, sat at the Carrot Cafe, plotting over popcorn, red wine, and lopsided statistics. 

For years Loiselle, a veteran actor and co-founder of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, had been “looking around me in the arts community,” as she says, and “seeing, there in plain sight, how women didn’t have as many opportunities in the theatre profession as men.” It was not a sight for sore eyes.

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“It was systemic. Mostly men were running the theatre companies. Mostly the plays being produced were written by men. And that (imbalance) trickled down to performers…. The statistics blew me away, how bad it actually was.” 

“Well, what can we do? Our original instinct was let’s start a theatre company!’” says Loiselle of an idea that’s always found fertile ground in this theatre town. “Let’s do all women’s plays and hire all women as performers, directors, writers, designers!” There already was an indie company built on that model, though, and they didn’t want to compete with The Maggie Tree. 

“That’s when we started thinking festival. And multi-disciplinary…. We discovered women weren’t just under-represented in theatre but in all the arts,” says Loiselle. SkirtsAfire was born in that thought. And the annual celebration of women and non-binary artists has expanded in length, in artistic vision, in audience outreach, in cultural impact ever since — one of Edmonton arts’ bona fide success stories. “I was a bit intimidated,” says the SkirtsAfire artistic director, who has a very appealing resistance to rhetorical grandeur. “I understood theatre, and I understood music a bit. But visual arts? Spoken word? A whole new world for me.” 

The debut SkirtsAfire of 2013 was small — but not that small. Among other ventures in programming it presented a fusion production, Piece By Piece, “not so much a play but a song cycle” created by and starring popular Edmonton singer-songwriter Maria Dunn. It chronicled the history of the women at the GWG factory, and their fight for rights. “Maria created a video and projections; she sang songs and told stories…. And because she had such a following, we had some audience (600) that year,” says Loiselle.

A festival that started as a pencil mini-skirt, so to speak, has volumized into something big, gathered, elasticized, mid-calf to floor-length. The four-day celebration in 2013, with its 70 artist participants, has grown steadily —  into an influential 10-day festival, with multiple locations and curators, a full theatrical production centrepiece, and (even in the tortuous pandemical vagaries of the last two years) an audience of 2,000.

Annette Loiselle, artistic director of SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by April MacDonald Killins.

“In 10 years a lot has happened and changed in theatre,” muses Loiselle, “and we’ve gone down that road too. The climate has improved for sure. It’s started, but we still have a long way to go.… in gender and cultural diversity.” Now, she thinks, “it’s less about uplifting the voices of women and more about uplifting the voices of under-represented communities. Which includes women!” 

“It’s not like we don’t hire men. We do. But our goal is that the people driving the work are women or non-binary people.” 

SkirtsAfire may be multi-disciplinary. But these days theatre is still “at the forefront of the festival,” as Loiselle puts it. Some years, the festival presents; some years it produces. In 2020, for example, on the brink of the pandemic, SkirtsAfire premiered Michele Vance Hehir’s The Blue Hour. Several firsts are attached to that atmospheric play, the third of the playwright’s Roseglen trilogy set in a small fictional prairie town.

The Blue Hour by Michelle Vance Hehir, SkirtsAFire Festival. Photo by BB Collective.

One was that “it was our first year in a proper theatre” (the Westbury) after years of strenuous SkirtsAfire labours building a theatre from scratch annually in the Alberta Avenue Community League. “A big move forward!” says Loiselle. Another was that it was Loiselle’s own directing debut, a handsome large-scale production designed by Megan Koshka and lighted by T. Erin Gruber. 

Coralie Cairns, Mary Hulbert, Chantelle Han in The Mommy Monologues. Photo by BB Collective Photography.

The festival has showcased the work of other experienced playwrights, Nicole Moeller (The Mothers) and Trina Davies (The Romeo Initiative) among them. And the development of new plays (and new playwrights) is a SkirtsAfire goal. The centrepiece of the 2017 edition, The Mommy Monologues, was a collection of original vignettes by 11 playwrights and one singer-songwriter. In 2018 SkirtsAfire launched the “Peep Shows,” staged readings (curated by dramaturge Tracy Carroll) of plays-in-progress the festival hopes to produce in the future.

Heather Cant, Aaron Hursh, Sarah Feutl in The Romeo Initiative, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by BB Collective.

A decade of slowly acquiring profile, grants, and an audience has arrived — despite the grinding exigencies of the pandemic — at a 10th anniversary edition that’s the biggest and busiest yet, says Loiselle. The festivities open on the Westbury stage March 3 with the premiere of Ayita, a theatre/Indigenous contemporary dance fusion by the Indigenous film and theatre artist Teneil Whiskeyjack of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation.  

“It’s been a long-time coming,” says Loiselle, who’d caught sight of Ayita as a Nextfest staged reading in 2019. “We’d hoped to produce it in 2021. But despite the pandemic we still managed to do the workshopping we needed to do — on the land,” she says of the piece, which weaves stories of three generations of Cree women into a contemporary fabric.  

She describes the SkirtsAfire premiere production, co-directed by Lebogang Disele and choreographer Sandra Lamouche, as “very much Indigenous-driven. I’m just following the lead of an Elder (Alsena White), a Knowledge Keeper (Lana Whiskeyjack), and the creator herself.” And the company, including actors, dancers and technical crew, is nearly all Indigenous. 

SkirtsAfire acquired, too, the dramaturgical expertise of New York-born Toronto-based Monique Mojica, an expert in land-based Indigenous theatre creation. Says Loiselle, “she’s so passionate about this very different way of creation, bringing Indigenous models into dramaturgy and the building and telling of stories.”

It’s a process of making theatre that is in striking contrast to Euro-centric colonial models — non-hierarchical, developed through movement,“tied to being on the land, to being rooted in Indigenous teaching and ancestry, to stories that have passed on for generations,” as Loiselle describes. “I’ve had to let go of my need to understand the process — and just trust it.”

When SkirtsAfire moves into a space, they occupy every corner. During the run of Ayita, the Westbury lobby (as designed by Daniela Masellis) will be the site of installations, too, connected to the production. 

A&N, SkirtsAfire 2021. Photo by April MacDonald Killins

The expanded anniversary edition returns to the roomy old A&N space on Whyte Avenue. That’s where Dana Wylie’s “theatrical song cycle” Makings of a Voice was filmed last year for SkirtsAfire. And it’s where singer-songwriters performed in the front windows, with sound pumped out into the street where the audience could gather.  

The mystery question for passers-by, laughs Loiselle, was what was in the darkness behind the activity in the windows. And answer was … nothing. “What if we actually had something to see?” This time, in partnership with the art and design company Vignettes, there is. And it’s something ambitiously multi-disciplinary: a main floor cabaret space, three interactive art installations and a live painter. Ah, and after the opening A-Line Variety Show March 4, five nights of entertainment: one is “a little bit country,” one is “a little bit roots and soul,” and two are “comedy nights” (Dirty Show & Celeste Lampa for one and Girl Brain & ZENON for the other). The festival has capped the audience at 100 max, for distancing. 

For those who feel more secure on the outside looking in, the annual Skirt Challenge, Skirts On Whyte, happens in four Strathcona retail store-front windows: four skirts created by four designers assigned the same box of up-cycled materials in windows fully realized — à la Macy’s New York, says Loiselle — for colour and lighting. 

Esther Forseth, SirtsAfire 2021. Photo by April MacDonald Killins

Music? You’ll find singer-songwriters in The Key of Me series at the Woodrack Cafe, and a three-choir festival, Songs For The Sanctuary, at Holy Trinity Anglican Church.  Spoken word, storytelling, film? Seek out the schedule at the Westbury.  

The challenges continue for festivals in these uncertain times. The contradictions built into city zoning requirements, and a granting system that favours “projects” over “programming don’t help. Neither does the provincial government’s sudden without-warning no-consultation jettisoning of COVID precautions. The performing arts industry, and SkirtsAfire, have worked so hard to keep artists, volunteers and audiences safe.“It’s really tough,” Loiselle sighs. “Such a challenging situation for businesses and the arts….”

But a decade of hard work later, the SkirtsAfire idea, a festival designed to amplify the voices of women and non-binary artists, has gained traction in the collective imagination. SkirtsAfire is an all-sizes fit. 

PREVIEW

SkirtsAfire Festival 2022

Where: Old Strathcona. Westbury Theatre (ATB  Financial Arts Barns), A&N on Whyte, Woodrack Cafe, Holy Trinity Anglican Church, and assorted retail outlets.

Running: March 3 to 13

Tickets and full schedule: skirtsafire.com

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Old Strathcona here they come: for the first time in Workshop West history, a theatre of their own

Posted on February 23, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Heather Inglis, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre artistic producer, at the Gateway Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Workshop West Playwrights Theatre is moving.  

Come March 1 you’ll find the venerable company, age 43, in their own theatre, in the heart of Edmonton’s entertainment district. Welcome to the newly christened Gateway Theatre in Old Strathcona — formerly Theatre Network’s  Roxy on Gateway, formerly C103, formerly Catalyst, formerly a defunct warehouse.

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“It’s the first time in its history Workshop West will be housed in an autonomous venue that it operates,” says artistic producer Heather Inglis of the 130-seat black box theatre next door to the Yardbird Suite on Gateway Blvd. And for the first time, Workshop West’s roster of plays-in-progress can be developed, workshopped and rehearsed in the theatre where they will be performed.  

For the last 30 years, the theatre company founded by Gerry Potter in 1978 to develop and showcase new Canadian plays has applied its signature tender loving care to new scripts (and their writers) from offices and rehearsal space in a north-end neighbourhood ex-church. And when it came time to take new plays to the stage, they’ve rented theatre venues all over town, among them the Backstage Theatre, La Cité francophone, the Citadel’s Rice Theatre. The earliest sighting of Workshop West, as Potter has said, happened when he rented Espace Tournesol, the grotty ex-Kingdom Hall near the Coliseum that became Theatre Network for a puppet non-extravaganza called Punch and Polly.

The company that started in Potter’s own south side apartment has included headquarters in an ex-furniture store on 95th St. behind the long-gone Theatre 3 and the McLeod Building downtown. And, since 1992, Workshop West has been ensconced in The Third Space near Kingsway, originally fixed up by Northern Light Theatre (and shared with that company before NLT de-camped its offices to Old Strathcona).   

“I love that space up north,” says Inglis of the ex-church, a desirable, busy, and affordable rehearsal space. “But really (its location) takes Workshop West away from the public eye… So the notion that we can have our own venue with a store front where people can find us in the heart of an arts district, where people are looking to attend cultural events … will allow the company to grow.” 

“A fully operational black box and bigger space … gives us lots of opportunities to promote playwriting and playwrights. To generate a larger impact for the work that we’re producing,” says Inglis. “It’s a big year for us, a lot of work, and really exciting to see the sign go up!” 

“Gateway.” Inglis likes the sound of it. “It’s simple. It speaks to the notion of theatre being a gateway — to new conversations, new ideas.” The Workshop West slogan ‘it starts here’ “might seem funny for a theatre that’s 43 years old,” she says. “But it’s about new beginnings, new voices, new stories; it’s about bringing people together…. When people come to the theatre they are coming to the beginning of something.” 

There are other theatres in town that produce new Canadian plays of course, Theatre Network, Fringe Theatre, Catalyst, the Citadel among them. “It’s the development part of the equation that makes us unique,” says Inglis. “It’s the emphasis on working with writers, the community outreach of finding and identifying them, and helping them get their work eventually to the stage.” It was former artistic director Vern Thiessen, a playwright himself, who noted that Workshop West Playwrights Theatre is the only professional theatre in the country with “playwrights” actually in its title. 

As soon as Theatre Network moved out of the Roxy on Gateway last spring (back to their 124th St. home where the re-built Roxy is applying finishing touches), there was interest in the Old Strathcona space, leased from the city by the Jazz Society. Workshop West submitted a proposal to the Jazz Society for a 10-year lease in late summer, says Inglis. “It’s a once-in-a-decade opportunity; when the iron is hot….” 

Until Rapid Fire Theatre move into their new home later in 2022 in the old telephone museum they’re renovating in Fringe-Land, they’ll sub-lease from Workshop West. The improv company has been doing shows there since January.  

For Workshop West, the Old Strathcona location is exponentially higher-profile. “And for playwrights it’s a very unique circumstance to be workshopping in a space where the work is potentially going to be performed,” says Inglis. Not only that, but the time lost in moving to rental performance venues will be re-gained, to benefit the playwright, the cast, and the production crew. Extending the performance run for popular shows becomes a possibility, too.

The flexibility of reconfiguring a black box theatre is particularly appealing to Inglis’s aesthetic. She arrived at Workshop West just pre-pandemic from Theatre Yes, an indie with a history of site-specific performance in unexpected spaces sometimes as tiny as an elevator (The Elevator Project). “It allows you to change the configuration specially for every play that’s produced in the building…. Plays are about a relationship between an audience and a story.”

“For the audience we can constantly shift the expectation of what they’ll be seeing in the space — one of the beautiful things a black box offers.” 

Workshop West has maintained an active, multi-pronged program of playwriting initiatives. But even before the devastation of COVID, the mainstage seasons were shrinking in number of productions. “Our hope is to expand — not immediately; we are in a post-COVID world — back to three or four mainstage shows a year,” says Inglis. 

“We want the space to be available to the community at an affordable price,” she says. “Our preference is for artists who are producing new Canadian work.” She hopes the City and Arts Habitat will maintain the Third Space as a civic arts venue, so crucial to small and mid-sized companies as a rehearsal space, “the best in town and so important to the arts ecology here.” 

Meanwhile renos to the lobby of the Gateway Theatre continue (“to make the space our own!”). And fund-raising for equipping it with permanent theatre gear is about to start. Workshop West’s season in their new Gateway digs starts with the Springboards Festival, returning to action March 22 to 27. It continues with the premiere of Michelle Robb’s Tell Us What Happened in May, and public performances of The Shoe Project in June. And then, in the summer, the Gateway will be an official Fringe venue. 

The signage counts. “We want to be able to promote the work of playwrights to the community,” says Inglis, “to keep the importance and relevance of local work front and centre.… We are a town that loves local playwrights.” 

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A home of their own, in the entertainment ‘hood: Rapid Fire Theatre at 41

Posted on February 19, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

They’ve dreamed it for years. Now, at age 41, Rapid Fire Theatre finally has a home of their own. And it’s in the ‘hood that’s their  traditional home base, Old Strathcona. 

Edmonton’s premier improv company is moving into the Strathcona Exchange Building, the historic old telephone exchange-turned-phone museum on 83rd Ave. you know from summers of Fringe shows. Which means that RFT will be throwing down the welcome mat in the heart of the city’s liveliest entertainment district, less than a block from the Varscona, where audiences queued for their late-night improv shows for more than two decades.

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The building — now owned by Telus and sitting empty (save for Fringe shows in August) since the early 2000’s — dates back more than a century to the era when Strathcona merged with the City of Edmonton. It’s a fixer-upper, to say the least, as RFT artistic director Matt Schuurman explains. And the home improvements have already started. “We just finished the demolition of the interior last week. And its looks far different, much bigger…. The potential is so exciting!” 

In January, Rapid Fire exited downtown where they’d spent eight seasons in the Citadel’s Zeidler Hall, and crossed the river. Since then their programming has been happening in the Roxy on Gateway, the black box theatre that’s been home to Catalyst Theatre and, for six years as their 124th re-build progressed, Theatre Network. And that’s where you’ll find RFT shows till their new theatre is ready: “no hard date yet, but maybe as early as the fall of this year,” says Schuurman. “A lot of things can put that back,” including supply chain issues.

Group2 the architecture/interior design firm in charge of Theatre Network’s new Roxy, is creating the design. Though details remain to be finalized, the budget for the custom re-fit is “ball-park $3 million.” What Schuurman and his improviser cohorts have in mind is that rarest of showbiz venues: a theatre designed specifically for improv. “In all the different spaces we’ve worked in, what we kept coming back to was this: a level of intimacy with the audience,” he says. “Not a hard separation with an audience quietly sitting in the dark watching a show…. We’re performance that bleeds into the audience, that’s constantly engaged with the audience, performers constantly moving into the house and the audience coming on to the stage. Exchange!” 

“Side note,” says Schuurman, happily, “I love that the building is called the Strathcona Exchange. It’s perfect!” 

The main house upstairs will have a capacity of about 160 or 170, “our magic number,” Schuurman says. “Anything over 200 is unwieldy … since the audience is part of the show. The set-up is proscenium but with a curved stage — a mix between a proscenium, and a thrust stage. The audience is curved around the stage, so people on the ends can see each other and share the experience.” 

Enhancing the exchange principle is a stage that’s very low, “only six inches off the ground, a single step on and off the stage,” says Schuurman. In the basement there will be a second smaller space, capacity under 100, a black box useful as a rehearsal and practice studio and RFT’s busy, expandable roster of public workshops and classes. Before the pandemic that schedule amounted to three or four days a week, he says. “During festival season, for Improvaganza (RFT’s international improv/ comedy fest) and the Fringe, it’ll be a secondary performance space.”

And “for the first time ever, we’ll have offices, a work place for our entire staff (numbering around 10, mostly part-time except for Schuurman and general manager Sarah Huffman), to be in the same building, together.” 

Huffman started her general manager gig a year ago, just about the time the lease with Telus was secured. “This’ll be a big project,” Schuurman told her at the time. “And, cool story, it turns out her grandfather worked in (creating) the phone museum!” 

Soon, home sweet home for Rapid Fire Theatre.

In this town improv is a growth industry. And Rapid Fire has outgrown its series of venues, the Varscona and the Citadel’s Zeidler included. With a building of their own, and a prime location, the theatre company can grow again. “Our location in the neighbourhood opens up new opportunities,”  Schuurman points out. Proximity to the Farmer’s Market has inspired plans for kids’ matinees on Saturdays, for example. 

He imagines RFT’s dozen-year-old schedule of outreach programs, taken to youth at such organizations as the Amiskwaciy Academy and the Boyle Street Education Centre, happening in the new space. And RFT’s roster of corporate clients can be hosted, too, for team-building workshops and the like. Here’s the pitch: “Take an improv workshop in our theatre on a Friday afternoon , have dinner somewhere on Whyte, come and see a show at the end of the night.” 

“I haven’t counted the steps out,” says Schuurman. “But I think we might actually be closer to the Next Act (the showbiz bar and bistro) than we were at the Varscona.” Yes, back home where they belong.

 

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Melanie Piatocha: theatre has lost a bright talent and a questing spirit

Posted on February 15, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Melanie Piatocha in All Shook Up, Mayfield Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In this bleak mid-winter of theatre, heartbreaking news of the January death of actor Melanie Piatocha at 36 seems particularly cruel.

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The abrupt loss of a talent so expansive, and a quester so spirited, so restless, makes the world of theatre seem especially fraught and fragile. Our sense of possibility is dimmed by the tragedy. Exceptional talent, hard work, kindness are recurring motifs as theatre people think of their fellow artist. So is the more elusive theatrical term “sparkle.” 

In a dramatic way, Edmonton-born Piatocha, the beautiful north end kid who found her people at Victoria School of the Arts and Grant MacEwan theatre arts, was the quintessential triple-threat, the actor/singer/dancers who are the essence of musical theatre. And Piatocha had the resumé to prove it. 

When she strapped on those musical theatre single-strap pumps or tap shoes and found her light, there seemed to be nothing she couldn’t do, as 15 years of revues and Broadway musicals at the Mayfield, her most frequent employer, attest. And that archive of work, show after show, runs parallel to striking performances in the challenging off-centre, small-scale musicals, Drat! The Cat! and Little Fish among them, that are the specialty of The Plain Janes. 

But, more than that, as the Mayfield’s Van Wilmott points out, and her Janes’ history reveals, Piatocha was driven to seek unexpected depths under the surface glitter of even the flimsiest revue. For Class of ’63, “a silly revue in which she was brilliant in every scene,” Wilmott remembers sending her the name of a movie to watch. “I asked, simply, if she would still have time to do this. … I didn’t have to tell her what to look; I knew she would know. Twenty-four hours later came her reply: ‘Candy rocks.” So did Melanie!”

“It didn’t matter if she was the lead or in the ensemble, her attention to detail was the same…. She had an unequalled work ethic. She did more evening post-rehearsal homework than any actor I’ve ever encountered,” says Willmott. He valued the “trust and respect” in their professional relationship. “She had no problems pulling me aside and telling me whatever I just said was a bad idea. And she was always right. We miss her terribly.”  

He remembers advice in 2005 from the late Tim Ryan, whose credentials as a talent scout were honed by his years founding and leading the theatre arts program at Grant MacEwan. “You gotta see this girl; she’s terrific!” She landed her first Mayfield show, the Christmas revue, that year. 

The size of the role didn’t affect the unflagging commitment from Piatocha; her ensemble esprit de corps has many testimonials from her fellow theatre artists. In Kate Ryan’s 2018 Mayfield production of All Shook Up, for example — a jukebox musical that’s a sassy cavort through the Elvis canon with Shakespearean storylines — Piatocha was a sparkling lovestruck heroine in men’s garb, à la Twelfth Night’s Viola or As You Like It’s Rosalind. In the Mayfield’s Hairspray, she brought a particular piquancy to the role of the heroine’s nerdy bespectacled BFF; their relationship was one of the highlights of Tracey Flye’s production. In Bob Baker’s Citadel/ Banff Centre production of West Side Story, she threw herself into the tiny but impactful role of Anybodys, the little gang wannabe.

Melanie Piatocha and Chris W. Cook in Drat! The Cat!, Plain Jane Theatre Company

Lead or ensemble, in musical revues or Shakespeare in the park (Freewill Shakespeare Festival), Piatocha was a full-commitment artist. With the Plain Janes, she starred as an 1890s New York socialite-turned-jewel thief who preys on the rich in Kate Ryan’s 2015 Plain Janes production of Drat! The Cat!, a highly unusual Victorian melodrama/caper. As part of the gallery of fractious Manhattanites who surround the angst-ridden protagonist in the John Michael LaChiusa chamber musical Little Fish, she was Anne Frank, of diary fame. 

“Melanie cared with her whole heart,” says director Ryan. “She was a fierce and fragile light onstage and off-. She elevated every story, every moment. She was direct and honest. I loved working with her as a friend and an artist, and miss her terribly….” 

Melanie Piatocha (far right) in The Invisible – Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Catalyst Theatre. Photo by dbphotographics.

Catalyst Theatre’s artistic director Jonathan Christenson who cast Piatocha — as Jack, a crack sniper in the ensemble of all-female secret agents in his original musical play The Invisible: Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare, echoes that thought. “She was a truly special talent,” he says. “Fiercely committed, uncompromisingly professional, demanding nothing but the best of herself at all times. At the same time she was phenomenally sensitive, generous, kind-hearted, thoughtful, and despite her exceptional talent, humble…. She threw herself into everything she did.”  She was slated to re-join the cast next month to prepare for a remounting of The Invisible. 

Northern Light Theatre artistic director Trevor Schmidt’s first sighting of Piatocha was as a 15-year-old Vic student in an NLT production of The Oedipus Project, an arty deconstruction of the Greek tragedy. “She was shy but the sparkle in her eye said she was mischievous. I adored her immediately.” 

Melanie Piatocha in Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

When Schmidt discovered Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen to launch his NLT season in 2009, he thought of Piatocha, 24 at the time and getting ready for her marriage to fellow actor Mike Zimmerman, to be the title character in a play in which “the third most popular sophomore” reluctantly invades the brainiac world of four math geeks. “It could be played shallow, silly and clueless — like Clueless or Legally Blonde.… But I think there’s a lot of pain in these characters. I wanted Melanie because she’s so emotionally accessible as an actor. I needed her to anchor the whole show, as the central character and the catalyst.” 

“I told her she was the only person I would consider for the role. And if she didn’t want to do it I wouldn’t do it, either,” Schmidt remembers. “Melanie very seriously sat me down, and said that she wanted me to know she was considered ‘slow’ in the rehearsal process by other directors, but assured me she would ‘get there’ by opening.” And indeed she did, in a very funny performance as the popular girl who gets her comeuppance from a bunch of nerds, and then joins them. 

“Her self-awareness of her own personal process was insightful. And her willingness to articulate it was simultaneously extremely vulnerable and brave,” says Schmidt. “’Extremely vulnerable and brave’ are the best descriptions I can think of for Melanie. So talented, promising, kind, and gentle. I felt very protective of her….” 

I remember interviewing Piatocha for the Journal at the time about the show, her first in some time in which dance breaks were not involved. “It was so refreshing,” she said, “because it reminded me that I was an actor first, someone who can hold the storyline, then a singer second and a dancer third.”

Melanie Piatocha and Carmela Sison in Jailbait, Northern Light Theatre, Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Piatocha returned to NLT the following season in another challenging role, a hard-edged tough-cookie of a 15-year-old out clubbing with her more malleable pal in Jailbait.  She appeared in Schmidt’s production alongside Zimmerman. 

Piatocha and Zimmerman moved across the country to P.E.I. five years ago. She described the relocation as personal rather than professional — a quest for beauty and adventure as she described to Alan Kellogg in an interview for Teatro La Quindicina’s AIEEEEE! newsletter.  “I’m embracing not knowing. I might just stretch out and start self-producing in a new city,” she said. 

Melanie Piatocha and Richard Lee Hsi in Shocker’s Delight!. Photo by Mat Busby.

Piatocha was back in her home town to make her Teatro debut in Ron Pederson’s 2017 revival of Shocker’s Delight, Stewart Lemoine’s  funny/sad love-triangle comedy with its trio of collegiate characters struggling to apply their book learning in the laboratory of real life, and attach it to something as unmappable, unreadable as the human heart. Piatocha was delightful and touching as Julia, the bright, impulsive, forthright romantic heroine.

The word Julia tosses around with her friends through Shocker’s Delight is “unfathomable.” It has an echo for us too, now.  As Christenson says, “we’ve been reeling, as have so many theatre folks across the country, trying to make sense of the incomprehensible and figure out how we move forward without her.” 

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Someone on your side: Berend McKenzie, Catalyst Confluence Fellow, reaches out to outsiders

Posted on February 9, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Berend McKenzie in NGGRFG (would you say the name of this play?). Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“This is about visibility!” declares Berend McKenzie with the kind of go-for-the-gusto velocity that makes time fly when you talk to them. “This is about opportunity! This is about being in the room where it happens!” they say quoting a musical (Hamilton) they admire without actually liking. You’ll have to imagine the way the italics roll out…. 

McKenzie is talking about Confluence, the second annual “creative fellowship” established by Catalyst to support IBPOC artists in creating, honing, and setting forth their own work their own way. They’re this year’s Confluence Fellow, and at some point we’ll be seeing their Confluence project, a new musical-in-progress called In The Centre, set in a care centre for AIDS patients.  

Actually, the word ‘confluence” seems custom-tailored for McKenzie, who’s black and queer, with a tumultuous history and a skill set that seem infinitely expansible (stage and screen actor; writer of plays, sketches, short stories, films).

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Their story, which has more than its share of tragedy, death, setbacks, self-discoveries and reinventions, is a veritable confluence of artistic branches. And it’s a wellspring of raw lived-in material for their plays, which step up fearlessly to subjects like racism and homophobia. 

McKenzie knows what it’s like to be on the outside looking in. They know, as well, what’s like “to have a hero on your side,” as they put it. And, they figure that “reaching out to BIPOC queer outsiders in schools and universities, and being a cheerleader for them” is a part of being a Confluence fellow. 

Berend McKenzie. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Which explains why they’ve teamed up with the faculty of Victoria School and the Black Students Association there for Black History Month and beyond, to orchestrate a series of online conversations for the kids. And they’ve reached out to a wide range of practising artists — ceramicists, trans and two-spirit performers, actors, playwrights (Brad Fraser among them).…

The starting point is three or four questions, says McKenzie, who has an empathetic kind of exuberance about them in conversation. “Things like ‘what does representation look like to you? What does Black History Month mean to you? What would you say to people who feel they don’t have a place in the arts because of the colour of their skin?’” Then the students take it away; they’re in charge.

“It’s a way for kids to feel connection, and get some inspiration.” COVID, as they point out, has ravaged the sense of cultural connectivity, and “destroyed a lot of hopes and dreams.” This month they’re consulting with the theatre students at MacEwan University to launch a similar project. 

“If people don’t feel there’s a place for them, I get it!” says McKenzie.  

MacEwan theatre arts in its pre-university period was their alma mater. Which is where they found their “hero,” the late teacher/mentor/director Tim Ryan, who stood up for them when they heard from others that “you’re not black enough, or you’re too gay…. He saw in me what others didn’t. He’d punch me in the shoulder and say ‘you can do it! I believe in you!’” And it was Ryan who cast them in such Leave It To Jane productions as The Tempest and Measure For Measure. 

Right after graduation, McKenzie, who’d been diagnosed HIV-positive, moved to Vancouver. It was 1991, “before the pills,” as they put it. What followed was a sort of apocalyptic decade-long drugs and alcohol binge, as they describe. “Everyone I knew had died, or was continuing to die. I went to Vancouver to party my face off. I spent the first 10 years waiting for my end, and it never came. No matter what I did.” ”

Once sober, they decided to be a film actor. That at least was the plan. “I did three horrible big-budget movies,” says McKenzie cheerfully. In Angelina Jolie’s Life Or Something, “one of the worst movies ever made. I played her make-up artist.” He was in Connie and Carla, with Nia Varadalos and Toni Collette, “also a bomb,” and Catwoman with Halle Berry, who won a Razzie for her work. “I had to walk by her cubicle and say ‘man sandwich 12 o’clock’,” and they got asked to “be a little less gay!” They laugh. “I mean, what’s my motivation?”

About then, by no coincidence, McKenzie started writing.  

Writing and Edmonton are inextricably linked in the McKenzie story, “The very first thing I’d ever written” was a short play for the Loud ‘N’ Queer festival here. Fashion Police was based, as they describe, on a scene (All That Glitters), from Darrin Hagen’s memoir The Edmonton Queen in which they appeared. In Fashion Police, “the story is judge-y gay people sitting at a table criticizing people about their fashion choices.” 

“Titans of the Edmonton theatre community, Trevor Schmidt and Andrea House, were in it. And they can make anything good!” says McKenzie. The capper was that the actors used puppets. “It was hilarious. When Trevor would lose his line, the puppet would look for it.” 

Bruthe from Get Off The Cross, Mary!. Photo by Darrin Hagen.

Putting the puppets in charge — “they get to decide who manipulates them” — inspired McKenzie’s first full-length play in 2009. Get Off The Cross, Mary! which eminently deserved its exclamation mark, is a queer puppet show for adults. “A bunch of puppets hire actors in L.A. and bring them up to Edmonton to do a queer version of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ.”  

McKenzie’s provocative solo show NGGRFG (would you say the name of this play?), based on his own experience of being marginalized, premiered at the Edmonton Fringe. It toured 25 Vancouver high schools and (in a somewhat edited version) 25 elementary schools, and played theatres in the east including Young People’s Theatre in Toronto and the Neptune in Halifax. “After the Edinburgh Fringe (“soul-crushing!”),  I didn’t write for eight years. I had nothing else to give.”

NGGRFG, Young People’s Theatre. Photo by Daniel Alexander.

These days McKenzie is back in Edmonton, where it all began. Vancouver became too fraught with memories when his partner of 28 years passed away. When COVID hit in early 2020, McKenzie reached out to out-of-work filmmaker friends — “here’s 500 bucks; teach me what you know” — to teach him how to translate a short story they’d written for an AIDS anthology into a 10-episode web series, Hockey Night in Canada. Then, with help, they turned it into a feature film — which won them a place in WarnerMedia’s debut X Global Access Academy’s Writers’ Program. Now their script Angry Little Black Man is under option by Warner.

“It’s the opportunity of a lifetime. And it’s really changed my life,” says McKenzie. And change is their mantra, he says, as a Confluence Fellow: change in the behind-the-scenes power structure of the arts, change in the granting bodies that support them, change in the gate-keeper structure of artistic directorships.

“The main work is letting other IBPOC artists and queer outsiders know there is a place for them in a more inclusive arts community…. We’re here,” McKenzie says. “And we’re not going anywhere.”

 

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Get rhythm at the Mayfield: Nashville Outlaws. A review

Posted on February 6, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Roman Pfob, Duane Steele, Jefferson McDonald and (top) Melissa MacPherson in Nashville Outlaws, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

With Nashville Outlaws, the Mayfield returns to a hit revue it created and premiered some 15 years ago. And why not?

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In these isolating, leaden times, an homage to country music renegades Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, has life advice for us. When you get the blues get rhythm (it will put a rock and roll feeling in your bones). Who are we to argue with The Man In Black, in this regard at least?

Fashioned by the ever-mysterious Mayfield muse Will Marks with Sara-Jeanne Hosie (seen here recently as Patsy Cline), the entertaining show currently running at the Mayfield assembles a generous hit song list and a really excellent band (led by virtuoso guitar licks from Harley Symington). Ah, and a trio of performers who capture signatures  aspects of a legendary trio of cultural renegades. 

Melissa MacPherson, Duane Steele in Nashville Outlaws. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The enthusiastic narrator (Melissa MacPherson), who will step out of the super-fan frame and up to the mic impressively as June Carter and Jessi Colter, brings a nicely ironic edge to her lofty assessments when she describes the title outlaws as “a travelling Mount Rushmore of country music icons.” 

But not before she’s called them, variously, “raw” and “uninhibited,” and paid tribute to the ways the “outlaws” went up against the sanitized corporate Nashville record establishment. “Whatever country is, some of us ain’t,” says one. 

We will learn that the three had in common blue-chip credentials in substance abuse and serial divorces (not unrelated), and touring stardom that came with trimmings like “women throwing themselves at them.” But the music is what the show is all about. And the performers capture the individual styles, cadences, attitudes of the three without resorting to mere impersonation, with its parody potential. 

As Cash, statuesque, deep-voiced Roman Pfob, who can wear a black top-coat (designer: Leona Brausen) with the best of them, returns to the Mayfield in the role he occupied in 2007. Jefferson McDonald (seen here recently as Jerry Lee Lewis in the Mayfield’s Million Dollar Quartet), takes on the chipper, quirkier persona of Willie Nelson. And he captures the reedy, nasal quality of that distinctive voice and sweet-and-sour style.  As Waylon Jennings (“the biggest rebel of them all,” declares the narrator without explanation), Duane Steele wraps great country pipes around the songs with ease. 

“He just couldn’t hang on to his women,” says the narrator cheerfully of Jennings. Or was it just that he “was feeding his soul on experiences he could write about”? The narrator is amused. Thanks to MacPherson, the narrative glue that sticks Nashville Outlaws together has a certain sense of humour as it bounces between off-the-rack adulation, biographical snippets, poetic clichés like “his fire burned out,” and teasing provocations. 

Intermittent interplay between the narrator and the “characters” is part of the show. “What could go wrong?” she wonders, just before the IRS hands Nelson a tab for $16 million in back taxes, or Cash checks into the Betty Ford and gets dried out. or Jennings gets diabetes and loses a foot. “Don’t worry about me; I can still kick ass,” the super-star assures us.  

Nashville Outlaws, Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

That rhythm is captured, too, in Carmon Arlett’s set, an atmospheric saloon with a decorative cannabis flag, Southern flags, and a giant Jack Daniels bottle. And the hits roll out — Folsom Prison Blues, I Walk The Line, On The Road Again, Good-Hearted Woman, Luckenbach Texas and the rest — under a fascinating projection-scape of real-life black-and-white shots of the three designed by Matt Schuurman.

You’ll see Cash, Jennings and Nelson as little kids (they’re all adorable), and the former, the most photogenic of the three apparently, in concert at San Quentin. You’ll even see an unnerving shot of him smiling. 

As always, the music and sound quality in Mayfield revues is top-notch; the opening night audience was pumped. I would leave more detailed assessments to true country music aficionados. But from the theatrical point of view, the thought of Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings as carousing roommates, the former making biscuits, seems like a missed opportunity for a comedy sketch. Just saying.

REVIEW

Nashville Outlaws

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Written and compiled by: Will Marks and Sara-Jeanne Hosie

Directed by: Van Wilmott

Starring: Melissa MacPherson, Jefferson McDonald, Roman Pfob, Duane Steele

Running: through April 3

Tickets and COVID protocols: mayfieldtheatre.ca

 

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New faces in theatre: meet theatre creator/ designer Even Gilchrist

Posted on February 5, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

They’re young, adaptable, and creative. And as theatre returns in this late-pandemic grind, and the doors open to live audiences, we’ll be seeing the work of these theatre artists light up, and transform, the scene here, on- and backstage. You’ll meet some of these sought-after up-and-comers in this annual 12thnight New Faces series. Here’s designer/ theatre creator Even Gilchrist, in a continuing 12thnight series that began with designer Beyata Hackborn , actor Rochelle Laplante, and composer/lyricist Simon Abbott.

Designer/theatre creator/ scenographer Even Gilchrist. Photo by Janice Saxon.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

EVEN GILCHRIST, designer/ theatre creator/ ‘experimentalist’

If you found yourself in a back alley in Strathcona last summer chatting with a stranger — who happened to be a puppet running a bar in a parking lot (don’t you love when that happens?)— you were experiencing theatre dreamed up by Even Gilchrist. 

The 27-year-old designer/ theatre creator, an “experimentalist” as he identifies, found a way to restore something that had gone AWOL in these pandemical times: a sense of connection.

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Gilchrist, the Found Festival’s 2021 Fresh AiR artist-in-residence invited half a dozen fellow artists, of every stripe, to create puppets who “come to life and greet you” to tell original stories, in a series of encounters in unexpected locations. Theatre for one cohort group at a time. COVID nixed the original idea of random meet-ups in crowded Strathcona bars, so it was improv time for the puppets. “And there was something fun about going around in back alleys and parking lots….” 

Puppet Pub Crawl, Found Festival 2021, Photo by Mat Simpson

The idea of “found theatre,” up close in locations you’d never expect to find artists, is highly appealing to Gilchrist, who arrived here from Ottawa in 2019 for the U of A’s design program. “There’s something scrappy about it,” he says. “I really appreciate limitations and parameters…. What does the space sound like? What does the space smell like?” 

“Sometimes it’s way more enriching as an experience than sitting in a dark theatre and breathing silently with a bunch of other people,” thinks Gilchrist. “I like those experiences too, don’t get me wrong…. But there’s something electrifying about serendipity!” 

Naturally, Found was a true find for the Edmonton newcomer; so was Catch The Keys Productions, specialists in site-specific, immersive, ambulatory theatre like Dead Centre of Town. “Hang on! That’s exactly the kind of thing I want to be doing!” he says of his preliminary research into the scene here.

Gilchrist’s entry point into theatre wasn’t the seductive portal of the limelight. No being onstage, singing the title number, sucking up applause fr him. “It was the exact opposite of stardom,” he laughs. He’d arrived in high school in Barrie, Ont. “without ever really seeing a proper professional production of anything.” His introduction to design, though he wouldn’t have used the word at the time, was his alma mater’s contribution to the Ontario-wide school competition, the Sears Festival. It’s a memory of late-night hilarity. “We had to find something free,” he says of a play called Ten Thousand Cigarettes. Fifteen kids auditioned; 15 kids got into a play with four characters. 

Something had to give. The creation that resulted, “a strange ensemble piece,” had “people in black suits, buildings made of cigarettes, smoking zero-nicotine e-cigarettes … white masks from the Dollar Store. Something that would be in a Euro-farce!”

Gilchrist was the stage manager, and “the quasi-co-director…. the other director bailed. It became (about) creating with friends. That was the start of it.” And lo and behold, “we won the municipal round.… We had to saw our cardboard set in half in order to get it on the bus.”  No one had measured.

“I was the one trying to build the set; I didn’t realize I was designing it. I was the one putting together the costumes; I didn’t realize I was designing them….” He was working the lighting board. “I was everything that wasn’t Actor.” 

It was Gilchrist’s introduction to the multi-tasking rigours of indie theatre, and, needless to say, the concept of working all night. “It was training me from the very beginning,” he laughs. “My understanding of theatre, what it looks like, what it does, was broken open when I went to university…. I wasn’t jaded about theatre or the scene in Canada. It was a fresh new page in the book.” 

That happened in Ottawa, where he went to university and “theatre in unconventional spaces is part of the bag,” a given, says Gilchrist. 

Since his arrival in Edmonton, he’s gravitated to indie theatre, in a variety of design assignments, including such high-profile off-centre projects as Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play (You Are Here Theatre), Tracks (Amoris Projects), All That Binds Us (Azimuth Theatre). 

Patricia Cerra and Ray Strachan in The Mountaintop, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Ironically, for a designer attracted to the off-centre architecture of devised projects, there’s a rigorous sense of reality attached to his most recent design assignments, at least as a point of departure. One was the dingy Memphis motel room in which Shadow Theatre’s production of The Mountaintop unspools. On Martin Luther King’s last night on earth, cheap lino cedes to magic realism and it suddenly starts to snow, and conjure a vision of the future.

And at the U of A, Gilchrist’s  degree project was Patricia Darbasie’s production of Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage, a play that chronicles the declension into moral chaos of two couples in the recognizable setting of a bourgeois living room.Meanwhile, Gilchrist’s own play Re:Construct, which he began before coming to Edmonton, is getting its next stage of development as part of RISER Edmonton, a national initiative designed to support and enhance the profile of indie theatre. The premiere at the Backstage Theatre, originally slated for February, has been delayed till spring courtesy of the pandemic.

God of Carnage, Studio Theatre. Photo by dbphotographics

The stops and starts of the pandemical world have been cruelly destructive to theatre, as he readily concurs. But, “overall, I do remain optimistic,” Gilchrist says. “I really am hopeful. We are tired, and we hate the word ‘resilient’. But theatre endures. There’s no way we can not do art. It’s been that way from time immemorial.” 

“Theatre is certainly exhausting. But it’s not dying…. Our need to see it is way more urgent than it was before — for our brains and our hearts!”  

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New faces in theatre: meet composer/lyricist Simon Abbott

Posted on February 1, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

They’re young, adaptable, and creative. And as theatre returns in this late-pandemic grind, and the doors open to live audiences, we’ll be seeing the work of these theatre artists light up, and transform, the scene here, on- and backstage. Meet some of these sought-after up-and-comers in this annual 12thnight New Faces series. Here’s composer/lyricist Simon Abbot, in a continuing 12thnight series that began with designer Beyata Hackborn and actor Rochelle Laplante.

Musical-writing team Simon Abbott and Byron Martin, on the set of Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

SIMON ABBOTT, composer/lyricist

In a terrible year in Alberta, when everything was going from grim to grimmer and we the people were sliding around on the spectrum between fury and despair, something unexpectedly kooky, cathartic and, well, fun happened onstage in Edmonton.

The sound of laughter was heard in the land.

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A musical satire with the doom-laden name Jason Kenney in the title, containing a power ballad for the least popular premier in the country? Really? Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer sold out, before it even opened. Grindstone Theatre’s production was held over three times. By then end of the  “fourth wave” this past weekend, 11,000 masked people had seen it.

If you cheered and sang along to Fuck Kenney, a catchy rock number, or you left the theatre still humming Ottawa, a sassy assortment of multi-syllable rhymes in a duet for Rachel Notley and her boyfriend Justin Trudeau, you were hooked by the work of Grindstone’s Byron Martin and his musical-writing partner composer/co-lyricist Simon Abbott.

Simon Abbott (centre) with bandmates Erik Mortimer and Jesse Crowley, Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer. Photo supplied

The latter, onstage at the keyboard with a crack band, is a newcomer to the scene who says with startling modesty that “I feel like I’m not really a theatre guy …. completely without theatre training.” There’s a kind of remarkable instinct about a not-theatre guy who creates whole musicals with smart, funny, well-positioned songs, not to mention whole Broadway-style production numbers. Abbott credits the savvy and experience of his writing partner Martin.

The much-travelled Abbott, who grew up in Quebec and spent time in Germany, arrived here from Halifax by chance three years ago — just as Grindstone was opening its comedy theatre/bistro in Strathcona. He hit it off with Martin, and found his way into Grindstone’s popular The 11 O’Clock Number, a fully improvised show with the formidable challenge of creating a full musical on the spot. “So hard. A lot of fun.”

“I’d decided to try music full time,” he says of an unusual career that has included playing in bar bands and a scholarship in organ (he still has a church gig to supplement his income).

The Abbott route into musical theatre is uniquely zigzag, as he tells it. He’d taken piano lessons as a kid, “hated it, and quit, and got back into jazz in high school,” he says. “I’d started musical-directing, I guess because I could play piano and sing a bit,” he says casually. “And I ended up doing that a lot, pushing 35 musicals at this point. At a certain point you just know the genre well enough, I guess.”

As to why he’d started writing songs, Abbott thinks about it. “I’m definitely not a songwriter or composer,” he says. The score of Hot Boy Summer, which embraces a wide and complex variety of music from hard-driving rock to G&S-style patter songs, romantic ballads, character-driven musical theatre-type odes, is a counter-argument. Abbott is the antithesis of lofty pronouncements. “You conduct, you direct, you accompany. And then, ‘we need some songs for this’ and you’ve just got to do it….”

“The real miracle is that it went up in six weeks,” he says of Hot Boy Summer. “Just crazy. Nuts. Basically, we just wrote down an improvised musical, and then edited it.” What started in comedy sketches, for Donovan Workun as Jason Kenney and Abby Vandenberghe as Dr. Hinshaw, grew and grew. What Martin and Abbott originally thought of as a one-act sketch comedy show, “a four-hander maybe, got way out of hand!” Abbott laughs.

“A lot of the writing was still happening before the casting was finished…. It was half workshop half rehearsal, right up until opening night.” And, says Abbott appreciatively, “we got lucky.” The cast is diverse. “There are (serious) theatre actors, amazing musical theatre talents, a bunch of improvisers (many from The 11 O’Clock Number) — a big mash-up of people.”

Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer.

The creators were inspired by the performers. Half of the eight-actor ensemble, the ‘80s frat boys on a crusade to ensure that The Best Summer Ever will happen, are female. “How do you write something that sounds male when half of them aren’t: it’s tricky,” says Abbott, who shared the lyric-writing with Martin.

The first song they wrote, “before we knew the plot,” was a big 11 o’clock number for Workun as Jason Kenney, Unify My Heart. Then they tackled the flamboyant opening song-and-dance production number, Upsilon Kappa Pi. “We were looking for tropes to parody, says Abbott of the goofy ‘80s collegiate setting of the characters, younger versions of names we know. “As Byron says, it’s not funny if it’s malice…. Everyone knows who Kenney is. There’s no point in just doing that.”

Donovan Workun and Abby Vandenberghe in Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, Grindstone Theatre.

“I didn’t appreciate how hard the character stuff would be,” says Abbott of the most challenging part of lyric-writing. “To get stuff to feel natural and line up right. There were a lot of versions….”

And since the show is by its very nature topical, things changed. Towards the end of the run “we had new stuff about Kaycee Madu,” laughs Abbott. “That cabinet (sigh) … they write this stuff for us.”

Meanwhile the pair is considering new options for another musical they wrote together. If it hadn’t been for the pandemic ThunderCats, a fusion of “Cats the musical and ‘90s cartoons about cats, in space, fighting aliens,” would have toured.

And Abbott has turned the randomness of his arrival here into a positive answer to the question “why Edmonton?” for himself into the future. “Edmonton is a great place,” he says. “There’s tons of work here … most of it in musical theatre. And I’ve pretty much given up playing in bars; it’s just not worth it….”

And here’s “a further testimonial to what a great city this is”: Abbott doesn’t own a phone (too distracting, he says). “If you can make it as a freelancer here, and not have a phone….”

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New faces in theatre: meet actor Rochelle Laplante

Posted on January 30, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

They’re young, adaptable, and creative. And as theatre returns in this late-pandemic grind, and the doors open to live audiences, we’ll be seeing the work of these theatre artists light up, and transform, the scene here, on- and backstage. Meet six of these sought-after up-and-comers in this annual 12thnight New Faces series. Here’s actor Rochelle Laplante, in a continuing 12thnight series that began with designer Beyata Hackborn.

Laura Raboud, Nadien Chu, Rochelle Laplante in Macbeth, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Rochelle Laplante, actor

If you caught a clever, unexpectedly funny version of the Scottish play last summer on its travels through town (and possibly in your own backyard), you saw a raffish trio of bouffons play all the characters, provide stage directions, recruit audience members directly, sing a selection of biting satirical songs….

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That was Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s black comedy/ tragedy/ satire mash-up take on Macbeth, which charted the endlessly repeating cycle of power grabs, corruption and assassination. And in Dave Horak’s high-speed production, newcomer Rochelle Laplante was, among her other roles, an impressively confident Lady M. How often does an actor who’s also a musical theatre triple-threat get to reveal that skill set … in Shakespeare?

actor Rochelle Laplante

It was her “first big stage thing” out of theatre school, “a clown version, with songs!” And “I absolutely loved doing it!” says Laplante, now 24, who has one of those deep, husky, amused voices you associate with golden age of Hollywood stars. “Going out, travelling around town and showing people some Shakespeare!”

“People could rent us,” Laplante laughs. “One of our last shows was for eight people in a backyard, so ‘OK, we’re not going to get the most audience interaction but…. In smaller spaces you realize you’re making eye contact with the same people over and over.” She found fascinating the reaction of diverse audiences to the disconcerting weirdness of finding themselves laughing, “the slow burn from the thought that, hey, this is a tragedy; what’s happening right now?”

Laplante grew up in Edmonton, a theatre kid who “loved to sing and dance — all the time! Finding theatre was a good thing.” “What really drew me into it,” she laughs, “was I saw my  sister in an acting class. And ‘little sister jealousy’ took over: ‘I could do that!’”

Inevitably she went to Vic (the Victoria School of the Arts), and found herself in the big musicals Greg Dowler-Coltman directed there. She was in musicals with the Citadel’s Young Company. The distinctive voice was a distinctive asset; greetings from alto section of the ensemble. Fringe audiences saw Laplante in a modern dress production of The Importance of Being Earnest from the clever indie theatre Empress of Blandings Productions in 2018. Then came the National Theatre in Montreal. “I was lucky to not be in school during the pandemic.” She emerged with a career waiting to happen: “things booked, all cancelled by the pandemic.”

The time-honoured Edmonton theatre DYI principle has evidently been an inspiration. At the digital edition of Nextfest last year, audiences saw her solo creation Homegrown, “an audio-visual exploration of the connections between my natural hair and different plant life.”

Rochelle Laplante (top) and Kristi Hansen in Hiraeth, Bright Young Things. Photo by Mat Busby.

Bright and charismatic onstage, Laplante has caught the eye of veteran theatre artists, including Horak, Belinda Cornish and Rachel Peake. In Hiraeth, the new Cornish two-hander comedy that premiered last fall in Peake’s Bright Young Things production, Laplante co-starred as a mysterious and kooky young neighbour-from-hell who moves into the house of Kristi Hansen’s accomplished mid-career professional woman. Who is she, really? A reveal/withhold situation that Laplante handled expertly.

It’s an odd-couple comedy of a sort, and it unfolds in surprising ways — with in vitro fertilization as its centrepiece.“I had a great time,” says Laplante. Both the playwright and the director “wanted us to be open with our ideas…. It’s such a personal story for them, and it felt like such a beautiful thing to be part of it!” And Laplante was amused to realize that “hey, I’ve worked on a play about IVF before!”

There’s an exclusive subset of Canadian theatre: Hiraeth was her second new Canadian play about pregnancy. As part of their last year of training, NTS actors appear in plays by their playwriting classmates. Her assignment was in Jacob Margaret Archer’s Think of the Children, “a story of a trans man who accidentally gets impregnated by his boyfriend.”

The future is in many ways mapless terrain for young theatre artists. But Laplante has upcoming work, details as yet unannounced, at the Citadel and Teatro La Quindicina. She does imagine being based in Edmonton for a while. “I lived in Toronto for a year after graduation,” she says. “And I found out how exhausting it is to be part of the grind of a big city, trying to have enough money to live, but also wanting to start my career. Here, I can find acting jobs that interest me, and I can enjoy doing theatre!”

“Yes, I do feel positive!”

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UnCovered: The Music of Dolly Parton alights here (digitally), courtesy of Catalyst

Posted on January 27, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Jully Black, UnCovered; The Music of Dolly Parton, The Musical Stage Company. Photo by Dahlia Katz.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Here they come again…. Some of the country’s top musical theatre talent has a date Saturday night — at your place.

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Toronto’s Musical Stage Company returns with a digital version of their hugely popular annual “signature concert.” For this 15th incarnation of UnCovered, hosted here by Catalyst Theatre, the six-person cast of artists, filmed in performance at Koerner Hall, presents the music of Dolly Parton.

As you’ll know if you had the fun of seeing last year’s concert, UnCovered: Notes From The Heart — which plumbed a repertoire from Leonard Cohen to Billie Holiday, Carole King to Bob Marley —  The Musical Stage Company has a highly entertaining way of letting musical theatre stars loose on the pop repertoire. The results are fascinating.

The cast of UnCovered: The Music of Dolly Parton, photo by Dahlia Katz.

For 2022, it’s hits by the queen of country (and COVID hero), reimagined in inventive original arrangements by the company’s musical director Reza Jacobs. And with it, the Toronto company again pairs with Catalyst, a theatre with its own highly original take on musical theatre, as we know from such hit productions as Frankenstein, Nevermore, Vigilante.

The “digital tour” arrives chez vous at 8 p.m. Saturday, with a cast that includes Jully Black, Beau Dixon, Sara Farb, Hailey Gillis, Kelly Holiff, and Andrew Penner. Tickets ($30 per household) are available at catalyst theatre.ca.

•In other theatre news, Die-Nasty, Edmonton’s award-winning improv comedy troupe, has bid adieu to the Stroganoffs, that fractious, treacherous, angst-ridden Russian clan. The deluxe improvisers of Die-Nasty return Monday night — and every Monday night through March 31 — with the second half of their live improvised season at the Varscona: Murder at the Off-Whyte Lotus Hotel. The notably quick-witted Edmonton murder mystery novelist Janice MacDonald co-directs. Tickets: varsconatheatre.com.

•Shadow Theatre has delayed this week’s performances of their current production The Mountaintop till Tuesday, due to positive COVID tests. Tickets (and ticket adjustments) for the show, which imagines in an encounter with a motel housekeeper Martin Luther King’s last night on earth, are available at shadowtheatre.org. Check out the 12thnight review here.     

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