The hopes and dreams of a raccoon existentialist: The Shiniest Piece of Trailer Trash, a review

Posted on September 11, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Meegan Sweet, creator and star of The Shiniest Piece of Trailer Trash. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Aww, this is the life! I get to be here, for free!” declares the resourceful, scrappy character we meet in The Shiniest Piece of Trailer Trash.

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In Meegan Sweet’s imaginative solo show, the staff choice at the 2024 Fringe, that character is a raccoon, wary but chipper, making a life in “the most decrepit trailer park — a world of garbage, left-overs, discards. The raccoon’s-eye view of things transmutes trash into treasure. But is that enough for happiness? Fulfilment?   

It’s a fundamental existential question. For our new raccoon friend the trashed half-empty Hungry Man containers are a find, but also a symbol. They aspire to be human, a being driven by appetite that creates the trash, not just consumes it. More poetically, it’s the dream of being “re-incarbonated into a yuman bean.” After all, who can say No to a Hungry Man?

Our aspirational raccoon is looking for a transcendent experience (aren’t we all?). Which explains why they’re drawn to interact with the audience: “I have never seen so many human beans in one place before,” they say, cautiously approaching one of us. “You look nice. Are you nice?” And since existential questions are a veritable dumpster dive (or rabbit hole, to mix our species allusions), the curious raccoon wonders about destiny, identity, and whether we’re locked in, to either. Death: now there’s a question. Which brings them to God — who, what, where? “what is your real name?”.

Sweet’s show touches down on big questions lightly, whimsically rifling through our human “trash.” This is not raccoon Beckett; our protagonist is not waiting for Godot. And it’s not Old Deuteronomy ready to ascend to the Heavyside Layer. But there’s poignancy in the humour, and a witty way of addressing the profound by tossing it up, then undercutting it while it’s still in the air.

Meegan Sweet in The Shiniest Piece of Trailer Trash. Photo supplied.

A black-nosed clown, they’re a free-associator, highly distractible in that clown-ly way. In this odd original of a show directed jointly by Charlie Peters and Autumn Strom. Sweet, a fearless performer and improviser, creates a mischievous, sly character who’s paws-on with the audience. “Share!” they command. And we do. There are outbursts of poetry both lyrical and muscular; there are songs (“the pineapple of human existence”).

Its biggest risk comes at the end, which faces up to the challenges of creating an imaginary world in a way that leans into clarity a bit too much perhaps. I’m of two minds about that ending, and reluctant to tell you more. But getting there with the self-styled “king of garbage” is clever fun, with a soulful edge: this is a smart, funny performance piece, and such a bold opener for the Fringe Theatre season. “Come in come on, follow the trail of stars.”

REVIEW

The Shiniest Piece of Trailer Trash

Theatre: at Edmonton Fringe Theatre

Created by and starring: Meegan Sweet

Directed by: Charlie Peters and Autumn Strom

Where: Studio Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: through Saturday

Tickets: fringetheatre.ca

  

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The season is underway, in dreams, aspirations, memories. A quick 12thnight survey of the week on Edmonton stages

Posted on September 10, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Meegan Sweet in The Shiniest Piece of Trailer Trash. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

•The star of The Shiniest Piece Of Trailer Trash, the solo show launching the Fringe Theatre season tonight, is a dreamer. The aspirational raccoon from the crummy trailer park on the wrong side of the tracks wants to be human, a real live ‘yuman bean’. The solo show, by and starring the multi-faceted Meegan Sweet (who’s is also the costume, set and sound designer) was the ‘staff pick’ of the 2024 Fringe. And, as I know, it was impossible to get a ticket, for love or snacks.

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It runs through Saturday in the Studio Theatre at the Fringe Arts Barns, before de-camping to Toronto’s What The Festival later this month. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

•It’s been 85 years since the Battle of Britain, as British prime minister Winston Churchill coined it. And in a genuine l940s hangar at the Alberta Aviation Museum Saturday evening that seminal event, and Canada’s role in it, are celebrated in an original site-immersive play by Kenneth Brown, specially written for the occasion.

The evening, which includes dinner, is the inspiration of the 700 (City of Edmonton) Wing of the Royal Canadian Air Force Association. And all proceeds benefit the veterans at the Capital Care Kipnes Centre.

The playwright is an expert in bringing Canadian wartime history to life in the theatre, as Edmonton audiences know from such Brown plays as Letters in Wartime, Roy versus The Red Baron, and his epic Spiral Dive Trilogy, with its Canadian fighter pilot hero. As Brown explains, at the centre of Battle of Britain, which unfolds in four parts (and three intermissions for dinner), we meet Kent, a Canadian test pilot enlisted to lead the RAF’s 303 Polish Squadron. Based on a real Canadian aviation story, “one of the great ones,” his crazily dangerous job is “to test huge helium-filled balloons suspended on cables at 10,000 feet,” by ramming them — designed to repel the Luftwaffe air onslaught. “Kent leads us into the story,” says Brown. “And he’s an extraordinary character, in a way blandly ‘Canadian’, but managed to corral these Polish ex-pats; he didn’t even speak Polish.”

Brown has borrowed liberally from his Spiral Dive plays for Battle of Britain. And, he says, he “welcomed the opportunity to go back to a historically important period … a battle that changed the course of world history.” And not least, because it counts as “a glorious defensive war, nothing morally ambiguous about it.”

Brown’s cast includes a top-flight trio of Edmonton actors: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski, Graham Mothersill, and Brennan Campbell. Tickets: 700wing.com.

•Starting previews Saturday (and opening next week) is Life of Pi, a stage adaptation of the Yann Martel best-seller about a shipwrecked Indian teenager on an impossible journey — afloat for hundreds of days on a lifeboat in the Pacific with a menagerie of zoo animals de-populated (by ways you can imagine) down to a Bengal tiger. The Citadel-Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production directed by Haysam Kadri features puppets by Calgary-based Puppet Stuff Canada (you can read about how they came to life in this 12thnight preview here). Life of Pi runs through Oct. 5. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

•Continuing at the Mayfield is their season-opening production of The Simon & Garfunkel Story, in which an expert cast and band conjure those indelible songs and that signature sound. It runs through Nov. 2, and the 12thnight review is here.

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A change in artistic leadership at Shadow Theatre: the multi-talented Lana Michelle Hughes will be the new artistic director

Posted on September 10, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Lana Michelle Hughes, Shadow Theatre’s new artistic director as of July 1 2026.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

After 35 years, a torch is being passed at Shadow Theatre.

At the end of the 2025-2026 season, John Hudson, a co-founder of the company and its artistic director from the start, is retiring. Stepping into the a.d. role is Lana Michelle Hughes, the highly accomplished director/ actor/ playwright/ producer/ sound designer who’s been Shadow’s associate artistic director since 2024.

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Of the four productions in the 2025-2026 lineup, jointly programmed by Hudson and Hughes, each will direct two, starting with the latter’s premiere production of the Mhairi Berg/ Simon Abbott musical Morningside Road in October. And on July 1 2026 “a new generation with new ideas,” as Hudson puts it, takes over, at the artistic helm of one of Edmonton’s flagship theatre companies.

Shadow Theatre artistic director John Hudson

As its name implies, Shadow was born on the dark side of town, where the gritty plays live, three-and-a-half decades ago (Hudson jokingly calls the aesthetic “young man theatre”). He and his U of A theatre school classmate Shaun Johnston, newly minted U of actors, shared an appetite for dark and edgy, and a dream of starting a theatre company.

Hudson traces Shadow back to a 1989 Fringe production of Sam Shepard’s Fool For Love. The late great Jim DeFelice was in that show, and directed How I Got That Story for the new Hudson-Johnston venture. Hudson made his own directorial debut with the bizarre black comedy Some Things You Need To Know Before The World ends (A Final Evening With The Illuminati).

The budget? “Nothing!” laughs Hudson. “We put in our 800 bucks out of our pockets to be in the Fringe, and we paid ourselves back…. We all made 10 cents. We were young!”

The new company launched itself more officially at the old Phoenix Downtown, with Johnston’s own play Catching The Train (which won the first Sterling new play award) and The Day They Shot John Lennon. As Johnston left for the world of TV and film, the  productions were a confluence of key Shadow players, including Coralie Cairns, John Sproule, and David Belke (whose own company ACME Theatre merged with Shadow in 1995). The debut Shadow season was a three-show lineup, with 32 subscribers.

Hudson doesn’t discount luck in the Shadow success story. When the Fringe decamped from Chinook Theatre to the Bus Barns across the street in 1993, suddenly there was an available theatre space, and a consortium of Shadow, Teatro La Quindicina and Rapid Fire Theatre snapped it up and renamed the ex-firehall the Varscona. “And we snuck in the back door with the Alberta Foundation of the Arts, when Union Theatre left town. They had a charity number and let Shadow have it…. So we could fund-raise. We were on our way!”

And that way was assisted by dexterous administrators in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Eva Cairns and Al Rasko among them, who secured “foundational funding” and taught the company the ropes. “We all learned; we’ve had solid administration,” says Hudson of a Shadow genealogy that now includes general manager Karen Brown Furnell.

Since those early days of “young man theatre,” the programming has expanded. Hudson, now 63, has directed some 110 Shadow productions, and more than three dozen new Canadian plays, “the most raucous comedy to the most serious drama,” as he says. His list of favourite Shadow productions includes The Comedy Company, Bloomsday, Sexy Laundry, Blithe Spirit, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. And it includes “an exhausting 10 years” fund-raising for the $7.1 million Varscona re-build which opened in 2016.

“The timing is right for me,” he says of his exit from the artistic leadership. “I’ve had to put writing and acting on the shelf.” And he’s sure the company with the very flexible mandate — “the best of contemporary theatre” — has found in Hughes an ideal successor, with an impressive skill set.

In addition to her multi-faceted history as an artist, which includes directing and sound design, devising a solo show, and acting in an assortment of Promise Productions, Hughes was at Catalyst Theatre for 14 years — as managing director and producer, “a really challenging outside-the-box job, not at all cookie-cutter,” as she describes. “There was nothing I didn’t do,” at the unique theatre company that develops and tours original work. Grant-writing, marketing, administration…” Hughes has done it all. What she hasn’t done before, as she says, is “to be the face of a company.” And that’s what her new job will mean.

Not only did she pitch Hudson in 2017 an idea for an Artistic Director Fellowship Program for women and gender/ marginalized people, “as a stepping stone towards theatre leadership, she raised the funds, some $90,000, to support it for three years. Alexandra Dawkins and Amanda Goldberg were the first Fellows; in the second of her two years, Hughes became Shadow’s first-ever associate artistic director.

Developing new work is a particular focus for Hughes. Shadow has always developed and premiered Canadian plays, by Conni Massing, Neil Grahn, Darrin Hagen, and other Edmonton playwriting stars. But it’s been on a piecemeal project by project basis (Shadow, like their Varscona roommate companies, has never received any Canada Council funding). And Hughes will be working to make new play development and playwright outreach a more formalized and sustainable program at Shadow.

Meanwhile, the transitional season of joint-artistic directorship at Shadow is about to begin, when Morningside Road opens Oct. 16.

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Boy, tiger, sea journey … and the magic of puppets. Life of Pi at the Citadel: meet puppet designer/creator Brendan James Boyd

Posted on September 9, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Leah Carmichael, painting the hyena for Life of Pi, Puppet Stuff Canada. Citadel Theatre, photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It would seem to define the impossible: the page-to-live stage adventure of Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s 2001 Booker Prize-winning novel.

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A story about an Indian teenager lost at sea for 227 days? Afloat on a lifeboat in the boundless Pacific in the company of a shipwrecked menagerie of zoo animals, and finally a Bengal tiger?

It’s been a movie, yes, (Ang Lee, 2012). But theatre magic requires a much different kind of imaginative participation, from artists and audiences. It’s transported Lolita Chakrabarti’s 2019 stage adaptation from northern England to the West End and on to Broadway. And now, for the first time at a regional theatre in this country, Life of Pi is happening on the Shoctor stage at the Citadel in a co-production with the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production, starting previews Saturday.

The design and building of the animal characters led by Richard Parker, the fearsome tiger with the whimsical name, is the work of Calgary-based Puppet Stuff Canada. And the lead designer/sculptor Brendan James Boyd, the company co-founder (with Reese Scott) and a passionate career inhabitant of the world of puppets, is on the phone to explain the particular challenges of the production we’ll see.

Brendan James Boyd of Puppet Stuff Canada. Photo supplied.

“Gargantuan!” says Boyd, an Edmontonian who moved to Calgary five years ago to work on the Apple+ Fraggle Rock reboot series Back To the Rock. “So exciting to come back to theatre on this scale!” he says of his return from the film and TV gigs of the last few years. If you fell in love with Olaf the adorable snowman in the Citadel production of Frozen the Disney Musical last winter you know something about Puppet Stuff creativity.  “That was our re-entry. We were the last-minute choice,” says Boyd, “and we had a month!”

Life of Pi was years in development before its stage debut at the Crucible in Sheffield England, and “they’re now on their seventh iteration (of the puppets)…. We’re doing it in way less time (two months) with significantly less resources,” says Boyd. “This was a challenging build! They asked us to do something different from the established show.”

Start with this test of ingenuity: the logistics and choreography involved way fewer puppeteers. In London the six or eight puppeteers of the West End production, who give the zebra, the hyena, the orangutan, the goat, and super-star tiger Richard Parker the breath of life, were nominated for a supporting actor Olivier Award. Here, the cast includes only two dedicated puppeteers (Troy Feldman and Braydon Dowler-Coltman), Boyd explains. “And the 14-member ensemble jumps in to (puppeteer) when possible.”

Boyd is delighted by the continuing collaboration — with director Haysam Kadri, the actors, the design team led by Beyata Hackborn — this demanded. “A lot of what we do is third-party. Here, we were in there from the start with the production,” a collaboration updated constantly. And fine-tuning will happen till opening night, Boyd figures.

Leah Carmichael of Puppet Stuff Canada, working on Life of Pi, Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied.

Originality was required — in the weight of the puppets, the aesthetic, the movement lexicon. “We built the tiger from the ground up,” Boyd says. There are no blueprints, no instructions. It’s not like Little Shop of Horrors where the instructions for building the plant (the carnivorous Audrey II) are included in the front of the libretto. We had to make this up from scratch.”

Boyd and his Puppet Stuff team-mates made cardboard miniatures for the initial workshops. Director Kadri (whose production of Heist was at the Citadel last season) “wanted to keep the puppets in the scale of real animals,” neither reduced in size nor abstract.

“For me, I speak mostly through sculpture. When I design for clients I don’t sketch on paper; I sketch with water-based clay, and quickly sketch out a shape and a silhouette. That’s how I get inspired…. It’s impulsive, very emotional. You get that artistic fervour when you get what’s in your head out into clay…. That’s the raw first pass, and there’s something beautiful about it, and something does get lost in the process of refinement.”

So Boyd and co set about translating those first passes into puppets. The originals, as he points out, were hand-sculpted, hand-carved, and beautiful…. But we didn’t have the time or the staff to do that.” So they alighted on the idea of using full-scale 3-D scan printouts to capture the initial artistic impulses. “Life-sized, and in the case of Richard Parker, even a hair bigger,” says Boyd, in the interest of “making Richard Parker an aggressive form onstage, more threatening.” Be warned: “when he glares at you, in the face, it’s quite intimidating!”

“Every week we’re constantly re-jointing the legs, or the neck, adjusting for all the little nuances the performers figure out…. The two puppeteers (Dowler-Coltman and Feldman), both movement-based artists, are fantastic, very collaborative.” And the puppets themselves … well, as Boyd points out, “generally in theatre they tell you what they want to do, and you have to adjust accordingly.”

The largest of the puppets (who has to be the lightest) is the zebra. A single human performer brings the hyena to life. Each puppet presents their own challenges, especially with person-power at such a premium. It’s a balance, thinks Boyd who personally hand-sculpted all the faces. “Because of the limitations the puppeteers help sell the characters, with the movement of their bodies. They help fill in the information for the imagination….”

As you might guess, the tiger is the most complex and challenging of all. At core inside the tiger, Richard Parker is an athletic human being “with a crutch/stilt configuration.” And it will not surprise you to learn that “it’s incredibly hard to fit a human into any animal profile.”   

The infrastructure is plastic, Boyd explains. “We managed to 3-D print it SO thin, 2 mm shells …. Mostly in puppetry you build from the inside out. For this we worked from the outside in. Which gave us room to adjust the mechanics.” And that thinness gives the puppets a kind of shine, almost a translucency.”

The original aesthetic inspiration of the West End touring show, as the English puppet-makers have said in interviews, was driftwood. Boyd and Puppet Stuff are thinking “shipwreck, water, wave formation.” And in this they work in tandem with lighting designer April Viczko and sound designer Joelysa Pankanea. “Puppets take a team!”

And there’s sustainability to consider too, as Boyd points out, since Pi’s traumatic journey at the Citadel is followed by another in Winnipeg. “I have never built puppets that had to go through so much vigorous use and stress. They take a beating…. I mean, they kill each other!” Puppetry director Dayna Tietzen, a puppeteer and movement specialist herself, “goes to bat for the puppets,” as Boyd puts it.

“We swore we’d never build puppets again for people,” Boyd laughs of his Puppet Stuff plan with Scott of five years ago to “just sell supplies, hence the name — fleece and foam and sculpting tools. Very quickly people started asking us to build again. And that’s been our trajectory. Now we’re building for companies all across North America.” If you’re hot to have a 16-foot puppet climb a 41-storey building, Puppet Stuff is your go-to.

A home base in Calgary is a natural terroir: “the puppet capital of Canada” is a mysterious vortex of puppets and their human collaborators, with at least six puppet companies, including the Old Trout Puppet Workshop and the Green Fools (it’s where marionettist Ronnie Burkett made his start), and 54 independent puppeteers. “I’ve gone on many journeys in my life,” Boyd laughs, “many forks in the road.” But the five-year-old who saw a marionette show at a festival and said “I’m going to be a puppet man when I grow up” stuck to his GPS.

“”Everyone who works in our collective is a puppeteer, and very talented performer in their own right,” Boyd says of his cohorts, who also write, direct, and perform.  “At least once a year we all devise a show together.” The Boo Revue, their cabaret-style “passion project” family musical, which embraces hand puppets and bunraku puppets (Boyd’s own favourite), has taken to touring — it’ll be at the Arden Theatre in St. Albert Oct. 26. “It’s our chance to try new things,” a impulse he compares to Burkett’s free-wheeling Daisy Theatre.

Meanwhile, Puppet Stuff’s return to theatre from film and TV has excited the collective. “Theatre is thrilling and it lives in a different way in space in front of people. We fill in the gaps with our imaginations….” That’s something puppets demand of their audiences. And Life of Pi is “the Olympics of puppetry!”

PREVIEW

Life of Pi

Theatre: Citadel and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre

Written by: Lolita Chakrabarti, adapted from the Yann Martel novel

Directed by: Haysam Kadri

Starring: Davinder Malhi, Deena Aziz, Omar Alex Khan, Andrea Cheung, Bailey Chin, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Troy Felman, N. Girgis, Kevin Klassen, Azeem Nato, Kristen Padayas, Garett Ross, Anaka Maharaj-Sandhu, Suchiththa Wickremesooriya

Running: Saturday (in preview) through October. 5

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820

  

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Nostalgia in sight and sound: The Simon & Garfunkel Story opens the Mayfield season, a review

Posted on September 7, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Kaden Brett Forsberg and Josh Bellan in The Simon & Garfunkel Story, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What is conjured for us at the (newly renovated) Mayfield showroom, in The Simon & Garfunkel Story, is the signature harmonious blend of the last century’s most celebrated duo. There is something witty about starting a show, and a season, as the lights go down in the theatre, with “hello darkness, my old friend….” But I digress.

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This is a show that taps into memory (“the vision that was planted in our brain still remains”) as two expert singers, Josh Bellan and Kaden Brett Forsberg, take on Paul Simon’s indelible songbook. In the Mayfield production directed by the show creator Dean Elliott (with associate director Kate Ryan), this they do in collaboration with a hot band (led by musical director Lisa MacDougall), and an elaborate projection-scape mashup of black-and-white period footage and abstract interpolations of light and colour. It’s nostalgia, in sight and sound. And there’s even currency: the intrepid Simon has continued to tour this summer.

There they are, onstage in concert: the intense Bellan, guitar in hand as songwriter Simon; the lanky Brett Forsberg with the mop of hair, motionless, hands in his pockets, as Garfunkel. They have the look. And what the pair delivers, in an uncanny way, is a series of hits from a hit-studded archive, arranged in rough chronological order, from their earliest days as high school rock buds Tom and Jerry to their triumphant 1981 reunion concert in Central Park: Hey Schoolgirl to Cecilia, Bridge Over Troubled Water, The Boxer…. On opening night the sound mix, usually impeccable at the Mayfield, was marred by over-amplification in favour of the band, easily adjusted one imagines.

Great songs aplenty from a stellar archive. A “story”? Not so much. Narration exists only in brief, flat annotations by the singers, who step out of the music and their “roles”  occasionally to address us about Simon and Garfunkel, in the third person. “Paul had a decision to make.” Or “they were making a real name for themselves in the folk-rock scene all over the world.”

The famous break-up which preceded the famous reunion gets the helpful notation that “at this time Paul and Art’s relationship was at a breaking point.” It was “a rollercoaster relationship,” and “they felt they were moving in different directions.” Did the fact that one guy wrote the songs and lyrics, and the other guy didn’t, have anything to do with the celebrated estrangement? Discuss amongst yourselves. And, hey, think of it as relief for survivors of exhaustive musical revues where a narrator introduces every song, and footnotes every trip to the recording studio, every rehearsal.       

Anyhow, instead of “story,” in which the show clearly isn’t much interested (beyond identifying the albums from which songs are culled), there are projections (by Z Frame). They’re a fascinating, ever-changing collage of images that seem to be about cultural context, capturing the moment in America. The news footage sequence at the outset, for example, alights on seminal Civil Rights Movement identifiers. The haunting Scarborough Fair is accompanied by Vietnam protest footage. There are period ads; there’s a collage of images from The Graduate….

And occasionally, there are insertions, projected in type, of titles of films in which Garfunkel appeared in his actor period, or Simon singles. We learn, in one projected sentence, that Garfunkel became a math teacher, and in another that he walked around the world writing poetry (there might be Fringe comedy in that).

The two stars, both excellent, are new to the much-travelled hit homage devised by Elliott, the designated Paul Simon the last time we saw the show at the Mayfield nine years ago. As last time for me, the most striking juxtaposition of visuals and music happens in the great song America. It unrolls in a series of vintage postcards from out-of-the-way places evoked by the song’s quest through the hinterland: “Greetings from Barstow,” or Denver, or Santa Cruz.

What has changed in the last decade is the battering ram the word Freedom has become, and even the word America doesn’t have the same meaning. In so many ways we are all “looking for America,” and it makes that song poignant and nostalgic as never before, a kind of requiem for what has been lost.

So, a season-opening evening in the company of an archive of songs with memorably poetic lyrics, delivered in concert by two harmonizing singers with a first-rate band, projections (and the bonus possibility of a cocktail called Bridge Over Bourbon Waters). This highly enjoyable evening is all in the music. And that’s a lot.

REVIEW

The Simon & Garfunkel Story

Theatre: Mayfield

Created, produced, directed by: Dean Elliott

Starring: Josh Bellan, Kaden Brett Forsberg, Oscar Derkx, Matthew Atkins, Lisa MacDougall, Derek Stremel, Harley Symington

Running: through Nov. 2

Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca 

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The curtain comes down on Fringe Full of Stars, with starshine stats and records broken

Posted on August 24, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Christine Lesiak and Louise Casemore in Lost Sock Rescue Society, Small Matters Productions. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A Fringe Full Of Stars, Edmonton Fringe 2025

After 11 days and nights, Fringe Full of Stars, the 44th annual edition of our giant summer theatre festival, is poised to exit the stage (actually, its 40 stages) Sunday night.

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And by Sunday morning delighted Fringe organizers could bask in some official starshine from the box office. By then, 138,500 tickets to its 221 shows had already been sold (topping rather decisively last year’s 127,371 sales figure, and up still further from 2023’s 114,000). By closing Sunday night, that figure had climbed to 140,153 tickets sold. And this warming news of post-pandemic recovery included 519 sold-out shows, 16 shows that totally sold out their entire Fringe runs.

The behemoth Fringe of 2019 did sell more tickets, 147,358 to be precise, than Fringe Full of Stars, but, in context, that year’s lineup was 258 shows strong, so the audience was spread out more thinly amongst shows. And the record-breaker that pleases Fringe Theatre executive director Megan Dart and Fringe festival artistic director Murray Utas the most is the $1,49 million, so far, that goes back to Fringe artists, who keep 100 percent of the base ticket price. It surpasses even the $1.39 million of 2019.

“Literally more money back to artists’ pockets,” says Utas happily, “more sold-out shows, and more new audience.” Dart echoes the thought. “This year we were focussed on audience engagement. How do we bring new audiences to the festival? How do we inspire folks who come to the outdoor festival (which includes a veritable carnival of street performers, food, beer tent action) to see a show? Because  we know that when they get indoors to see theatre, they’re hooked!”

“And they come back next year to see three shows, then five shows, and then before you know it they’re a Frequent Fringer,” with a multi-show pass. Theatre is contagious that way, as Dart argues. Hence, the space, time, budget, and importance devoted to the (free) KidsFringe.

The increase in the Fringe lineup from last year’s 216 shows to 221 is deliberately modest, as Utas and Dart explain — judged so that number doesn’t outstrip either the audience or the critical festival infrastructure. Utas imagines that the number of shows in next year’s Fringe will remain about the same, “in the 215 to 225-show range.”

This year, a tough one in live theatre, production costs, including materials and utilities, have risen exponentially, in parallel to a freeze, or reduction, in grants and the dwindling of sponsorships. Setting up one of the Fringe’s official lotteried venues used to have a $10,000 tab; now it’s $15,000 or so. The Sustain Fringe campaign designed to encourage fringers to sign up for monthly donations, started a year ago with 34 donors. That number is now 692, and counting.

When it comes to community engagement, the Fringe itself is an experimenter. This year, the technical wizard Bradley King set up a trial program on the Edmonton Fringe website where the theatre-going public, student critics, and the media could submit reviews. Since “critical dialogue” is part of theatre, and theatre careers, and print journalism is on the decline, as Dart suggests, the Fringe has made a contribution with this initiative. So far, success!, there are over 1200 on the site, an average of four reviews per show.

Indie theatre, and its artists, are up against it. The circuit of Fringe festivals, built on the Edmonton model (the oldest and still the biggest on the continent), can take a bow for its role in launching and building careers, and finding audiences for artists’ creations. Dart wonders if there is any working theatre artist in the country whose career hasn’t been connected, “at some point, in some fashion, with a Fringe.”

Good question. In addition to emerging talents, this summer’s edition has attracted the return of working theatre professionals.

Bomb, starring Mariya Khomutova. Pyretic Productions. Poster by Amelia Scott.

When actor/playwright/activist Lianna Makuch, for example, got excited to direct the Canadian premiere of Bomb, a dark, absurdist comedy by Natalia Blok, and thereby introduce us to the world of contemporary Ukrainian theatre, she knew she’d found the perfect home for it at the Fringe. “It’s subversive, it’s weird, it’s edgy … it encompasses everything the Fringe is all about.” The entire run sold out.

Small Matters Productions artistic director Christine Lesiak is considering future touring for The Lost Sock Rescue Society, the new interactive two-hander comedy (co-created with co-star Louise Casemore). It made sense to premiere the show at the Fringe. “For me (the Fringe) is a space where I know I can try something new with a reasonable safety net. Producing as an indie artist outside of Fringe is very expensive and very financially risky…. Fringe has a built-in audience of thousands (maybe tens of thousands?) of people who only go to to theatre during the Fringe, so it exposes work to new audiences.”

Larissa Poho in Moonshine, Edmonton Fringe 2025. Photo supplied.

Larissa Poho, the creator and star of Moonshine, an original musical cum immersive Ukrainian kitchen party that she expanded from a solo creation to an ensemble with a live band, found a first-time BYOV (bring-your-own) venue at Waffle Bird in Strathcona. “I knew I could easily fill seats, with my connection to the Ukrainian community outside of Fringe. But I never expected the overwhelming response and excitement for our show. We had sold 80 per cent (of the seats) before the festival, and that became selling out the entire run before the end of day 2.”

As part of the Fringe Holdover Series this week the show will now be adapted (Poho calls it “refreshed”) for an actual theatre, the Westbury, instead of “a cozy restaurant.” And she’s already received hosting offers from other venues — in Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Armstrong, Philadelphia.   

“At the end of the day,” says Poho, “it’s all about connection, shared through my personal lens and all the communities that being to (Ukrainian, queer, disabled, theatre-makers, tattooists, visual artists, musicians …)…. The story of Moonshine itself isn’t new — but it’s necessary,” in our post-pandemic re-adjustment. “We all need a little community magic and connection.”

Ah, and that’s what the Fringe is for. And it’s what keeps us coming back.

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Focus, people! The Fringe rolls into its last weekend, already a record-busting edition

Posted on August 23, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Jezec Sanders in Where Foxes Lie, Ready Go Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2025. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Fringe Full of Stars goes into its final weekend with shiny news to share. As of Friday noon, the 11-day and night) 44th annual edition of our big 223-show summer theatre bash is already a record-buster.

A Fringe Full Of Stars, Edmonton Fringe 2025

It’s sold 128,000 tickets to 223 indoor shows, already more than last year’s total (127,000) — and the most since the box office stats of the gigantic pre-COVIDian 2019 Fringe, with its 258 shows and 147,000-plus tickets sold. With a full weekend of fringing ahead, $1.3 million is already going home with Fringe artists, who collect 100 per cent of the ticket sales (minus the Fringe surcharge, $5 max). Which is only slightly less than the $1.4 million artist payout at the 2019 monster, and with fewer shows for this dispersal. By Sunday night, it’s likely that this record will be broken, too.

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Meanwhile there are still lots of shows for your last weekend of fringing. What to see? Have a peek at the 12thnight.ca reviews gathered under the heading Fringe 2025. And consider this little Fringe menu of possibles from the big Fringe buffet. .

Victor & Victoria’s Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things, Edmonton Fringe 2025. Photo supplied

A gem of a two-hander, part 1: a thriller directed and executed with eerie precision in an interlocking pair of uncanny performances. That would be Victor and Victoria’s  Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things (directed by Jim Guedo and starring Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk). One of my favourite shows. See the 12thnight review here.

A gem of a two-hander, part 2: Riot!, sharp, interactive comedy from Vancouver’s Monster Theatre about a historic NYC riot centred on an actor rivalry in the live theatre (imagine that!). Cunningly constructed and genuinely funny. Ryan and Jeff Gladstone are charming, and know exactly how to make participation easy and fun. See the 12thnight review here.

Christine Lesiak and Louise Casemore in Lost Sock Rescue Society, Small Matters Productions. Photo supplied.

A gem of a two-hander, part 3: Christine Lesiak and Louise Casemore commit with hilarious clown intensity (and friction!) to the ne plus ultra of silly premises in The Lost Sock Rescue Society. And they even take a chance on a smidge of pathos. See the 12thnight review here.   

A cunningly crafted solo thriller: Jezec Sanders’ prairie gothic Where Foxes Lie, beautifully calibrated for mounting dread, in Erik Richards’ production. Is there a category in theatre for “soulful horror”? Or ghost story told by a ghost? See the 12thnight review here.

An impossibly dexterous performance: Damon Pitcher as the ever-hopeful shlepper hero/anti-hero Ray in Zombies, Inc., who  has to make his own story as an aspirational careerist stick against the upstaging brouhaha of a zombie apocalypse. He’s the narrator, and he sings the songs, in a whole range of styles, in this unusual new musical.  See the 12thnight review here. 

Caitlin Stasey and Hayden Ezzy in A Kind of Electra, The Clown School Company. Photo supplied.

A blistering dramatic performance: Caitlin Stasey as the title character in A Kind of Electra, dangerous and scarily pumped for vengeance, nearly levitating in rage. You feel flung back in your seat.

A re-imagining of the classics: (see above). A Kind of Electra. The Greeks in a viscerally contemporary way. A killer 3-actor production with a scorcher ending you won’t see coming (until you think about it). See the 12thnight review here.

A new musical with smart and funny lyrics that rhyme: Try Final Girl, new from Straight Edge Theatre, a “horror comedy musical” that’s an homage to teen slasher classics à la Scream. See the 12thnight review here.

A masterly musical that you can’t see anywhere else: Sondheim’s 1990 Assassins, from a young and talented Uniform Theatre cast, in a lovely reno’ed venue up against dodgy acoustics. Renewed topicality thanks to the idiocy down south. See the 12thnight review here.

Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner in Rat Academy 2 – Gnaw and Order, Batrabbit Collective. Photo supplied

A very funny, dark-edged and kinda political clown show: Rat Academy 2: Gnaw and Order, in which Fingers and Shrimp, the last two rats in a rat-free province, evicted from their Whyte Ave back alley, attempt to have a home sweet home of their own. Risky, and with hilarious audience participation. Brilliant, and one of my favourite shows at the festival. See the 12thnight review here.

Sachin Sharms and Shreya Parashar in Colonial Circus: History, Clown-Style, Culture Opus Inc. at Edmonton Fringe 2025. Photo supplied

Something truly weird, fascinating, and experimental: Colonial Circus, in which bouffon clowns step up to do a “brief history of colonialism,” risky, and with unsettling audience participation. You’ll either enjoy its queasiness, or you really really won’t. The “fringe-iest” show I’ve seen so far at the Fringe. See the 12thnight review here.

And, hey, if you’re foiled, Fringe Full of Stars carries on next week, with holdovers of some of its hit shows…. Check out the holdover lineups at Fringe headquarters and the Varscona here.

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Wait, there’s more…. Fringe holdovers next week

Posted on August 22, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner in Rat Academy 2 – Gnaw and Order, Batrabbit Collective. Photo supplied

Undiscovered Country by Chris Bullough, Edmonton Fringe 2025. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Did it just dawn on you that Fringe Full of Stars ends Sunday night? And your big plans to navigate your way to the Fringe and its 223-show galaxy of possibilities just haven’t materialized so far? And your might-have-seens are receding into the distance?

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DO NOT PANIC. You’ve had a reprieve.

Some of the Fringe’s hottest, most intriguing shows are getting held over next week in two curated series — one at the Fringe’s own Westbury Theatre (aka Stage 1), and one at the Varscona Theatre (aka Stage 11).

At the Westbury Theatre, the Fringe itself is holding over four shows for two performances each Aug. 27 through 30.

52 Stories: Aug. 27, 7 p.m.; Aug. 28, 9 p.m.

Cabaret of Legends: Aug. 27, 9 p.m.; Aug. 28, 7 p.m.

Undiscovered Country: Aug. 29, 7 p.m. and 30, 9 p.m.

Moonshine: Aug. 29, 9:30 p.m.; Aug. 30, 7 p.m.

Jake Tkaczyk and Trevor Schmidt in Flora and Fawna Face Their Fears, Guys in Disguise. Photo supplied.

At the Varscona Theatre, four shows are held over Aug. 26 through 31.

Rat Academy 2 – Gnaw and Order: Aug. 26 and 37, 7:30 p.m.; Aug. 31, 2 p.m. (see the 12thnight review here)

Bump and Grindhouse Burlesque: Aug. 29 and 30, 9 p.m.

Flora & Fawna Face Their Fears: Aug. 29, 7 p.m. (see the 12thnight review here)

Lousy Parents: Aug. 30, 7 p.m.; Aug. 31, 4 p.m.

Tickets, show descriptions, and times: fringetheatre.ca

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Look! Look! I spotted a pair of rare white-topped cuckoos. The fun and charm of The Birds, a Fringe review

Posted on August 22, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Anastasia Maywood and Krista Lin in The Birds, AM Choreography at Edmonton Fringe 2025. Photo by Mat Simpson

The Birds (Stage 1, ATB Westbury Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“The wonders of the avian world” can be yours, my friends, via this “flock-umentary,” which trains the bird-watcher opera glasses on the the birth, adolescence, courtship, mating, parenting rituals of a pair of rare Edmonton albino magpies.

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Wait, you’d swear that the bird duo onstage (Anastasia Maywood and Krista Lin) are almost human. The fun and charm of this kooky  creation — far from bird-brained — directed by Christine Lesiak, is the inventive cross-species physical comedy of it all. The commitment of the star birds to the premise is, well, intense, and funny. And it’s supplemented by annotations beaked by one of those hushed and solemn documentarians in voice-over.

There they are, “as if choreographed by Nature herself,” in perpetual motion in this birding expedition, all flighty and twitching, with an ingenious lexicon of flurries of movement, lyrical moves, and that weird bird-y neck-forward propulsion thing birds do (OK, it’s true I wasn’t a biology major).

First, though, a pair of bird-watchers with binoculars point at fascinating examples of avian wildlife among us. Look, a bald-headed eagle! OMG, “blond-headed booby. And so far north!”

Then, in reverse binocular action, we see our feathered protagonists in their natural habitat, as they squirm out of their shells and tumble out of the nest. They grow up fast. “Birds must attract a mate.… Or DIE!” says the sepulchral voice as the stars prep for some sexy club action. The haute-fashion show of species-specific  models strutting their fancy get-ups on the runway is a hooooot. “Versace for Flamingo … Gap for mallard duck.” There’s a very amusing hatching. And there’s even an inspired Evolution game show.

The ingenuity and physical precision of actor/dancers Maywood and Lin doesn’t stop. Poor Emily Dickinson had it a bit wrong. It’s not hope but comedy that’s a feathered thing.

Posted in Fringe 2025, Reviews | Comments Off on Look! Look! I spotted a pair of rare white-topped cuckoos. The fun and charm of The Birds, a Fringe review

‘Everybody has a right to their dreams’: Sondheim’s Assassins, a Fringe review

Posted on August 21, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Assassins, Uniform Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2025. Photo by bbcollective.

Assassins (Stage 36, ArtsHub Ortona)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“All you have to do is move your little finger and you can change the world,” sings the disaffected actor John Wilkes Booth in Assassins. And he did just that in 1865 in a theatre in Washington D.C.

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In Stephen Sondheim’s darkly comic 1990 musical, Booth is a paid-up member of the macabre and raffish shooting gallery of men and women who killed American presidents, or at least tried to. There is something eerie about the way that this step-right-up carnival of the aggrieved, the disappointed, the disenfranchised, the disturbed, the unremarkable, from Booth to Lee Harvey Oswald, exercising their right to be extraordinary, bursts into the Now like it belongs here. And there’s something inspiring (thank you, Fringe), too, about the way a new generation of young musical theatre talent is drawn to it.

Sarah Dowling’s 10-actor production with a live band, to be found in a first-time BYOV, the ArtsHub Ortona in the river valley, is the work of the musical theatre company Uniform Theatre. Even the cavalier way that guns get handed around is unnerving, not least because it’s somehow inevitable in our moment in history. The continuing theme of a perpetual winter of our discontent has never been more frightening.  Democratic ideals are up against it in a new way. Immigrants are up against. “No one can be put in jail for their dreams” has a more sinister reverb now. And hey, fantasies of assassination refuse to be squelched (c’mon haven’t you had some?).

The musical is a strange mixture of the ironic and the heartfelt. And the Sondheim score is a fascinating array of ballads that hearken back to the Great American Songbook, mixed with crackling musical theatre songs — aspirational, romantic, comic. And, since the vocal talents of the cast do vary in force and easeful-ness — the echo-y acoustics in the lovely brick and wood-lined chamber of the venue, which has a perfectly vintage look, are a big challenge — some musical numbers land more successfully than others, in truth. But in Dowling’s production the characters step out of history in vivid outlines drawn by the actors.

Unworthy of Your Love, a sweet duet between Manson disciple Squeaky Fromme (Bella King) and J.W. Hinckley (Brian Christensen), the Jodie Foster stalker who tried to pop Ronald Reagan in 1981, has a lyrical touchdown. I Am A Terrifying and Imposing Figure, a nutbar ode to himself by the James Garfield assassin Charles Guiteau, who’s singing “look on the bright side” as they put the noose around his neck, gets a crackling performance from Anthony Hurston. Samuel Byck, who picketed the White House in a Santa suit and tried to hire a 747 to take out Richard Nixon there, is compellingly conjured  by Michael Vetsch.

Aran McAnally as wry Balladeer, who pops up from time to time guitar in hand to annotate the storytelling, sets the jaunty tone. The single funniest scene is the farcical failed assassination of Gerald Ford by King’s star-struck Squeaky Fromme and the chronic klutz Sara Jane Moore (the very funny Alyson Horne). And it’s a highlight.

Getting a ticket to this Fringe hit won’t be easy. But, hey, “everyone has the right to be happy.” And this is a chance to see what a new generation of musical theatre talent can do with a masterwork.

 

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