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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Surprise! Finding yourself at Found 2022: the festival of art in unexpected places

Posted on July 1, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Dig by Breanna Barrington, Found Festival 2022. Photo suppied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

At  Found 2022 you could find yourself … following a story into a fort in the river valley. You could find yourself in a hidden nook of Old Strathcona, in a park, in a garbage enclosure in an alley. You could even find yourself in a ‘theatre’, or at a table outside one. 

That’s the thing about Found, the festival that returns Thursday for an 11th annual weekend of surprising encounters with art, artists, and audiences. There’s magic in adventuring outside the concept ‘theatre’,  both the space and the experience — and “having your expectations subverted, in a weird way,” as Whittyn Jason puts it. “I’m honoured to be at the helm of a festival where that’s at the core of it.”

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Designer/scenographer Jason (they/them) is Found’s incoming director. And along with Mac Brock, playwright/ actor/ administrator who’s Found’s new managing producer, they’re explaining their attraction to surprising interactions between artists and their audiences. It’s everywhere in this year’s live multi-disciplinary line-up, a mash-up of theatre, dance, music, poetry, visual art that sets you in motion, map or ticket in hand, from Found Fest headquarters, the Backstage Theatre and the patio outside it.

Jason and Brock have curated the line-up from submissions — save one project pitched to Found in 2019, and deferred from 2020. Perfect Strangers, the brainchild of innovative Vancouver duo June Fukumura and Keely O’Brien of  Popcorn Galaxies, is perhaps the most audacious experiment of them all. 

Perfect Strangers, Found Festival 2022. Photo supplied.

Audience members who’ve never met are paired up for a walking journey through the Strathcona neighbourhood. And at curated stops along their route through the ‘hood, there are games, moments, experiences for them to share and react to, and leave a trail of Post-Its to record their impressions.

“It’s not a narrative in the theatrical sense,” says Brock. “It’s a development … an experience you wouldn’t have had with someone you wouldn’t otherwise meet.” Fukumura and O’Brien, who’ve spent weeks in Edmonton sussing out locations, have been “so thoughtful how to make a safe, engaging, meaningful experience for two people who may have little or nothing in common.” 

And who knows? Jason laughs. “You might make a new friend. Or a new enemy.”

Jason is a five-year veteran Found artist themself. “One of the first pieces I was ever commissioned for was a public art installation for the Found beer garden in 2017. I made cactuses made out of clothes and fabric…. A lot of my friends were moving, and trying to get rid of their stuff.” Since then they’ve even experimented with film for Found. 

Bringing a design background to the festival is a natural. The “truth through materials” design mantra prompts found-space choices like, say, producing a living room drama in someone’s actual living room (instead of trying to re-create a living room on a theatre stage). “If you’re doing a fight in a park, do it in a park!” says Jason. “It engages the audience in a different way…. There’s a sliver of that in Found.”

Big Feelings, Small World, Found Festival 2022. Photo supplied.

In Big Feelings, Small World, designer/ model-builder Skye Grinde partners with three different artists, a poet, a musician and a playwright, to create miniature models that are mini-captures of  stories and memories. Grinde locates them in familiar locations in Old Strathcona, and adds an audio track accessible by QR code.

“What gets me excited about Found Fest,” says Brock, “is getting audiences to re-familiarize and re-contextualize places they know and love. And it’s really urgent right now, getting people out into the community again, re-engaging with public events and businesses. Being out in the community. Finding a little magic in places we walk by every day.” 

There are plays-in-progress at this year’s Found Fest (“we’re planting seeds for what shows are coming down the line,” says Brock”). From Steven and Nicole Sobolewski, Found Festival’s 2022 Fresh AiR artists-in-residence, is Gym Class Queer-Roes, their debut as theatre creators. This piece, about the queer community within a fictional gym, gets an in-progress reveal in the Studio Theatre at the ATB Financial Arts Barns. Since Whittyn and Brock have re-thought Fresh AiR as two-year venture, Found 2023 will see a full production, in an actual gym.

003_Playback, Found Festival 2022. Photo supplied.

At Found you could find yourself participating actively in the creation of an innovative movement piece — online. That’s the ‘found space’ for 003_Playback, the work of Vancouver’s Caroline MacCaull. In a live-streamed choose-your-own-adventure way that goes far beyond rhetoric or reactions in a chat box, “it asks the audience directly to have a tangible, visible impact on what they’re seeing,” as Brock puts it.

“They vote on how the piece expands and breathes and changes and moves,” says Jason. “They can change camera angles and lighting; they make decisions that change their viewing experience…. The audience has the ability to be a creator.”

Former festival director Beth Dart and her team were tasked with the full digital shift of 2020, as Brock says. “And the something that happened, the experience with digital and online, is now encoded in Found’s DNA…. We’re intentionally moving forward with that, and the new opportunities to be found in it.” Jason adds, “because 003_Playback lives exclusively in an online world, the audience could be anywhere.” 

It’s a testament to Fringe TV, “the amazing infrastructure for film and theatre broadcast” built by the Fringe in the pandemic years,” Brock says, “that it actually made more sense to bring the artists here to do the (live-streamed) show than to do it in Vancouver. 

Another exploration of technology, this one designed for in person experience, is BASK, which assembles the work of queer artists and plays with queerness, queer identities and perspectives. As billed it’s “a durational projection mapping installation,” the creation of Calgary projection artist/ animator Mackenzie Bedford. You’ll find it shaping to surfaces in (and possibly outside) the Backstage Theatre. 

Perhaps the most original (and direct) invitation to the audience comes from visual artist Breanna Barrington and Dig. After all, as Brock says, laughing, “in what other festival do you have to source 300 to 500 pounds of soil to pack into a garbage enclosure?” 

Jason laughs. “A gardening festival, I would imagine.” 

For the first two days of the festival, Dig asks viewers to contribute used objects, broken knick-knacks, “clean no-longer-usable things,” to be buried in the dirt. Saturday afternoon, “they will emerge from the dirt,” to be “activated” in a largely improvised performance by Barrington as she explores consumerism and its ecological impact, and the climate crisis … through trash. 

You don’t need to leave empty-handed. Bring a receptacle on Sunday, and “at the end of the day you can take home some dirt and have it live in your own garden,” says Jason. 

And there is, it need hardly be said, a party. The Hoe Down, happening Saturday night at the Backstage, is curated by Exstepmom, aka Salem Zurch. And it’s your chance to dress up country-glam. “We encourage DIY,” says Jason, an expert on the subject. Declares Brock, “it’s us re-claiming Alberta!”

PREVIEW

Found Festival 2022

Company: Common Ground Arts Society

Where: Backstage Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barn, 10330 84 Ave. and environs, plus Fort Edmonton Park. 

Running: July 7 to 10

Tickets, lineup, schedule, show descriptions: commongroundarts.ca

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Sexual assault, scorched earth, and the fire that burns: Smoke, a review

Posted on June 25, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Gabe Richardson, Jade Robinson in Smoke, Tiny Bear Jaws. Photo by Brianne Jang.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Smoke is both of the air and the earth. And so is Elena Belyea’s challenging and elusive play, getting its Edmonton premiere at Co*Lab in a Tiny Bear Jaws production with two casts.  

Smoke is set in the smouldering ruins of a relationship that has either burned out entirely, or maybe hasn’t. And at the centre of it, the hot ember so to speak, is a sexual assault and the related question of consent. And since Smoke is questing for clarity through the smoke-filled territory of gender, and audiences assumptions about gender, Jenna Rodgers’s production alternates casts: one night the relationship is heterosexual, the next night queer.

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We meet two post-collegiate characters who are, not coincidentally, both aspiring artists, one a poet and one a storyteller. And, as artists do, they use the raw materials of real life to create. Aiden (always played by Jade Robinson) is writing the once-upon-a-time fable of a town razed to the ground by “a giant fire,” re-built built over and over again only to burn again. We see Jordan (played by Gabriel Richardson the night I saw Smoke), doing final edits on a volume of verse called “Bloom,” at a book launch, reading a poem called Anxiety. The sound design (by Daniela Fernandez) has an uneasy kind of anxious buzz to it. 

Jade Robinson, Hayley Moorhouse in Smoke, the second cast in the Tiny Bear Jaws production. Photo by Brianne Jang

One night a fateful knocking at Aiden’s door reveals Jordan, there to confront his erstwhile lover about the allegations of sexual assault she’s confided to mutual friends. This presents itself on initial impact, at least to me, as an unwelcome encounter between a victim and her abuser, not least because Aiden is a fragile-looking Asian-Canadian woman and Jordan is, though genial and appealing, a big strapping guy. 

Aiden is a tinderbox of wounded fury. Jordan seems genuinely perplexed. He swears repeatedly he has no idea what she’s talking about, only that she vanished from his life without explanation. And he is believable. It takes a while to unspool time, back to a university party, with all the university party trimmings like an argument and drunk sex. Their memories are very different. What happens, not least to the audience, when two opposing perceptions collide is what Smoke is about — partly. But it’s also about the toxic, unbreathable smoke of trauma.

Belyea’s script is a complex volley of cross-hatched fragments; her ear for cadence is uncanny. The play, like its chosen metaphor, is stoked by accusation and resistance, out-and-out rebuttal, shards of shared memories, manipulatory tactics that get called, or don’t. Ah, and ancillary factors like artistic competitiveness. If there’s such a thing in this country as success as a poet (for another discussion another time), Jordan is gaining traction; Aiden is a collector of rejection notices. 

It’s surprising, moment by moment; Smoke seems (to mix my own metaphors) to come at you in waves that subside momentarily into apparent calm, tiny sparks that flame out in one place and get re-ignited somewhere else. And under Rodgers’ direction, the rhythms of the play are always disconcerting — it’s a nerve-wrackingly watchable experience. And Robinson and Richardson make every moment, even those that are wildly improbable on paper, possible and even plausible, shocking though they are. 

I must admit I have reservations about one of those developments in particular (and wonder how that would play out in the queer relationship version of Smoke that co-stars Hayley Moorhouse). But I must leave it with you, in the interests of not spoiling the surprises that are the infrastructure of the play. 

“This isn’t a story about what caused the fire,” Aiden’s story tells us. “It’s about what happened after….” And so here we are, immersed in a play that’s built on reactions to a sexual assault, while resisting  definitive answers about cause, blame and even the “truth” of the assault. Which leads Smoke, incrementally, away from the he said/she said scenario, unresolvable here, to the burning question of what it will take to satisfy Aiden. And how far Jordan will go to fix a crime he definitely declares he did not commit, as a kind of reparation.   

Here’s a dramatic concept to wrap your wits around: a play that’s built on reactions to a sexual assault that’s not about sexual assault. In a life incinerated by trauma, can you start all over again, from the ground up? Is the scorched earth policy the way to go? Smoke wonders about that; it stays in your lungs.

Check out the 12thnight preview of Smoke here, an interview with playwright Elena Belyea and director Jenna Rodgers.

REVIEW

Smoke

Theatre: Tiny Bear Jaws

Written by: Elena Belyea

Starring: Jade Robinson, Gabriel Richardson (alternate nights) and Hayley Moorhouse (alternate nights)

Where: Co*Lab, 9641 102 A Ave

Running: through July 1

Tickets and masking/vaccination specifics: tinybearjaws.square.site

 

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‘Immigrants get the job done’: Hamilton’s finally here, in a first-rate touring production

Posted on June 23, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Julius Thomas III (right), Hamilton, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Joan Marcus

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Hamilton: it’s epic. It’s crazy rich in its language, music, and theatricality. And it explodes onto the stage with an offer, no, a demand, to focus both history and musical theatre from the outsider perspective.

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It’s been fully seven years (and a wealth, of Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize) since the sensational arrival on Broadway of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s audacious musical. And a lot has happened in the world (not least to the American mythology of greatness). Hamilton finally arrives in Edmonton, in a first-rate, powerfully performed Broadway Across Canada touring production on the Jube stage. And it will leave you dazzled, and a little dazed, at the achievement of it all — both the broad strokes and the layers of detail. 

I’ve seen Hamilton a couple of times before (like many amongst the cheering (and masked) opening night audience I suspect). But it still had that effect on me. You’ll leave buzzed. 

The story playwright/composer/lyricist Miranda tells — in a wild non-stop swirl of hip-hop, jazz, blues, G&S, rock, pop, musical theatre — is about an impoverished orphan immigrant from the Caribbean, who came to New York “longing for something to be part of” and became one of the American founding fathers. 

Julius Thomas III, Hamilton, Broadway Across Canada tour. Photo by Joan Marcus

Hamilton rose fast. He was an assistant to George Washington, a general in the Revolutionary War, a creator of the federal Treasury, a scholar and a pamphleteering defender of the Constitution. He gets a great delayed entrance in Hamilton, after Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, and his arch-rival Aaron Burr review, in rap, this improbable biography.  

Anyhow, the story is, to say the least, an unusual choice of subject matter for the American musical theatre, which has hitherto not given much thought to the Federalist Papers. Hamilton hands over the birth-of-the-nation storytelling to performers of colour. And it gives much of the musical to hip-hop, the street-wise form that comes at you in a sassy barrage of cheeky rhyme, crowded with syllables.   

Hamilton, and Thomas Kail’s production, capture the flow of history in contemporary language, movement, music, and look. Paul Tazewell’s costumes attest to that, with their mix of period costumes and androgynous modern dance gear for the chorus. The cast are set in perpetual motion by Andy Blankenbuehler’s stunningly inventive choreography that takes the story non-stop into the urban whirl of New York, into battle, into backroom politics, “the room where it happens.”

Kail’s stagecraft unspools in a seamless flow of scenes. The room where Hamilton happens, in David Korins’s beautiful design, is lined with wood and brick, with hanging ropes, fold-down staircases, moved by human agency not techno effects. The lighting (by Howell Binkley) has sources like rustic lanterns and candles, and it has dramatic meaning. Characters appear in flickering shadows to command the limelight of history, and disappear into blackness.

At the centre, brilliant, ambitious, brash, maddeningly mouthy, energized (kinda like the musical itself) is Alexander Hamilton. And he gets a superb performance, capturing all those qualities, from Julius Thomas III. “I’m just like my country, I’m young, scrappy, and hungry, and I’m not throwing away my shot,” he declares in song near the outset. Thomas crafts beautifully the arc by which the upstart outsider catapults to success, negotiates tragedy at the intersection of the personal and the political, and then (spoiler courtesy of history) does throw away his shot in a fatal duel with his nemesis Burr.  

Donald Webber Jr. as Aaron Burr, Hamilton, Broadway Across Canada tour. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Burr, the cautious lawyer who is Hamilton’s rival, a man of careful calculation increasingly smoulders with grievance in the course of time, is something of a tragic figure in Hamilton. And Donald Webber Jr. delivers a performance with real resonance.  

Other stand-outs include Darnell Abraham’s soulful George Washington, and Justin Showell’s a raucously funny double-turn as the Marquis de Lafayette in Act I and a flamboyant Thomas Jefferson, the francophile denizen of Monticello (who never did free his slaves), in Act II.  

 In his recurring cameo As King George III, the monarch who famously lost America and went mad, Rick Negron is great fun. The audience cheered so loudly every time he came onstage that my companion, an independence-minded Scot, wondered if it was partly by dint of performing in a country still tied to British royalty. I’ll have to get back to you on that. 

The women of the production are less distinguished. But Victoria Ann Scovens as Eliza, the wealthy Schuyler Hamilton married and the Milika Cherée as Angelica, the sister he didn’t marry, do deliver their pop ballads feelingly. 

The American Dream, long fractured in the realities of the centuries since 1776, has crumbled into dust lately, as we know in a baleful storm of racism, violence, and right-wing backwardness. It gives Hamilton, with its hand-over of idealism and hope to outsiders, a particularly heart-wrenching quality of loss. “If you stand for nothing,” Hamilton says to Burr in Act I, “what’ll you fall for?” 

As this touring production demonstrates, the resourcefulness of theatre artists at the top of their game, unleashed on a groundbreaker of a musical, turns to stage magic that is human, and essentially low-tech. That’s inspiring in itself. Catch yourself a ticket if you can.

REVIEW

Hamilton

Broadway Across Canada

Book, Music, Lyrics: Lin-Manuel Miranda

Directed by: Thomas Kail

Choreographed by: Andy Blankenbuehler

Starring: Julius Thomas III, Donald Webber Jr., Victoria Ann Scovens, Darnell Abraham, Justin Showell, Milika Cherée, Rick Negron

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through July 10

Tickets: ticketmaster.com

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Where there’s fire there’s … Smoke: assault, consent and gender in a play with two casts

Posted on June 21, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Jade Robinson, Hayley Moorhouse in Smoke, Tiny Bear Jaws. Photo by Brianne Jang

Gabe Richardson, Jade Robinson in Smoke, Tiny Bear Jaws. Photo by Brianne Jang.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In Smoke, getting its Edmonton premiere Thursday at Co*Lab, a woman opens her apartment door to discover that the past has showed up.

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Aiden’s -ex is there to confront her about allegations she’s made to a mutual friend that she was sexually assaulted at a university party two years before.

“I’ve never had a play where people have had such different interpretations of both characters,” says playwright Elena Belyea, the artistic director and presiding muse of the sharp-toothed indie theatre Tiny Bear Jaws. Director Jenna Rodgers calls it “a play with two protagonists…. Both characters are likeable and deeply, evidently, flawed. A lot of the work is to continue practising not taking a side.” 

The subject matter of Smoke is flammable, to be sure, and nothing if not timely. And the provocation is further fuelled, intriguingly and unavoidably, by the double casting and considerations of gender. Aiden is played by Jade Robinson and the text remains “98 per cent the same,” says Belyea. But on some nights Jordan is played by a man (Gabriel Richardson), some nights by a woman (Hayley Moorhouse). 

“The casting,” says Rodgers, who’s also the dramaturge, “forces us to think about the way we map reactions onto different bodies.” The actors’ two takes on Jordan, though armed with the same words, are very different. And, Belyea adds, “Jade’s performance is definitely different depending on who she’s playing with…. It’s exciting to see that actors can do so many things with the same text.”

“In a play about sexual assault, the automatic assumption is that the sex of the perpetrator is male and the sex of the victim is female. And that is not always the case.”  

Smoke has smouldered for a long time. It premiered at Downstage Theatre in Calgary in 2019 after development in Toronto, at Nightwood Theatre’s Write From The Hip Playwriting Unit and workshops at Tarragon. But it was in Edmonton that Belyea (Cleave, Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable, I Don’t Even Miss You) felt the spark that would become Smoke. 

It was Wild Side’s 2016 production of The Realistic Joneses that “blew my head apart,” says Belyea of the odd and oddly funny play by the American writer Will Eno about two couples and the complicated dynamics in perception and language that underpin them. “I went home, still buzzing, and started writing that night.” The scene in which Jordan is at the door asking to come in was the start of Smoke.

The news of the moment contributed to Smoke, too, as Belyea explains — for one thing, allegations about Jian Ghomeshi as a serial sexual abuser; for another, the disastrous Fort McMurray fire. So it started with the encounter between “a woman and her parter trying to unpack together whether a sexual assault occurred,” says Belyea. Then “based on my experience as a queer woman, lamenting some of the assumptions people automatically jump to about gender,” other dramatic possibilities occurred to her. “How would the play would be different if Jordan was played by a woman?”

Would questions of sexual assault, rape and consent be different in queer relationships? Rodgers, who’d worked as a dramaturge on the Downstage production, was fascinated to examine audience assumptions and “the ways an audience might respond differently to the same text. … No matter what mental training we have, no matter what we think we understand about consent.” As she points out, theatre people “just assume we have so much in common…. Smoke is “a very large opportunity to encourage conversation in a community that’s often caught preaching to the choir.” 

Says Belyea “I don’t know if I’ve ever had a show where I hear the audience so much — people having opinions, people being surprised….”

“Both characters are, intentionally, really likeable.” Both the script and Rodgers’ direction “actively disrupt the archetype of what a good survivor looks like, what a potential abuser looks like.” Each version of the play “is made to hold up on its own,” Belyea says. Even if audience members don’t see both versions of the show, just knowing that there’s another cast, other possibilities of presenting the script, changes things. “In a strange little way,” says Rodgers, the three actors “do kind of function as an ensemble.”  

“The main question I had while writing Smoke,” says Belyea, “is what if someone had hurt me, or betrayed me profoundly what would it take for me to forgive them? Or if  I found out I had caused immense harm to someone that I had loved very very much, what lengths would I go to try and repair that?”

At a distance, Smoke, with its serious set-up and subject matter under investigation, might seem like “a 90-minute slog” of a prospect, Belyea says cheerfully. “But it’s also a fun and funny play I think… That’s part of what makes it uncomfortable!”  

And, says Rodgers, “I think there’s an ambitious amount of spectacle for a little space.” You may anticipate talking heads. “But there are also some aesthetic surprises!”

PREVIEW

Smoke

Theatre: Tiny Bear Jaws

Written by: Elena Belyea

Directed by: Jenna Rodgers

Starring: Jade Robinson (Aiden), Hayley Moorhouse (Jordan), Gabe Richardson (Jordan)

Where: Co*Lab, 9641 102A Ave.

Running: Thursday through July 1

Tickets: Tiny Bear Jaws 

 

 

 

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Sex in the city, hypocrite puritans, corrupt politicians … who’s ever heard of that? Measure For Measure in the park

Posted on June 16, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

Priya Narina and Michael Peng, Measure For Measure, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The opening image of Nancy McAlear’s production of Measure For Measure, the Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s companion piece to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Hawrelak Park this summer, is a male pole dancer in a cage.

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It’s perpetual party time in Vienna (it’s been called Shakespeare’s Sex in the City). “The city,” says a disembodied voice by way of introduction to a genuinely strange and eerily modern play, “is about to come down hard on law-breakers.” 

Ah, but what if the cage is way more threatening than the pole, and the enforcers of righteousness are themselves corrupt? Hypocritical puritans in politics? Ring a bell anyone, in the relentless right-ward drift of the times?

The characters have their moments, but they’re all morally ambiguous. You can call Measure For Measure a ‘problem comedy’: the biggest problem might be the queasy open-ended finale that McAlear takes in hand and reinvents.

Really, Measure For Measure is not an easy play to like. Maybe that’s why Freewill has never staged it before (it’s a gutsy choice for this cast of veterans and newcomers). But, as McAlear’s production demonstrates, it is a play to get caught up in — absorbing in its densely worded, intricate arguments about justice and morality, leadership, order and liberty, the political system and the church.

Measure For Measure, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

In the licentious chaos into which the city has fallen, the Duke (Michael Peng), who’s been a lenient ruler, opts to leave town. And he transfers authority for enforcing disregarded laws to his deputy Angelo (Vincent Forcier), a rigidly upright, cold-eyed moralist whose “blood is very snow-broth.” Then the Duke sticks around, in a monk’s disguise. And you don’t ever quite know why, except that the mystery monk sets in motion a variety of plot devices, like the old bed switcheroo, that lighten the tragic colours. 

The Duke doesn’t have the cajones to do his own dirty work? He’s got a case of workplace burnout, and needs some ‘me time’? He already suspects Angelo of not being the moral purist he claims to be? Or maybe he wants to spy on his home town to suss out the political climate? 

In McAlear’s production, Peng’s intriguing performance, full of silences, hesitations and question marks, suggests a character thinking on his feet, looking for tentative answers to a mystery that might be … himself. Either that, or the Duke has been in therapy too long — it is Vienna after all, the good doctor Freud’s home town. 

Anyhow, the crux of the plot is that in the new puritan climate, a young man Claudio (Yassine El Fassi El Fihri) has been sentenced to death for knocking up his fiancée Juliet  (Dayna Lee Hoffman). And Claudio’s chaste sister Isabella (Priya Narine), a nun-in-progress, goes to Angelo to plead for her brother’s life. 

That’s when Angelo, poster boy for probity, finds himself attracted to Isabella and makes a fateful proposition: her brother’s life for her virginity. She’s horrified, and refuses the offer: “more than our brother is our chastity.” Which is an austere line to take, as poor Claudio argues when he changes his mind in a great jail scene between brother and sister. “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where, to lie in cold obstruction and to rot….”

Vincent Forcier, Measure For Measure, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

What gives Measure for Measure its disturbing twilight ambiguity is that no point of view can be dismissed outright — all get some heft, in densely worded confrontations or, especially in the case of Angelo, soliloquies. And McAlear’s cast really dig in. In the meaty role of Angelo, the bureaucrat in the conservative brown suit who’s more tempted by resistance than by easy vice as he’s shocked to realize, Forcier conveys an unwelcome sense of discovery. Angelo’s gradual resort to threats is scarily plausible. “Say what you will. My false outweighs your truth.”

Isabella is one of the most challenging “heroines” in the canon, as the quotation marks suggest. She can seem awfully fierce and unappealing. But in her persuasive performance, newcomer Narine mounts Isabella’s arguments to Angelo for mercy with real eloquence: “it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant….” 

As for the comedy in Measure For Measure, the urban demi-monde, fractious and licentious (costumed zestfully by Alison Yanota), is where it’s at, starring a rancid and amusing triumvirate: Brett Dahl as a sassy, dissolute man-about-town, Ian Leung as a smart-mouth worldly pimp, Nadien Chu as the cackling proprietor of a “house of resort” in the ‘burbs. Thanks to the dimbulb Constable Elbow (Troy O’Donnell), a repository of malapropisms, law enforcement is incomprehensible buffoonery.  

And Aaron Macri’s score, which veers between an ominous industrial buzz and thundering party rock, captures a crucial feature of the whole enterprise.  

To say that the ending of Measure For Measure is weird is something of an understatement. McAlear’s production goes to some pains to solve the problem that, after many convolutions, Isabella ricochets from one indecent proposition to another, even more bizarre, from the Duke himself, in and out of disguise. She, along with pretty much everyone onstage, is thunderstruck. In this version, we’ll see the women, all of them wronged in one way or another in the course of the play, moved to bond.  

The reinvented ending solves one problem and leaves another: the Duke himself. As the play closes he tortures everyone by insisting at sadistic length, as both a faux monk and himself, that Claudio has been executed although he hasn’t, and threatening many people, including the kindly jailer (Sarah Gale), with jail time. On preview night Wednesday, a formation of cynical gulls crossed the sky just then, squawking with laughter. 

Peng’s performance, full of subtlety and nuance, has made a good case for the Duke as a conflicted authority figure. But the more he’s in charge, the more manipulative he gets.  Maybe the contradictions of the play, as it explores abuses of male power at every level, are exactly what makes it relevant. In any case, it’s a fascinating and welcome chance to catch a rarely seen Shakespeare play in the great outdoors.

And since the city plans to shut the entire park for three years, a stunning lack of civic creativity, see Freewill at their creative work while you can. 

REVIEW

Measure For Measure

Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2022

Written by: you know who

Directed by: Nancy McAlear

Starring: Priya Narine, Vincent Forcier, Michael Peng, Yassine El Fassi El Fihri, Ruth Alexander, Ian Leung, Nadien Chu, Brett Dahl, Kijo Eunice Gatama,  Moses Kouyate, Troy O’Donnell, Meegan Sweet, Dean Stockdale, Dayna Lea Hoffman, Sarah Gale.

Running: through July 10, odd dates and July 10 matinée, alternating with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, even dates and most matinée.s

Where: Heritage Amphitheatre, Hawrelak Park

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com or at the gate  

 

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More about folly than love: A Midsummer Night’s Dream brings Freewill Shakespeare back to the park. A review

Posted on June 15, 2022 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Blow blow thou winter wind…”  oops, wrong play. 

After two years of wandering the town in small-cast entertainments, the Freewill Shakespeare Festival is back on the big stage in Hawrelak Park. And on Tuesday’s blustery, unremittingly soggy preview night of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the first of this summer’s alternating Shakespeares, capricious Mother Nature, who always gets an “ambience director” credit in Freewill productions, seemed to have screwed up her cues. You mean, it wasn’t going to be The Tempest? Or maybe Macbeth? Or the shipwreck in Twelfth Night?

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But that’s the fun, and the challenge, of outdoor Shakespeare on a summer’s eve in Edmonton. Sometimes the counter-intuitive impulses are bright sunshine instead of fog on the ghost of Hamlet’s father; sometimes it buckets down on the big festive marriage party at the end of As You Like It.  

You wouldn’t call Dave Horak’s kooky, high-spirited, aerobic production of Shakespeare’s early and most popular comedy — a web of romantic miscues and entanglements woven into no fewer than four plots in intersecting worlds — dreamy, or even Dream-y, exactly. It’s set in a world that’s gone somehow askew. 

Alison Yanota’s set is all wonky angles, brick-faced doorways and bright-coloured panels, a mash-up of the vertical and horizontal, the aftermath of some sort of earthquake perhaps, set down in the park. In a play where Wall is actually a character (later on in the play-within-the-play), one wall has a road with a yellow line going straight up, with a vertically placed manhole cover like a porthole, and a green compost bin sticking out. Characters appear and exit from it, along with lawn chairs, “magic” wands, and assorted props.

Have we perhaps, like a collective Alice, tumbled down the manhole into a world where Titania the fairy queen (Nadien Chu) talks about Nature in chaos, “the whistling wind,” “contagious fogs,” flooding rivers, the altering of seasons? O, wait….

Anyhow, there’s no “bank where the wild thyme blows,” as per fairy king (Ian Leung) Oberon’s idyllic vision. But there is a park, very visible, surrounding us. And as Yanota’s very odd assortment of costumes suggest, the play’s urbanite humans seem to be sprouting. The courtiers, led by Duke Theseus (Leung) and his captive bride Hippolyta (Chu) are growing leaves on their heads, flowers studding their their lapels, branches entwining their cloaks and jackets. Ditto the quartet of Athenian lovers (Freewill newcomers all). The guys, Lysander (Vincent Forcier) and Demetrius (Moses Kouyate), have outsized collars where flowers have popped up. The gals, Hermia (Kijo Eunice Gatama) and Helena (Brett Dahl), are flower shops on legs.  

The fairies are kitted out as the kind of party people who improvise vintage from thrift shops. Puck (Meegan Sweet), the “merry wanderer of the night” and instigator of the romantic mismatching, looks like a dealer in a Vegas casino. And in Horak’s production, fairy magic is deliberately and amusingly low-tech — human you might say.   

Brett Dahl as Helena, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz.

That’s one of the hallmarks of this version of Dream. It’s a romantic comedy that’s more about the nature of human absurdity than the nature of love. The lover plot — four young people ricocheting furiously through the woods ending up with the wrong person and in pursuit of the right person (or vice versa) — is set in motion when a father (Troy O’Donnell as Edges) invokes Athenian law to insist his daughter Hermia (Gatama) either renounce the man she loves (Forcier as Lysander) and marry Demetrius (Kouyate) the man he’s chosen for her — or else die or become a nun, either of which would be a real drag.

Meanwhile Helena (Dahl) has the hots for Demetrius and … but heck, you probably won’t care who ends up with whom. Chemistry isn’t involved. And there is no quiz next period. Andrés Moreno’s pre-show Thou Art Here puppet version of Dream gets a kick out of the plot complications in a little tent at the top of the grassy hill.

Brett Dahl, Moses Kouyate, Kijo Eunice Gatama, Vincent Forcier in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

Humans in love, as Horak’s 15-actor production tells us, are figures of fun, ridiculously overheated, indistinguishable, and on short fuses. Kouyate and Forcier play Demetrius and Lysander as grotesques with no anger-management filters. Forcier, especially, has a streak of the smart-ass sardonic about him, Gatama and Dahl, who translate girly friendship and lovestruck intensity into high-kicking choreographed brawling when crossed (fight direction Anastasia St. Amand, choreography Amber Borotsik). Deep-voiced Dahl gets lots of laughs for Helena’s high-dudgeon outrage at offences against maidenly propriety.   

Meegan Sweet as Puck, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz

No wonder Puck is amused, in a detached way, by their dopey antics. Oberon’s fairy fixer is a veritable repository of malicious amusement in Sweet’s original performance. Puck has been at the human circus too long and is a tad jaded. Leung and Chu preside over this world with regal charm, and command the lyrical verse with authority.

As always in Dream, it’s the “hempen homespuns,” the “rude mechanicals,” who tend to steal the show (Matthew Skopyk’s appealing original score adds tuba parts whenever they’re onstage). They’re theatre people wannabes in workers’ construction jackets—  especially Nick (here, Nicky) Bottom the Weaver, a bossy histrionic stage-struck amateur who magnanimously offers to play all the lead roles. Ruth Alexander, equipped with a Scottish accent you could cut a haggis on, is a hoot. 

Their earnest rehearsals for Pyramus and Thisbe, as beleaguered stage manager Peter Quince (Sarah Gale) divvies up the parts, are amusing and even a bit touching in their generosity for fellow talents. It is, in the terms of a later age, a collective creation with amusing audience trigger warnings — all Bottom-ed out by star power.  You do hope they won’t be  reviewed too harshly by the courtiers when they put on their show. 

And when, as an instrument of Oberon’s revenge against his wife, Bottom is magically endowed with an ass’s head and Titania falls in love with him, Bottom effortlessly insinuates himself into the fairy world. And he brings his native bossiness with him. 

It all starts and ends in dancing. Like Pyramus and Thisbe with its prologue, this Midsummer Night’s Dream gets a prologue too — fairy speeches borrowed from Act II. It’s all, Puck says, about mirth and merriment. And, at the moment in our own world, those are words to live by. 

REVIEW

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2022

Written by: you know who

Directed by: Dave Horak

Starring: Ruth Alexander, Ian Leung, Nadien Chu, Brett Dahl, Kijo Eunice Gatama, Vincent Forcier, Moses Kouyate, Priya Narine, Yassine El Fassi El Fihri, Troy O’Donnell, Meegan Sweet, Dean Stockdale, Michael Peng, Dayna Lea Hoffman, Sarah Gale.

Running: through July 10, even dates and most matinées, alternating with Measure For Measure odd dates and July 10 matinée.

Where: Heritage Amphitheatre, Hawrelak Park

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com or at the gate  

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