Off the page and onto the stage, with murderous intent: Murder He Wrote, a Fringe review

Posted on August 18, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

John D. Huston as Charles Dickens in Murder He Wrote. Photo by David Whitely

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Murder He Wrote: A Dickens Of An Hour (La Cité francophone theatre)

The stories are vividly dramatic, ’tis true. But the translation of Charles Dickens’s rich, descriptive prose style, and his gallery of vivid characters, into solo theatre is work for the pros.

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You’re in luck, fringers. John D. Huston is back at the Fringe with a two-part Dickens show he last performed here nearly three decades ago. Murder He Wrote is old-fashioned storytelling as performance, a virtuoso weave of narration, voices, very particular accents, expressive gestures, facial adjustments.

Part 1, Sikes and Nancy, a set-piece culled from Oliver Twist, take us into the criminal London demi-monde. The man who stands before us is Dickens, or a contemporary re-creation thereof, in vintage lecture wear (with Dickens hair), at a podium. Huston’s predecessor in this enterprise, a violent crime thriller, was the man himself. Dickens apparently took it on the road for his lucrative “Readings” series in 1868. It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a hit. Nothing like lurid violence to draw in the Victorian thrill-seekers.

It’s a measure of Huston’s expertise that he sets in motion, with impressive precision, a cast of individual characters and the successive locales of a nocturnal pursuit, with annotations about the spooky shadows and lighting. You know exactly who’s who, in accent, cadence, and timbre.

The poster child for good-hearted women doomed by their attraction to bad men, sweet Nancy has terrible taste in boyfriends: he’s the brutish thug housebreaker Bill Sikes. On the night in question, she’s followed by a spy to a nocturnal encounter with a rich gentleman. It will not end well for her. And as for Sikes … well, Dickens as we know, is good on hauntings.

The companion piece, Captain Murderer, a droll confection adapted from a Dickens short story, is a macabre black comedy about a serial husband with a particular way of dispatching his wives. The characters are heightened, the surprise twists amusing. All good unwholesome fun. And fun, too, to see how an expert lifts storytelling out of the library, off the page, and onto the stage.

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What are friends for? Everything Is Beautiful, a Fringe review

Posted on August 17, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Everything is Beautiful (La Cité francophone theatre)

Two old guys on a park bench: a study in contrast. One is a gloomy gus scowler; one is a determinedly chipper smiler. One accuses restaurant servers of purposely seating oldsters at the back to avoid reminding people of their mortality. One says he actually prefers to sit near the kitchen.

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They’ve been needling, volleying barbs, and generally irritating the hell out of each other for 50 years. They are best friends. And what they play out, every time they meet you figure, is a sort of comedy of bad manners à la Neil Simon.

In this English adaptation of France Levasseur-Ouimet’s much-travelled Prends mes yeux, tu vas voir, two of franco-albertan theatre’s best-known actors, André Roy and Gilles Denis, tuck gleefully, and amusingly, into the fragments, interruptions, gestures, edits, asides that go into a long-standing friendship. And they have chemistry.

The play is built on a comical assortment of observations about old age — its physical humiliations, its social grievances, its neglect at the hands of a youth-worshipping culture — played on a loop. The characters have been around the block with each other’s stories. Jean, for example, consults an itemized history of his assorted infirmities and their outcomes. Cancer? “That story doesn’t get more interesting the more you tell it,” says Robert, unsympathetically.

But there’s heart, too, in happy shared memories too, doled out more grudgingly (one word: hockey). Gradually, in different ways, they admit to feelings of loneliness and exclusion. It’s poignant to realize that Robert (Roy), the grouchier one of the pair, comes to the park bench almost daily, hoping to catch a glimpse of his grandson in the schoolyard, his only connection.

Everything is Beautiful is a photo album of an old friendship, not a ground-breaking motion picture. But it does arrive at a question. How can two old guys remain current in a world where everyone is younger, and has a job or kids or both? That’s not the drift of things. Thinking young won’t quite do it. Jean, the sunnier one (Denis), has an idea. And it helps to have a pal.

 

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The world is on fire and there’s silence in the land of dreams: Patina, a Fringe review

Posted on August 17, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Patina (Old Strathcona Performing Arts)

What in the world is happening to the world? It’s on fire. It’s drowning. It’s melting. Its axis is slipping.

Patina Bellweather (Rebecca Starr), the official child minder in Smaland, “the land of dreams,” is trying to keep her spirits up. And she’s still up for a round of Fun Facts or “Where in the world are you?” if you want to play, just to remind herself that despite everything there are still random wonders left in the world. But there’s an unmistakeable air of desperation about her efforts. In a global emergency, time is running out, and her heart has “lost its lustre.”

“I have to be honest, you’re not exactly who I was hoping to see,” she says at the outset of Patina. She was hoping for a return of Smals to Smaland. But there’s “nothing but silence in the space where there should be children.”

The Frente Collective is dedicated to taking a strong climate-change  message onto the stage, and that’s a worthy and important mandate. Subtlety and oblique angles are not their thing, although Leslea Kroll’s new play takes its imagery from the playroom in the land of flat-box Scando furniture you have to assemble yourself, and meatballs.

Patina gets its inspiration from the children’s climate strikes launched by Greta Thunberg. Ah, so Smaland is deserted because the Smals are off, gainfully employed spreading ecological knowledge, doing the work the “biggers” should be doing but clearly aren’t. Which makes the absence of Smals is a good thing, right? (not least because meatballs are a notable heart-stopper).

Patina is a disillusioned idealist; her “heart bells” have stopped ringing. But being a character isn’t really her strong suit. True, she’s been hiding her light under a bushel (of coloured balls) in Smaland. But explaining her state of mind, for example, as “a vexation of spirit,” a phrase she credits to Robert Burton’s hefty 1621 volume The Anatomy of Melancholy (while marvelling at its 900-page heft) pretty much boots her out of her twinkly ‘collector of fun facts’ persona.

Starr is an engaging performer, who makes skilful off-centre choices onstage in trying to fashion an arc of discovery in the protagonist. But Patina is a spokesperson, not really a character. And the theatrical framework is there to temporarily camouflage the revelations attached to a passionate message. And it doesn’t quite pay off, on a pound for pound basis.

It feels like Patina is waiting, biding its time to say what it’s come for. “We do not get a do-over … no one is too small to make a difference.” That is loud and clear, in primary colours.

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Coming out, in a brand new musical: One Song, a review.

Posted on August 16, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Jaimi Reese, Ceris Backstrom, Manny Aguerrevere, Josh Travnik in One Song, Margin Release at Edmonton Fringe 2021. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

One Song (La Cité Auditorium)

“I think I just met myself … ” sings Rye (Manny Aguerrevere) in the opening number of One Song, a striking new musical for young audiences about being young, coming out, and being a friend.

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It’s by the team of Calla Wright (book and lyrics) and Daniel Belland (music). And it’s at the Fringe in staged reading form, an exciting reminder of something the festival is for: young talent testing something brand new in front of a live audience. And that something brand new is an amazingly accomplished piece of musical theatre.

We’re in the 90s, and Rye and her best friend Jackson (Josh Travnik) have just seen the rock musical Rent, with its easy mix of gay and straight characters. Rye’s mind is blown by the new thrill of self-knowledge and belonging, “feeling like a part of things,” of opening the door on a world where there are other people “on the same path going the same way.”

In his more tentative and cautious way, Jackson senses the same growing discovery about his own sexuality and place in the world — “I was wooden and now I’m real.” Rye understands her pal. But Jackson’s way of coming out, yet to be figured out, will be a different, less demonstrative  way than hers. And Rye’s failure to get that lands their friendship on the rocks.

Jaimi Reese plays mom, and gets a lovely song Not This, about the struggle to make your life choices your own. The other characters are there to offer different perspectives on being a queer creative — with songs to match. Chris Backstrom plays two. Paul (Ceris Backstrom), a friend of Rye’s mom, is a repository of examples of seminal queer performers, from Stormé DeLarverie to k.d. lang.. Toast (Backstrom) is a drag queen, whose mantra is direct connection to the audience. You can “lose the paint, lose the music,” she sings. “Just remember me.”

In its storytelling, the warm, wide embrace of  One Song is intrinsic to its appeal. But I wonder, on this first viewing, if the scene involving Rye’s mom and her own best friend, especially as a climactic  catalyst to resolving the conflict, could use a re-think. It seems a little forced at the moment.

Belland and Wright’s songs — their unexpected imagery, their sense of discovery and emotional impact on  the storytelling — are fresh and affecting. One Song is many songs, of course, and their stylistic confidence will knock you back in your seat. A highlight is Jackson’s killer song Quiet, musically complex and emotionally rich. It’s delivered beautifully by Travnik. My eyes are watering to think of it now.

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A cultural survey of Cuba in a hot dance musical: Mi Habana Querida, a Fringe review

Posted on August 16, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Mi Habana Querida, Cuban Movements Dance at Fringe 2021. Photo by Tyler Baker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Mi Habana Querida (Westbury Theatre)

The idea is intriguing: a cultural survey of Cuba in a dance musical. And so is the Romeo and Juliet theatrical premise, a tale of lovers, one Cuban and one American, separated by the Cuban Revolution.

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None of this, however, prepares you for the startling explosion of colour, the riot of gorgeous costumes (don’t get me started on the shoes) and the sexy moves that set them in non-stop motion, the irresistible music, and knockout dance numbers of Mi Habana Querida.

It’s a veritable extravaganza of romance, brought to the Fringe by Cuban Movements, the Edmonton dance company founded by Cuban-Canadian artistic director/choreographer Leo Gonzalez (they’re the recipient of the Fringe’s 2021 Mowat Diversity Award). And the operative word is hot, in all its implications, including a reminder of the perpetual summer we only dream about (did I mention the shoes?).

Mi Habana Querida is, you will glean, on a production scale you just don’t expect to find at the Fringe. It unfolds like a Cuban fan (fans are big in this show) in a sort of collage of dance solos, pas de deux, and ensemble numbers, fleeting dramatic scenes, flashbacks, and large-scale projection footage of seminal cultural events: the capital’s lavish pre-Revolutionary nightclub scene, the carnival, street parties, Afro-Cuban choirs, an impassioned revolutionary speech by Castro (who was, in case its slipped anyone’s mind, a great orator).    

Madrina (producer Cecilia Ferreyra) presides. She’s the engaging proprietor of the title Havana club, a self-styled “hopeless romantic” who introduces the scenes, narrates, plays yenta, joins in, or shoos everyone off the stage when the police are raiding. When the Revolution comes, it is, says Madrina, “the end of life as I know it.”

The natural rhythm of the numbers for the men, Gonzalez and Raydel Martinez-Portuondo, seems to be escalation — faster, higher, more and more acrobatic. The women, led by Amalia Cameron who plays half of star-cross’d pair of lovers with Gonzalez, are graceful, elegant, balletic.

The show pays tribute to Cuba’s Afro-Cuban culture, too, and its distinctive musical and choreographic personality, in forceful, visceral solos (and an entirely different set of costumes).

In the end, Ferreyra tells us sadly, “life is hard in Cuba … especially for the Afro-Cuban population.” Some day, says Gonzalez, Cuba will “get the smiles and the happy back.” The Revolutionary mantra of “Nation or Death” will cede to “Nación y Vida,” Nation and Life. And there’s a big flamboyant finale as a demo.

If you’re up for going out, try to see them live. It’s a treat.

  

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Landing lightly on a shameful chapter in our history: Camping, a Fringe review

Posted on August 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Camping (Vanta Group Outdoor Stage)

Breathing life into our history onstage is the raison d’être of MAA and PAA Theatre. This little 35-minute play, by David Cheoros and his 10-year-old daughter Sophia Cheoros, alights on a shameful chapter in the Canadian story, the internment of Eastern Europeans as enemy aliens during World War I.

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How to shed light in a kids’ play on the bad exclusionary behaviour of a country that talks a good game about international kindness? In Camping, team Cheoros imagines a chance encounter in a Banff Park woods between a seven-year-old in 2021 and a Ukrainian man in 1916, imprisoned by the War Measures Act.

Nikki (Gabby Bernard) has her grievances. In an act of egregious unfairness her mom has taken her camping (a word she delivers like with eight or so grudging syllables) when the world should know that Nikki had her heart set on going to her BFF’s birthday party in town.

Nick (Matt Mihiliewicz) isn’t so keen on camping either, needless to say, since he’s been a starving prisoner for a year in a hard labour camp. He’s amazed that anyone who has access to an apartment that’s warm, dry, and safe in a city would choose to be spend time in a tent.

Both of them are surprised by the difference a century can make. Nikki is shocked that he’s cutting down a tree in a national park. “I only know how to plant trees,” she says. It’s a skill he’s never run across.

In the course of their encounter, as they pass the time, Nikki learns a little something about hardship, about dreams of a better life in a new country that didn’t come true. “Nobody invited him to the party,” she concludes, exploring the concept of the outsider in her own terms.

It’s simple; it lands lightly, even humorously; it’s a little eye-opener. The prisoner treats the kid kindly. And the actors are charming.   

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A play date with … us: Merk du Solapocalypse, a Fringe review

Posted on August 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Merk du Solapocalyse. Photo by Brianne Jang.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Merk du Solapocalypse (Westbury Theatre)

In this latest instalment of Dammitammy Productions’ loopy Merk du Soleil series, the twin concept goofy/giddy really comes into its own.

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There is no real way to explain the nutbar down-at-heel charms of an entertainment that weight-lifts with pool noodles, revels equally in terrible puns and wigs, and introduces acts that include a stand-up comedian so spectacularly atrocious that he counts as a satire of stand-up, or maybe spoken word performance. And then the show suddenly cuts to an original song that really catches the ear.

Hang on. Merk du Solapocalypse has showbiz roots. It borrows — well, pilfers — from circus, old-school vaudeville, and cabaret. And there’s a premise. Merk (Rebecca Merkley, creator/ director/ composer/ Dammitammy muse), the headliner of a circus troupe with no interest in circus acts, has called it quits on live theatre in “the shitshow we call 2021.” Who’s gonna argue with that?

She’s sold off the theatre to some religious outfit. But then, as one of her very likeable trio of Sideshow Boobs (Carol Chu, Yvonne Boon, Kristina Hunszinger) notes, their “open-door policy” meant that the door was actually open and their stuff got stolen. Odds against notwithstanding, the Boobs say “the show must go on, jump jump jump jump kick.” Words to live by.

It’s what they do. And, hey, there seems to be an audience, so why the hell not?

What ensues has something to do with time-travelling, back back back to when there was no art. There were, however, cows (or do they come later? my notes are unclear on this point). And by then, we get to be part of a survey of our biggest beefs in order. (Anti-vaxxers got the biggest boo, at the performance I caught; the government was a contender).

Anyhow, in a stop along the space-time continuum, Jesus shows up with a parable. There’s Bible study that loses interest in itself and wanders off. It’s just one thing after another at the Solapocalypse, a high-speed entertainment with an attention deficit. Scenes end before the punch line; so do jokes, a vaudevillian take on nihilism perhaps.

The whole thing — including the sound which could use a boost — has an air of scrambled spontaneity that makes improv look planned out (back to goofy/giddy). You’ll have fun if you just sit back, relax, and go with free association and the non sequitur as a concept. And you’d have even more fun, I think, if you could hear everything better.

It’s a play date — with us. And the “us” is, in the end, the heart of the banter. “It was you who kept us breathing,” the beaming cast tells us. Yup, we’re back to live.

  

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Cracking up, a black comedy about glueing ourselves together: The Man Who Fell To Pieces, a Fringe review

Posted on August 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

The Man Who Fell To Pieces, Fairly Odd Productions. Poster image supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Man Who Fell To Pieces (Garneau Theatre)

The man we meet in this absurdist black comedy by the Belfast playwright Patrick O’Reilly has gone to pieces. Literally. He’s cracked up, and his body parts are in a bag on his mom’s kitchen table.

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“Are you too warm in there?” she asks him. “Could you speak more clearly?”

His fiancée Caroline (Dayna Lea Hoffman) is all for taking him to the hospital for repair. But Alice (Liz Grierson) has done what any loving mother would do under the circumstances. She’s called a handyman (James Hastings). “You can fix anything,” she says, sending Henry for his tools.   

John (Ben Osgood) appears onstage to introduce himself and tell his story, how he cracked up and ended up in the bag. The storytelling happens in an inventive, highly entertaining whirl of dance and red-nose clowning, circus acrobatics, plate-spinning, and juggling in Kate Sheridan’s production. It introduces a well-named new theatre indie in town, Fairly Odd Productions.

John explains that he started cracking up at work one day. His job? Telephone cold-call life insurance sales. A crack appeared in his face, and one of his ears flew off. That was just the start. “Fractures kept appearing everywhere.”

The more he denies that anything’s wrong, and patches himself together with cellotape and staples, the more he splinters his relationship with Caroline, who’s feels rejected and furious at his lies. They break up. Even his home is cracking up. He comes from a broken home — literally. His single mom regularly smashes up the furniture with her twirling baton so that Henry can come and fix them.

A crack-up is never a one-man show: John is a spreader of chaos; there’s a price to be paid for going it alone.

The four actors, who share a startling skill set, step up impressively to the fast and furious, ever-changing, very demanding physicality of the storytelling. A climactic breakup sequence, in dance, between John and Caroline is a knock-out. And the characters, even the handyman, have dramatic weight and dimension, emotional heft, in this literal deconstruction of a mental breakdown.

The ending, in which John, a one-man crack-up on (temporary) legs, will leave you thinking. A very cool theatrical way to spin a metaphor and be thought-provoking about a serious subject. It speaks in an ingenious, non-hectoring way to a moment in history where we’re all trying to glue the pieces back together.

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Taking sword in hand. Win The Warrior: a King Arthur Tale, a Fringe review,

Posted on August 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Katie Yoner in Win the Warrior: A King Arthur Tale. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Win the Warrior, Vanta Group Outdoor Stage

The 12-year-old heroine of Ellen Chorley’s new play Win The Warrior: A King Arthur Tale, for kids and the adults they tend to bring with them, has a particularly tricky modern challenge. How to satisfy her appetite for heroic action when her video game device melts down (the horror, the horror!) on a trip abroad with her professor dad. Is a book, a gift copy of the Arthurian Chronicles, a worthy replacement?

Judging by the look on her face when she sees the book Arwen (Katie Yoner) has her doubts. We all have our doubts. But never underestimate the magic of location location (as real estate agents in every period, including the medieval, have always known). The kid’s in Arthurian country.

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Soon she has imagined herself into the world of young Arthur, the magus Merlin, and the knights of the round table. Captivated, she’s taken on the cause, and the persona, of the boy who pulled the sword from the stone and landed a major royal gig. And she’s entered full-throttle into the sword-fighting and duels, in demanding sequences designed by fight choreographer Janine Waddell for Elizabeth Hobbs’ production.

Curiously, Arwen is only momentarily taken aback, along with us, by the implications of the Lancelot-Guinevere story for her own life; they’re inserted rather out of the blue into the play.  I guess she’s taking the magnanimous Arthurian position on the relationship she discovers between her dad (Aaron Refugio) and his research assistant (Kristin Unruh).

There are acting challenges for the trio in this enterprise. Prime among them is how to portray kid energy and enthusiasm without  making the audience want to hand you over to the Lady in the Lake for storage underwater. Yoner is delightful throughout, exuberant in her physical choices, and judicious in her “kid” vocal inflections and gestures. The counterpart to the cliche “kid role” is the cliche “dad role,” the dad who actually uses the term “quality time” with no irony to describe his parenting goal on the research trip. Refugio doesn’t overdo it. Both he and Unruh (who has fun with accents and sword-wielding) have multiple assignments in the storytelling, and rise to them with confidence and humour.

The framing of the play, between real life situations and Arthurian legend doesn’t really  hold together. But it’s lively, full of action; the kid wins; there’s a book in it. And there’s this: Win the Warrior: A King Arthur Tale will be the only play of this Fringe, possibly any Fringe, with the line “I found Excalibur! I found Excalibur! I have to go find Dad!”

  

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A fizzy offshore reunion: Destination Wedding, a Fringe review

Posted on August 14, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Destination Wedding, starring Michelle Todd, Cheryl James, Kristin Johnston. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Destination Wedding (Westbury Theatre)

Like the drinks at a tropical all-inclusive — where you have no serious cultural obligations except buying jewelry with seashells in it and having fun — the clues keep coming in this fizzy comedy-with-a-twist by Trevor Schmidt.

Three old friends of middle years, sorority sisters of yore, have been invited to a destination wedding. Their long-time-no-see pal is tying the knot again, after untying several previous knots.

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And after a few (quite a few) margaritas), an innocuous oddity turns into a mystery that turns into a whodunnit. The details of this intriguing progression are safe with me (though for an Aperol spritzer on a Strathcona patio …). As in the best mysteries, Destination Wedding keeps you re-spooling to re-think casual throw-aways that might be clues, as the list of characters increases, and the net of possible culpability spreads wider and wider. Which isn’t the original meaning of ‘all-inclusive’, but whatever.…

Anyhow, in addition to the fun of discovering a puzzle that you don’t realize at first is one, there’s the all-inclusive entertainment value in this Whizgiggling production of seeing what three expert comic actors make of the characters. Amazingly, Kristin Johnston, Cheryl Jameson and Michelle Todd, who drink cocktails out of plastic pineapples, never leave their deck chairs. Their arrival catch-up, to the sound of waves, is a very funny cross-hatching of memories and barbs.

Like the costumes (designed by director Schmidt), the performances are a riot.  Johnston, in black, is an artist and the fiercest of the three, who has one of those steely gazes that could lift an acrylic nail off a pinky finger at 100 paces. Todd is the one who’s always taking offence: “what’s that supposed to mean?” or “I’m always the last to know….” Jameson is the dim and daffy one, in pink, always beaming, who’s always a step behind the gist of things. “Things have evolved,” she’s admonished on the subject of women taking their husband’s names. “But I haven’t!” she says brightly. Exactly.

The interplay is funny. And the circle is widened when each of the actors plays, and zestfully, another character in the story. A comedy based, like many wedding parties, on the proposition that we might not know our friends as well as we think we do is put together expertly. Larky fun.

Incidentally, you can vote for the guilty character on Whizgiggling Production’s Facebook page. The results will be revealed at the end of the Fringe.

  

  

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