Merry, merry … further suggestions for your holiday entertainment this week

Posted on December 14, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Lindsey Walker, Kayla Gorman, Bob Rasko, Cheryl Jameson, Billy Brown, Natalie Czar in The Best Little Newfoundland Christmas Pageant Ever. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

This is the week you can get Santa to say Merry Christmas to you in a language of your choice — for $4.38 (including fees).

It’s also the week you can go backstage in the notoriously fractious world of the amateur theatrical. Or watch Elk, Moose and Deer celebrate the holidays, in the woods. You can see the Yuletide danced, or create a sensational Christmas cocktail, as tutored by theatre people who know these things. You can experience the redemptive journey of Mr. Scrooge back to the shared human experience.

Yes, you can alight on antidotes to the oppressive retail drift of Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You through mall air.

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Contrary to popular assumption, there is no cookie cutter for holiday shows. Some are sequined; some are decked out in reindeer sweaters. And they come in every nuance of fa-la-la-la-la, every cast and budget size, every degree of irony from zero to flamboyant.

•At Rapid Fire Theatre, a company devoted to every adrenalized form of improv comedy, Interactive Santa! gives you the rare opportunity Friday (10 a.m. to 5 p.m.) to explore the principal Claus’s range of spontaneous talents. For $6.29, for example, Santa will write you a haiku on a subject of your choice; $6.57 gets you a pun made up by Santa based on “an object you suggest.” You can even get the jolly old elf do the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy ($21.90 including fees). Tickets and the catalogue of possibilities (which may not be suitable for kids): rapidfiretheatre.com.

Coralie Cairns and Davina Stewart in Cookless Cooking, part of the 2021 Varscona Virtual Holiday Gala.

•The Varscona’s Virtual Holiday Gala returns Sunday night, this time filmed from the theatre stage (and not from the living rooms of the participants). “We’ve upped our game!” says the Varscona’s new executive director Kendra Connor.

The show is led by the luminous singer-songwriter Andrea House, with Chris Andrews and Rubim de Toledo. Surrounded by a veritable bank of candles (designer: Trevor Schmidt) they’ll  be doing Christmas songs, some of the jazz stripe, and a song of House’s own device, filmed by Adam Kidd.

The evening’s entertainment includes a piece commissioned (and performed) by Edmonton Opera and Ballet Edmonton, originally recorded during one of the pandemical lockdowns. And Fatalism in the New World, from Teatro La Quindicina’s season-opener Lost Lemoine Part 1, admirably fulfills the seasonal requirement of black comedy. You’ll see Andrea House and Mark Meer as a pair of aging cracker stoics sitting on their porch, following morbid prairie logic to its inevitable conclusion.

Mark Meer and Andrea House in Fatalism In The New World, Lost Lemoine Part 1, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Adam Kidd.

Teatro stars Belinda Cornish and Rachel Bowron will assist you in making their favourite cocktails. And in the spirit of educational zeal, the team of Davina Stewart and Coralie Cairns explores “cookless cooking,” for people who don’t like to cook but have to entertain. Ring any bells?

As Connor puts it, the event is designed to showcase the exceptional variety of entertainment housed at the Varscona. It happens Sunday (7:30 p.m.) on the Varscona Theatre’s YouTube channel, and is available for a couple of weeks after that. Further details: varsconatheatre.com. Donations to support this invaluable Edmonton theatre venue are encouraged.

•In Stewart Lemoine’s A Hudson’s Bay Story, a disgruntled menswear sales associate launches a fractious serial correspondence with the head office in Toronto. His complaint? The pre-opening store holiday playlist. He has a profound, deep-seated, detailed objection to Eydie Gormé’s version of Sleigh Ride — the voice, the lyrics, everything really.

A man mired in retail and looking for catharsis…. How can this not resonate with you?

Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Kendra Connor star in this perennial Teatro La Quindicina fave, the theatre’s contribution to this year’s edition of Ballet Edmonton’s BE Merry. It’s on the Varscona stage Thursday through Saturday. The evening’s entertainment includes dance along with holiday music from Sheri Somerville (Ballet Edmonton executive director), Andrea House, and Kendra Connor, actor-singers all. There’s a reading from former poet laureate Mary Pinkoski. Naturally, seasonal cocktails in the lobby are involved. Tickets: balletedmonton.ca.

Ted Dykstra as Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge, A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre 2021. Photo by Nanc Price.

•Ah, a man mired in retail and not looking for catharsis … at least until a ghostly intervention happens. That would be Ebenezer Scrooge, the stony-hearted CEO of Marley’s department store in David van Belle’s post-war music-filled adaptation of A Christmas Carol at the Citadel. In Ted Dykstra’s compelling performance Mr. Scrooge will be hurling his ‘Bah, humbug’s (and also ‘Scram!’ and ‘get out of here!’ and a variety of hard-edged thoughts about the bottom line) through Dec. 23. Read the 12thnight review. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.

•Drama? You wanted Drama? Whizgiggling Productions’ The Best Little Newfoundland Christmas Pageant … Ever, back for its 11th annual edition this weekend (Friday through Sunday), takes us into the ultimate showbiz war zone. The auditions for the annual Christmas pageant have been invaded by the anarchist Herdmans, “the worst kids in school,” attracted by the rumour of free snacks.

OK, the plot and all that stuff about the manger and The Three Wise Guys may elude them, but they’re all over the concept of ruthless competition. They muscle their way into the best parts, mostly by threat, much to the consternation of the townsfolk. Can the traditional pageant survive the Herdman onslaught?

The indie company Whizgiggling founded by ex-Newfoundlander Cheryl Jameson is named in honour of the Newfoundland term for acting “silly and foolish.” Their festive show runs live Friday through Sunday at the Backstage Theatre, and it’s available Dec. 22 and 23 online. Tickets: tixonthesquare.ca.

•At Festival Place in Sherwood Park, Elf the Musical approaches the re-awakening of Christmas spirit in another way. It’s an adaptation, by Thomas Meehan (of Annie fame) and Bob Martin (of The Drowsy Chaperone fame) of the 2003 Will Ferrell movie. The Festival Players’ 30-actor production runs Saturday through Dec. 28. Tickets: ticketmaster.ca.

•In Theatre Prospero’s The Enchanted Antlers, back for a fourth iteration,  Elk, Moose, Deer and Beaver gather in the woods to celebrate All Ungulate’s Eve, “the season’s only hooved holiday.” It’s on livestreamed on YouTube, Friday at 7 p.m.

•Shumka’s Nutcracker, lyrical and stunningly athletic, returns to the Jube Friday and Saturday, with guest artists from Kyiv Ballet, Virsky Ukrainian Dance Ensemble of Ukraine, Shumka School of Dance and Clara’s Dream Choir. Tickets: ticketmaster.ca.

 

 

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Sharing the story: a new version of Lake of the Strangers opens the Fringe Theatre season on stage and screen

Posted on December 7, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Hunter Cardinal in Lake of the Strangers, Naheyawin and Fringe Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In the play you’ll see Saturday night — either live on Fringe Theatre’s Westbury stage or live-streamed on Fringe TV from there — you’ll meet two little Indigenous brothers, 10 and seven. They’re out on a secret nocturnal adventure through the woods to a great lake.

What Henry and his little brother Thomas are after in the late summer of 1973, on the Sucker Creek First Nations reserve on the shores of Lesser Slave Lake, is a really big fish. What they have in mind is a family feast, with their prize as the centrepiece.

In Lake of the Strangers, you’ll also meet older generations, and future ones too, as the past and the future are woven into the present, and the story is woven into the Nehiyaw mythology that threads its way through the starry firmament.

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It’s a test for the magic of storytelling in the theatre: there is but one actor in Lake of the Strangers, the production that launches the Fringe Theatre season. He’s Hunter Cardinal, a co-creator of the play with his sister Jacquelyn Cardinal. And for him, at 28 one of the country’s new generation of accomplished, multi-faceted Indigenous theatre artists, something has changed since the play’s 2019 premiere directed by Ron Jenkins in an outsized reflecting pool at the Backstage Theatre.

“There’s a massive shift in how the story is being told, and who is telling it,” says Fringe Theatre’s Murray Utas, who directs the new production, in progress since July. “It exists in the present, the past, and the past-present,” the latter that mysterious storytelling verb tense that unhinges time from chronology. “And we have cast the audience; they are there with us, not sitting in the dark!”

“If we’re pausing storytelling,” says Cardinal of the pandemical moment (in Utas-speak “The Great Fucking Pause”), “we have to pause the assumptions we’re bringing into a space…. We’re asking ‘why?. Why are we telling this story now? That resonated for my sister and me.”

“What are other ways we as storytellers and me as a performer can honour the people who inspired the story?”

The Cardinals, brother and sister co-playwrights, are co-founders of Naheyawin, a consulting agency that help clients build community and see the world through an Indigenous lens. They are joint heirs to a venerable Cardinal family tradition of sibling accomplishment.Their dad is the notable human rights activist and educator Lewis Cardinal; their uncle Lorne Cardinal is the stage and screen star for whom Theatre Network’s studio space at the new Roxy Theatre is named. The grandparent generation is Cree elder Don Cardinal and his brother activist/writer Harold. It’s a distinguished lineage, spinning ever outward from the Sucker Creek reserve. Have a look at the 2019 12thnight interview with Hunter Cardinal, where he talks about his mentors.

Cardinal, a U of A theatre school grad, plays “not just multiple characters but generations of characters,” as he says. And “since I really wanted to root it in Sucker Creek,” that has meant “different generations of accents.”

He repaired to the CBC archives to listen to great uncle Harold in interviews, and to extrapolate from that to capturing Henry and Thomas’s dad, a hunter. “And that became an exploration of physicality, “of how he walked….. And what two little kids would sound like in 1973, and how they would sound 20 years into the future … being exposed to the popular mainstream.”

It is, to say the least, an intricate acting challenge. But this time out, collaborating with Utas, Cardinal was determined to transcend virtuosity into a realm where the audience and the performer “share” the space and the story. He and Utas both talk a lot about “the journey” and “the process” rather than “the show.”

Hunter Cardinal in Lake of the Strangers, Naheyawin and Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo supplied.

“I’m sharing something that’s bigger than me,” says the actor. “It’s not about me, but I’m bringing myself fully into that process, with everything I’ve learned…. It’s all about sharing.”

Cardinal, an exciting young Hamlet in Freewill Shakespeare’s 2018 production, thinks his performance in that dauntingly signature role would be much different now. “The most difficult part for me was finding a way to relate to it. It  took me a long time to get there,” he says. He understands more fully now what it takes to “bring to it my unique experience as an Indigenous dude, a young guy who’s feeling what it’s like to have a forced Western masculinity that causes so much strife and feeling of shame … the drive to be something you inherently are not.”

Lake of the Strangers in 2021 has the added complication of an audience that is, simultaneously, both in-person and at home in front of a screen. “It’s an offering to both audiences,” says Utas. He enlisted veteran filmmaker David Baron. Their question, a seminal one for theatre artists through these pandemical times: “How do you create a moment that resonates for both? How do create a relationship between artist and audience when they don’t exist in the same plane?”

As Utas points out, even time works out in the two forms. “What’s a 60-minute show online? Those minutes are different.” If you see Lake of the Strangers in person, the camera crew isn’t hidden; you’ll see on screens in the theatre what the at-home audience is seeing.

Cardinal thinks of theatre and film as “two portals into the same place where we all end up together…. It’s the place you go to when you’re reading, and immersed, and you forget you’re reading.” It’s the place, he says, that Baron is trying to find through film, Kris Harper through music, Brianna Kolybaba through design. “We’re all in this together.” And that includes the audience, who bring with them “the stories that are important to them, a huge night-time sky of stories.”

“We’re not re-inventing storytelling; we’re returning storytelling to its essential form,” as Utas puts it. “It’s not so much about ‘doing’ a show, but how we treat the audience in this process,” says Cardinal. “What do we care about? How can we align ourselves with those values?”

Lake of the Strangers may well be “the most specifically Indigenous story some people will see,” says Cardinal. “It comes from my sister and I and our specific family…. But storytelling is a way we can connect and still be totally, beautifully, different. That’s the magic.”

“I think we’re all going through a re-envisioning of what storytelling is, in theatre and film, a larger storytelling process about who we are as Canadians. How can we look bravely at our past and present, and also look at the future? I feel we’re following that larger movement.… And that’s been really exciting for me!”

PREVIEW

Lake of the Strangers

Theatre: Naheyawin and Edmonton Fringe Theatre

Written by: Jacquelyn Cardinal and Hunter Cardinal

Starring: Hunter Cardinal

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

Running: Saturday only (in conjunction with Fringe Theatre’s Lakes & Streams, and a Friday performance by the Jay Gilday band)

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

         

   

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A windfall for actresses: Brad Fraser’s 5@50 at Walterdale

Posted on December 6, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Nicole Lemay and Cinnamon Stacey in 5@50, Walterdale Theatre. Photo by Scott Henderson, Henderson Images.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The play that opens Wednesday live on the Walterdale stage does something rare in theatre. In a world where aging is a vanishing act for women artists, Brad Fraser’s 5@50 provides a windfall: five big, juicy roles for middle-aged actresses.

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The playwright himself has said in interviews that was his original impetus for writing the play that premiered in 2011 at the Royal Exchange in Manchester (and in Vancouver two years later).

With 5@50, Walterdale Theatre returns in its 62nd season to the work of the star Canadian playwright the company stepped up to produce early in his career. One of the oldest community theatres in the country and demonstrably one of its least risk-averse, Walterdale premiered Mutants by the 21-year-old playwright (and director) in 1980, a programming decision that was not without its controversies en route to opening night, and thereafter.

“We have a history of making hard choices,” says 5@50 director Louise Mallory, “of wanting to do challenging stuff, struggling with it, not always getting it right, but trying to do justice to it….”

It’s been seven years or so since Mallory picked up the 5@50 script, newly published at the time, at the annual Fringe sale. Her attraction to the play, in which five old friends have gathered to celebrate the big five-oh of one of the circle, was immediate. “Wow, this is about women my age, an interesting portrayal of women who don’t pull any punches and say what they think…. Wow, I don’t very often see stories about older women in romantic relationships, with ambiguities about their orientation, whether they’re out or not.”

Addictions play a part, too. “Not only how that affects the whole group, but how recovery also affects everybody.”

“I’d read the play before premiere of (Fraser’s) Kill Me Now at Workshop West in 2013. I was bartending on opening night, and I had the script with me thinking I might get him to sign it. But in the end I got too tongue-tied, and just served him a drink,” Mallory laughs.

Ursula Pattloch, Elizabeth Marsh, Nicolle Lemay, Anne Marie Szucs, Cinnamon Stacey in 5@50, Walterdale Theatre. Photo by Scott Henderson, Henderson Images.

In 5@50 the five friends go way back, and their lives have diverged dramatically through the years. “It’s sort of like the friendships you might see in a sports team,” she thinks. The members don’t keep up with the daily details of each other’s lives; when they reunite from time to time, there are gaps. It’s a vivid gallery of mouthy, raucous, funny characters. “This is the one who takes care of everybody, and always remembers to bring a card and present for birthdays. This is the blunt one who calls everyone on their crap every time. This is the drunk life of the party…. The people who rub each other the wrong way in scene one are still the people who rub each other the wrong way later on, as things escalate.”

“For me, part of the fun is seeing how different the characters are from each other. You start out thinking it’s a story about one person and how her trouble affects everybody. But over the course of a year, we find out more about what’s going on in everybody else’s lives.”    

An engineer by profession, Mallory says “I feel in love with theatre 10 years ago, as an audience member (she’s an inveterate play-goer and sometime Sterling Award juror). And then I tried everything! Even acting classes at the Citadel….The Fringe and Walterdale are great places for people who want to try stuff out, and get their feet wet.”

“But what came naturally to me first was stage management. It’s pretty similar to project engineering,” she says. “Scheduling, organizing, anticipating problems and worst-case scenarios, keeping track of people. I really like that part….”

5@50 isn’t Mallory’s directing debut. For one, she directed a Fringe production, a tribute to The Golden Girls, in 2016. “Very different in tone, but women my age, with agency…. She’d have been happy to work on 5@50 in other capacities, just to see it happen. she says. “Then I got thinking about what I’d bring to a production….”

Ah, the scheduling. Even in the best of times, which no one would argue these are, the rehearsal schedule is always a challenge at an amateur company like Walterdale, where everyone does theatre for love not for money, and arrives at rehearsal having already done a full day’s work.

A long lead time is a given: at Walterdale rehearsals typically happen three times a week for three months. Still, an 18-month pause? 5@50 was nearly ready for production in March 2020 when the pandemic blundered into our lives. “We thought it was a two-week hold, and then … nothing,” sigh Mallory. “I put my script away.”

A certain startling onstage/offstage synchronicity revealed itself when she and her cast (all but one are the original actors) returned to the play, first on Zoom. “The script lends itself to the idea that the women haven’t been in touch lately. They don’t remember whose birthday they’ve missed or how old people’s kids are…. Isolation, reconnections, tentativeness for all of us. Suddenly I understood that in a way I didn’t a year ago.”

“We were struck this fall out the insights everybody had into the characters, stuff we hadn’t caught the first time around. Having more time with it? Letting it sit?”

She points to the strange collective feeling, exhilarating but weird, of returning to the theatre in person, “and being amazed to see that this world still exists,” albeit with masks and without the standard theatre greeting, a hug. People are catching up with each other’s lives.

You’ll see that happening onstage (and in the lobby) at Walterdale this week.

PREVIEW

5@50

Theatre: Walterdale

Written by: Brad Fraser

Directed by: Louise Mallory

Starring: Ursula Pattloch, Elizabeth Marsh, Cinnamon Stacey, Nicolle Lemay, Anne Marie Szucs

Running: Wednesday through Dec. 18

Tickets: tixonthesquare.ca

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A shared responsibility for human happiness: A Christmas Carol is back at the Citadel, live. A review.

Posted on December 3, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Ted Dykstra as Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge, A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre 2021. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Snow’s a given. Sunset before happy hour, also a given. But in Edmonton it’s never really “beginning to look a lot like Christmas” till A Christmas Carol opens at the Citadel. That’s just the way it is here.

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“The the hap-happiest season of all,” as another hit from the Christmas songbook has it, can begin. David van Belle’s clever 20th century adaptation of the evergreen Dickens ghost story, which premiered in 2019 (after 19 seasons of Tom Woods’ hit Victorian era version), is back onstage. Live and in-person. And, times being what they are, when we can’t ever take human connectedness for granted, seeing Daryl Cloran’s big, handsome, music-filled production live as it populates the stage with 25 actors and a band, feels like a special occasion — and a sign. (The 2020 film version is available this year, too).

In van Belle’s version, Ebenezer Scrooge tells us that “Christmas is an excuse to be weak.” When it comes to making large-scale theatre in 2021, he couldn’t be more wrong. The Citadel’s A Christmas Carol takes ingenuity, commitment, and a $1 million budget.

If you saw the 2019 production of A Christmas Carol, or caught the Citadel’s 90-minute film adaptation, created last year in the COVID-ian maelstrom to maintain the theatre’s two-decade holiday tradition, you already know that van Belle re-locates the story in time and space — and hence in sight and sound. The last-minute ghostly intervention that thaws the frozen heart of Ebenezer Scrooge and saves him from solitary damnation happens a century later, and across the pond from the original.

It’s Christmas Eve, 1949. And Mr. Scrooge (the excellent Ted Dykstra returning to the role) is the ruthless, perpetually exasperated boss of Marley’s department store. He worships at the shrine of the bottom line and talks the talk of profit margins. And although Christmas retail is good for both (especially if you front-rack the colour red, he says), the season seems to bring out the worst in him with its spirit of bonhomie.

“Wrap it up!” he snaps at the in-store Santa, who’s gone 20 minutes over his time. To passing choristers, it’s “knock it off! Scram!” To everyone else — including the terrifying chain-dragging ghost of his late partner Jacob Marley (Julien Arnold), businessmen raising money for the Christmas Fund, his ever-exuberant nephew Fred (Oscar Derkx), the mysteriously lovely Ghost of Christmas Past (Lilla Solymos) — it’s “waddya want?” And it’s delivered like a slap to the head.

Seeing the show again, I was re-struck by the unerring way Dykstra lands the idiom and cadence of van Belle’s witty, sharp-eared re-fashioning of Dickens’s language for another century (and continent). “Miserable woman,” he mutters at his housekeeper Mrs. Dilber (Ruth Alexander), fleeing the room. “She’s got the place lit up like the Moulin Rouge.”

“I chose to warn you,” says Marley, rattling his chains alarmingly as he warns of impending salutary house calls from three spirits. “Message received,” declares Scrooge, hoping to avert the visitations. “I’d rather not….”   

Dykstra’s Scrooge, who stomps through the store as if it might slide away from him, is a man of wit turned rancid. His ironies are withering, his comebacks acid. “Welfare!?” he briskly tells the Ghost of Christmas Past, who’s brought up the subject in its largest sense. “Not a fan.”

Braydon Dowler-Coltman returns to the role of the younger Scrooge, impeccably charting an incremental hardening of the soul. This year Daniela Fernandez is Belle, his first and only love, playful at first, and increasingly neglected by her money-obsessed fiancé. Her exit line as she gives back the ring? “Be who you want to be.”

The Cratchits, Patricia Zentilli centre, in A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre 2021. Photo by Nanc Price.

And new, too, is Patricia Zentilli, in a lovely performance as Mrs. Cratchit, widowed by the war and harried by circumstance. She’s trying to be positive, hold down a job under an impossible boss, and keep a big family going on a shoestring — with a chronically ill youngest kid and no health care. It’s not the 1840s prospect of death by starvation perhaps. But it’s the meagre hard-scrabble single-parent life of the post-war working poor. Zentilli’s is a performance that expertly incorporates music — the wistful and nostalgic Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas — in a musing, organic way. It redeems a role that never quite seemed believable in previous years.

Lilla Solymos in A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre 2021. Photo by Nanc Price.

As the Ghost of Christmas Past, Solymos, whose ethereal account of White Christmas propels Scrooge on his journey into his own past, seems to have lighted down from the spheres. And as the ‘50s performing hep-cat/ Beat poet Ghost of Christmas Present (“and Presents”), John Ullyatt is a breezy and riotous tour guide. “I don’t teach; everything in my school is show and tell,” he tells ‘Scrooge-y.’ The latter makes a feeble attempt to shut down more incriminating journeying into the “consequences” of his cruel behavior. “Is this the only way we can do this?” Well yes, actually.

John Ullyatt as the Ghost of Christmas Present, A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre 2021. Photo by Nanc Price.

“Music is part of the whole Christmas gig, baby,” the ghost tells Scrooge. The whole Christmas Carol gig, too: In this production it’s a 14-hit songbook of post-war hits that range from the wistful, I’ll Be Home For Christmas for one, to the giddy fave I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas.

The production gives you another chance to appreciate Cory Sincennes’ design, in synch with Cloran’s stagecraft that sends characters whirling through window and doors, and especially the revolving door that along with the clock is a keynote of the stage. Sincennes’ lavish costumes trace Scrooge’s journey into his past through the 20th century. And Leigh Ann Vardy’s dramatically apt lighting moves the piece through time and space, and ghostly appearances, too.

Scrooge’s mantra of “consequences,” wielded as a bludgeon against others, turns the spotlight on his own sins in the course of the adaptation. It’s not a question of “doling out” charity; it’s a sense of the shared responsibility for human happiness as “fellow passengers on the journey of life,” as Fred puts it in van Belle’s adaptation.

The party scene at the Fezziwigs, with a star solo from Chariz Faulmino, which reveals the joy on which Scrooge has slammed the door, is a highlight. Ditto the party scene chez Fred, and the family dynamic chez Cratchit

If you haven’t got a family of your own, “the one you’re born with,” or the familial past is something to be overcome, you can find another. That’s the story of Ebenezer Scrooge. And, yes, the theatre family is back together to tell it to us.

REVIEW

A Christmas Carol

Theatre: Citadel Theatre

Written by: David van Belle from the Charles Dickens novella

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Ted Dykstra, Julien Arnold, Ruth Alexander, Oscar Derkx, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Patricia Zentilli, Lilla Solymos, John Ullyatt, Priya Narine, 25 actors in all

Running: through Dec. 23

Tickets: 7890-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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A bona fide hit with Jason in the title? Say, what? The second, third, and fourth wave of Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer

Posted on December 1, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Abby Vandenberghe and Donovan Workun in Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Darla Woodley, Red Socks Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

C’mon, who could have predicted that the hottest ticket in the first half of the Edmonton theatre season would be a show with “Jason Kenney” in the title?

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Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer is a bona fide hit. The first 10-show run of the original musical satire by the Grindstone Theatre team of Byron Martin and Simon Abbott, which played the 230-seat Campus St.-Jean Theatre, was sold out before it even opened on Nov. 10. Tickets to the added matinees vanished in two hours. The extended run, the “second wave” as Grindstone cheekily dubbed it, sold out too. So has the “third wave,” which has temporarily moved the production this week to the 350-seat The Orange Hub (the old Jasper Place MacEwan campus) from Campus St.-Jean, where it returns on Dec. 9.

And Martin, Grindstone’s enterprising but notably chill artistic director, and the director of the production, is planning for the “4th wave” (hey, that’s something the Alberta government should consider doing). It will happen in January at the Campus St.-Jean, dates to be announced when Martin has figured out the logistics of actor and venue availability for his cast of eight and the crack three-member live band that includes composer Abbott.

Yes, a lot of people are keen to see the perpetrator of the infamous mantra The Best Summer Ever — not coincidentally the most unpopular premier in Alberta history — as a dopey ‘80s frat boy college kid with a big rodeo party and not much else on his tiny mind. It’s 1983 and in a droll performance by Donovan Workun, Jason Kenney is the hapless “hero,” the newly elected Summer Session Students Union President at Alberta University. His nemesis, Rachel Notley the “villain” of the piece (Stephanie Wolfe), is a type-A super-organized control freak who’s the high-maintenance girlfriend of Justin Trudeau (Malachi Wilkins). See my review here.  

Abby Vandenberghe in Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Darla Woodley, Red Socks Photography.

“I feel very proud of the quality of the show…. But nobody expected it to blow up (like this),” says the bemused and slightly harried Martin, who’s had to replace an actor here and there for the second and third waves. “We’re still kinda scrappy and indie….”

Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer is the biggest-budget undertaking ever for the little comedy company whose Strathcona headquarters is a 85-seat theatre/bistro (plus a 120-seat “education” venue for improv, stand-up, and sketch comedy workshops under the Mill Creek Cafe). The Grindstone is an entertainment destination with accessible ticket prices heavily weighted to improv, with regulars (and walk-up traffic), not subscribers.

Their productions, which regularly play the Fringe, are usually co-ops. The box office heat of Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer has been a game-changer. “We’ve been able to bump everybody up to professional Equity rates for the show,” says Martin of his cast and musicians. “It’s been my goal for so long!”

Stephanie Wolfe and Malachi Wilkins as Rachel Notley and Justin Trudeau in Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, Grindstone Theatre.

From the start Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer was designed to be a musical, says Martin, a musical theatre triple-threat himself by training, who leads Grindstone’s weekly all-improvised musical The 11 O’Clock Number. Maybe Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer is having a spin-off effect; that show has been sold out for the last eight weeks.

For one thing, as Martin said in an interview with 12thnight in November (see it here), musical theatre, with its built-in heightening effect, lends itself to satire. And original political satire is a rarity in these parts. One local billboard company refused to run Grindstone’s ads, for example.

For another, Martin’s own tastes in musicals run to comedy-satires like Urinetown (which has directed for the Fringe) or The Book of Mormon. His musical ThunderCATS, which he honed at the Banff Centre under the mentorship of Bob Martin and Lisa Lambert of The Drowsy Chaperone fame, falls under that category, too, as you’ll glean from its title. He’s thinking of revisiting the idea of the ThunderCATS tour that got canned for COVID.

Abby Vandenberghe, Mark Sinongco and Donovan Workun in Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer. Photo by Darla Woodley, Red Socks Photography.

So who are the people filling the house seats to hear some catchy songs with clever lyrics — and watch a dazed doofus, champion of Upsilon Kappa Pi, tell Dr. Deena Hinshaw (Abby Vandenberghe’s very funny comic reinvention of the monotonous, ever-compliant government doctor) that he’d never realized science was a thing? “A weird combo,” says Martin. “The political crowd is showing up, MLAs, city councillors.… And a very blue-collar Alberta crowd is coming out too, not traditionally a theatre-going crowd. And also older theatre-goers; they line up early.  A mix with more of a Grindstone crowd…. And some theatre people. But not a lot,” he laughs.

“I’ve been blown away that everybody’s heard of it now; the reach has been pretty amazing,”

Byron Martin, Grindstone Theatre artistic director and co-creator of Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer. Photo by Darla Woodley, Red Socks Photography.

An audience favourite — they cheer and sing along every night — is Tyler Shandro’s raucous number Fuck Kenney. In oppressive times, where things feel royally screwed up, “it’s a release,” says Martin. The moment Jason Kenney talks about chemistry, saying “the curriculum must have changed,” always gets a big laugh too, he reports. Workun, a dangerously skilled improviser, has played his part in honing the script. “Donovan killed us in rehearsal….We’ve encouraged the actors to be mischievous; we’re not too precious.”

There are theatre jokes too. Wilkins plays both Trudeaus, father and son, because “we don’t have the budget for another actor,” he tells the audience.

“I’m pretty happy with the laughs per minute,” says Martin. “And I’ve been getting nice messages about how cathartic, healing even, it is. So nice to hear and so hilarious in its own way…. We’re making light of it, but it’s heavy stuff we’re poking at,” says Martin. “It just reminds you how important it is to laugh; laughter really is good medicine….”

It seems obvious that Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer should play Calgary, too; the Calgary media have been in touch, says Martin. He’s hoping for an 18-performance run “some time between January and March.” But the logistics are tough. Some of his actors have full-time jobs to work around. Venues with available dates are hard to find, and “it’s an eye-opener what some of them cost.”

Martin approached one Calgary venue for a rental and got refused on the grounds that “we don’t do political satire. We have to stay politically neutral because we get government grants.” Martin sighs, and laughs. “That’s so funny. As if it’s politically neutral to turn down our show!”

Grindstone is on to something. That’s satire in itself.

Check Grindstone Theatre for updates on the fourth wave, and tickets.

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Some day soon we all will be together… A Christmas Carol is back live at the Citadel

Posted on November 29, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Ted Dykstra and Patricia Zentilli as Mr Scrooge and his employee Mrs. Cratchit in A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre 2021. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Daryl Cloran has discovered an infallible new applause line, simple but profound. He’s used it in pre-show remarks to audiences at the Citadel’s productions of The Fiancée, Bears, and The Garneau Block this fall. Same effect every time: “I just say ‘it’s so nice to have you back’. And the audience always cheers….”

Anticipate then the reverb when a venerable Edmonton tradition of some 22 seasons standing returns to live and in-person this week: the Citadel’s A Christmas Carol. It comes after last year’s 90-minute film version that, of necessity in the dark circumstances of December 2020, took David van Belle’s screen adaptation of his own adaptation of the evergreen Dickens novella, which premiered in 2019, to people on location in their own homes.

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Citadel artistic director Cloran, who directed both stage production and film, says the latter (a $250,000 venture made possible by EPCOR’s Heart and Soul Fund and the Edmonton Community Foundation) “was all about finding a way to be connected even though we were apart…. It looked beautiful; we were all so thrilled. Lots of people watched it. For a ‘pandemic pivot’, pretty great!” ”

Now, Christmas 2021. “We’re back! And this time it’s a celebration of being a community again!” For many of his cast, says Cloran, “it’s their first show back after nearly two years. And for lots of our audience it’s going to be the same.”

Ted Dykstra as Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge, A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre 2021. Photo by Nanc Price.

The Citadel’s $1 million production, a successor to 19 seasons of Tom Wood’s Victorian era best-seller, propels the flinty Ebenezer and his dark night of the soul ahead a century. It’s 1949, in Marley’s department store. The visions of Mr. Scrooge (Ted Dykstra), its cold-eyed, acid-tongued proprietor and boss, run not to sugarplums but profit margins and overtime.

The music, relocated in space and time, too, is gathered from the familiar post-war secular Christmas songbook of hits like Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, White Christmas, Winter Wonderland.

The Cratchits, Patricia Zentilli centre, in A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre 2021. Photo by Nanc Price.

If the song of the dozen or so in the production songbook that resonated most poignantly in 2020 was the melancholy Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas with its thought that “some day soon we all will be together … if the fates allow.” It’s 2021 and we’ve all muddled through somehow. Our circumstances this year give I’ll Be Home For Christmas, with its wistful “if only in my dreams,” a new emotional palette too. There are many festive reunions in the offing.“My parents arrive from Sarnia today,” said Cloran last week. “We haven’t seen them, and they haven’t seen their grandkids, in two years!”

“For many people A Christmas Carol is that kind of reunion.”

Daniela Fernandez and Braydon Dowler-Coltman in A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre 2021. Photo by Nanc Price.

Playwright Van Belle echoes the thought. COVID grinds on and on. “But we’re starting to get there… We will actually be present in a space together. Something about that is really powerful, and especially important at Christmas time. Hearing songs sung in a room full of people is a beautiful thing.”

Those songs were trimmed, sometimes to fleeting sound allusions, for the 90-minute film version. They’re back. To van Belle’s delight, so are “the extra characters I dearly love,” like the immigrant family who ask Mr. Scrooge for directions and get back a withering “Learn. To. Speak. English.”

“Everything is back to its 2019 glory!” says Cloran happily. “From a production standpoint we’ve changed a couple of moments around the ghosts, added a few new elements…. And it’s a chance to finish the costumes we didn’t have the time or resources to finish!”

Since the Maclab backstage is particularly tiny and cramped, the 35-actor cast list of 2019 has been reduced by 10, five fewer kids, five fewer adults. But, led again by Ted Dykstra as Mr. Scrooge, it’s still a strikingly large big ensemble (with live music) by the standards of the pandemic theatre landscape, dotted with one- or two-person adaptations. Theatre Calgary’s Christmas Carol, returning this year, has three actors.

It’s complicated, and labour-intensive, to pull off a large-cast musical any time. In the time of COVID, the ante is upped exponentially with rapid testing, masks, daily check-ins. The adults have been vaccinated. So have the kids, who are all 12 or older in this year’s production.“We joke that Tiny Tim (Ivy deGagné does the honours) is Moderately-Sized Tim,” laughs Van Belle.

Three people on the Citadel production team are assigned full-time to managing COVID protocols. Director, stage manager, and crew are all masked all the time. The actors rehearsed in masks; onstage they’re mask-less. But when they exit the stage and even during costume changes, “there’s a mask waiting for them,” says Cloran. It adds a whole other layer to the time-honoured ‘getting into character’ actor’s mantra. “Everyone is going the extra mile,” says van Belle of the cast, most of whom are returning to the show this year.

And, as extra insurance, there’s a cast of understudies too, by no means the usual in Canadian theatre where ‘the show must go on’ is the operational law that overrules all others. “Some of the extras I hope we can maintain,” says van Belle. “It makes theatre practice more resilient, more flexible.”

John Ullyatt as the Ghost of Christmas Present, A Christmas Carol, Citadel Theatre 2021. Photo by Nanc Price.

Does A Christmas Carol have a different reverb at the end of 2021? He thinks of it as “a container story. The mythology and meaning of the time fill that container….”

“Who are we this year? We’re Scrooge at the end of the play, on Christmas morning.” We’re Scrooge after his long dark night of the soul. “He has a choice,” says van Belle. He’s ‘what am I going to do today? How am I going to behave differently?’ He has to start making new choices, on a moment to moment basis.”

“I think that’s where we are this year.  How do we want to put things back together? The way they were before? Or do we want to say ‘I’m not the person I was?’ What are we we going to do with the knowledge of who got left behind?”

It’s a Christmas morning moment.

PREVIEW

A Christmas Carol

Theatre: Citadel Theatre

Written by: David van Belle from the Charles Dickens novella

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Ted Dykstra, Julien Arnold, Ruth Alexander, Oscar Derkx, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Patricia Zentilli, Lilla Solymos, John Ullyatt, Priya Narine

Running: through Dec. 23

Tickets: 7890-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com

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Holding the torch in a man’s world: The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921 at Northern Light Theatre. A review

Posted on November 21, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Twilla MacLeod and Sue Huff in The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

History is the springboard for The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921, the cunningly knotted little play that opens the Northern Light Theatre season in Trevor Schmidt’s crackling production.

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The title reveals the small-town crime, recorded by the local paper and apparently never even investigated much less pursued to justice. What unfolds onstage, scene by scene, is playwright Linda Wood Edwards’s hypothesis about what happened in Big Valley, Alberta just after Christmas that year.

There’s no shortage in the  theatre archive of two-handers that throw together mismatched, utterly incompatible characters. Nun and showgirl, red-lipped drag queen and purse-lipped accountant, oligarch and bum, criminal and cop, woman and misogynist … in stuck elevators, sealed bunkers, locked cellars, rent-controlled apartments…. Then we watch as the odd-couple hostility gets de-thorned, and turns into grudging accommodation, understanding, maybe even appreciation.   

In its set-up at least The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921, originally developed as a Fringe production by the indie company MAA and PAA Theatre, is an heir to that venerable tradition. Wood Edwards imagines a series of encounters in a small mining town in the Alberta hinterland between Mrs. Hastings (Sue Huff) the local brothel madam and Mrs. Smith (Twilla MacLeod), the upright proprietor of the local boarding house. And the play is woven with monologues in which the characters speak directly to us.

Sue Huff, Twilla MacLeod in The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

At the outset, when we learn of the mysterious conflagration that has razed the brothel to the ground, the characters stand on either side of a sensibility abyss. The bold, earthy worldliness of the former and the corseted Victorian moral disapproval of the latter are set forth vividly in performances from Huff and MacLeod, costumed with high-style pizzaz by designer Alison Yanota and make-up artist Kendra Humphrey.

As Mrs. Hastings, Huff has a breezy, off-the-cuff bravado about her. Her sass doesn’t abandon her even in moments of duress in a hard life. In the first scene, as she recounts the night in which she fled her burning house “and walked into a town that burned us out,” she cites a Robert W. Service poem.

MacLeod as Mrs. Smith looks properly horrified when the fire refugee hopes for a drop of something quite a bit stronger than the tea she’s offered. She’s constantly taken aback by the pragmatism and anti-sentimentality of her counterpart. But her attachment to respectability is, as she is moved to realize, is a kind of social pragmatism, too.

Her worldly “recipe” for getting along in a small town (“a cup of drivel, teaspoon of flattery, a pinch of venom…”) is a rare jarring moment when the playwright’s gift for natural dialogue gives way to a more authorial, imposed sort of voice. What? Suddenly Mrs. Smith is the northern Alberta Lady Bracknell? But MacLeod’s performance smartly negotiates the thawing of the moral permafrost that the character knows at some level keeps all ambiguities frozen in place.

The play unspools in reverse, with alternating flashbacks. Against a backdrop of birthing cries on an Easter weekend in Mrs. Smith’s boarding house (sound by Mason Snelgrove), it transpires that the two women are, in a curious way, connected by business. The one runs a brothel with a core clientele of single miners; the other runs a boarding house that is a refuge for the brothel employees, who regularly get knocked up in their line of work.

Mrs. Smith muses that the birth of “the child of a whore” is a blasphemous way to usher in Easter. For her part Mrs. Hastings concedes that the birth may be indeed touching: “it touches me like a bullet to the brain.”

Sue Huff and Twilla MacLeod, The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Their back stories are revealed by the characters themselves, as they simply step outside the wooden frame dwelling, beautifully lighted, that is the centrepiece of Yanota’s striking design in Schmidt’s production. And in their encounters, increasingly casual and confessional as Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Hastings become “friends,” they confirm in their individual ways that the relationships of women to men are nuanced, and crucial to survival in the age in which they live.

Mrs. Hasting’s argument that marriage merely delays the pay-off — “why wait to inherit one man’s money when I can get most men’s money right now?” — has the Shavian ring of Mrs. Warren’s Profession and its thought that Victorian marriage is legalized prostitution. Mrs. Smith is less and less inclined to disagree, and under the tutelage of her friend, develops a work-around.

There is a starchy wit to Wood Edwards’s writing. Each scene has its own surprises to offer. One woman has lost a child; the other hasn’t been able to conceive. “God didn’t give me my own children. But he left me the playpen,” says Mrs. Hastings brightly.

Soon they will be trading Christmas puddings and mustard pickles, as well as gossip about a town that runs on that subterranean nastiness. And there’s a further point at which negotiation gets trickier, more delicate. The miners, single and foreign, are the mainstay of Mrs. Hasting’s business. But isn’t it curious that the men of the town, the husbands, seem to be bathing more frequently?

How this will be resolved is unexpected, and fun to follow. And what is surprising, too, is what will not be resolved. The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921 is tough-minded about the way women’s friendships develop in a society where men have the upper hand — and the way they are undermined and betrayed.

REVIEW

The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Linda Wood Edwards

Starring: Sue Huff, Twilla MacLeod

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Nov. 28

Tickets (must be purchased in advance) and vaccination/ masking protocols: northernlighttheatre.com.

 

  

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Rave on: Buddy Holly is back at the Mayfield. A review

Posted on November 20, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Tyler Check in Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“You have about as much sex appeal as a telegraph pole,” an old-timey Texas country radio DJ tells a nerdy, bespectacled young man with rock n’ roll on his mind at the outset of Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story, currently reminding Mayfield audiences that it’s so easy to fall in love.

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Citing the young man’s grievous offence against community musical standards, Hipockets Duncan’s sage advice to the offender is to get a real job, in the tiling biz with his brothers. Ah yes, career counselling at its finest, like pushing the young upstart from Stratford to forget about theatre and get settled in his dad’s glove-making operation.

Anyhow, that was 1956. And the young man with the guitar and geek glasses, “a stubborn son of a gun,” held his ground. Soon Hipockets would be calling Buddy Holly “our Buddy” in hopes of a fleeting interview. And as the world knows, the gangly son of Lubbock would be a bona fide rock ’n’ roll icon by the time he died. Stardom happened in awfully short order. Less than three years later, in 1959, age 22, Buddy Holly was killed in a plane crash — just 18 months after the release of his prophetically named first hit single That’ll Be The Day.

But as it was with Patsy Cline, who occupied the Mayfield stage earlier this fall (A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline), icons don’t give up the ghost. They rave on from beyond the grave, and keep the music coming. (And in the case of Patsy and Buddy they throw in a warning against flying in small aircraft in bad weather in the American hinterland.)

Created by the English writer Alan Janes in 1989 for London’s West End (where it ran for 12 years), Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story is something of a prototype for the jukebox musical: a crowd-pleasing  amplitude of hit songs, minimal narrative interference (luckily) beyond the requisite “why don’t we get you boys in the studio?”

Which actually suits a speeded-up bio like the one belonging to the gangly groundbreaker who played a major role in transforming American musical culture in the ‘50s. Buddy’s up against the Southern white country musical establishment that finds rock ’n’ roll  too sexy and, in a nutshell, too Black. But in Buddy’s story, the status quo doesn’t have much time to put up a continued resistance. Soon, very soon, Buddy and the Crickets will be in New York, amazing the audience at the Apollo in Harlem — by being white.

The biographical clock is ticking: that rickety plane in the wintry Iowa boondocks awaits on the tarmac of time. Holly’s wife Maria Elena (Nayeli Abrego) had it right in her bad dreams. Take the bus, Buddy, take the bus.

And as for the West Texas family from which the rock ’n’ roll star, apparently a progressive in racial terms, emerged? Their only presence in the show is Ma’s voice on the phone, exhorting Buddy to remember to eat.

Scott Carmichael, Alex Panneton, Tyler Check, Evan Stewart in Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story, Mayfield Dinner Theatre, Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story, one of the Mayfield’s most popular shows ever, is back in a new version after a decade. And with it, a song list of 30 hits, Peggy Sue, Maybe Baby, True Love Ways, It’s So Easy To Fall In Love, Every Day, among them. And, crucially, a 13-member cast led by the very appealing Tyler Check as Buddy and Alex Panneton and Even Stewart as the Crickets. They perform the songs live, assisted by the ensemble: the signature sound (under John Banister’s musical direction), no air guitar, no sleight of hand. The musical values, as always at the Mayfield, are high.

Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

As played by Check, Buddy is both the nerd charmer and an adamantine trailblazer, who says repeatedly that he wants “to play my music my way.” (and in more fulsome moments, which sound a bit like the author speaking, “for me, my music is always evolving; staying here is like standing still”). He expertly, apparently easily, captures the Holly vocal signatures, the light timbre, the little hiccups and slides, and the star’s long-legged physicality. Christine Bandelow’s choreography is apt and atmospheric.

The scenes that glue the songs together are a sort of biographical checklist, with a few additional interpolations for period colour (the Snowbirds, a girl trio, break in to sing advertisements of the time). It’s the jukebox, not the drama, that counts.

Trevor Patt, Alex Panneton, Tyler Check in Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The Act II highlight, and the climax of the evening, is a kind of re-creation of the fateful “winter dance party” at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa on Feb. 2, 1959. Holly is joined by fellow stars Ritchie Valens (Alex Panneton) and the Big Bopper (Trevor Patt, with Sheldon Elter taking over Nov. 30 to Jan. 23).

It’s the night before ‘the day the music died’. And, in addition to the eerie way that every song gives off a fateful vibe (underscored by a string of comments about the weather), it’s a big sound/ big finish to an evening that gives us a short life as a long songbook — and a remarkably well performed one.

REVIEW

Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Written by: Alan Janes

Directed by: Van Wilmott

Musical Director: John Banister

Starring: Tyler Check, Trevor Patt, Alex Panneton, Evan Stewart, Nayeli Abrego

Running: through Jan. 23

Tickets: mayfield theatre.ca, 780-483-4051

  

  

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Linda Wood Edwards reimagines a mysterious chapter in our history: The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921 at Northern Light

Posted on November 16, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Sue Huff, The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

In December 26, 1921, just outside the small Alberta town of Big Valley, a brothel started by an enterprising woman burned to the ground.Narrow escapes ensued, as duly reported by The Big Valley News that week. The cause of the blaze was “unknown” … and unknown it stayed. No investigation happened; no charges were laid.

MAA and PAA Theatre, an indie company devoted to making Alberta history live onstage, discovered a further mystery in the course of their researches. All references to the event and the brothel mysteriously had disappeared from the official town records. What was left behind, a kind of oral history residue, was the persistent rumour that the women of the town had banded together, moral vigilantes, to do the cleansing deed.

Twilla MacLeod, The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson.

That speculation inspired Linda Wood Edwards’s two-hander play that arrived onstage first at the 2018 Fringe in a MAA and PAA production. The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921 returns, in a new version, its professional premiere directed by Trevor Schmidt, to open the Northern Light Theatre season.

“People send David (MAA and PAA’s co-producer David Cheoros) ideas all the time, rumours about this or that,” says Wood Edwards. “This one came as an unsolicited email.” It offered a tantalizing theatrical prospect for the little company founded by a theatre artist (David Cheoros) and an expert archivist (Karen Simonson). Assiduous research turned up … nothing. “It would have been a major crime, but suddenly the trail was cold.”

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The dead end was intriguing in itself. “I wasn’t getting my own work done. So hey, what better thing to do than interfere in someone else’s?,” laughs Wood Edwards, a highly entertaining conversationalist. What history didn’t provide, the theatre did. The result is a play that fictionalizes what happened en route to the fateful fire. It imagines an unlikely friendship between the entrepreneurial madame (Sue Huff) and a prim upright Christian woman (Twilla MacLeod) who runs a local boarding house. And it explores the exclusionary tactics of “proper” society, and the support and sabotage that can be part of women’s relationships.

The playwright, who’s been taking her plays (Spring Alibi, True Grid, Four in the Crib, Trail and Error among them) to the Fringe since 2005, is on the phone from the Varscona Theatre, watching rehearsals and savouring the experience of revisiting The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921 in its professional Northern Light incarnation.

playwright Linda Wood Edwards

“I’m giddier by the minute,” she says of seeing Alison Yanota’s set. “The difference between 10 minutes (turnaround) at the Fringe, a couple of chairs — it’s blowing my mind… I stage manage my own Fringe stuff. Now I see what a real stage manager (Elizabeth Allison) does. And I can up my game!”

In the world of Canadian theatre, where second outings are a rarity, the Northern Light production provides a sense of possibility in another way, too. In the strikingly different version we’ll see starting Friday, Huff reprises her role as the earthy Hastings, the brothel entrepreneur (her Fringe co-star was Linda Grass), but with a dramatic difference. Scant weeks before The Great Whorehouse Fire opened in 2018, Huff developed a scary mystery ailment with paralyzing symptoms not unlike rheumatoid arthritis (“a nightmare,” as Wood Edwards says). All the blocking was custom-remade so Huff could play the role sitting in a chair. It was a test of the collaborative spirit, and the mantra that the show must go on. Which it did, and sold out nearly every performance.

Like the design, the stage activity in Schmidt’s production is “much more expanded,” as Wood Edwards points out. “Absolutely! And the actors say the words completely differently too…. What a delight!”

Wood Edwards is a theatre-maker with an unusual route into showbiz.  Three decades of experience as a consultant to boards of not-for-profits and professional and industry associations (“I do board governance, bylaws, policy”) came first. “I only started consulting to not-for-profit theatres in the last 10 years…. All the theatre I’ve done I looked at through a business lens,” she says cheerfully. “It makes the world sane for me to take a business approach, to make sure ‘my people’ do well enough, or better than most.”

And as for Wood Edwards the playwright, “I always say that when I have a really pressing need to use an adjective I write a play.”

A kind of dark hilarity all its own attaches to her playwriting debut, as she recounts. At “a really bad point of my life,” 1996 to be precise, she’d opted to change the scene by hiking the 55 km. Chilkoot Trail in the Yukon. She later turned this into a Sterling-nominated Fringe show Trail and Error, starring Ellen Chorley.

At the time “I was just wandering around Whitehorse and saw a sign on a telephone poll, about a 24-hour playwriting competition. “It cost 30 bucks and you got a hotel room, and I really wanted a bath, and I had a pen and paper,” she says. “So I signed up for it.”

“I had a couple of meals, two baths and a shower, and wrote some stuff. And at the end of 24 hours someone knocked on the door and said ‘you’ve got to hand it in now…. I just hated what I wrote and told them to take it away or I’m going to set fire to the f-in’ thing.”

“Six weeks later I was day-drinking with some retired teachers in the bar of the Capital Hotel in Whitehorse,” she continues. One of them had noticed a public service announcement on CBC North to the effect that “anyone knowing the whereabouts of Linda Wood from Edmonton, send her to Nakai Theatre.” She ‘d won a prize, and she got handed a cheque.

That play was Spring Alibi, her first. It premiered at the 2005 Fringe, introduced Wood Edwards to the Edmonton theatre scene, and has travelled widely since, including productions at the Yukon Comedy Arts Festival, the Capital Fringe Festival in Washington DC, and the Adelaide Fringe. “And it kinda changed the trajectory of things for me,” she says.

Wood Edwards riffs on her own life experience in plays like Trail and Error or True Grid, about the bonding amongst die-hard football fans. Four in the Crib is spun from her mom’s experience in a seniors home. “As a dialogue writer,” as she puts it, the pandemic has been hard to negotiate. “I discovered that my inspiration comes from overhearing other people in conversation…. Not hearing anyone talk for months and months has been a pretty deep hole. I’m just starting to get out now.”

Her go-to pandemic form? The 10-minute play (“I like the discipline”). Her go-to place for eavesdropping? Golden, B.C. She hadn’t been there for many months, till last week. “I spent 20 hours and left laughing my head off and going ‘ah, that feels better’…. If you’re stuck there for more than three days, either you’re never leaving or never coming back. I became one of this never-leave people.”  Ah, not coincidentally there’s a Wood Edwards play, her last produced before the pandemic, drawn from that thought: Three Nights To Forever premiered at the 2019 Fringe.

Meanwhile, there’s another Wood Edwards/Cheoros collaboration in progress, this one a farce (“too big for the Fringe”) that sets nine characters in motion in a a high-end restaurant. And the Grey Cup is coming up, Wood Edwards’ 26th in person, and an unmissable event in her world. The air of authenticity about True Grid is a tip-off. Like her late husband Brian Edwards — he passed away in July, and TSN did a tribute — she is a super-fan.

The day before we talked she’d been to a Grey Cup season launch party and “won an awesome beer fridge.” And she’s happy to talk about the Elks’ dismal record this season. “For me, since I work with boards, everything starts there…. Of  course when your only tool’s a hammer, everything’s a nail.”

Meanwhile, before she leaves for Hamilton and the CFL Alumni Association Board’s annual general meeting, there’s theatre, and a premiere. “Writing is fun!” she says. “How else do I get all the noises out of my head? The difficult is finding the plot. My characters talk and talk, until they tell me what the hell they’re supposed to be doing. And that can take a long time!” Sometimes there’s a fire.

PREVIEW

The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Linda Wood Edwards

Starring: Sue Huff, Twilla MacLeod

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday through Nov. 28

Tickets (must be purchased in advance) and vaccination/ masking protocols: northernlighttheatre.com.

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The (88) keys to the kingdom: Darrin Hagen’s solo show Metronome. A review

Posted on November 14, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Darrin Hagen, Metronome, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In his new solo play Metronome, Darrin Hagen sits at a table under a giant arc, a rainbow of piano fragments, strings, unstrung sounding plates, keyboards. At one end, attached to the ground like the mythical pot of gold, is an accordion. The other end is free-floating.

What an apt and witty metaphor (designer: Beyata Hackborn) for a memoir in which Hagen traces his multi-hued story back through the years — and a queen’s ransom in sequins — to a life-changing discovery by a gay trailer park kid in a small prairie town.

We know Hagen as a playwright and performer, an author, a queer history documentarian and activist, one of this theatre town’s busiest sound designers and composers. We’ve seen his glamorous alter-ego as a drag queen, in four-inch stilettos or a mermaid’s tail.

But where did he come from, this mysteriously expandable multi-branched talent? Was he planted in the hard soil of Rocky Mountain House? Assembled from parts? Found fully formed? Self-created? Stick around. That’s what Metronome, getting its premiere in Heather Inglis’s Workshop West Playwrights Theatre production, is for.

The First Cause in this origin story is music. And the key (well, the 88 keys) to the kingdom? The piano. “Something about piano keys has always pulled me in. I’m literally unable to resist,” he tells us near the outset.

Maybe that’s why — in a counter-intuitive choice — there isn’t a real live piano onstage in Heather Inglis’s artful production. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to leave it alone.

Instead, there are musical memories assembled from the air by Jason Kodie’s score, a vivid capture of time and place. For Hagen, memory is built and archived from music. And the circular floor on which Hagen revolves to tell his story is dappled with pages of music, notes, the ticking of the metronome. Adam Turnbull’s lighting and Ian Jackson’s video design, both striking, create a sort of magical memory world for Hagen to play in.

For Hagen at age seven, music was a language he urgently had to “figure out with my ear.” He describes tinkering away on his Grandma’s chord organ until it “made sense.” In the face of such full-hearted persistence what could a resistant keyboard do? An hour later,  completely untrained, he could play On Top Of Old Smokey.

Darrin Hagen in Metronome, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

“Every song, he says at the beginning and end of Metronome, “is a memory.” And the musical memory bank begins with a used starter accordion (“cheap accordions are everywhere on the prairies,” Hagen tells us). Then, with a series of ever-bigger and more adult accordions, progress came so fast that in three years he’d outgrown the skills of his teacher Mrs. Bonde.

In a pungent little add-on (which seems to be the way Hagen’s storyteller wit rolls), he remembers playing The Entertainer (from The Sting) at a school assembly, and his reward afterward. “On the school bus on the way home, one of the dickheads called me a faggot … for being good at something.’

It was time for a piano, and none too soon since “I was beginning to realize the accordion was the Kiss of Nerd Death. I blame Lawrence Welk. And Gaby Haas. And The Emeralds.” And through the efforts of his mom and dad, a used Ennis & Sons upright grand was acquired for 700 bucks from an old lady in Sylvan Lake, and hauled into the trailer.

What emerges in the course of Metronome is the story of a special  talent, and the way it got noticed almost by accident in unlikely circumstances, and nurtured against the odds. Music unlocked a rainbow of creative possibilities for a gay kid otherwise consigned to the solitary closet of small-town bullying and low expectations.

Hagen’s piano, as he tells us, was his inspiration, his source of friends, his talisman against a brute and brutalizing world. It gave him applause, family rapport, and jobs, as he recounts in amusing anecdotes. At 12, he was already a piano teacher. He played weddings, old folks’ homes, trade fairs, community halls. His stories about competing in music festivals and taking Royal Conservatory exams are wincing and funny.

Soon he’d move to the big city and have the creative confidence to reinvent himself in a crazy new showbiz life. That chapter is a story Hagen has told elsewhere, in his volume (and play) The Edmonton Queen. And it’s not the focus here, except that his precious piano provides a springboard, enters that world, and moves around in it.

Hagen is a great raconteur, with an instinct for gathering wry, telling details, and an aversion to self-pity. And gradually what emerges from his stage memoir is a vivid double-portrait of small-town trailer park life, in which he was both the pride and joy of his un-artistic family and the odd-kid out in town. It’s Hagen as a sort of Rocky Mountain House Wingfield … if Walt Wingfield loved Donna Summer, stayed up way too late, and dropped acid. His account of the Battle of the Bands on Rocky’s main street is worth the price of admission.

The challenge of a solo show is to make the written come alive as verbal storytelling to an audience. On opening night at least, the performance took a little time to overcome that hurdle, to slow down and breathe, find a rhythm of spontaneous pauses, afterthoughts, annotations that could take the show away from the writer and give it more fully to the actor.

It did happen, though. And with it, Hagen is finally able to step a little away from his time-travelling journey, and tell us more directly of his debt to a moment 50 years ago, “the day music became my life.”

It’s Hagen’s poetic coda to a lively first-hand account of how art can be a life-changer. He himself, actor and playwright, is the tangible proof. It feels earned, and it’s moving.

Check out 12thnight’s conversation with the playwright/star in this preview.

REVIEW

Metronome

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written and performed by: Darrin Hagen

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Where: Backstage Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: through Nov. 21

Tickets and mask/vaccination requirement: workshopwest.org

 

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