A funny thing happened on the way to the Vatican: Cadaver Synod, a 12thnight review

Posted on August 16, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Cadaver Synod, Vault Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2025. Poster by Sebastian Ley and Sarah Fett.

Cadaver Synod (Stage 31, Nancy Power Theatre at the Roxy)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

I don’t know about you, but when I’m looking for comedy, I turn first to ecclesiastical history.

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The premise of Cadaver Synod, a new satire by the up-and-comer playwright Sebastian Ley (638 Ways To Kill Castro), is just too outrageous, too absurd, not to be on loan from reality. Who could make up the bizarre events of 897 AD, when a vengeful pope, in cahoots with the Holy Roman Emperor, digs up the corpse of a predecessor pope, dead for seven months — and puts the rotting cadaver on trial? Lordy, what they get up at the Vatican!

Along with the lowly provincial sub-deacon who’s conscripted to be the legal counsel for the defence and “speak” for the deceased, they are all characters pried from this amazingly wacky historical canvas, in a dark comedy that doesn’t rule out magic.

With the possible exception of the corpse of Pope Formosus (the jury’s out on that), they get the breath of life in Ley’s breezy, amusing contemporary dialogue, from the three ace comic actors in Kathleen Weiss’s striking production. It’s an intricate piece of theatrical contruction, for one thing an unusual coming-of-age story, with its sweet own dance number, set in an age of mind-bending political complications.

The script imagines a thwarted schoolboy relationship between Stephen VI (Michael Watt) and the career-challenged Jacob (Samuel Bronson), whose career in Catholicism has been stalled indefinitely.  The agile Watt is very funny as a fresh-faced, blithely hapless pope who occasionally worries he might be evil, and hasn’t quite figured out his new gig (“I don’t like foot-kissing; it makes me feel weird”). Bronson plays it straight, which has big comic pay-offs, as Stephen’s estranged friend Jacob, perplexed by the job he’s landed speaking for the cadaver, scrambling to brush up his crappy Latin. “I’m NOT having a sleepover with the Pope,” he says turning down Stephen’s offer to spend the night.

And as the suave, self-serving Emperor Lambert, Stephen’s mentor and the comedy’s éminence grise, a dab hand at intrigue, perjury, bribery, and assorted other corruptions,  David Ley is a riot, always clutching a goblet of possibly holy wine.

All good unwholesome fun behind the scenes at the Vatican.

 

 

 

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Is a home sweet home too much to ask? The hilarity of Rat Academy 2 – Gnaw and Order, a 12thnight Fringe review

Posted on August 16, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

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

Rat Academy 2 – Gnaw and Order (Stage 11, Varscona Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The last time we saw them, the last two rats in Alberta, Fingers (Dayna Lea Hoffmann) and Shrimp (Katie Yoner), were in a back alley, their natural habitat. And the alley-wise former, ever wary, ever vigilante, was coaching the latter, a naive recent lab escapee, in such life skills as how to be steal. 

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They have managed to survive in a dangerous world. But rats, marginalized outsiders in a rat-free province (with enforcers), have dreams too. Fingers and Shrimp are back, with a sequel to their much-travelled 2023 hit, and they want more than Whyte Avenue back alley garbage bins. They want a home sweet home to call their own. Is real estate (and, you know, freedom from arrest), too much to want in Alberta?

And at the start of this very funny Batrabbit Collective production,  Rat Academy 2 – Gnaw and Order, the pair scuttle onstage to show off what they have achieved (design by Claire Conmor), and celebrate a house-warming. But not before the scrappy, congenitally suspicious Fingers points accusingly at someone in the audience front row. “Are you a cop? Don’t you lie to me!”

In this very funny, imagined world created in zestful comic detail by two expert clowns, the mentor-pupil dynamic drives the new show too. Fingers, always on the edge of exasperation with his distractible protegé and our rapport with Shrimp, can read the increasingly ominous eviction notices. “No, it’s not a party invitation!” When Shrimp has a bright idea — and these have an inspired lunacy about them — lighting designer Whittyn Jason steps up accordingly.

They decide to buy (it’s the Alberta way), and, first-time buyers, they’re up against it. There’s an amusing ingenuity to the way quick-witted Hoffmann and Yoner, who are first-rate improvisers, build audience consultation into the fabric of their story. And they press their luck with their own premise, in a hilarious way, by upping the ante, incrementally, as two rats, hitherto law avoiders extraordinaire, venture into politics, and the Alberta justice system. I won’t spoil your fun, except to say that at the performance I saw, revealingly, almost no one in the sold-out audience, except one histrionic volunteer, wanted to undertake a defence of Alberta. And so Fingers and Shrimp are born-again rodent satirists, who even scavenge a scrap or two of poignance from their plight.

Non-stop laughter from an audience, me among them, having a very good time: a sound that’s music to a fringer’s ears. Seek it out.   

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In ‘the boneyard of dreams’, high on pixie dust: The Peter Pan Cometh, a Fringe review

Posted on August 16, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

The Peter Pan Cometh, Clevername Theatre. Photo supplied.

The Peter Pan Cometh (Stage 4, Fine Arts Walterdale Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It seems to be the particular, and way-off-centre, genius of Minnesota’s Clevername Theatre to re-imagine dark and weighty American theatre hits with characters from childhood classics. Last summer they surprised us with Who’s Afraid of Winnie The Pooh?, in which playwright Alexander Gerchak’s version of the Edward Albee marital scorcher was populated by the beloved A.A. Milne characters from the Hundred Acre Wood. And, no joke, the play shed light on both.

This time the aimless characters slumped over bar tables, passed out, at the outset of The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill’s relentlessly grim epic-sized 1946 drama of delusion and hope, are … Captain Hook (Thomas Buan), Smee ( Alec Berchem) and Tinkerbell (Isabelle Hopewell) from the great high-flying J.M. Barrie fantasy adventure Peter Pan. Look what they’ve come to, these denizens of Neverland, narcotized by pixie dust, pipe dreams and denial, waiting for their bender buddy Peter Pan to show up for his annual ‘spring-cleaning’ visit.

Match-making The Iceman Cometh and Peter Pan seems even more improbable, on paper. But what makes the play more than just an exercise in extreme ingenuity is the way Gerchak’s play susses out the surprising parallels, en route to the heart of the matter: growing up has big downsides.

Like Hickey, the fast-talking travelling salesman in O’Neill, the much-awaited Peter Pan (Nick Hill) flies in to this “boneyard of dreams, of what-could-have-beens,” jaunty on his rollerskates, all suited up, a boater on his head. Instead of party-time, he’s “off the dust, forever. I don’t need it no more.”

He’s arrived, as he says, to explode their self-deceptions, to “save y’all from your dreams,” The boy who wouldn’t grow up has grown up. “All you got to do is grow up too.” And that means taking responsibility for their darkest secrets: what happened to the lost boys, and Captain Hook’s crew? Where’s Wendy? And isn’t that an uneasy look on Peter’s face?

The Ice Man Cometh has  kind of long, relentless, repetitive inertia about it, part of the point of its monologues. Taking its cue (in a mere 60 minutes), The Peter Pan Cometh is clever though not quite satisfying. It does capture, and darken, the wistfulness that always seems to attach to Peter Pan. Don’t you always feel a bit sad at the end of Peter Pan?

But this play doesn’t entirely take on a life of its own, though; it’s more a ‘where are they now?’ type sequel.  The idea, in itself, is intriguing, and performances are apt. As a listless post-nihilist Hook in Gerchak’s production, Buan has a rusty authority as he unravels in this “boneyard of dreams, of what-could-have-beens.” The crackling, energized Peter played by Hill in a fine (and welcome) performance, can barely get a spark from him. Berchem is just right as the ever-hopeful Smee, clinging to the life-raft of his hope — when the wind is “just right,” they will right the sunken Jolly Roger.  Dream on.

 

 

 

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The ticking explosive within! Bomb, a Fringe review

Posted on August 15, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Bomb (Stage 4, MacEwan Fine Arts Walterdale Theatre)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s a visceral absurdity about this clever, very dark multi-loaded stinger of a comedy that Pyretic Productions (well-named for its inflammatory proclivities), brings to the Fringe. And it’s detonated by a cast with major fire-power in the crackling production directed by Lianna Makuch.

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It’s 2017, and Dasha (the wonderful Mariya Khomutova), the human rights activist protagonist of Bomb, by the contemporary Ukrainian playwright Natalia Blok, is on a short fuse, so to speak. She’s up against it: acute anxiety, panic attacks, PTSD. She feels like she has a time bomb ticking inside her. And lo and behold….

Dasha has tried everything — pills, psychotherapy, tai chi, advice like “don’t work yourself up” from her sympathetic husband Phil, played with giddy comic charm by Geoffrey Simon Brown. Nothing works. Dasha’s life feels out of control, and it exhausts her.

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

Her next stop, pushed by the perplexed and increasingly desperate Phil, is a new shrink/therapist, whose “medical” practice includes auras, “square breathing,” and salt water spray. And, played as an outrageous grotesque by James MacDonald, the doc discovers that Dasha does has an actual bomb inside her. “You and only you,” as he says,  can wipe out  Ukraine’s tumultuous and blood-stained past since the early ‘90s — a history of international betrayal and constant violence — if she detonates it. Guilt and a sense of responsibility for … everything are the trigger. The proposition? Save Ukraine by destroying Ukraine as a nation, the ultimate absurdity (ring a bell?). It goes Strangelove’s “how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb” one better.

Khomutova, who has stage presence for days, is compelling and funny as a woman torn between her activist tendencies, and a desire for a nice, ordinary, peaceful life with domestic perks like sex.

Makuch sets this highly unusual Fringe production in motion, using utilitarian hospital screens, old-school projection, shadowplay (designed by Stephanie Bahniuk). It’s funny. And it gives full weight to the dark comedy and absurdist provocations of a satire embedded with thoughts about the world, politics, and activism fatigue.

Don’t miss the explosion. 

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The plight of the single, in a couples world: the nutty hilarity of The Lost Sock Rescue Society, a Fringe review

Posted on August 15, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

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

The Lost Sock Rescue Society (Stage 28, Roots on Whyte)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In this nutty and inspired latest from the physical comedy and clown company Small Matters Productions (For Science!, The Spinsters), we’re at a volunteer recruitment session held by a society devoted to a worthy cause.

The raison d’être of the Lost Sock Rescue Society is to address the sadly neglected plight of the single sock, marginalized and often abandoned in a world of matched pairs. We meet a pair of activists at least as mismatched as any of their rescue socks. The righteous 30-year veteran Sandra ( Christine Lesiak) and smartie community college intern Sabrina (Louise Casemore) are on a mission: to recover, rehabilitate and re-home, to find “Forever Foot Friends,” for lost and wanted socks, orphans and the newly single alike. Not just any home, of course, as Sandra reminds us: potential adoptees must be screened — for reliability, laundry habits, views on disposability, etc. And as for the demeaning practice of sock puppetry … don’t get them started.

We arrive as they’re setting up their single-sock display — all socks are named and tagged — assisted by an IST (“international sock technician”), a different guest at every performance. And part of the fun is the amateur bustle at work. “You’re welcome to visit with the socks and take pictures with them!” beams Sandra, the more excitable of the two. At the performance I saw, people from the crowd lined up to do just that. It’s that kind of show.

Gradually, a classic clown dynamic emerges. Sandra, who bounces on her runners (even her hairdo seems to be on springs) as she trots through the crowd, is the voice of experience and a veritable repository of positivity. And she’s a natural-born A-type upstager. Sabrina, the upstart newcomer whose college practicum is in community leadership, has been studying the “input data.” And she has prepared an earnestly collegiate “society modernization program” as her class project. Her slide show, including testimonials, and subjects like “tools for recruitment” (led by “Guilt”and“Shame”), is a hoot.

There’s an impressive kind of kooky single-mindedness and comic commitment at work. And, as the session goes increasingly haywire, it’s hilariously involving. Lesiak and Casemore, both quick on the uptake, are fully at ease interacting with the audience; it’s the most fun you’ll ever have participating. And they’re unafraid to push their whimsical premise and set-up into a slightly riskier zone, a comic resolution with funny and surprising layers that takes chances with the audience buy-in — and gets its rewards.

Hey, sock symmetry is out, people. In case you’ve been shirking your social responsibilities (or wearing flip-flops all the time), it’s time for some, er, sole-searching.

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It’s Fringe Eve, and Edmonton’s biggest opening night is coming up: five shows I’ve enjoyed before

Posted on August 13, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Ruth Alexander in Dead in the Water, Lodestar Theatre and Theatre Yes. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A year has been weirdly compressed. And somehow, magically, it’s the eve of the Fringe, the 44th annual edition of Edmonton’s mighty summer theatre bash. When the curtains go up Thursday night at 8 p.m., they don’t come down again for 10 days and nights of theatre after that.

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Don’t get twisted out by the 223-show 40-venue dimensions of Fringe Full of Stars. Be bold, take a chance, experiment; it’s what the Fringe is for — both for you and for artists. You could discover something you haven’t dreamed of. Which is exactly what will happen when the startlingly dexterous improvisers of Gordon’s Big Bald Head take to the stage in Play-giarism, the 2025 version of their annual undertaking to improvise their own version of any show in the Fringe program (as picked by an audience member). Mark Meer and Jacob Banigan will be improvising even harder since their third GBBH member Ron Pederson is tied up doing Ibsen, A Doll’s House, at the Arts Club in Vancouver.

Just for starters, have you looked at 12thnight’s selection of a dozen intriguing prospects here? And further promising possibilities here? In the Fringe Full of Stars program, there are shows I’ve had a chance to see — at previous Fringes, or elsewhere in the season. Here are five. Keep in mind that there could be/will be adjustments, re-writes, alterations, edits, since last time out. It’s what artists do; it’s built into the artist psyche.

Dead in the Water. In 2023 the new artistic directors of Theatre Yes introduced themselves with this funny, moving original solo musical by and starring musician/ composer/ actor/ playwright Ruth Alexander and directed by Max Rubin. The set-up, with the charismatic Alexander at the piano, is pure cabaret. But there’s a real story. Accompanying herself with an array of songs, protagonist Amanda tells her story; she’s an entertainer on the double-quest, possibly contradictory, for a fulfilling career and a romantic life/love partner. A narrative full of fleeting triumphs and multiple disappointments and hilarious and/or wince-making humiliations. My review is here.

The Pansy Cabaret. This cabaret is a capture, by theatre artist cum queer historian Darrin Hagen, of a vibrant and joyful culture of a century ago in New York. Queer and gender-fluid performers were big stars, among the highest paid of entertainers in a showbiz town, in “pansy bars,” on vaudeville stages, on Broadway. Hagen has unearthed a whole archive of sassy Edwardian songs and cheeky comedy routines. They’re performed in this Guys in Disguise production, by a terrific entertainer, Lilith Fair (aka Zachary Parsons-Lozinski), with Daniel Belland at the piano. And the story of how the “Pansy Craze” and the rich culture that unleashed, all vanished in a decade when Prohibition ended, vanquished by homophobia, speaks powerfully to our time. My review, from the 2022 Fringe, is here.

Adam Proulx and Horatio P. Corvus in The FAMILY CROW: A Murder Mystery, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo by Dahlia Katz.

The FAMILY CROW: A Murder Mystery. This kooky, clever show, by puppeteer/playwright Adam Proulx, has a brilliance all its own. It’s a murder mystery in the Agatha Crow-stie vein, in which all the characters, including Detective Horatio P.  Corvus, are crows. The deceased and the prime suspects, including right-wing patriarch Edgar Allan Crow, are all members of the Crow family. And the show is a veritable archive of feathered puns. Bonkers. I saw it at the 2023 Fringe, and my review is here.

Romeo and Juliet’s Notebook, Edmonton Fringe 2025. Photo supplied

Romeo & Juliet’s Notebook. I saw this funny, entertainment musical comedy spoof by Aimée Beaudoin and Jeff Halaby with a packed house of revellers at the Spotlight Cabaret this March. It’s back for the Fringe in a much bigger venue, the Garneau Theatre. It brings a jukebox crammed with Millennial hits, and a playful, quick-witted Edmonton-ization of the Bard’s tragedy of “ancient grudge and new mutiny” — “in fair Strathcona where we lay our scene…” — into a story about young lovers caught in the feud between the upscale southside Hendays and the north end Yellowheads. John Hudson’s cast includes Spotlight proprietors Beaudoin and Halaby, with Tyler Pinsent as the dimbulb Romeo Yellowhead and Abby Vandenberghe (replacing Rain Matkin) as the dewy Juliet Henday. My review is here.

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

Undiscovered Country. At the 2023 Fringe Chris Bullough’s strange, hallucinogenic dark comedy musical, was a later replacement for a show that cancelled. It’s back, directed by David Kennedy, in what I have a feeling will be a new version. It was a a story of the rise-and-fall of a country music star, with country tropes to match, along with Bullough’s songs, which have a subversive poetry to them. The apparently meandering way actor/ singer-songwriter Bullough turns apparent nostalgia into a kind of fantastical futurist vision is truly unique. You can read my review here (I’ll be trying to catch it again to see what’s changed).

Stay tuned to 12thnight.ca for reviews starting Thursday night. I’m really hoping you’ll be able to chip in a monthly sum to my ongoing Patreon campaign — every little bit helps — to support theatre coverage on this free (so far!) and independent site. It’s supported entirely by readers! The link is here. 

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Two sensational celebrity trials inspire two new plays at the Fringe: The Cult of the Clitoris and Cadaver Synod, a preview

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Maud Allan as Salomé, The Cult of the Clitoris, Empress of Blandings Productions. Poster art by Laurel Dundee.

Cadaver Synod by Sebastian Ley, Vault Theatre. Poster image by Sebastian Ley and Sarah Fett.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Both, in their way, were celebrity trials. And both trials, in separately sensational ways, 1,128 years apart, have inspired two new plays premiering at the Fringe. Like theatre, history can be weirdly generous that way. Witness The Cult of the Clitoris and Cadaver Synod, both premiering at the Fringe this week.

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The Cult of the Clitoris, the latest from Empress of Blandings Productions, sent playwright Celia Taylor into the fascinating transcripts of Rex v Pemberton Billing, the trial that, as she says, “captivated the British public in 1918.” The legal proceedings that created a frenzy of publicity involved Canadian actor/dancer Maud Allan, whose hit showbiz specialty in the West End was Dance of the Seven Veils. When British MP Noel Pemberton-Billing accused Allan of “treason, lesbianism, and treasonous lesbianism,” topped up with a strong implication of espionage, she took him to court.

Rochelle Laplante as Maud Allan in The Cult of the Clitoris, Empress of Blandings Productions. Tech rehearsal photo supplied.

The scene was wild, describes Taylor, a theatre artist for whom legal research in law school archives is meat and drink since she’s also a practising lawyer (in a busy Vancouver family law firm). “Members of the gallery leapt out of their seats to shout insults at the judge. Personal enmities bubbled up during cross-examination. And, of course, everyone had to discuss — while clinging to their Edwardian dignity with varying levels of success — just exactly what lesbians do, what exactly a clitoris is, and how exactly it can work.”

“I think law and theatre are natural friends,” says Taylor, who originally wrote The Cult of the Clitoris during law school (“as a final project for a class called Queering the Law”). “I wasn’t the only person in my law school who came from a theatre background, and I wasn’t the only person in my theatre program who went on to law school.”

“Adapting transcripts into a play also feels natural. They’re already written as a script, after all.” And “verbatim theatre,” culled from documentary sources, is one of Taylor’s special interests. In this she was particularly inspired by Darrin Hagen’s play Witch Hunt At The Strand, drawn as it is from a sorry chapter in our civic history. And she’s appreciated Hagen’s help in workshopping her script.   

Still, courts do tend to “the dry, quiet, meandering, and dull,” as Taylor puts it, in defiance of their livelier, more lurid depictions on American TV. And she admits to “worrying that even transcripts of a trial about a celebrity accused of lesbianism and treason, featuring witnesses who included a known spy and seductress, a mad conspiracy theorist, and Oscar Wilde’s most notorious ex-lover, might not end up lending themselves as well to the stage as I hoped.”

But the transcripts do “crackle with outrageous, absurd energy” — a rich vein of comedic possibility for Empress of Bandings Productions. And comedy classics, adapted for contemporary audiences, have been something of a specialty of the company started by Taylor, and named for a rotund pig in P.G. Wodehouse stories. They celebrated their 10th anniversary at last year’s Fringe with a return to Taylor’s original translation of the Molière comedy The Flying Doctor.

Maud Allan as Salomé in the Edwardian era. The Cult of the Clitoris. Photo supplied by Empress of Blandings Productions.

This new play, says Taylor, is “more serious than the usual Empress fare, because I think the story is grimly relevant to today’s political climate…. Politicians who seize on a marginalized or misunderstood community as a scapegoat for the anxieties of a society in turmoil feel all too contemporary. An awful lot of things threaten the livelihood and well-being of the working classes in 1918 — but gay sex really wasn’t one of them. In 2025, politicians, pundits, podcaster, and formerly beloved children’s authors are similarly putting energy that could be better spent, well, literally anywhere else, into the persecution of trans people. …”

”It’s hard not to hear the ghost of Noel Pemberton-Billing echoing in the voices of government and public opinion right here in Alberta, a hundred years later.”

The Cult of the Clitoris runs Friday through Aug. 24 at Fringe Stage 21, The Sanctuary Stage at Holy Trinity Anglican Church. Tickets and full schedule: fringetheatre.ca.

Cadaver Synod, Vault Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2025. Poster by Sebastian Ley and Sarah Fett.

What captivated actor/playwright Sebastian Ley about the real-life trial that ignited controversy and mob violence in 897 CE was the bizarre extremes of obsession in the participants. Obsession, says the Edmonton-based author of Cadaver Synod (opening Friday at the Fringe) “is a common thread in the stuff I write.” In 638 Ways To Kill Castro, Ley’s first full-length fully produced play, a hit at last summer’s Fringe, obsession was a rich vein of dark satirical comedy. As history verifies, try as they might (hilariously, the title wasn’t even a joke by the 1970s), the CIA backed by the mighty American military-industrial complex, couldn’t manage to assassinate Castro. “Ohmygod,” thought Ley, “what kind of people rise to that level of tenacity but also that level of incompetence?”

He had a similar experience with the “historical tidbit” about the so-called Cadaver Synod that popped into his view. “Who are these people? What kind of person does it take to hold a grudge against someone so single-mindedly they insist on digging up their corpse seven months after they’ve died, and putting them on trial?” No matter how fierce the thirst for vengeance, death, as he points out, usually means “the end of that relationship, and you move on.”

Not the obsessive Pope Stephen VI, apparently. The three-week trial of the decomposing Pope Formosus (a deacon pretended to speak for the body) conducted by his successor, and backed by the Holy Roman Emperor, actually ended with conviction. Formosus’s three benediction fingers were cut off, and the corpse was tossed into the Tiber. No shortage of Roman drama, to put it mildly, as Ley, bemused and awestruck in equal measure, describes the conspiracies, the power struggles, the trial, the aftermath. “It was so controversial that the pope who was running it ended up being killed. And violent mobs then burned down the cathedral where the trial was being held.” Then the sightings of the corpse, walking around performing miracles, started.

As in the case of his Castro play, underpinned by a father-son story, Ley’s new play uses a “deeply bizarre story from the real world as a framework for telling a more personal story about real people and real feelings,” as the playwright explains. “I love that dichotomy.”

It concerns the “awkward relationship of two young men in Catholic school together….” The one (Michael Watt) left to go become a bishop, and then the obsessive pope. The other (Samuel Bronson) was sent away, and returns. And there’s unfinished business between them.

Ley describes creative inspirations like the darkly comic film Death of Stalin. Or the TV series Succession, “characters who think that everything they’re doing is the most important thing in the world.” He points to the plays of Pinter, like The Birthday Party, as an influence, too, “witty and very serious and entertaining at the same time.”

Kathleen Weiss’s Vault Theatre cast also includes Ley’s father David Ley, a U of A drama prof who’s also appearing in a solo Samuel Beckett play, First Love, at the Fringe. “I’ve grown up watching him do theatre,” says the younger Ley. “So this is very special.”

Cadaver Synod runs Friday through Aug. 23 at Fringe Stage 31, Nancy Power mainstage at Theatre Network’s Roxy. Tickets and full schedule: fringtheatre.ca.

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A dark absurdist comedy introduces us to contemporary Ukrainian theatre: Bomb. A Fringe preview

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

Can you name a single Ukrainian playwright? Me neither. Fringe Full of Stars is about to change that.   

When director Lianna Makuch got her hands on Bomb, a dark, absurdist comedy by the contemporary Ukrainian playwright Natalia Blok, she knew she’d found a perfect home for it at the Fringe. And she set about gathering an all-star cast, including Mariya Khomutova, James MacDonald, Geoffrey Simon Brown, and Anna Kuman for the Pyretic production that opens at the Fringe Thursday.

“A strange little show … it encompasses everything the Fringe is all about: it’s subversive, it’s weird, it’s edgy. It leaves people with questions; you’re invited to think! It’s going to make you laugh — and not in the way you think.”

Bomb, our introduction to a brave new world of contemporary Ukrainian theatre, came to Makuch, an award-winning Ukrainian-Canadian director/ actor/ playwright (and the artistic director of Pyretic Productions), from Khomutova. The award-winning Ukrainian actor who now lives in Canada with her husband playwright Matthew MacKenzie (First Métis Man of Odesa) and young son Ivan, is a peer of playwright Blok.

Set in 2017, “after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine and before the full-scale invasion,” as Makuch explains, Bomb speaks to our age of chronic anxiety, resonating in the collective ribcage — literally. The protagonist Dasha, plagued by anxiety and PTSD, the journalist and activist played by Khomutova, has a bomb in her stomach.

“She is the Chosen One. That bomb, if she chooses to set it off, can change the fate of Ukraine forever…. Back to before the revolution, before the Russian invasions, before the Budapest Memorandum signed by major world powers who convinced Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for protecting its territorial integrity. Back to when Ukraine was just starting out as a country.”

“But Dasha would rather just get a moment of peace and quiet.…So she has to make a decision,” says Makuch. “Save the world. Or go about living a ‘normal life’.…”

On the recommendation of her husband (Brown), Dasha consults a new-age doctor (MacDonald). As Makuch explains, that character is inspired “by the pseudo-scientific doctors of the post-Soviet world,  and modelled particularly on a tele-hypnotist said to have hypnotized 300 million people via Soviet state television.”

It’s the kind of surreal absurdist comedy that really only an Eastern European can write,” says Makuch, fresh from assistant-directing Daryl Cloran’s production of Sense and Sensibility at the Stratford Festival. Where does that distinctive sense of humour and appreciation for absurdism, “so much part of the post-Soviet mentality,” come from? “It’s a sensibility shaped by a society with government structures that made no sense at all. A topsy-turvy world. A government that makes choices that are illogical, steeped in corruption and confusion at all times.”

“It feels like a Vaclav Havel kind of show,” she says of the playwright/ essayist/ poet/ public intellectual (who became the first president of the Czech Republic). Makuch remembers being in the cast of Havel’s The Memorandum in her last year of U of A theatre school. Trevor Schmidt’s production “really leaned into that world, and the absurdity of bureaucracy. A lot of fun to do, and a lot of fun to perform…. I’ve thought about that a lot getting ready to direct this show.”   

Bomb, she says, “is really a story about the cost of caring, the internal battles activists face when the world asks too much of you…. the toll it takes on our bodies, and our souls.”

Bloodshed and war have been terrible constants in Ukrainian history. By 2017, the first time Makuch was in Ukraine, researching on location for her own plays (Barvinok and Alina among them), she noted that “a prevailing sentiment, outside the veterans groups I was connected with, was the question of whether all the chaos, all the upheaval was worth it.… People have gone to war and risked everything. But there’s exhaustion; there’s the wanting to live a normal life.”

“Ukraine has constantly been thrust into asking those questions, and taking responsibility for defending the entire free world. Would it be better to just start again?”

After the full-scale invasion, the story has a new relevance,” says Makuch. The world, and our sense that “everything is spinning out of control,” have seen to that. “With everything that’s happening down south, the rise of populist governments, increased authoritarian rhetoric around us … we are slowly eroding democratic norms, and the basic rules of world order.”

“The fun challenge for me as a director,” says Makuch, “is how to create a container for this show that is going to invite people into that world. How do we make this show, so steeped in the Ukrainian mindset, relevant to a North American audience? To not be didactic — this isn’t a history lesson by any means! — and honour the dark comedy of the show?.”

The design, by Stephanie Bahniuk, “leans into the retro-futurist aesthetic,” says Makuch. “Big old-school tech, overhead projectors, analogue lighting.” The look is “old Soviet state-run hospital…. Very moody, very dark, a little bit scary but still fun!.”

“So often we impose a perspective on what’s happening,” she says.“We need to be listening to Ukrainian voices abut Ukrainian things.”

Bomb runs Thursday through Aug. 24 at MacEwan Fine Arts Walterdale Theatre, Fringe Stage 4. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

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Fringe Full of Stars: further thoughts from 12thnight on how to get intrigued, and what to see

Posted on August 11, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Elena Porter in I’ll Be Here: a musical cabaret. Broken Toys Theatre. Photo by Ryan Parker

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Starting Thursday you have the fun of launching yourself into the galaxy of Fringe Full of Stars, the 44th annual edition of the oldest and biggest of the continent’s Fringes (and the prototype for the rest).

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

You have 223 shows to choose from, in 40 venues, at this year’s Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival (through Aug. 24). OK, it’s a lot (and the 152-page $15 glossy guide weighs a ton in your purse). But don’t be flattened, be pumped. Take your cue from the deluxe improvisers in this theatre town, and say Yes to experimenting.

Did you have a peek at 12thnight.ca‘s selection of a dozen intriguing shows to get you started? It’s here. And here are some further thoughts about the strange and wonderful world at hand.

playwright Moemen Gaafar, author of Genesis , Fringe 2025. Photo suppliede

A new play by an emerging playwright: Nobody’s Fringe is complete without one. And Genesis, a first play by Egyptian-born computer science whiz Moemen Gaafar (the 2025 recipient of the Fringe’s Mowat Diversity Award), has a particularly enticing premise: playwright Adam, struggling with writer’s block, tries to dislodge his creative impasse by changing places with his character Eve.

Read the Fringe’s own interview with the playwright here:  https://tinyurl.com/2ay53py

Shakespeare shows up: He’s a stand-up Fringe collaborator; no playwright is more resilient. There are two versions of Macbeth at the Fringe (maybe the theme of ambition is irresistible). One’s a new opera, Macbeth, performed by the New Era Group (12 musicians, eight singers), music by J. A. Creaghan. The other, Out Damned, Spot is a 45-minute punk rock musical which sees the world of Macbeth through Lady M’s eyes.

Jon Paterson and Rod Peter in Iago vs Hamlet, RibbitRePublic. Photo supplied

Houston-based  comedian Patrick Hercamp is evidently a specialist in ripping through entire Shakespeare plays in 30 minutes. Fakespeare promises a condensation of “some of Shakespeare’s best loved tragedies, characters, and iconic dramatic moments.” In Tragedy or Triumph: An Improvised Shakespearean Epic, Vancouver’s Spontaneous Shakespeare Company makes up an entire Shakespeare play on the spot, the one he somehow forgot to write, from audience cues. Andrew Hamilton’s Kaliban wonders what happens to Prospero’s unruly servant, the son of a sea witch (with a viable land claim), at the end of The Tempest. In Jason McDonald’s Iago vs Hamlet, two of Shakespeare’s heavy-hitters go at it over … life? mortality? No, a double-booked rehearsal space.

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

Scaling up, not down!, for the Fringe. When I saw it at Nextfest in 2018, Moonshine was a highly unusual one-woman show — performance art for want of a better descriptive — in which Larissa Poho celebrated her Ukrainian roots in story, song (and trays of vodka shots). As of its Fringe premiere this week,  Moonshine, “a Ukrainian kitchen party in a fried chicken restaurant,” is re-born as “a five-member actor-musician ensemble show,” she says. It defies the Fringe drift to smaller, more condensed, in a striking way.

The bilingual Poho is the possessor of a remarkably expansive artist skill set: actor, playwright (Before The River), singer, composer, lighting designer, visual artist, musical director and arranger. She plays the violin, and a veritable band full of instruments including the accordian, the dulcimer, the guitar, an assortment of exotic Ukrainian instruments. She’s a tattoo artist, too.

For Moonshine, as she describes, Poho “leads the storytelling” (in two languages), supported by Billy Brown, Scott Shpeley, local singer-songwriter Marissa K, Saskatoon’s Jordan Welbourne. “Yes, there is new and even more music!” she says. And it comes in a eclectic whirl of styles, “folk, pop, klezmer, punk, instrumental and a capella. And many more instruments. Whereas previously I played the show solely on my violin, we’ve added guitars, mandolin, ukulele, tsymbaly, accordion and more.” Bonus: Moonshine happens in a (licensed) BYOV where you’ve never before seen a Fringe show, Waffle Bird (Stage 35) in the heart of Fringe Land.

Assassins, Uniform Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2025. Graphic supplied

Topicality, renewed: Stephen Sondheim’s 1990 musical Assassins returns to the Fringe after a decade in all its dark, weird, subversive brilliance. And it’s armed (so to speak) with a new and lustrous topicality in our Moment. The characters are men and women who assassinated presidents of the United States, or at least gave it a shot. Even if that American Dream mantra that any kid can grow up to be president is a big fat lie, any kid can grow up to kill one. The 10-actor Uniform Theatre production happens at a first-time Fringe BYOV, ArtsHub Ortona in the river valley.   

Homecoming: The Fringe is a playground, and brave new world, for young and emerging artists, yes. But the Edmonton Fringe’s enduring success is also built on its appeal, however intermittent, for seasoned professionals, like director Jim Guedo (back at the Fringe after 35 years to direct Victor and Victoria’s Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things). The last time actor/director James MacDonald did a Fringe show was Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me in 2003. Since then, a lot has happened in a career that’s taken him to the Citadel and across the country, and to the artistic directorship at Western Canada Theatre in Kamloops, a job he’s recently left. He returns to Edmonton and the Fringe as an actor, in the cast of the dark political comedy Bomb. The appeal, as he describes, was three-fold. One was the “excellent production of First Métis Man of Odesa” that played WCT under his watch. “I was so struck by the beautiful artistry and daring creativity” of director Lianna Makuch and star Mariya Khomutova. And they’re the artistic engine of Bomb. Meaningfully, MacDonald is in the role (of the doctor) that was to have been occupied by the late great Julien Arnold. “I am so pleased to to it, both to work with some innovative artists on a unique and topical play, and also as a tribute to my great friend and his incredible legacy in Edmonton.”

Broken Toys Theatre, the company created by husband-and-wife team Elena Porter and Clinton Carew, has brought Edmonton audiences powerful contemporary productions of the masters (Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, Pinter’s Betrayal) along with such large-scale originals as Star Killing Machine. It’s been six years since a Broken Toys production has been at the Fringe (The Trophy Hunt). Till now. And for the first time, something as “small, personal, and intimate” as a cabaret, as Porter says. A musical theatre veteran she stars in her first cabaret, I‘ll Be Here: A Musical Cabaret. with Steven Greenfield, directed by Carew. She’s always loved the form, and its juxtaposition of  known, and little known, songs,  gathered to reflect on “the joy and pain of the past decade.”

Michelle Todd and Cheryl Jameson in Paloma & Joy, Whizgiggling Productions. Photo supplied

Busiest artist at the Fringe: Hands down, playwright/ director/ actor Trevor Schmidt, artistic director of Northern Light Theatre (who also wrote a play, Monstress, for NLT this past season). Q: why doesn’t Schmidt have a Red Bull sponsorship? He has written no fewer than three new comedies for the Fringe and co-written a fourth. He has directed and designed all four. And he’s in the cast of two of them. Whizgiggling Productions (Black Widow Gun Club, Destination Wedding) premieres Schmidt’s comedy Paloma & Joy (which re-assembles the fave trio of Michelle Todd, Kristin Johnston and Cheryl Jameson, and an unusual guest star, “a rare and exotic white tiger”). The comedy Carole of the Belles is for the collective 100% More Girls, and he joins the Whizgiggling trio onstage along with Jason Hardwick and Jake Tkaczyk. Co-written with Darrin Hagen, Flora & Fawna Face Their Fears, with Schmidt as Flora, is a Guys in Disguise production that returns to the characters, earnestly helpful pre-teen girls, we met in Flora & Fawna’s Field Trip. Schmidt has also written a comedy, Lousy Parents, for the Novus Actors lawyers’ collective (all proceeds benefit the Varscona Theatre).   

Accidental Beach: A Previously Improvised Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

Sequels and a prequel: There are sequels at the Fringe, !SNAFU’s Sexy Puppet Show (Epidermis Circus 2) among them, a follow-up to Ingrid Hansen and Britt Small’s ingenious physical puppet show, all done with fingers and other body parts, mirrors and a camera. The Fringe has become self-referential for its returning audiences. Prequels, thought, are rare upon the ground, as rare as rhymes for Saskatchewan River. GUMS: An Accidental Beach Prequel couldn’t be more local. The new Grindstone musical by the stellar theatre composer/musical director Simon Abbott with Dallas Friesen, Abby Vandenberghe and Malachi Wilkins rolls back time, back before last summer’s Accidental Beach: A Previously Improvised Musical — a goofball affair with clever songs — back to the moment that a dangerous, shifting new river beach emerges, along with a scary giant sturgeon. Where’s a heroic lifeguard when you need one?

Tell us a story, do (the loneliness of the long-distance storyteller): The Fringe circuit is a repository for storytellers (not least because it’s a portable solo art form and generally designers need not apply). Fringe Full of Stars has three of the best.

Martin Dockery in 1 Small Lie, Edmonton Fringe 2025. Photo supplied.

One is the charismatic Anishinaabe playwright/storyteller Josh Languedoc of Indigenized Indigenous Theatre (one of my favourite company names). The protagonist of his puckishly titled Elon Muskrat has put his new casino up for sale. Martin Dockery’s particular kind of low-key bemusement lends itself to the unspooling shaggy-dog kind of comedy, made incrementally plausible. It seems tailor-made for a possibly-true crime premise like 1 Small Lie, in which, as billed, “a family man robs a thief of a ton of money.” Paul Strickland, a Kentucky storyteller of great charm and comic chops, is a specialist in the particularly deadpan comedy of tall tales somehow made plausible. And they come with music. Last year he brought us Once Upon A Lie; this year 100% UnTrueBadour.

New musical theatre at the Fringe: Launching a new musical anywhere, much less at the Fringe, takes impressive (crazy labour-intensive) creative energy. But, hey, they have proliferated in a startling way at the festival. There are genre spoofs (Final Girl), live cartoons (Popeye The Musical), dramatic period pieces (The  Spotlight’s Shadow). There’s even a solo musical (Zombies, Inc.).

Tickets, show descriptions and schedules: fringetheatre.ca.

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Are you lost in the stars? What to see at Fringe Full Of Stars: a little survey to get you started

Posted on August 7, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matkin in Victor and Victoria’s Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things, Thought Train. Photo by Evan Makewecki

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Starting Thursday, Edmonton’s best idea ever is back in action to screw up your bedtime, and make life more exciting. The 44th annual edition of our 11 day-and-night theatre bash, the biggest and oldest Fringe on the continent, and the place where the phenom started on this side of the pond, is an invitation to experiment, take a chance, make a discovery.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

The starry 223-show Fringe galaxy is yours to explore Aug. 14 to 24. So what looks promising? intriguing? Just for starters, here’s a preliminary survey of a dozen shows that caught my eye — for the play, the premise, the artists, the weirdness and/or the likelihood you’ve never seen anything like it. (I haven’t seen them yet either, so we’re in this together). Stay tuned for companion pieces, and more suggestions, coming up on 12thnight.ca.

Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk in Victor and Victoria’s Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things. Photo by Evan Makowecki

Victor and Victoria’s Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things. This cleverly macabre homage to Victorian bedtime storytelling, and the irresistible lure of getting scared, is an original by actor/playwrights Beth Graham and Nathan Cuckow. It premiered nearly 15 years ago at the Fringe here and in New York. It’s back, with a pair of this theatre town’s hottest young actors, Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk, and marks the return the of star director Jim Guedo to the Fringe — after 35 years. “It would take a lot to lure me back,” says Guedo of his return to the Fringe after lo these many years. Last time was as an actor: Leave It To Jane’s 1990 production of Charles Ludlum’s Medea, with Maralyn Ryan, directed by Tim Ryan.

The appeal for Guedo was double-barrelled. One was the actors. “Rain and Eli asked me, I happen to think they’re both fabulous,” Guedo says of the pair of recent MacEwan Theatre Arts grads who starred together in Northern Light’s Radiant Vermin this past season. “This will be our fourth show working together,” Guedo says of a history that includes MacEwan’s production of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George (Matkin and Yaschuk were Dot and George). “Two: the script. Beth and Nathan’s script is a bang-up beautiful piece of writing. It’s marvellous, twisted, dark, funny, and is a dense rollercoaster to navigate…. We’ve had a blast working on it.”

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

Bomb. Pyretic Productions, a local indie with a national profile, has a history with our Fringe they can trace back to Matthew MacKenzie’s The Particulars in 2008. And an archive of originals that leans into bold and inflammatory (Bears, Alina, Michael Mysterious, Barvinok …). With this Canadian premiere of Bomb, a (very) black absurdist comedy by Natalia Blok billed as “explosively funny” (with a bomb to back up that claim), Pyretic introduces us to contemporary Ukrainian theatre. And director Lianna Makuch has assembled an all-star cast of heavy-hitters for the occasion: Mariya Khomutova, James MacDonald, Geoffrey Simon Brown, Anna Kuman. More about this play in a 12thnight companion piece coming soon.

The Peter Pan Cometh. If you were surprised (and who wasn’t?) by Who’s Afraid of Winnie the Pooh? at last summer’s Fringe, you already know something about the playful audacity at work in Clevername Theater of Minnesota. Somehow, impossibly, they pulled off a funny and very moving capture of Edward Albee’s celebrated barb-slinging marital bloodbath with the AA Milne characters from the Hundred Acre Wood. You can’t help but be curious about this latest from playwright Alexander Gerchak, in which the illusion-soaked barflies of Eugene O’Neill’s monumentally bleak The Iceman Cometh, are visited by The Boy Who Refuses To Grow Up et al. Sounds even more impossible.

Cadaver Synod by Sebastian Ley, Vault Theatre. Poster image supplied

Cadaver Synod. Sebastian Ley’s 638 Ways To Kill Castro, a smart satire with a zest for the absurdist potential of … reality, was our introduction at last summer’s Fringe to the accomplished work of this theatrically savvy young actor/playwright. His first play, it was a hit. Ley is back with another equally outlandish premise from actual history: an obsessed medieval emperor with, as Ley puts it dryly, “a high level of inability to let things go,” orders the body of a long-dead pope who’s offended him to be dug up. In 897, the corpse is put on trial. Kathleen Weiss, a director with experimental cred, returns, to direct a starry cast that includes Samuel Bronson, David Ley, and Michael Watt. More about the playwright and his new play in an upcoming 12thnight post.

Zombies, Inc, Live & In Color. Poster image supplied

ZOMBIES, INC. The intriguing proposition at the heart of this new solo musical comedy is alluringly off-centre: “what if you were already living like the undead before the zombie apocalypse? Satirical barbs aimed at “corporate culture, capitalism, existential dread … through the lens a zombie apocalypse” as director Devanand Janki describes? OK, I’m in. The show was developed by Live & In Color, the New York company started by the Edmonton born and raised New Yorker Janki to champion the work of under-represented and BIPOC artists. His musical adaptation (with Tommy Newman) of Darrin Hagen’s Yuletide comedy With Bells On premiered at Theatre Network in 2023. Janki directs this new musical created by the Bolivian-American artist Marcus Perkins Bejarano and Korean-Mongolian Kim Jinhyoung and starring Edmonton’s Damon Pitcher, “a local gem and a star in the making” as Janki describes. “A true tour-de-force performance” by “a fellow South Asian artist…. Directing Damon has been a deeply personal joy.” Janki says. OK, I’m in.

The Alberta Hospital For The Insane by Calla Wright. Photo supplied.

The Alberta Hospital for the Insane. They’ve included puppets in their Fringe casts before now (The Wright Sisters Present: The Wright Brothers , e.g.) In May I saw a workshop production of Calla Wright’s Binding, a witty, highly original one-human many-puppet character play at the RISER New Works Festival. And here’s a Wright Punch and Judy-style puppet show, Wright’s first with an all-puppet cast, directed by the adventurous theatre artist Meegan Sweet. The puppets have the intriguing challenge of stepping up to thorny, complex subject matter … the relationship between queer and trans identities, gender roles, the social weaponizing of the mental illness label. It’s set in dustbowl Alberta in the 1930s at the notorious Alberta Hospital in Ponoka. Why puppets? “A lot of the play is about perception, and the cognitive dissonance between how you feel within and how you’re perceived by others,” Wright says. “And puppets help us play with this reality/unreality truth/mask theme.”

Rat Academy 2: Gnaw and Order. Three years ago, Fringe audiences were smitten by the fractious dynamic between a couple of rats, marginalized outsiders up against it in a rat-free province. Rat Academy, the imaginative and playful work of clown artists Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner, went on to tour theatres and festivals across the country, a bona fide hit and Edmonton Fringe success story. Fingers (Hoffmann), the exasperated street-wise one, and Shrimp (Yoner), a former lab rat and the more naive and impulsive one, are back, with a free-standing ‘sequel’. This time, as their creators said in a 12thnight interview for their Nextfest run, the rodent duo, quick on the uptake with their audiences, have been evicted from their alley and are exploring the notion of home, what it means to be at home. Have a peek at the 12thnight interview with Hoffmann and Yoner in June, here.

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

Lost Sock Rescue Society. The prospect of a new show from Small Matters Productions, purveyors of such clownly comic delights as For Science! and The Spinsters, is no small matter at all. In this one you get to support the vital activism of a society with a mission to recover, rehabilitate, and re-home lost, unwanted, and abandoned socks. Not only that, you can apply to adopt. The production introduces as new stage partnership, and the kooky fun potential is high: Christine Lesiak (Hey Science!) and Louise Casemore (OCD, Gemini), the latter fresh from a sold-out premiere run of Lucky Charm at the Found Festival, and both experts at making audience interaction actually fun! (a gift to be prized). Unlike Lesiak Casemore isn’t known as a clown artist per se. “But aesthetically and philosophically, we’re on the same page!” as Lesiak puts it. There’s a guest “international sock technician” at every performance.

Final Girl: A New Musical. A new musical comedy by the Straight Edge Theatre team of Seth Gilfillan and Stephen Allred, the musical theatre-soaked duo who brought us Conjoined and Krampus, is an enticing prospect. Billed as “Scream meets Mean Girls,” their new show is named for the teen horror flick trope of, you know, cheery serial slasher deaths.

Dave Clarke and John Ullyatt in ShipShow, Photo supplied.

ShipShow! Together again. Even the thought of Dave Clarke and John Ullyatt, two of this town’s most adventurous theatre artists, as a musical cabaret duo in nautical mode, taking on the curse of the Flying Dutchman, is pretty well irresistible. Eileen Sproule directs. (Memories do linger of their Dr. Grot and Moon shows of yore: Clarke as a demented self-help guru and Ullyatt as a slightly rancid eager-beaver boy scout acolyte. Once seen never forgotten).

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

Flora & Fawna Face Their Fears. The NaturElles, the all-inclusive non-binary pre-teen collective (founded by two earnest 10-year-old girls as a haven for bullied outsiders: ‘no mean girls!’), were born at the Fringe a decade ago. They’re the comedy inspiration of Guys in Disguise’s Darrin Hagen and Trevor Schmidt, who co-starred (with Brian Dooley) in the inaugural Flora & Fawna’s Field Trip (With Fleurette), a NaturElles recruitment seminar, a decade ago. “Trevor and I came up with the character names when we were up north in 2013 in the Yukon researching Klondykes,” says Hagen. “One of us said ohmygod there’s so much flora and fauna up here. And the other said those would be great character names.” Flora & Fawna Have Beaver Fever (And So Does Fleurette) followed. I can’t not see the latest show: Schmidt as Fawna, Jake Tkaczyk as Flora, and Jason Hardwick as the NaturElles new secretary.

Jezec Sanders in Where Foxes Lie, Nextfest and Ready Go Theatre. Photo supplied.

Where Foxes Lie. Fringe audiences found out about playwright Jezec Sanders with his impressively accomplished and witty thriller The Cabin on Bald Dune in 2023. This new solo show, is similarly intricate (I saw a workshop version a year ago at Nextfest, a co-producer at the Fringe premiere with Ready Go Theatre), and just as challenging, since the dark unstoppable course of a rumour in a community is chronicled onstage by one actor. Sanders himself stars; Erik Richards directs.

Before this gets any longer, I leave you, just temporarily, with some enticing premises: A Kind of Electra, a clown version of the violent Greek myth by L.A.’s The Clown School Company. The Empire of Sand, a new show, would you call it “performance poetry”?,  featuring the verbal gymnastics of Steve Pirot. Riot! something new from the ingenious theatrical smarties of Vancouver’s Monster Theatre. It involves an actual 1849 theatre riot in NYC. 

Tickets, show descriptions and schedules: fringetheatre.ca.  Did you check out our “tickets on sale” post. It’s here. 

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