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

Posted on November 20, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REVIEW

Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Written by: Alan Janes

Directed by: Van Wilmott

Musical Director: John Banister

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

Running: through Jan. 23

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

  

  

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

Posted on November 16, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

playwright Linda Wood Edwards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREVIEW

The Great Whorehouse Fire of 1921

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Linda Wood Edwards

Starring: Sue Huff, Twilla MacLeod

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: Friday through Nov. 28

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

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

Posted on November 14, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

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

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REVIEW

Metronome

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written and performed by: Darrin Hagen

Directed by: Heather Inglis

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

Running: through Nov. 21

Tickets and mask/vaccination requirement: workshopwest.org

 

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The door slams and they’re off! The Fiancée, a deluxe new farce at the Citadel. A review.

Posted on November 12, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Helen Belay and Farren Timoteo, The Fiancée, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There they stand before us, seven closed doors.

A tidy pink and cream apartment (designer: Whittyn Jason). A vision of domestic harmony: orderly arrangements of size-gradated kitchen canisters, a slice of cake under a glass dome, a nearly complete set of encyclopedias on a shelf over the fridge. Enter a woman with the final volume, the v to z’s, tucked under her arm and a smile of triumph on her face.

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What could possibly go wrong?

Well…. Those doors, my friends, are the world-wide theatrical sign of farce — of fate being tempted and riot being incited, comically speaking. The first sound you hear from the stage in The Fiancée, an exhilarating new farce by Holly Lewis premiering at the Citadel and directed by Daryl Cloran, is a door slam, the first of many in an evening of fun in the theatre.

Helen Belay, Patricia Cerra, Sheldon Elter in The Fiancée, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

What follows this opening gambit is spiralling complication in the lives of Lucy (Helen Belay) and her sister Rose (Patricia Cerra). It’s 1945 in Edmonton. The war has ended; the men are coming home. And Rose, the sensible working woman of the pair, is about to discover, incrementally, that her sis, a sweet-natured would-be actress who can’t say no, has said yes a few — quite a few — too many times.

This congenital yay-sayer has gotten herself engaged to not one man, not two, but three, as they left for World War II. And, wouldn’t you know — farces are as rigorous about inevitability as Greek tragedy — all three are arriving back on the same day. Which is the very day the rent is due. And it’s in a building reserved exclusively for the respectably married, run by a rule-bound new tyrant landlady Ms. Crotch (Lora Brovold). And, by the way, the ever-pliable Lucy has just said yes to a new vacuum cleaner, and forked over the rent money.

In farce the percussion track of doors being knocked on and slammed is the sound track of the ante being upped. Buried, and not too deeply, in the escalating lunacy of every farce, is a simple but profound insight about life, my friends. You’ve suspected it lately, who wouldn’t?, and it’s true: the orderly universe is an illusion. There is a thin line between order and chaos. The intricate architecture of farces, like our lives, is a teetering affair, built on quicksand. Mayhem is just an impromptu lie, a miscue, a mistaken identity, a preposterous disguise, a pratfall, a slammed door or an opened one, away.

The Fiancée is a deluxe piece of farce engineering, with an unusual  premise and feminist buttresses. And it’s dressed to the nines by costume designer Leona Brausen, a specialist in ’40s visuals. It’s a post-war world where women like Rose and the formidable Ms. Crotch are wearing the pants (and look great in them). And they’ve had a taste of being in charge. “What happened?” Lucy asks Rose, who’s just been fired from her factory job. “Men happened,” she says grimly of the unwelcome return to a tired status quo.

Cloran’s highly entertaining production starts fast (possibly a little too fast) and gets faster. Rigorously timed as it is, it crucially never loses the farcical sense of careening physical comedy being improvised on the spot. That’s the great attraction of the near-miss (which appeals to the dark side of our human nature; we should be ashamed of ourselves). The cast, divided between the women who are the active instigators and the men who are the hapless satellites in orbit, all deliver nimble comic performances.   

Patricia Cerra, The Fiancée, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

It’s Rose, the thorny one, who takes charge of chaos control. And in a terrific comic performance from Cerra, we see her backed into ever-tighter corners, having to improvise ever more acrobatically on revelations from a sister who congenitally tells people what they want to hear. Rose is the smartest person in the room, the problem-solver, always thinking, always on the edge of exasperation, always having to act against her better judgment and watching herself, appalled. And Cerra captures it all to a T.

Helen Belay, The Fiancée, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Belay, who has a smile that could melt icing off a cake (her favourite crisis food) in a snowstorm, is a hoot as the sweetly dazed and daffy Lucy. When caught out by her sister she throws up her hands: “What could I say? What could I do?” The obverse side of making the kindly choice is taking the line of least resistance. And Lucy is a chronic hedger. She’s so guileless she’s been working at Eaton’s without being hired, a tale of non-employment that occasions a very funny shaggy dog story. The sight of Lucy attempting to hide in the fridge is one of the lingering images of the evening.

I loved Brovold as the acidic landlady who continually peels the grapes of wrath with her mordant wit. She has the snarly presence (and hair) of a ‘40s movie star, delivering grimly sardonic bytes like someone spitting out bad cashews. She is very funny.

Tenaj Williams, Sheldon Elter, Farren Timoteo, The Fiancée, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

The trio of ridiculous male characters, who must not meet, ricochet around the women getting shoved through the seven doors. Which is why it inevitably comes to pass, for example, that a rabbity man with no mechanical prowess whatsoever will be mistaken for a plumber, and later appear in a skimpy towel. That would be Manny, a meticulous list-maker played hilariously by Farren Timoteo. “I’m not really a tool guy,” he ventures. (Rose snaps “every guy’s a tool guy”).

Sheldon Elter is the adamantine soldier’s soldier. “I don’t change my mind,” he declares. “I’m a captain in the Canadian armed forces.”  Tenaj Williams is handsome, swaggering Dick, “God’s gift to Edmonton,” as he says modestly of himself, while his name gets bandied about, sportingly. Rose is unimpressed. “You’re not even God’s gift to Leduc”.

One of the great appeals of The Fiancée is that woven into its barbs is a shameless affection for dumb jokes, both physical and verbal. I leave you to savour those on the spot  when you see The Fiancée which I highly recommend you do. (But here’s a teeny, possibly enigmatic, hint: cake in The Fiancée is like Chekhov’s gun). In these uncertain times, there’s nothing like other people’s panic to quell your own.

REVIEW

The Fiancée

Theatre: Citadel

Written by: Holly Lewis

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Helen Belay, Lora Brovold, Patricia Cerra, Sheldon Elter, Farren Timoteo, Tenaj Williams

Running: through Nov. 28

Tickets and masking/vaccination requirements: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com.

 

 

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Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, frat party kegger of a satire. A review.

Posted on November 10, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Donovan Workun and Abby Vandenberghe in Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer The Musical, Grindstone Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I would never lie; I’ve taken poli-sci.”

This declaration in song from the goofball hero got a big laugh from the preview night crowd at Grindstone Theatre’s new musical satire Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer.

Hey, people, I hear the incredulity in your voice. Hero? Jason Kenney? Yup, in the musical created by the Grindstone team of Byron Martin and Simon Abbott, Kenney (Donovan Workun) is the newly elected Summer Session Students’ Union President at Alberta University c. 1983; we see the ballot box being stuffed. He leads a frat boy crusade to ensure that The Best Summer Ever will happen. And let’s face it, The Best Summer Ever can’t be best without a rockin’ rodeo party and hot cowboys. Priorities, people, priorities.

Yes, Kenney will have moments of self-doubt, well, OK, paranoia. Heavy is the head that wears the … whatever. Yes, his heroic quest will be thwarted by an outbreak of the flu (don’t you hate when that happens?). Yes, he will have moments when it dawns on him that everything is screwed up. Yes, he will even make discoveries and learn stuff: “Wow! I didn’t even know science was real,” he tells Dr. Deena Hinshaw (Abby Vandenberghe). “I always thought it was a myth.”

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And his nemesis, the bad guy with the villain laugh, is Rachel Notley (Stephanie Wolfe). She’s outraged that funding to the jazz club has been diverted by Kenney et al towards partying. She’s outraged by the mess in the quad, outraged by flagrant rule-breaking, and really really outraged by losing the summer session election. “How could I lose to such idiots? It shoulda been me; it shoulda been mine!” she shouts at her boyfriend Justin Trudeau (Malachi Wilkins), shaking her fist like a Greek tragedian at the cosmic injustice of it all.

There are amusing shivs, like Justin’s outrage that the drama club funding got cut just when he got a starring role … as Othello. But the strokes, as you will glean, are generally broad in Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer. We’ll meet the younger “versions” — singing and dancing ’80s college kids — of characters whose names we know even if we don’t entirely recognize them: Tyler Shandro, Tracy Allard, Kaycee Madu, Justin Trudeau (son of the Dean).

Stephanie Wolfe and Malachi Wilkins, Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, Grindstone Theatre.

In these appalling times, does this upending whereby JK is the hero (and Notley is the villain) actually work? Don’t go to Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer expecting a stinging surgical dissection of the scene — the one that  turned Alberta infamously into a how-not-to guide to pandemics and sent Kenney plummeting to most-hated status at the bottom of the polls. A dunce cap and a red nose lets the guy off easy, of course. But that’s not what this is. It’s a high-spirited, giddy, oddly genial affair, more a fraternity party roast rather than a scathing satire. Claire Theobold’s set, assembled and re-assembled with dispatch, captures that rollicking feel, too.

Donovan Workun and Abby Vandenberghe in Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer The Musical, Grindstone Theatre.

The script gives a cast of actors with comic chops a menu of grotesqueries to work with. Workun’s amusing performance fashions Kenney as a self-centred ignoramus, a dazed party-hearty dimbulb, too dumb to even be unscrupulous. In a hilariously physical performance, full of semaphore arms, Wolfe creates Notley from keynotes of quivering righteous indignation. Vandenberghe turns into comedy the blandly monotonous government doctor we know from catastrophic ‘updates’ and the uninflected overuse of the word “concerning.” Which is an achievement.

Wilkins will make you laugh as Trudeau, dancing across hot coals at all times, exiting histrionically like the Prince in Swan Lake, pausing oddly in the middle of sentences.

The story has its patchy bits, to be sure. And there’s a certain scrambly goofball quality to the whole thing. The real success of the new musical is the music. It’s accompanied by a first-rate live three-piece band led by composer Abbott at the keyboard. The songs are genuinely impressive — catchy, complex, with clever lyrics — in a variety of styles.

Stephanie Wolfe and Malachi Wilkins, Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, Grindstone Theatre.

Martin and Abbott know their musical theatre, expertly locating the songs, the weave of solo and ensemble numbers. The evening has an energizing Broadway-style production number to open, led by the frat boys of Upsilon Kappa Pi. And it’s bookended with an equally fab closer. In between you’ll hear solos, duets, trios. In the way it has fun with the conventions of musical theatre, it reminds me a little of the mocking but chin-up spirit of The Book of Mormon, turning villains into dopes.

Trudeau gets a very funny song, Ottawa, woven with three- syllable rhymes. Deena Hinshaw, the ultimate science nerd, gets a G&S style epidemiology patter song (really) and a  romantic solo about how unromantic she is (Immune To Love). Fuck Kenney, Shandro’s number, is a driving  assortment of off-rhythms.

Not all of the cast are great singers but, damn!, they all know how to power a song. And in the end, there’s something valiant about creating something fun, with smart songs, from the grim and awful raw material at hand.

REVIEW

Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer the musical

Theatre: Grindstone Comedy Theatre and Bistro

Written by: Byron Martin and Simon Abbott

Directed by: Byron Martin

Starring: Donovan Workun, Abby Vandenburghe, Stephanie Wolfe, Malachi Wilkins, Kathleen Sera, Mark Sinongco, Tyra Banda, Sarah Dowling

Where: Campus St.-Jean Auditorium, 8406 91 St.

Running: through Nov. 21

Tickets, masking and vaccination requirements: grindstone theatre.ca

   

 

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‘Our opportunity to meet the moment’: 366 Days, the latest from Major Matt Mason

Posted on November 10, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

366 Days, Major Matt Mason Collective. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Here’s a strange, unsettling thought: We are all hybrid creatures. That’s how we have to live now, forever straddling the live and the digital, not fully existing in one world or another. Are we then our own artistic creations, our own live-streamed works of art? Discuss.

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There’s a play about that — by David Gagnon Walker, directed by Geoffrey Simon Brown — opening online this week. Or, wait, is it a play? The “live-action hallucinatory freak-out,” as 366 Days is billed, “is our opportunity to meet the moment,” says Brown of the latest from the high-profile experimental theatre collective he co-founded, Major Matt Mason. “It’s theatrical, but we’re deciding whether or not we feel it’s a play.”

“It’s a weird thing,” says Brown (whose own play Michael Mysterious recently premiered in a Pyretic production here). “Unlike anything I’ve done before.” Which is a declaration that counts, considering the original innovative experiments that make up the Major Matt Mason Collective archive.

366 Days, he says, is “exclusively built for the medium it’s on,” or in, since it’s set in the overlap between live and virtual space, a theatre “where the medium meets the message, and lines are blurred.” It’s live, it’s digital, it’s live-streamed, and “reality” has live animation layers to it, too.

“Whenever we come up with a project we ask ‘why is this live?”“Why does it have to be in front of an audience? And if we can’t come up with an answer, we don’t do the project,” says Brown of “one of our guiding philosophies as a live performance company.” With 366 Days, “we flipped the question. Why does it have to be online? Why does the audience have to engage with it in a digital space?”

366 Days, Major Matt Mason Collective. Photo supplied

For one thing, the narrative demands it. The person we meet in 366 Days lives there. “He’s trapped himself in that space,” as Brown explains. And we’re meeting him there, on his home turf, so to speak. Blair has spent a year in self-imposed penitential isolation in a small apartment, connected by live-stream to the internet. His presence in the world is virtual.

The story in 366 Days picks up Blair, the other characters, and the narrative after the events of Premium Content, the Gagnon Walker play Edmonton audiences would have seen live last fall if COVID hadn’t been continuing its rampage. “It was about the intersection between art and the internet and real life,” Brown says.

The new piece, commissioned by Major Matt Mason, takes us into Blair’s digital world, into the art he’s creating from his life, into his website, into his head. Brown credits the animator Tyler Klein Longmire with integrating live performance and animation in ways he’s “never seen anywhere else before — all executed live.”

“The real room can be toggled into a digital room that looks exactly the same. So a forest can grow out of it. Or it can float into space…. Other characters come in as floating heads wearing masks of their own faces…. The play exists half in live recorded video and half in animation. And all of it happens live.”

Like Premium Content, 366 Days “asks a lot of questions about art.” What is it made of? “What are you allowed to use from your life? What are you seeking by bringing your own life into?” And then it goes further: “can you solve anything in your life, can you heal, making yourself into art?”

The process of making art about the blurred boundaries between real and digital blurs the boundaries between real and digital. The creation of 366 Days has a certain striking synchronicity with its content. For one thing, it assembles talent across the country. “Four or five of us are working in person. Thirteen or 14 or us are working remotely,” says Brown. The full set is in a Calgary studio. And that’s where the animator (Klein Longmire), the stage manager (Meredith Johnson), and the designer (Lauren Acheson) are located. One performer is in Vancouver, one in Toronto, two in Calgary. Director Brown (who is also the producer, alongside Evan Medd) and the costume designer (Whittyn Jason) are in Edmonton.

In addition to the challenges of isolation, “I’m feeling a lot of ‘imposter syndrome’,” laughs Brown. “Especially when it comes to animation and streaming…. Suddenly I find myself directing the movement of an animated cast. In live theatre I don’t know how to hang and focus lights, but I know how long it takes. With this, I have no idea how much time it takes to build the world!”

At every step the play re-invented the way of producing it. “Did I want to come into the room and direct from the space?” On reflection Brown decided no. “When I direct a stage play I don’t do it from the stage; I direct from where the audience is going to sit. And with this play the audience is going to be sitting on the other side of a screen.”

And as for acting, “our performers are also puppeteers of animation, acting and puppeteering their digital avatars…. It’s a little bit like rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time,” says Brown. “There are moments in digital puppeteering where movements need to be more exaggerated than onstage. Sometimes, when the masks are dropped, that theatrical language has to fade away and become far more intimate than we’d do on any stage.”

“We’re all trying to figure out which tool to pull from our various tool kits,” says Brown of a collective process that’s been evolving since 2018. “We’re trying to do something we’ve never done before, and create an experience we haven’t seen before.” Welcome to the theatre of our new world.

PREVIEW

366 Days

Theatre: Major Matt Mason Collective

Written by: David Gagnon Walker

Directed by: Geoffrey Simon Brown

Animation and video design: Tyler Klein Longmire

Performed by: Mikaela Cochrane, Vanessa Jetté, Evan Medd, Jay Northcott, Mike Tan

Where: streaming online

Running: Nov. 11 to 13

Tickets: pay-what-you-can, mmmtheatrecollective.com

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The Best Summer Ever, mantra for a musical satire: Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer

Posted on November 8, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Donovan Workun in Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer the musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Best Summer Ever. Four words destined to live in infamy.

An open invitation to disaster, as well we know (and everyone knew at the time). And, hey, a banner for Alberta to carry onto the national (and international) stage as a world COVID infection giant. It produced head shakes, double-takes, out-and-out incredulity — and now an original musical satire.

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Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer, a creation of Grindstone Comedy Theatre premiering Wednesday at the Campus St.-Jean auditorium, has black comedy in its heart and ridicule on its mind. Byron Martin, Grindstone’s indefatigable triple-threat artistic director, co-wrote the “80s frat party musical” with musical director Simon Abbott.

It’s a flashback to Kenney in college (Alberta University, 1983),”  Martin explains. “And it opens with him winning Summer Session Students’ Union President, and Rachel Notley losing….” In fact, as Kenney and his Upsilon Kappa Pi buds plan “the hottest year-end party ever,” she’s the villain of the piece, a party pooper out for blood. And Justin Trudeau is her boyfriend. “They’re all in school together.”

The most reviled premier in Alberta history as the hero of the story? Really? “That makes it pretty heavy satire…. It’s kinda awful to watch in a way!” says Martin cheerfully. “Really it’s written from the perspective that maybe Jason Kenney wrote this play. The whole idea that he’d be the hero of the play is, you know, so ridiculous!”

“When I tried writing it the other way around, with Jason Kenney the villain, it wasn’t funny. That’s just real life. Not cathartic at all…. It takes turning it on its head to be able to laugh at it.”

That’s what happens with Notley, too, the villain of this ‘80s frat world. Stephanie Wolfe “does an amazing job,” says Martin. “She’s so funny…. And in real life Rachel Notley is pretty normal, nice, wholesome.”   

The original impulse for the musical, originally planned for last summer’s Fringe, was a series of funny satirical videos that had Donovan Workun as Kenney and Abby Vandenberghe as Dr. Deena Hinshaw doing “updates,” à la Saturday Night Live. The sketches found their way into the 2020 Grindstone Christmas special.

“The musical is very different from the sketches,” says Martin.“We were wanting to write a satire about him, and wondering what the vehicle for that would be…. Musical theatre in itself is an exaggeration; it lends itself to satire.”

For his part Workun, one of the most fearless, funniest comic improvisers in this improv town, laughs “as soon as (the UCP) got into power, somebody was ‘hey you kind look like Jason Kenney; you should play him. That would be funny’.” He sighs. “Chubby, middle-aged white guy, great!” Of the TikTok videos that preceded the musical, he particularly remembers ‘Jason Kenney and the 1-800-sex chat Santa’. Both right in my wheelhouse.” He sighs again.

For a comedian/ satirist it wasn’t easy to suss out a Kenney keynote on which to hang a performance. “This guy doesn’t have a personality,” says Workun. “I don’t know what I should be doing.” And then it came to him.

When Martin persuaded him to do the video sketches on short notice, Workun had pleaded for a teleprompter. “Reading without my glasses was so hard … and I realized that reading poorly from the teleprompter is exactly what Jason Kenney does…. It’s the essence of him. His speech pattern is that it’s the first time he’s seeing whatever he’s reading and he has no idea what’s coming out of his mouth. I embraced that.”

Since a “bumbling fool” is the ‘hero’ of a two-act musical, the real question for Workun was “how do I help carry a show that’s funny and awesome and interesting when the two main characters are a little boring? Abby does the Deena Hinshaw monotone, and it’s funny. But how do I play JK, frat boy?” He channelled his own 19-year-old self, he says.

Like Martin, Workun thinks that making Kenney the villain of the piece would have been “way too easy.” Making him the hero is “the ultimate form of mockery…. ” It reminds him of Kurt Russell’s Jack Burton in Big Trouble In Little China. “He seems to be the hero but actually doesn’t do anything. Everyone just assumes he’s saving the day. But in reality it’s everybody else around him. And hey that’s another thing that’s pure JK: not doing much, screwing things up when he does, never picking up the tab…. It’s always on somebody else.”

“Pure Trump. Never apologize. It’s never your fault. It’s always somebody else who is incompetent….”

Though Workun is not principally known for musicals, he did star in Plain Janes revivals of Ankles Aweigh and Fiorello some years ago. “Martin asked me to do this, and I have trouble saying No,” he says happily. “If something really terrifies me, that’s the thing I should try. I’m going to learn something…. Improv is easy compared to this; I’d rather do a thousand improv shows than one of this!

With its three-piece band and eight-member cast, Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer is a big project for Grindstone, “the biggest production budget we’ve worked with to date,” Martin says. In addition to Kenney, Hinshaw, Notley and Trudeau, and the dread Tyler Shandro, we’ll meet a gallery of supporting characters, including Tracy Allard, Kaycee Madu, and Sarah Hoffman. Allard, the ex minister of municipal affairs who notoriously went on a family holiday while the rest of us were following the rules, “brings mono back from Hawaii, and then there’s a big mono breakout.”

And everybody sings. Allard’s number? Aloha, natch. The song list includes Kenney’s two signature songs There’s Nothing Like A Rodeo and an ‘80s rock ballad Unify My Heart, Hinshaw’s Immune To Love, and Shandro’s Fuck Kenney. Martin declares Trudeau’s song, Ottawa, to be “one of the funniest in the show.” And c’mon, have you ever tried to rhyme Ottawa?

Notley’s anthem? It’s Only Just Begun.”

Topical political satires in this part of the world are pretty hard to find. Egged on by their friends, Martin and Abbott stepped up. And it’s a little nerve-wracking, Martin admits. He doesn’t want to name the company that wouldn’t let them run show billboards. The U of A, from which the College St.-Jean theatre is rented, wouldn’t let them put up signs.

But the show sold out its run in short order (with extra performances and a streamed version pending). And “the reaction so far has has been really awesome. The cast talks about how funny it is, and how much we’re laughing in rehearsal…. In the end, I’m really happy to be doing this,” Martin says. “Other people aren’t taking it on.”

PREVIEW

Jason Kenney Hot Boy Summer the musical

Theatre: Grindstone Comedy Theatre and Bistro

Written by: Byron Martin and Simon Abbott

Directed by: Byron Martin

Starring: Donovan Workun, Abby Vandenburghe, Stephanie Wolfe, Malachi Wilkins, Kathleen Sera, Mark Sinongco, Tyra Banda, Sarah Dowling

Where: Campus St.-Jean Auditorium, 8406 91 St.

Running: Wednesday through Nov. 21

Tickets: grindstone theatre.ca

   

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‘That piano arrived in my life for a reason’: Metronome, a new Darrin Hagen solo show premieres at Workshop West

Posted on November 5, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Darrin Hagen at the keyboard, Metronome, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Have you ever tried something new, and instantly thought ‘O! I feel like I’ve been doing this my whole life?’”

That’s how Darrin Hagen remembers the exact day when everything changed for the small-town Alberta trailer park kid that he was, at seven. “Grandma had a little chord organ in her dining room” is his once-upon-a-time. And from that all else follows — Hagen the composer, the sound designer, the author, the playwright, the actor, the director, the drag queen — as we find out in Metronome, the new Hagen solo memoir  that launches the Workshop West Playwrights Theatre season Nov. 12.

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“I was always fascinated by piano keys,” declares the ebullient Hagen, “the way they’re laid out, the way they play.” While Grandma was cooking on the fateful day, the junior Hagen, completely untrained in matters musical, sat down at the keyboard and “figured it out…. I’d never had a lesson, but somehow it made perfect sense to me.”

That day ended with “a little concert” for Grandma and her three sisters, featuring On Top of Old Smokey, to general amazement. And the capper was that Great Aunt Ruby, a music teacher, said “you need to get that kid some music lessons….”

“Everything else comes from that moment, the moment you suddenly realize O, this is something I’m good at. And everyone around you goes, O, this is something he’s good at.”

Darrin Hagen at seven. Photo supplied.

His mom and dad found him a teacher and a $50 used entry-level accordion with 12 bass buttons “to see what would happen when I’d played it for a year.” And Hagen’s progress was exponential as he cut a swath through the Palmer Hughes accordion course. A particular fave was Two Guitars, mainly because “it had that middle-European sound, it got faster and faster, it was in a minor key, and it had a big loud finish.”

After three months Hagen advanced to a 48-bass accordion, then within a year a 120-bass instrument. After three years, he’d surpassed the skills of his teacher Mrs. Bonde, who suggested a change in instrument: the piano. And so it came to pass that Hagen’s parents raced to Sylvan Lake to trade an old lady $700 for her “big old upright mahogany grand,” an Ennis & Sons his mom had heard about on CKRD’s Swap Shop.

“It took four or five men, including my dad, to move it into the trailer,” says Hagen. His mom and her friends were the inspiration for his solo show Tornado Magnet. Metronome is his dad’s first appearance in a Hagen play: he does the heavy lifting throughout. The first big question on moving day: “will this fall through the floor?”

“It was the biggest piece of furniture we owned; it occupied as much space as the couch. And there was only one place it could go. In the front room against an interior wall so the weather wouldn’t throw the tuning off.”

The piano was a life-changer for a kid growing up gay in Rocky Mountain House. “It was my soul-mate; this was a love affair,” declares Hagen, who was teaching piano by age 12 (“before my job at the IGA, before the Dairy Queen”). And he ascribes magical powers to its 88-key allure. “It’s a character with huge significance in my life; it’s the reason I’m in the arts…. Without music lessons I’d like to think I’d have ended up somehow in theatre, but I’m not sure I would ever have figured out how.”

Darrin Hagen in Tornado Magnet. Photo by Ian Jackson.

For some people, the route to their inner creativity is  dance, for others painting. Hagen’s way in was music. “I’m a big believer that once you tap into your creative reserve, that river that’s inside you, it’s a matter of learning different skills. Music taught me to access it. And once I did I felt like I could do anything … write, act, do drag.”

Metronome didn’t start out to be a play. What Hagen had in mind was “a little anthology of piano-themed stories,” including one he’d written 30 years ago about him and his Grandma, and another from 2009. “I still think there’s a book down the road.” Hagen’s The Edmonton Queen, he points out, was like that too, finding its form as a solo play and a book.

It was Workshop West artist director Heather Inglis who’d called him on a hunch: “I have a feeling you might be working on something.” When she read the stories, she was sure they could be a play. “A solo show! It terrifies me, are you kidding!” he declares. “After the last one (Tornado Magnet at Theatre Network in 2014) I vowed I’d never do another one!”

“We talked long and hard about whether there should be a piano onstage, and if it was there whether I should play it — and if I didn’t, would that just piss people off?” In the end, Hagen won’t be sharing the stage. “It’s not a show about me playing the piano. It’s about how the piano changed my life….”

Darrin Hagen at the piano, Metronome, Workshop West. Photo by Ian Jackson

And there’s this: he doesn’t actually have the magical piano any more. He still has nine accordions, of various sizes and showbiz embellishments. But for 22 years he’s been piano-less. In 1999 he gave his piano away, “to my cousin’s blind daughter. Because it had another life to save. And I’ve never regretted it. It changed her life; the magic went to her. It was the right thing to do.”

With music, says Hagen, “you learn to access the truth inside you.”  Somehow, he thinks, “music has a magical effect on us emotionally,” an effect beyond language, beyond cultures and borders. Why do minor chords make you feel sad? “It’s a great mystery…. You let your emotions pour through the piano and into the air. And after you learn how to do that, all other art forms follow.”

“Mom never had to tell me to practice. Never. Not once! I loved every second, I’d have practised 12 hours a day if I could’ve,” says Hagen. “The only reason I ever stopped playing was that the piano was in the same room as the TV,” he laughs. “My mom loved to hear me play; she loved the World Series even more.”

Hagen “started to play weddings, trade fairs, old folks’ homes, contests; I was the go-to kid for school assemblies.” He wrote the song for his high school graduation ceremony (he remembers being too afraid to go to the party). He and his friend Shanann (“we were the Rocky version of Buckingham-Nicks”) won an ACT Search For Talent competition.

Growing up gay in small-town Alberta is no picnic. “You want to be invisible, but you’ve chosen a path that makes you SO visible…. When the bullying started, it was music that saved me,” Hagen says. “The piano is the reason I’m alive; I say that without hesitation…. My piano was my rock.”

Darrin Hagen the mermaid at City Hall. Photo supplied

For a kid “who was gay, had bad glasses and played the accordion,” the piano was also “a step toward non-nerdism,” Hagen laughs. When he left Rocky and moved to Edmonton and his new drag queen life, “it went from being covered with trophies to being covered with crowns, ashtrays, feather boas. It has a story to tell….”

In Metronome, Hagen “skips over the drag years,” as he says. “They’re a hiccup in a much longer plan. And I’ve told that story in many ways before…. This is about the stuff that got me to Edmonton. It really is an origin story, about my piano and me. It’s a miracle it happened at all; something, music I think, was looking out for me!”

There’s always a sound track playing in Hagen’s head, he says. “Millions of tunes in my head always, at the same time. Ready to pulled forward.” The piano, he says, is “a conduit to songs that are attached to memories.” Donna Summer figures prominently (her 17-minute disco version of MacArthur Park “was my go-to piece for competitions).” Heart, Rickie Lee Jones, Joni Mitchell … they tap into moments in Hagen’s story. Workshop West’s outreach coordinator Liam Salmon, a playwright himself, has compiled a Spotify playlist of references.

It’s all got Hagen thinking about having a piano again after two decades. “It’s time.” He’s been eying kijiji. “It’s sad,” he says. “The piano used to be the most valuable thing in any room; now they’re giving them away.” He’s auditioned a few, but hasn’t found his perfect mate yet. “It’s got to be love at first sight….” He doesn’t want “too bright, too brassy. I need something a little darker, smokier, fuller. The keys have to fight back a bit.”

“Music arrived in my life for a reason,” he says. “That’s what Metronome is about.”

PREVIEW

Metronome

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written and performed by: Darrin Hagen

Directed by: Heather Inglis

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

Running: Nov. 12 to 21

Tickets and mask/vaccination requirements: workshop west.org

.

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A spiral into comic chaos, through 7 doors: The Fiancée, a new farce by Holly Lewis, premieres at the Citadel

Posted on November 3, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

The Fiancée by Holly Lewis, premiering at the Citadel Theatre. Poster image.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Theatre is a serious work, my friends. It requires commitment, bold attack, research, tough backstage choices approached face-on.

Holly Lewis walked into a rehearsal room at the Citadel after lunch one day a couple of weeks ago. “The production team had been having a meeting,” she says of preparations for The Fiancée, her new comedy.“They’d set up different six different kinds of cake, with icing…. One of the actors would have to stick their face into all six, to see how each one sticks.” The rehearsal in question was listed on the call sheet for Friday as “a run with the cakes.” Lewis couldn’t stop laughing.

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A “six-actor farce with six actors, seven characters, and seven doors,” and cake, The Fiancée, winner of the Alberta Playwriting Competition Novitiate Award,  starts previews Saturday in a production directed by Daryl Cloran. And its stage logistics are exponentially intricate, quintessentially farcical one might say.

In Lewis’s farce, set in ‘40s Edmonton during World War II, we meet Lucy, a generous-minded young woman who accepts proposals from three men,— “no one should have to go overseas without someone to come home to” — expecting that they won’t all make it back. But they do. All three. On the same day.

Lucy’s world teeters precariously on the precipice of chaos. Doors are slammed, wigs are donned and doffed. Formerly sane people find themselves reduced to ducking behind things, or vaulting over couches, or getting shoved into closets.

Playwright Holly Lewis, whose farce The Fiancée is premiering at the Citadel. Photo supplied.

“Then you have to set a clock!” says Lewis, a remarkably funny, effervescent conversationalist much prone to laughter. Eviction hangs over Lucy (Helen Belay) and her sister (Patricia Cerra). “They’ve just got a new landlady, they don’t have the money to pay the rent, and they have to come up with it! By 6 o’clock!.” AND there are proprieties to be dodged: it’s a ‘family building’: visitations by a surplus of fiancés is a no-no.

This flirtation with cosmic chaos is only enhanced by having six actors play seven characters. Sheldon Elter (the star of Bears, recently closed) plays two; late in the play they appear in the same scene, says Lewis with unmistakeable glee. “And I like that! I love those moments that make theatre feel like a sport, and you’re not sure if the goal is going to happen…. It’s exciting for the audience; it’s exciting and terrifying for the actor!”

Elter had a hair-raising 30 seconds to make the costume change.“That was the day I needed to be in rehearsal hall and ask ‘how do we buy him another five seconds’?” He got them. Other re-writes happened, Lewis reports, because of the sheer comic inventiveness of the actors. “Actors are so brilliant…. In some places what the actor is doing with their body is funnier than what I’ve written so I can pull some things out.” The script, she says, “is three pages shorter than when we went into rehearsal.”

The Fiancée isn’t Lewis’s playwriting debut. She was a co-creator of two high-profile international collaborations undertaken by Theatrefront, the Toronto indie company founded in 1999 by an ensemble including Cloran and Lewis, who are married. One was Ubuntu: The Cape Town Project (Citadel audiences saw it in 2017). The other, Return: The Sarajevo Project, produced in Bosnia and Toronto in 2006, “is still the production I’m most proud of,” she says. The whole experience was so full…. I actually ended up going back to university after that, in Peace and Conflict studies.”

And there’s Lewis’s 15-minute kids’ play, Sisters, for Concrete Theatre’s 2018 Sprouts Festival. But The Fiancé, fully seven years in the making, is “my first full-length complete play written solo, by me alone,” she says. Why start with farce, the most intricate,  dauntingly complicated of theatrical forms? “What I was going to be when I grew up was an engineer,” she says. “Math, physics, that’s my jam.…”

Lewis is in an undoubtedly exclusive subset of Queen’s University transfers from engineering to theatre school. That’s where she met Cloran (and “we’ve been collaborators ever since”). “I’d finished my first year of university,” says the Scarborough native. “I went to Toronto to a play and the lights went down and I just started to cry. I cried for the first two scenes. And it was a comedy! It was then I realized I’d made a wrong choice….”

The precarious architecture of farces is a magnet to a mind like Lewis’s. “The thing about farces, there’s so much structure and math to them, speaks to my other passion,” she says “You take a play and reverse-engineer it, see how it works, rebuild. Math and laughter: how can you do better than that?”

How on earth does the playwright keep track of who’s behind which door when? Lewis hauls around a cork board that only an engineer manqué could love, with an elaborate system of cue cards colour-coded to reveal who’s in a room and who’s not. “And it’s quite beautiful!” Lewis says. “In an attempt to understand structure,” she’s even written a modern adaptation of The Three Sisters set in Edmonton (the three sisters used to be in a band). “It sounds crazy to choose Chekhov,” she says. “But within each of his beats, the structure is really clear….”

Cloran has said “secretly, if Holly could be anyone, she’d be Lucille Ball.” Lewis loves comedy. “Early in my acting career I did tragedy after tragedy. And I was, like, what if tripped on the stairs? No!” she laughs. In a Toronto production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which she played Hermia, one of her cast-mates was a Cirque du Soleil clown. “I begged him to teach me to do a stair fall.” He did; a farceur was born in that lesson.

The first draft of The Fiancée took five years. “I finished it just before the pandemic.” Lewis gathered friends and they read it aloud “to see it if was funny…. We laughed and laughed.”

“Proof of concept! It was funny; it had funny things in it. But it was missing its middle. The gears didn’t drive you forward to the end,” she says. “ So that was the work of the pandemic for me…. I knew what was going to happen in the end. But how to make that inevitable?”

The ‘40s look and performance style is “very delightful,” as Lewis says. “A lot of eye candy, fantastic costumes. and there’s something about the actors from that time period too, the Katherine Hepburns of the world, letting you see a different way of being being a woman and making choices.”

The starting point for Lewis was a question: “What would be a situation where it could happen that a woman would juggle three men?” a reversal of the more usual farce situation, where the escalating panic of a man is at the centre. In Boeing Boeing, for example, a man’s complicated romantic predicament is the result of having three flight attendant girlfriends, grounded on the same night due to global bad weather.

And Lewis had another condition. She didn’t want her protagonist “to be manipulative in the situation; I wanted to make a kinder protagonist; I wanted her to stay the hero.” Lucy’s motivation for letting herself get engaged to three guys is kindly, generous.

“Her challenge is my challenge,” says Lewis, laughing. “I do have have a hard time saying no and setting boundaries…. I’m a people-pleaser and I want people to feel good. And that can get you into a lot of trouble…. And (that womanly predicament) is still happening. Making it funny is a way of questioning it without judging it.”

“At the end of the day it’s not wrong to say Yes to things. It’s just you have to say Yes to the things you want, and No to the things you don’t want!”

Says Lewis “I tried to create a comedy where everyone in the audience is going to have an amazing time … because nobody is the butt of the joke.” She points to the first season of Ted Lasso, “laugh out loud  funny but no one is ever targeted in a mean way…. It’s a challenge because so much of comedy is about making fun of people.”

The farce archive is dotted liberally with examples that are pretty much unplayable in the modern world, “plays where making fun of people with different cultural backgrounds or physical differences is part of the engine of the farce,” as Lewis puts it. Humour tends to be time-sensitive. But there are classics that are perennially hysterical. The ne plus ultra farce in the contemporary repertoire? Noises Off,  says Lewis without hesitation. One Man Two Guvnors is a contender, too.

She thinks “you can learn a lot about the mechanics of a farce” from the 19th century master farceur Georges Feydeau. A Flea in Her Ear is often compared in its initial structural impulse to Othello. In Shakespeare, a misplaced handkerchief precipitates the declension into tragedy; in Feydeau a pair of suspenders gone AWOL leads to “outlandish comedy.”

“The hero of comedy doesn’t have time to think; they have to act immediately. And it leads them to ridiculous decisions and, of course, to happy endings. But the stakes are equally high…. As Daryl always says of farce, what the characters want they want so badly they’re willing to climb over a couch to get it!”

“Coming out of the pandemic, ha, there’s an optimistic phrase, I want to really laugh and enjoy myself,” says Lewis happily. “For me, sitting in my house imagining little pieces that will make people laugh is so good for my mental health. It’s driven me through to this point!”

“A writer writes for seven years in silence in their room…. And this is what we do it for. This is like a dessert buffet for me.” And there will be cake.

PREVIEW

The Fiancée

Theatre: Citadel

Written by: Holly Lewis

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: Helen Belay, Lora Brovold, Patricia Cerra, Sheldon Elter, Farren Timoteo, Tenaj Williams

Running: Saturday through Nov. 28

Tickets and masking/vaccination requirements: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com.

 

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What’s up in Edmonton theatre this weekend? Have a peek

Posted on October 30, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

What’s up in Edmonton theatre this weekend? Oh, you know, the usual…. A new theatre is glowing from the inside out. Shows are ending their runs, a live season of Die-Nasty is about to begin, Opera Nuova is back, live. Walterdale Theatre goes live this week, RISER Edmonton has chosen its four indie projects to support. And, hey, the Fringe has excellent news for us.

•The glowing yellow Roxy is a ray of sunshine direct to the heart, as work continues on the new home of Theatre Network, getting built on the footprint of the old. Now have a boo at the projections in the big glass front window giving on 124th St. They’re testing their new equipment, with cool imagery in honour of the spooky season (till the end of Halloween night). Soon, theatre-goers, soon, you’ll be there. The new Theatre Network welcomes audiences in January.

•This week Fringe Theatre had good news for us. Megan Dart, an unstoppably creative and multi-faceted theatre artist/ arts producer/ event planner, officially brings that formidable skill set to the Fringe, as the company’s Executive Director. She’s been in that uniquely demanding job on an interim basis since the departure of Adam Mitchell last March.

Fringe Theatre Executive Director Megan Dart

Fringe 2021 had to be the craziest, most challenging audition in history, surely. Our Fringe, the oldest and biggest of its kind in North America, turned 40 this past summer under circumstances that were, to say the least, a test of inventiveness and flexibility for a festival . Along with fellow artist Fringe director Murray Utas, Dart, the co-founder and co-artistic producer of Catch the Key Productions (an indie specializing in original, immersive theatre), devised a route through the intricacies of the moment. And they were daunting: how to respond to the ever-changing pandemical restrictions, how to make the Fringe, against the odds, happen live, and also have an online presence, how to retain a breath of its signature festive spirit and identity in a smaller version of something gigantic.   

Organizing anarchy has a certain paradoxical delicacy. It requires smarts, a deft touch, an instinctive inclination to say Yes, a collaborative temperament, rapport with fractious artists, audiences, and administrators.… Dart is ready, impressively, for all of it.

RISER participants (clockwise) Cuban Movements Dance Academy, NASRA, Even Gilchrist, Tai Amy Grauman. Photo supplied.

•RISER, the innovative project initiated by Toronto’s Why Not Theatre in 2014, was envisioned to initiative  designed to address the daunting challenges in producing indie theatre. Its first national expansion was announced for Edmonton last March. A jury has selected four participants: Tai Amy Grauman, Even Gilchrist, NASRA, and Cuban Movements Dance Academy. We’ll get to see their projects at the Backstage Theatre in February.

•Walterdale Theatre, Edmonton’s venerable community playhouse, launches their live season Wednesday with Colleen Murphy’s gut-wrenching Governor-General’s Award-winning The December Man (L’Homme de décembre). Its eight scenes unspool backwards from an egregious act of public violence, the murder of 14 women students in Room 303 of Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989. It’s not about the act itself, it’s about the fallout on one survivor, a young man and his parents. Alex Hawkins’ production runs Nov. 3 through 13. Tickets: tixonthesquare.ca.

Sheldon Elter in Bears, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alexis McKeown.

•It’s the last weekend for:

… Bears, Matthew MacKenzie’s imaginative, gorgeously theatrical fantasia on Nature, a man’s transformation as he journeys into it, in flight, and what we stand to lose if we screw it up. The Punctuate! Production is back here where it started, and this time it’s on the big stage. At the Citadel through Sunday. Don’t miss. Tickets: citadel theatre.com, 780-425-1820.

… Hiraeth, a mysterious dark comedy by Belinda Cornish premiering in a Bright Young Things production at the Varscona through Saturday. An audaciously unsettling combination of heartbreaking and funny, and what to do if you can’t get what you really really want. Tickets: varsconatheatre.com.

Mathew Hulshof and Kristen Padayas in A Fit, Happy Life, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Adam Kidd.

… Lost Lemoine Part 1, A Second Round of Seconds: Lost Lemoine Part 2, and A Fit, Happy Life, the three streamed productions that launched Teatro La Quindicina’s 2021 season (the fourth production, Fever Land, ran live). All are by Teatro’s resident playwright Stewart Lemoine, unearthed from the impressively huge original Lemoine comedy archive.  And all were filmed on the stage of Teatro’s home, the Varscona Theatre, behind the red velvet curtain. Ingenious, quixotic, and fun. Streaming passes: teatroq.com.

… We Had A Girl Before You, a solo gothic thriller (yes, amazing!) by Northern Light Theatre’s Trevor Schmidt, starring Kristin Johnston, remains available for streaming through Halloween night. It’s a corker. Passes: northernlighttheatre.com.

Little Women, Opera Nuova. Photo by Nanc Price.

•It’s the only weekend for: 

… Little Women, the Broadway musical spun from the evergreen Civil War era Louisa May Alcott novel about the four March sisters and their mama.  Opera Nuova makes a welcome return to live, in four performances through Sunday at the Maclab Theatre in Leduc, with streaming possibilities too. Kim Mattice Wanat directs (and plays Marmee). And her cast includes Hannah Wigglesworth, Elizabeth Chamberlain, Julia van Dam, Errin Pettifor, Ruth Alexander, Kaden Forsberg, Rob Herriot, Jackson Card, and Kael Wynn.  Tickets: Ticketpro.ca, 1-800-655-9090, or 780-487-4844.

  

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