New faces in theatre: meet triple-threat Chariz Faulmino

Posted on January 26, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

They’re young, bright, and unstoppably creative. And, pandemic be damned, their adaptable, flexible talents are already lighting up the Edmonton theatre scene. In this 12thnight series you’ll meet some of E-town’s sought-after up-and-comers, artists whose work, on- and backstage, is already having an impact in this challenging age — and will have more when the theatre doors are open again. 

Meet triple-threat Chariz Faulmino. The series has included  designer/scenographer Elise CM Jason and techno whiz Bradley King. Look for others in this continuing 12thnight New Faces series.

Chariz Faulmino. Photo by Ana Carmela Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

CHARIZ FAULMINO, actor/ singer/ dancer

“I went with the flow, and I never wanted to resist it,” says the exuberant, laughing voice on the phone. As if that accounted for the entrance of a stellar new triple-threat onto the scene any more than matches account for fireworks.

If you saw one of the guests knock it out of the park at the Fezziwigs’ annual holiday bash, in the Citadel’s ‘40s account of A Christmas Carol, you’ve already know something about the high-impact voice and sparkle of Chariz Faulmino.

Sister Act, starring Chariz Faulmino, MacEwan University. Photo supplied.

Even before she burst out of MacEwan U in 2018 with a theatre arts degree — and a knock-out star performance in Sister Act on her resumé — Faulmino had been catching the eye of producers and directors across town. And she’s been on stages of every size and description ever since — even a farm on one memorable afternoon as part of the Citadel’s summer roadshow initiative of intimate backyard concerts on location (“people sang along, and the horses did neigh at some points, or was that yay?”).

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It’s a list that includes outdoor troubadour gigs of songs and scenes in parks for the Free Willies (the Freewill Shakespeare Festival). A radio play (Dammitammy Productions’ They Wanted To Do Chekhov). An interactive online mystery (S.I.S.T.E.R. by the Fox Den Collective). A cabaret (Kate Ryan’s Cafe Wanderlust). A variety show (Teatro La Quindicina’s Welcome Home). A new musical (The Killing Jar, for Scona Alumni Theatre).

With the Citadel’s A Christmas Carol, “I met people I’ve seen onstage before; I got to work with them and be friends with them!” says Faulmino, who retains notes of awe-struck in her voice. “You meet your heroes, stars, and they’re all normal people and they’re awesome!”

Chariz Faulmino in Pinocchio, Alberta Opera. Photo by Mat Simpson.

And on a tour, more than 350 performances long, of Alberta Musical Theatre’s charmer of an original musical Pinocchio, she played the title character who emerges, in sprightly fashion, from a trunk, and immediately starts singing and dancing like a seasoned trouper.

Faulmino, who arrived age nine in Sherwood Park with her family from the Philippines, grew up speaking Tagalog, but singing in English “a regular thing for us there; we love our karaoke!” Her models came from the international world of pop music: “Whitney Huston (especially Whitney Huston), Celine Dion, Mariah Carey…. ”

So … Canada. Of her immigrant experience, Faulmino says “my English wasn’t very good. I didn’t fit in right away, and I didn’t have any friends…. I really tried to make friends, to become a people person!”, a self-appointed task that comes with rave reviews in the theatre community. Music, not theatre, was her jam at first. “I was a pop music kind of person…. I didn’t even know who Sondheim was till I was in post-secondary,” she says. “And did I miss out!”

Chariz Faulmino in Cafe Wanderlust. Photo by Ryan Parker.

“Music was always in our family remember singing forever. My grandfather always sang to us, and so did my dad….. The only theatre person I knew was Lea Salonga; I love Lea Salonga!,” a fellow Filipina who’d catapulted to Broadway stardom in Miss Saigon and become the first Asian woman to win a Tony. “I didn’t know theatre till I was in junior high, and was forced to audition for Aladdin.” Faulmino laughs. She “went with the flow” as she puts it cheerfully  — and landed the leading role of Princess Jasmine.

Musical theatre took hold. “I found a lot of heart in it; I think that’s what drew me to it,” says Faulmino, who’s in her early ‘20s.  “The songs are sung by characters, by people, by a person who’s walked a certain life.”

The Faulmino family was musical, true. But a musical theatre career?  “It was an odd route to take,” she says, a smile in her voice. “My dad was an engineer; my grandfather was an engineer…. But (the family) was always very supportive. When they see me perform, they know my heart is there….”

It’s been a tough year for that heart, a year of “huge life-changing events.” At about performance 270 when the long Pinocchio tour was in the Rockies, Faulmino had news that her father had suddenly passed away. Alberta Musical Theatre artistic director Farren Timoteo stepped into her role; so did musical director Mackenzie Reurink. “And the cast fully supported me through the terrible time…. I couldn’t have asked for better people.”

Later that year, on an Alberta Workers’ Health Centre tour, Faulmino learned that her grandmother, who speaks no English, was in hospital. Faulmino spent a month at her side daily, translating and assisting. Actor Michelle Diaz stepped up. And Faulmino is grateful.

If there’s a positive to come out of the pandemic isolation, it’s been “time to absorb everything, to be with my family,” she says. “A huge blessing to have this break in the world, and step back.”

Jameela McNeil and Chariz Faulmino. Photo by Cody Mulch

In the lockdown hiatus she and (fellow Free Willie) Jameela McNeil have formed a duo. And they’re currently Zoom rehearsing a play list  of “songs about love — with a partner, with yourself, with the world … R&B songs, songs that have influenced us, mostly made by people of colour, artists we’ve looked up to…. Lea Salonga is one!” CJ will make its debut at the SkirtsAfire Festival in March, with any luck live and if not online.

Faulmino is part of Dammitammy’s upcoming radio play Letters to No One (letters written but never sent); she even wrote one of the monologues. And when the delayed revival of Teatro’s musical Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s happens, we’ll see Faulmino in it.

Will she stay in Edmonton? “It’s a question I also ask myself,” Faulmino says. “But I’ve found something here that’s on the cusp of getting built, a great community that’s only growing.”

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The Look, from Northern Light: “for the many women you are.” A review

Posted on January 24, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Linda Grass in The Look, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s not enough to have the look, the former face of Estelle Cosmetics tells her audience of trainees, emphatically, near the outset of The Look. “You have to live the look.”

Which is exactly what Marilyn Miles (Linda Grass) has spent her career in the bezillion-dollar beauty biz doing. And which, in the waning days of her run at the top, is the crux of Marilyn’s current existential crisis, as revealed in this darkly comic little exfoliation by Australian screenwriter/editor Alexa Wyatt.

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What can Marilyn, age 50 or 60, do with a belief system built, explicitly, on capturing eternal youth — and the convenient corporate conviction, as a supplement, that the perfect, un-wrinkled youthful feminine facade is actually more than skin deep?

Concealer and the ever-more-liberal application of highlights, even the expensive Estelle kind, will only take you so far on the enforced march of time. For one thing chasing youth is just not a race you can win, even if you, like our Estelle representative, believe that all women should enter it. And hey, for another, it makes you wonder why there’s a race at all, since it leaves so much of humanity stranded and unvalued, on the shoals of chronology. But we’ll get back to Marilyn momentarily.

Linda Grass in The Look, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

The Look, which dates from 1992, gets its North American premiere in a vividly theatrical digital treatment from Northern Light Theatre directed by Trevor Schmidt (available for streaming till the end of the month). The set-up of the play is perfectly suited for a film counterpoint of pore-ready close-ups and interwoven long-shots, with stage lighting that’s make-up lights writ large, and audience murmurs (cinematographer Ian Jackson).

It’s Day 1 of training week at Estelle Cosmetics. We’re at a lecture-demo/ performance a la TED by the company’s original super-model, now relegated by age to the indignity of training her own replacements, the girls — and you get to use that word —  who will work the Estelle cosmetic counters.

Linda Grass presides, in fine, alert comic form as the beauty who rocketed from “ordinary schoolgirl to famous model — just like that!” as she says brightly, as a long manicured fingernail flies off. Ah yes, there will be more layering on and flinging off, a kind of emotional wax and peel, in the course of the play. And in her performance Grass is fearless about the playing on the frontier between glamourpuss and clown, the gorgeous and the grotesque, the comic and the tragic.

We follow her, perfectly groomed, wearing a shiny black helmet of hair and high-style pumps, up the stairs and onto the Estelle stage. She takes off one face covering, her gruesomely smiling COVID mask, to reveal another, grimly unsmiling — and then pastes on the automatic antidote “Estelle smile.”    

The look of The Look is, to say the least, striking (set and costumes by Schmidt; wonderfully garish lighting by Rae Dunn McCallum). So … big colours, bold strokes, grand poses, heightened come-hither or go-hence expressions from Grass as Marilyn. Her head seems to swivel for second thoughts and double takes, on a pivot owned and operated by her own massive fringe of false eyelashes.

Linda Grass in The Look, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

With its array of magic bottles and powders and sprays, the make-up counter is Marilyn’s altar, as high priestess. And the mirror has a magnetic effect on her whole body; she orbits around it and gravitates towards it; the willowy Grass, a skilful physical comedian, bends over backwards, literally, to find herself in it. If that mirror is Marilyn’s sun, the god in her galaxy is an aging cosmetic magnate (men can age, no problem). And in the course of her lecture, Marilyn will read between her own lines, and come to realize something crucial about her orbit.

The play itself seems a bit crude in its arc — like putting on mascara before the eyeliner — but Schmidt’s production is expert concealer. And in this delicate assignment, Grass smartly charts a physical course for the emotional crescendo of distraction that escalates awkwardness into full-scale desperation, and strips off one mask for another, and another. There’s a veritable river of mascara in this show.

We’re bombarded by a series of highly entertaining poster shots (projection designer Ian Jackson) from Estelle campaigns in which the youthful Marilyn, reinvented each time for the male and corporate gaze (with witty Darrin Hagen sound to match), has starred. Grass is stunningly transformable.

“Picadilly Circus,” a story for spring with a Twiggy-type blonde pixie smiling slyly out at us, is a seminal early example:“Brixton black” eyeliner, “London lashes,” “shy hint of blush” (the transforming makeup is by Kendra Humphrey). It introduced the ground-breaking landmark lipstick colour Eros Fantasy Pink, “pink down to its birthday suit,” as Marilyn annotates. The script has fun with beauty industry lingo. The most disturbing is “Sweet Dreams,” a long-lashed child fantasy, complete with hair bow and teddy bear. Marilyn has memories to match.

In the noble pursuit of beauty in an ugly world, full of bad things like, you know, war and famine, Estelle Cosmetics is relentless: beauty as something to be “created,” “enhanced,” “rejoiced in” — an art form, albeit a transient one, as Marilyn repeats. Estelle talks a good game. But there are telling hints that the fantasy manifesto, at least as waterproof as Estelle mascara, has begun to leak at the seams.

Marilyn can’t quite seem to remember which of her names is her “real” name. She isn’t confident she has the attention of the crowd; is her mic working? She has no lashes of her own; the “chronic sustained use of mascara” has seen to that. The silky sexy Estelle voice gives way to a real woman’s voice, blithe girlish laughter turns brittle. Marilyn has, she reveals, looked into her magic mirror, and seen … no one.

It’s the ultimate nightmare identity crisis, the vanishing of a self that has existed to be looked at. And there’s a universal horror story in that. Make-up, Marilyn has told us, is at the very heart of a woman’s perception of herself. Without it, and the gaze that attends it, Marilyn has become invisible.

Beautifully acted and filmed in this Northern Light production, this play about playing isn’t evasive, oblique, or even subtle. The Look is a little morality tale (an hour or so), “a tale as old as time” to quote from a Disney fairy tale about beauty, about existing in the world by play-acting a part on demand. It “puts you on a pedestal, to look up your skirt,” says Marilyn of the world, aiming for vivacity and landing on despair.

Estelle Cosmetics may be, as billed, “for the many women you are….”  Every woman, that is, except the real one.

REVIEW

The Look

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Alexa Wyatt

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Linda Grass

Where: streaming from northernlighttheatre.com

Running: through Jan. 31

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

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New faces in theatre, up-and-comers to track: meet techno whiz Bradley King

Posted on January 21, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

They’re young, bright, and unstoppably creative. And, pandemic be damned, their adaptable, flexible talents are already lighting up the Edmonton theatre scene. In this 12thnight series you’ll meet some of E-town’s sought-after up-and-comers, artists whose work, on- and backstage, is already having an impact in this challenging age — and will have more when the theatre doors are open again. 

Meet techno whiz Bradley King. First up was designer/scenographer Elise CM Jason. Look for others in this continuing 12thnight New Faces series.

systems analyst-turned-online platform designer Bradley King. Photo by Liam Mackenzie.

 

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

BRADLEY KING, digital systems designer 

If there ever was a moment in theatre for a creative mind like Bradley King’s it’s got to be now.

“I learn on the go,” says this 20something technology experimenter, modestly of his year of devising new ways to translate the liveness of live theatre to the digital world. “There are so many ideas in my head now, things I want to build….”

By day King, who was a physicist in his former life, is Fringe Theatre’s “systems analyst,” who has managed since 2018 the Fringe Theatre’s web of technological systems, dozens of them, that put shows on sale, sell tickets, offer promo discounts, offer merch, run beer tents in the summer and a take-out cafe these days, add photos.… The Fringe is a free-wheeling why-not? sort of creature in theory. But there’s nothing easy about the tech infrastructure of Edmonton’s biggest, most intricate festival.

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By night (and on weekends) King is open for proposals from theatre companies keen to create that ever-elusive sense of live when the audience and the performers can’t be in the same room.

A member of the exclusive brigade of physicists-turned-theatre people, King was working in a geophysics lab when he made the dramatic choice to move to the Fringe. How could he tear himself his way? “Rocks, Liz, are boring; they’re very boring.”

Not to say theatre was an outlandish departure. A Wainwright kid, he didn’t grow up going to the Fringe; falling in love with those summer festivities would come later when he moved to the big city to go to the U of A (where, incidentally, he did improv). But he was in community theatre. “Yes, I was onstage! I act and sing; I’m the whole show!” he laughs. “We did a musical every year; our most famous ones were Grease and Cinderella.”

Bradley King. Photo by Anna Davis

Figuring out how to bring a director/producer’s vision to life on a platform instead of a stage, that was something new. In this year of enforced alienation, when the indie Amoris Projects sought to rescue Mac Brock’s Tracks from its origins as an in-person theatrical perambulation, director Beth Dart’s go-to talent was King. She calls him “Bradley the Wizard King.” Says Brock, “we struck gold with Bradley.”

Here’s the open-ended question put to him for the May run of Tracks, King says. “Can you help us get it on the internet in a way that people will want to come and see it?” In the event, there was nothing straightforward about this, and everything that cried out for a custom-made solution.

The complications started with a cast of nine artists, performing their original stories about story-making, solo and live, from nine home “theatres.” But that’s not all. “We wanted something the audience could participate in actively, interact with, get immersed in,” says King. “Something more engaging than just another Zoom call.” A new platform, custom-made for Tracks, was born in that thought.

During the show, after every intervention by playwright Brock as a sort of MC, each audience member got to choose their own individual “track” through his “play.” They picked which artist to watch, in what order. “And their choices had consequences.”

The online experiment, which wove nine “theatres” into a piece, re-worked the stage manager’s role into something even more intricate than calling entrances and exits in sync with light and sound. What the moment needed, says King, was “features to help the stage managers coordinate the performers with the audience, to keep track of exactly where each audience member was (at every moment) on their “track,” so the stage managers could tell the performer ‘OK, your audience is here now. Get ready. Go!’.”

“And it worked!” says King happily. “Tracks was my first big project…. For me it was much more than I’d ever done. And I had six weeks to do it! It was a great experience.”

He upped his game with Catch the Keys Productions (of Dead Centre of Town fame). Curio Shoppe, their atmospheric spooky season experiment, was billed as “a brand new theatre-meets-internet-meets-‘the call is coming from inside the house’ interactive experience.”  The lead time was down to three weeks. And the experience was both online and live. Four different paths offered to individual members of the audience on their computers each led to an unnervingly custom-made phone call to you in your darkened house — from beyond the grave? — from one of the characters at a certain moment in the chosen narrative route.

Colin Matty, Curio Shoppe, Catch the Keys Productions. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography

The experience was personalized, person by person, for the 30-member audience. On King’s platform, the stage managers could track the path chosen by each audience member individually. “And they had to have the ability to move people around if they needed to,” he says. “So if you got stuck, or went to the Exit page because you got scared, they had to have a way to see where you were in real time, and also to be able to bounce your around to a different spot if need be.”

“I was very stressed, but happy with it!” says King of his part in this logistical puzzle of a theatre evening. “If it ever comes back, I’ll make it even better.”

Meanwhile, King is hatching ideas — for improv companies, for location-based theatre, for kinetic theatre experiences where we’re not just a voyeur of something happening on film (bradleyrking.ca). And the question continues to haunt him: “how can we use technology to make the theatrical experience online more immersive for people at home?”

In a Zoom-laden world, he’s on that for us.     

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New faces in theatre: meet designer/scenographer Elise CM Jason in a new 12thnight series

Posted on January 19, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

They’re young, bright, and unstoppably creative. And, pandemic be damned, their adaptable, flexible talents are already lighting up the Edmonton theatre scene. In this 12thnight series you’ll meet some of E-town’s sought-after up-and-comers, artists whose work, on- and backstage, is already having an impact in this challenging age — and will have more when the theatre doors are open again. 

Meet designer/scenographer Elise CM Jason first. And look for others in this continuing 12thnight New Faces series.

All That Binds Us, Azimuth Theatre. Scenographer Elise CM Jason, projections by Effy Adar. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

ELISE CM JASON, designer/ scenographer

If you saw Azimuth Theatre’s All That Binds Us in the fall, you’ll have watched five ethnically/ racially diverse characters intersect in a Canada shaped by a shimmering veil.

Sometimes it was translucent, an effect like seeing the imagery of the world refracted through ice; sometimes it was opaque, reflecting light and hard-edged images back at us. Sometimes it seemed to part.

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The design for this theatrical provocation, created to dispel our white-centric Canuck self-mythology, was the work of Elise CM Jason (they/them). Even before they graduated from the U of A’s BFA-in-design program in 2018, the multi-faceted artist, who identifies as mixed-race, non-binary and queer, has been in demand, in theatre companies of every size and aesthetic stripe, including the mighty Citadel.

Scenographer Elise CM Jason. Photo by Brianna Jang of BB Collective.

For Horizon Lab, a live experiment late last summer on the Shoctor stage, Jason fashioned a single evocative design for five original vignettes by five teams of BIPOC artists. The prompt they shared: “where are your stories?” The stage was dominated by three glowing orbs: a multi-hued galaxy of planets? a trio of tall draped connected figures?.

Where is Jason’s own story? Their portfolio includes design work at companies across town — Northern Light, Shadow, l’UniThéâtre, Opera Nuova among them, as well as an array of festivals (Nextfest, the Fringe, Freewill Shakespeare). It’s weighted to the theatrical outliers, indies with an off-centre bent and an appetite for experimentation, like Mile Zero Dance, Catch the Keys Productions, Cardiac Theatre, that make theatre happen in bars, loading docks and lighting booths, people’s apartments. Or the great outdoors. Jason’s Found Festival site-specific theatre piece On The Margin, developed when they were the fest’s 2018 FRESH AiR emerging artist, took audiences into the river valley, standing in for Banff National Park in 1982.

Jason’s natural home is indie theatre where the division of labour is “me doing five different jobs.” At the Citadel, instead of  “me pulling an all-nighter to finish the set and paint it,” Jason found themself the person assigning tasks to specialists. “It forced me to be a lot more organized than I usually am!”

Jason’s first paying job, as a second-year U of A theatre design student, was a Catch the Keys original. The Runcible Riddle, populated by Edward Lear characters, took audiences on a perambulation through the backstage labyrinth at the Citadel for unexpected encounters in odd spaces with Edward Lear characters. “I really got to see what immersive theatre, in found spaces, is like,” says Jason. “And I loved it!”

A set design kit for Tracks. Photo supplied.

For Tracks, Amoris Productions’ intricate experiment in live online storytelling in May, Jason designed nine quite different home theatres, in which nine performers presented their own personal stories of making art. The designs were delivered in boxes, lights, cords, video stuff, a theatrical Skip The Dishes of sorts, to the nine artists to set up in their own homes.

There’s a collaborative gist to creation at the companies Jason is most stoked to work with; scenography (a designation they prefer to ‘design’) is integrated, from the start. “Everybody is there creating the work together. It’s not a new thing; people have been working collaboratively and innovating together for centuries….” And the artists Jason most appreciates collaborating with, “give me the space to make bold creative decisions, out of my comfort zone.… I’m a person who learns by doing.” 

The goal is the opposite of design as decoration. Most designers are striving for that, Jason says. “I don’t like making a set that looks like acting or performing is happening on top of it. It’s the world (the characters) live in….”

The through-line of Jason’s story is to be found backstage. Growing up, they danced for 15 years before moving, pretty definitively, into theatre — but not as a performer. “I really liked the craft, the making of props and sets,” they say of their high school theatre kid self at Louis St. Laurent. By Grade 10 they were programming shows on the lighting board and creating lighting designs, and into video editing and mapping.

As for watching theatre “the Citadel, Broadway, that was the scope of it,” a traditional sense of theatre that expanded exponentially, at the U of A. And theatre as a career? Where did that notion come from? “This is deeply embarrassing,” they laugh. In Grade 12 “I built the dragon for Shrek the Musical (and got a Cappie nomination). Looking back, it was a terrifying thing put together with bamboo poles and Saran Wrap and spray paint. Deeply chaotic.” From this “hilarious little garbage piece,” Jason decided that “hey, I can do this for the rest of my life!” Which only goes to show that life-changing moments come in every size.

They have a special affection for Mile Zero Dance, where they’ve worked on such pieces as Secondhand Dances for a Crude Crude City (an homage to the late great Edmonton punk band SNFU) and The Great Canadian Beaver Party. “When I work there I always feel like I’m at home.” Among the changes the pandemic year has wrought, Jason’s front-of-house gig at Mile Zero is now officially “Zoom Moderator.”   

Ah, Zoom. “A blessing and a curse,” Jason thinks. They’re “excited to work in video…. I was definitely a kid of the internet,” glued to YouTube, fascinated by the evolving para-social relationships of people creating themselves online. And pandemic isolation year has confirmed Jason in their creative profile as a consumer of pop culture. Their upcoming design work — chances are it’ll be presented digitally — includes Dana Wylie’s Makings of a Voice, SkirtsAfire’s mainstage premiere, and Cheryl Foggo’s Heaven, the third of the Citadel’s Horizon series.

As a mixed-race artist, up-and-coming and in their 20s, Jason has mixed feelings about whether the year of Black Lives Matter and promises about inclusivity have brought about substantial change in the “very white system” in theatre. “I’m trying not to judge too harshly in a weird pandemic time,” they say. But “the proof’s in the pudding. Who’s truthfully committed to being more inclusive?”

“The work doesn’t stop. We never arrive.”

 

    

  

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Identity crisis in mascara and blush: The Look, streaming from Northern Light Theatre

Posted on January 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Linda Grass in The Look, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I’m going to let you in on a secret, girls. Eyelashes are back,” advises Marilyn Miles, the original face of Estelle Cosmetics, in The Look.

Lashes may be back. Live in-person theatre (formerly known as ‘Tteatre’), alas, is not.  Which is why the solo play, a beauty culture satire by the Australian playwright/ screenwriter Alexa Wyatt, opens Friday in a debut digital streaming venture from Northern Light Theatre.

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“Stressful!” declares director/ designer Trevor Schmidt, NLT’s artistic director cheerfully of NLT’s “straight to video” move online for this second production of its 45th anniversary season, a quartet of shows devoted to showcasing the work of actresses of a certain age. “Twice as much work, to be honest…. A lot of things are out of my control and that’s challenging — at a time period when we’re all feeling that things are out of our control.”

If there ever was a play, though, that lends itself to being “reconceptualized” (as Schmidt puts it) for film, it might be The Look. “It’s a kind of TED Talk, a training video lecture for the young women who’ll be working the Estelle make-up counter,” says the director of the prophetic 1992 play, updated in details by the playwright for this North American premiere.

Linda Grass in The Look, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

The glamorous Marilyn (played by Linda Grass), the first “Estelle girl” who’s lived inside an identity forged in beauty and youth, “has aged out of being the Estelle super-model now.” Her career on the wane, she’s been relegated to training the new generation of Estelle beauties. Says Schmidt, “and as the play goes on, she digresses from the speech she’s prepared, to reminisce about her famous fantasy looks from the past. She shows us all the people she has been, she’s been created to be, in ad campaigns.…”

“We see them on the the giant screen behind her. And we see where she’s at now, emotionally, in the present. A bit unmoored…. She lets her guard down.”

In the course of her training talk, Marilyn is liberally applying layers of make-up, and we’re in the presence of an expert. As Grass puts it, “the more she puts on, the more she reveals” — of her real self and her identity crisis.

In the beauty industry, time is not on anyone’s side. Marilyn “has lost her sense of personal identity,” says Schmidt. And there are wider applications. “It happens to many women for various reasons at points in their lives.” He points to empty nest syndrome (“who am I if I’m not a mother?”) and relationship break-ups (“who am I if I’m not a girlfriend?”). For the protagonist of The Look, the question is “who am I when I’m no long seen as an object of beauty? What is my value? How do I fit into the world? Where do I get my validation now?”

“Her career has fizzled out,” says Grass, a favourite Schmidt leading lady. “And if your identity is all about your work, how easy is it to reinvent yourself when that happens? Her personality is tied up in her looks…. She tells the girls that wearing make-up lies at the very heart of her perception of herself. She knows who she is because she’s seen.”   

Almost from the time she relocated to Edmonton in the mid-‘90s from her home town of Regina, Grass,  amusing and genial in conversation, has starred in many Schmidt productions. Her fearlessness and affinity with the offbeat darkly comic muse of The Unconscious Collective, an indie-co-op of the time where many of Schmidt’s early pieces, like the monologue quartet Tales From The Hospital, premiered, made them ideal collaborators from the start, he says.

And Grass has the the resumé to prove it. It includes such off-centre comedies as Too Bad She’s A Big Ol’ Slut and Kiss My Asp!. In the wacky musical Congo Song, a cross-gender, cross-species comedy, she played the snake. At NLT, among other productions she starred in the The Beard (as Jean Harlow, in a cage made of swimsuit elastic in Schmidt’s theatre-in-the-round production), and as the teacher in Miss Margarida’s Way, a dark Brazilian satire about the limitless expansiveness of power.

Schmidt is fulsome. “I love working with her! Great sense of humour! No ego!”

Linda Grass in The Look, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

For theatre artists the pandemical era is a test of flexibility (and survivability, that’s a word). We Had A Girl Before You, originally planned for the Studio Theatre in the TransAlta Arts Barns, had to be re-thought and re-designed (“on the same budget!” says Schmidt) when it was bumped to the much larger Westbury in November. Like Baroness Bianka’s Bloodsongs, The Look was originally planned in a live cabaret format, with make-up mirrors and palettes at every table. When that proved impossible, NLT spent December considering options. “All of them, except film, included ‘cancel’. And we didn’t want to do that,” says Schmidt.

Ergo, the transmutation of a theatre into a film company. Filming The Look, says Schmidt, was “a whole new level of planning things out . two cameras, long shots, medium shots.…” The company received an AHS exemption to gather, with a minimal crew, in the Studio Theatre, masked and distanced, to shoot, during limited hours in the building.

The Look is not a movie, Schmidt emphasizes. “We don’t have the money for that; to try to deny the theatre roots of something is to fall short…. We are filming a play.” In April Something Unspoken, the third of NLT’s 2020-2021 shows, will be filmed for digital streaming too. “I’m still struggling to wrap my head around how we’ll do it.” Plans for the fourth anniversary production, The Ugly Duchess in the Westbury Theatre in May, depend on the state of the world by then.

Meanwhile, the timeliness of the play, after nearly three decades, hasn’t faded, says Schmidt. “It doesn’t say anything new…. It talks about the pressures on women in the beauty industry, and in a patriarchal society where women’s currency, sexual viability, is based on looks…. So, nothing new. But it’s interesting that we still need to (explore) it.”

In a way, he thinks, “COVID has done a good thing. A lot of people went gray, stopped colouring their hair…. We’ve become obsessed with youth, what’s new and emerging blah blah blah. We don’t have to be constantly chasing youth.”

PREVIEW

The Look

Theatre: Northern Light Theatre

Written by: Alexa Wyatt

Directed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Linda Grass

Where: streamed from northernlighttheatre.com

Running: Jan. 22 to 24 and Jan. 28 to 31

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com

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Looking forward to 2021 in Edmonton theatre

Posted on January 5, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Laura Raboud, Rochelle Laplante, Vincent Forcier in Macbeth, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Ryan Parker.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

I know what you’re thinking.… The world has been so chaotic and unpredictable this past year that you’d have to be crazy to ink in a calendar of upcoming theatre events.     

But one thing that the shitstorm of 2020 has taught us is that theatre artists will find a way. In a performing arts industry devastated by the pandemic they’ve cancelled, postponed, planned, unplanned, re-planned, experimented; they’ve gone to extraordinary lengths. So we are, to put it mildly, looking forward to 2021. And why shouldn’t we? It’s bound to be a better year: hold that thought.

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To whet your appetite, here’s a selection of upcoming theatrical engagements that will happen, one way or another, or in ways yet unforeseen. Pencil them in; question marks hover over the dates.

And this, I need hardly add, is just a sampling, and a start: there will doubtless be more, created within ever-mutating parameters, as live theatre gradually returns to live-ness. Because unlike the government hypocrites that proclaim them whilst weasling out of them, theatre works creatively within the social contract.

Linda Grass, The Look, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

•Northern Light Theatre’s season, which began in stellar fashion with a live November production (for a tiny, distanced, masked audience in the big Westbury theatre) of We Had A Girl Before You, continues January 22 to 31, this time online, with another solo show. The Look, a black comedy by the Australian playwright and screenwriter Alexa Wyatt, is about an aging woman, the former face of Estelle Cosmetics, charged with training her replacement. Linda Grass stars in the Trevor Schmidt production. The $30 streaming tickets are available at northernlighttheatre.com.

•The theme of the 9th annual SkirtsAfire Festival (March 4 to 14) might be a mantra for the times: The Distance Between Us. The mainstage production, Makings of a Voice by and starring singer-songwriter folk artist/musicologist Dana Wylie, is billed as a “theatrical song cycle,” spun from the creator’s unusual personal story. The production, directed by Vanessa Sabourin, marks the welcome return to theatre of Wylie, a charismatic presence onstage (I still remember her in a Tim Ryan production of the Jeanine Tesori musical Violet lo these many years) who left the world of theatre to be a folk/roots artist.

Dana Wylie in Makings of a Voice, SkirtsAfire Festival.

DRAFT #1,000: At Edmonton’s largest playhouse, the Citadel, resourceful artistic director Daryl Cloran has spent the last 10 months hoping, and then creatively reshuffling and re-scheduling his 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 seasons, over and over (not to mention making a film version of the Citadel’s $1 million production of A Christmas Carol).

Will this be the year we finally get to see The Garneau Block, Belinda Cornish’s adaptation of the hit Todd Babiak novel, cancelled last March 13 after the last dress rehearsal? The answer is written (in pencil) in the stars. The set is currently gathering dust on the Maclab stage waiting for the doors to re-open.

The most current iteration of the plan is that it would be part of a “spring (2021) mini-series” of full-bodied productions originally programmed for the 2019-2020 season, along with Peter Pan Goes Wrong, Matthew MacKenzie’s Bears (a collaboration between Punctuate! Theatre and Alberta Aboriginal Arts,) and Erin Shields’ adaptation of Jane Eyre.

Helen Belay in Heaven, Citadel Theatre.

Meanwhile, the Citadel’s Horizon Series LIVE, a trio of small-cast shows which began with the heartwarming A Brimful of Asha (available for streaming through Jan. 10), is now an online venture. Mary’s Wedding, a Métis version of Stephen Massicotte’s Canadian classic by Tai Amy Grauman, is up for streaming till the end of January (see the 12thnight review HERE). Upcoming is Heaven, a new solo play by Calgary playwright Cheryl Foggo (John Ware Reimagined), set in Alberta’s Amber Valley, settled by  black pioneers from the southern U.S. in the early 20th century. Patricia Darbasie’s production stars the multi-talented Helen Belay.

ONLINE ADVENTURES AT Theatre Network: (a) Read and discuss: Theatre Network launches a new book club this month. When you sign up, you get a (free) copy of a Canadian play in the mail, thanks to Talon Books. Then you get to discuss it on Zoom with a star Edmonton playwright. First up is Darrin Hagen, leading a discussion of Michel Tremblay’s seminal Hosanna (Hagen starred in a 2015 Theatre Network production). Details await on February’s meet-up; it’s led by the sibling team of Hunter and Jacquelyn Cardinal, who brought us Lake of the Strangers in 2019. Registration is free; donations are encouraged.

playwright Colleen Murphy

(b) Sneak previews: a quartet of new plays commissioned by Theatre Network, and destined for premieres at the new Roxy Theatre in 2022, get introduced to audiences first, in a monthly online Sunday afternoon series. Tune in to excerpts, playwright interviews, illustrations, music, design ideas perhaps — all depending on the play and what stage of development it’s at. Calgary-based Eugene Stickland’s new play, about the reclusive Saskatchewan-born abstract painter Agnes Martin, is first up. The series includes Joan Upside Down by Colleen Murphy (The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius, Armstrong’s War, Pig Girl), a new play by Hunter and Jacquelyn Cardinal, and Darrin Hagen’s much-awaited play about Edmonton’s infamous bath house raids.

GETTING ALL SHOOK UP: The Mayfield Dinner Theatre re-opens April 13 (through June 13) with Matt Cage’s One Night With The King (not a show about Henry VIII). Edmonton audiences will remember Cage, an award-winning Elvis tribute artist, from his Presley-ian contributions to the Mayfield’s excellent 2019 Million Dollar Quartet. A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline follows at the Mayfield in the summer.

Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, 2009. Photo supplied.

•The Teatro La Quindicina summer season of Stewart Lemoine plays, originally planned for 2020, got punted by a full year to land on similar dates in 2021. It opens May 27 (through June 12) with a revival of Stewart Lemoine’s black comedy/ Hitchcock-ian thriller Evelyn Strange, surely the only offering of the season containing a scene set in a box at the Metropolitan Opera during a performance of Wagner’s Siegfried. The season includes a homegrown musical about this place, Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s (July 8 to 24)); a new Lemoine comedy for Fringe time (Aug. 12 to 28); and a revival of Lemoine’s Fever-Land (Sept. 23 to Oct. 9). All but one of the four productions are directed by women: Shannon Blanchet, Kate Ryan, and Belinda Cornish.

•FESTIVALS! (“dost thou think because thou are virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?”)

Braydon Dowler-Coltman and Christina Nguyen in Much Ado About Nothing, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Ryan Parker.

The Freewill Shakespeare Festival, which cancelled its entire 32nd annual edition of alternating Shakespeares last summer, is back in Hawrelak Park June 15 to July 11, with those very plays: Macbeth and Much Ado About Nothing. Garett Ross and Nadien Chu star in Macbeth, directed by Nancy McAlear. The company’s new artistic director Dave Horak directs Much Ado, with Bobbi Goddard and Mathew Hulshof as Beatrice and Benedick, and Braydon Dowler-Coltman and Christina Nguyen as Claudio and Hero.  Tickets are already on sale. The Heritage Amphitheatre, incidentally, is a 1,000-seat house: lots of room for distancing.

Nextfest, the influential multi-disciplinary showcase of emerging artists that figured out, on short notice, how to shift its massively complex self online in 2020, will happen, one way or another, June 3 to 13.  (They started inviting mainstage proposals in December.)

•Workshop West Playwrights Theatre has announced a spring premiere (date to be determined) for a new piece from the startlingly versatile actor/ playwright/ composer/ Guys in Disguise artistic director Darrin Hagen. It’s a story of falling in love with music.

•Punctuate! Theatre’s new Playwrights’ Unit brings together 15 theatre artists, of every ethnic background and experience, from across the country to create new plays while the world is imprisoned by COVID. Expect public readings from this diversity of talent in May.

•INTRIGUING NEW PARTNERSHIPS

The Shoe Project brings together the SkirtsAfire Festival and Workshop West Playwrights Theatre in the Edmonton chapter of a national project launched in 2011 to giving voices, through theatre, to immigrant and refugee women. Veteran Canadian playwright Conni Massing mentors women from around the globe; their storytelling prompt is a pair of shoes they have worn on journeys, often arduous, to new lives in this country. Public performances happen March 12 and 13, at (or possibly from) the Westbury Theatre.

The Shoe Project, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre and SkirtsAfire Festival

The SkirtsAfire festivities, designed to showcase the work of female artists, includes a collaboration with Edmonton Ballet. Body of Words is a multi-disciplinary work that includes Edmonton’s poet laureate Nisha Patel and spoken word artist Medicine Mathurin. It runs March 7, 8, and 14.

The new Roxy Theatre, in progress on 124th St.

A NEW THEATRE FOR A THEATRE TOWN: And as a grand finale, the new $12 million Roxy will open, late in 2021 — now, there’s a New Year’s Eve bash to anticipate! — on the footprint of Theatre Network’s 124th St. ex-cinema home, which burned to the ground in 2015. Not one but two theatre spaces, a 200-seat mainstage house and a 100-seat rehearsal hall/ studio theatre. Theatre Network will start equipping it this summer.

 

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Mary’s Wedding: inside Mary’s dream in a new Métis version of the classic, streaming from the Citadel. A review

Posted on January 4, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Todd Houseman and Tai Amy Grauman in Mary’s Wedding, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Arthur Mah.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It is no surprise that the land acknowledgment at the outset of Mary’s Wedding, delivered by one of its characters, has a particular resonance in the Citadel production that opened its digital streaming run Dec. 22 (with the idea of running it live sometime “early in 2021”).

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The land, the sense of place and displacement, the need to belong, and the pull of home have extra weight and meaning in the Métis version of Stephen Massicotte’s much-travelled World War I romance. It’s been adapted from Massicotte’s war-time love story by Métis/ Cree/ Hausenosaunee playwright Tai Amy Grauman, who co-stars in Jenna Rodgers’ Citadel production opposite Cree actor/playwright Todd Houseman.

Grauman’s bright idea reimagines with Métis characters this bona fide Canadian classic (which premiered in Calgary in 2002 at Alberta Theatre Projects’ PlayRites Festival). It’s the story of young, mismatched prairie lovers separated by time, space, a vast ocean, the dark currents of history. The Canadian cultural frictions — Mary is from the colonial aristocracy as the daughter of British immigrants, Charlie a homegrown homespun prairie farm boy — bite more sharply when the characters are both Métis.

The reinvention includes a language divide to be overcome, too. Mary (Grauman) is from a “scrip” family (a system of farm land allowances designed to assimilate Métis families into the mainstream). Cree is a foreign language to her. The unschooled Charlie (Houseman), whose native language is Michif (a French/Cree hybrid), is from “a road allowance community.” Theirs is a hard-scrabble life on the margins of the margins, excluded from both First Nations reserves and white world.

Charlie’s only ticket to respectability and inclusion is … war. “I’ll be someone; I’ll be a Canadian….” When he leaves home and crosses the sea to be a soldier, it’s under the flag of a country and for a way of life that devalues him. The stakes are upped. It’s Houseman as Charlie who delivers the land acknowledgment at the start. And in light of the play to follow there’s a particularly heartbreaking remonstration in that.

This fluid, lyrical play is a dream, and a nightmare, and a haunting. And haunting, a weave of past and present, defines first love in Mary’s Wedding. We’re inside Mary’s dream the night before her wedding in 1920. And the play works in the non-linear the way dreams do, in loops of remembered moments that defy chronology and transcend location.

The charm of the lovers’ meetings, which involve them taking shelter in a barn from booming prairie thunderstorms, is counterpointed by the roar (sound designer: Dave Clarke) of scenes from the horrific overseas war. Charlie writes to Mary laboriously from the trenches, and his letters come alive. Sometimes Mary imagines herself as Charlie’s  sergeant Gordon Flowerdew, whose advice to the young soldier is prophetic. Avoid falling in love, says the Sarge. Or “you’ll see her in everyone, and everything you do.” Love, Mary’s Wedding tells us, is a kind of imaginative co-habitation.

Todd Houseman and Tai Amy Grauman in Mary’s Wedding, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Arthur Mah

Like memory, Brianna Kolybaba’s design, a slatted wooden installation, sits like a kind of alighted installation free-floating in the surrounding  darkness. When Mary or Charlie step out of the light, it’s into blackness; images flash into the foreground of the remembered past, then get replaced by others. Patrick Beagan’s dramatic lighting design plays along the palette between golden and pewter: the glow of remembered encounters back home and the black-and-white flashes of the scenes of war imagined by Mary.  The original fiddle music is by Kathleen Nisbet.  

Rodgers’ production was originally destined for live performance at the end of November on the Citadel’s Shoctor stage. When, three days before opening, that proved impossible, it was captured on video. That it’s self-evidently a theatrical production, and feels like theatre and not a film, is actually an apt metaphor for a “memory play,” a play that happens on the mind’s stage.

The performances in Rodgers’ production have an unexpected dynamic. Grauman’s as Mary has a sturdy kind of matter-of-fact earthiness that’s an original choice in the role. Dreaming herself into Charlie’s wartime experience, Mary can say “I am alone on the moon,” but she doesn’t seem to be by nature a wistful moon-y romantic. When Mary says “war begins, and I cannot do anything about it,” it’s clear that she’s someone accustomed to “doing.” Regret doesn’t come easily to her, even in a dream. She is no sentimental cliché of the girl that got left behind. And in the end I found the starchy resistance in Grauman’s performance touching in itself.

Houseman captures the appealingly awkward, tentative charm of the shy farm boy who can’t help wondering, in the corner of his mind, if he’s out of his league. “I’ve never seen the ocean before. But I’ve heard good things.” The only poem Charlie knows is Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, with its ultra-romantic defence of sacrificial valour: “into the valley of death rode the 600.” The implications stop Mary in her tracks. “That’s poetry, not real life….”

It’s striking how easily, and meaningfully, Grauman’s Métis adaptation slides into the framework of the original. I’d venture to say that no one anywhere has ever made it through Mary’s Wedding without Kleenex. This Métis version earns your tears in an enhanced way.

Check out 12thnight’s interview with actor/playwright Tai Amy Grauman here.

REVIEW

Mary’s Wedding

Theatre: Citadel

Written by: Stephen Massicotte

Adapted by: Tai Amy Grauman

Directed by: Jenna Rodgers

Starring: Tai Amy Grauman, Todd Houseman

Where: online via citadeltheatre.com

Running: through Jan. 31

Streaming passes: citadeltheatre.com

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A wish for the new year from 12thnight.ca

Posted on January 2, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Happy New Year, theatre friends!

It was a year (was it only a year?) unimaginable in advance. A year of devastating losses and challenges for the performing arts. A year in which Edmonton’s valiant community of theatre-creators rose to the occasion in extraordinary, and inspiring, ways.

And through it all, dear readers, you’ve stuck with me, as I tried to remind theatre-lovers that 2020 wasn’t the final curtain, only a long and arduous detour, and a test of ingenuity and creativity. Suddenly (no, finally) it’s 2021, full of hope for the future and the return, however gradual, to live-ness of the live art form we love.

It’s the fourth anniversary of 12thnight.ca. And it’s a moment to thank you for your support and encouragement in continuing to covering theatre here, Edmonton’s most exciting and influential arts industry.

There’s no charge to subscribe to 12thnight. I hope you’ve enjoyed the content which is, so far, free. And I hope, too, that at the start of this new year, you’re up for chipping in a monthly amount (you choose the amount) to my Patreon campaign to help the 12thnight theatre coverage continue. Here’s the link: www.patreon.com/12thnight. Theatre people, the do-ers and the fans, know how to project: please do join me in this venture as a patron if you can. Spread the word!

To those who have already signed on as patrons, my deep gratitude for your support. It makes 12thnight possible. My new year’s resolution is to continue to provide as much theatre coverage as I can in feature articles, news, reviews. My mission is to be your guide to what’s happening on stages in this remarkable theatre town.

Meanwhile, here’s to health and  joyful times in a new year when we’ll all be together, excited by theatre in person, again.

  

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Giving 2020 the kiss-off (and welcoming 2021): how to be festive on New Year’s Eve

Posted on December 30, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Vincent Forcier, Mark Meer, Belinda Cornish, Mat Hulshof in A Louis of a Party (2017), Teatro La Quindicina. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s entirely possible no one will see your party shoes. But if there was ever a New Year’s Eve to hoist a glass of bubbly and cheer loudly, it’s got to be this one. And it comes not a moment too soon: goodbye and good riddance to 2020.

Here are a couple of thoughts for a festive theatre boost on The Eve, as you give 2020 the boot and toast a better year to come. 

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Live theatre is shuttered into mid-January, and we can’t wait for its return. But the spirit of revelry lives on Teatro La Quindicina, a company with a 15-year tradition of living it up from the Varscona stage (and backstage too) on New Year’s Eve.

The centrepiece of the festivities for the last decade, at the top of Act II, is always a brand new original playlet of a half-hour duration or so, by Teatro resident playwright Stewart Lemoine. The cast, of anywhere from a dozen to two, eat real food and drink colourful cocktails onstage. And (gasp!) they’re apt to sing. Lemoine calls all of the above “the very pinnacle of pre-COVIDian decadence.”

Speed is of the essence in this Teatro new-year new-play tradition. The play is always written by Lemoine on Dec. 27 and 28. Rehearsals invariably commence at 11 a.m. on the 29th and continue up till the half-hour call on the 31st.

2020 hasn’t been kind to any of the above, needless to say. Teatro cancelled its entire 2020 summer season, and re-booked everything to 2021. But in honour of a defining tradition, the theatre will be posting three favourite scripts from New Year’s Eves past to its website (teatroq.com)  Dec. 31 — along with annotations by the playwright, cast memories, photos and even some rare video footage.

The trio of the chosen all, incidentally, have Edmonton settings. You’ll get to read The Ball of Ideas (2012) involves an impromptu wedding at a Hilton Garden Inn. An Invitation And A Map (2015) is set at a New Year’s Eve Party in Picture Butte, with an invasion by unexpected guests. A Louis of a Party (2017) is a celebratory New Year’s Eve divorce party for perfect strangers at the Chateau Louis. The scripts are available, free, through the first week in January. Donations, though, are welcomed in celebratory fashion.

Other theatrical possibilities:

Filming A Christmas Carol at the Citadel Theatre. Photo by Raoul Bhatt.

•The Citadel has two productions for streaming on New Year’s Eve. Dec. 31 is your last chance to catch the Citadel’s digital edition of its lavish light-filled production of A Christmas Carol, starring the great Ted Dykstra as the stone-hearted Mr. Scrooge. This year’s production — the second season of a new adaptation by David van Belle, set in the post-war world of 1949 — was filmed so Edmonton wouldn’t be Carol-less on this of all years, not after two decades. Streaming passes are at citadeltheatre.com. Check out the 12thnight review here.

And the Citadel is streaming its new Métis version of Mary’s Wedding, a prairie love story set against the backdrop of World War I. Cree/ Métis/ Haudenosaunee playwright Tai Amy Grauman, who co-stars with Todd Houseman, adapted Stephen Massicotte’s much travelled Canadian hit. The Citadel production runs through Jan. 31. Streaming passes: citadeltheatre.com. 12thnight interviewed Grauman; read it here.

Kendra Connor, producer of the Virtual Holiday Gala. Photo by Adam Kidd.

•The Varscona Theatre‘s first-ever Virtual Holiday Gala, a fun and festive affair (I know, I hoisted a glass at home, watching), continues online. You can have fun watching; I know I did. Belinda Cornish and Mark Meer host. Cocktails-for-one lesson provided. A variety of offerings from Varscona’s bright assortment of triple-threat artists. The commercials (including one for EPCOR, purveyor of the invaluable Heart + Soul Fun) are a hoot. Bonus: you get to hear Andrea House sing, outside with a remarkably attractive view of the Edmonton river valley behind her. Streaming is free (varsconatheatre.com); donations will be applauded loudly. Read about it here.

Byron Martin, artistic director of Grindstone Comedy Theatre.

•The Grindstone Comedy Theatre is holding over, for streaming, its Comedy Christmas Special till Dec. 31. Livestreamed on Christmas Day, the big-cast multi-disciplinary extravaganza (made possible by EPCOR’s Heart and Soul Fund) is hosted by comedian Kathleen McGee, with musical guests Aladean Kheroufi and the Royal Foundry. And know this. No expense has been spared: you’ll be seeing an outstanding Deena Hinshaw wig.

And this may ring your 2020 New Year’s Eve chimes: it comes with a “strong language, violence, and sexual themes” warning.

•Go shopping for a 2021 calendar, and make yourself smile and feel part of something: . YEG theatre’s “meme queens” — Sue Goberdhan and Luc Tellier — have been amusing themselves along with the rest of us, by creating personalized rhyming and punning Elf On The Shelf memes for Edmonton’s theatre people, posted on FB walls. Now there’s a compilation, in the form of a meme-crammed calendar.

Check it out here, and order one at paypal.me/memequeensyeg.

•Hip to the needs of “the new world order,” The Queen of Rationalization (Heather D. Swain aka Dr. Auntie Dote) is available for online consultation on New Year’s Eve. The Queen undertakes to rationalize all your dubious choices and bad behaviour of the year. Book a 15-minute reprieve from yourself : 780-222-2005.

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You’ve heard of Elf on the Shelf, now get ready for … Edmonton’s Meme Queens

Posted on December 23, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You’ve heard of Elf on the Shelf, now get ready for this….

Face it, 2020, a dumpster fire of a year, hasn’t given theatre people a lot to get happy about, creative though they are. But there’s just no telling what the kooky side effects might be when they have to stay home, up late with time on their hands (and even when they don’t), making their own fun.

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Theatre artists Luc Tellier and Sue Goberdhan know all about that. On a whim, for sheer amusement value, they’ve been custom-making punned, rhymed, personalized Elf on the Shelf memes for members of the E-town theatre community — and posting them on Facebook walls. And the theatre community is tickled.

“I was worried we were just being annoying,” laughs Goberdhan, the new co-artistic director (with Morgan Yamada) of Azimuth Theatre. Au contraire, “what we kept hearing (via a stream of texts and emails and calls) was ‘You’re saving 2020! We will get Christmas after all!’”

“We were overwhelmed by the response!” says actor/ director/ coach/ teacher Tellier, equally amazed and delighted by the escalating buzz. “People kept asking ‘where can we see all of them?” Which is why, by popular request , after 200 (and counting) of their funny, individualized memes, the pair are creating a compilation, in the form of a calendar, The Meme Queens Present: Tons of Puns for 2021. The graphic design by Goberdhan includes 130 or more of them.

And if you’re a theatre artist (or know one), or a theatre go-er or wannabe, or, hell, just an all-round playful Edmonton fan, you’re just going to have to buy one (30 bucks up front, pick-up in January).  Tellier calls it “a love letter to Edmonton theatre.”

“The stars aligned perfectly!” declares Goberdhan. So did the collective sense of humour. The original inspiration was the Instagram celeb trend spun from a 2005 Christmas kids’ book about a surveillance elf sent from North Pole to scout out the naughty or nice kids. It went viral. Movie star Reese Witherspoon, for example, posted a picture of herself with an image of Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta dancing on her shoulder: “Grease on Reese.” It got a zillion hits.

Sue Goberdham, Sister Act II on a Girl Named Sue.

Goberdhan, an actor/ administrator/ activist with considerable indie theatre cred, spotted a photo of herself on Twitter, with an image of her smiling self with her all-time favourite movie Sister Act II (“the best movie ever made,” she insists) sitting on her shoulder. It takes some figuring out, but showbiz people are up for it. “Sister Act II on a girl named Sue,” of course. “It was the most joy I’ve felt the entire pandemic!” Goberdhan declares.

Some require insider knowledge of pronunciation, part of the fun. Take, for example, an image of actor/ playwright/ sketch comic Elena Belyea of Tiny Bear Jaws sitting on Tellier’s shoulder: “Belyea on a Tellier.”

And so it came to pass the Goberdhan and Tellier egged each other on. And “people loved it.” The first Elf on a Shelf Tellier posted on Facebook was “Tina on a Gina,” to wit Tina Turner on the shoulder of arts administrator/ stage manager Gina Puntil. “Alanis on a Janis”? Alanis Morisette on the NDP’s intrepid Janis Irwin. “It got thousands of Likes on Facebook,” says Tellier. One giddy thing led to another, more and more, the punnier the better, a veritable online carnival of free-associative wackiness.

Luc Tellier. Juke on a Luc.

“One of my favourite parts,” says Tellier, “is that neither of us ever made a decision to have a ‘project’….  It wasn’t till we were eyeballs deep into it, and people started reach out to us with suggestions” that the pair even realized they had one going. And it was a bona fide Edmonton theatre craze, a kind of group hug in a hug-less time.

“Suddenly I realized that with all the memes he’d made, no one had  made one of Luc,” says Goberdhan. Hence, a beaming image of him, a jukebox on his shoulder: “juke on a Luc.”

“I can’t sleep any more because I’ve got rhymes on the brain,” she laughs. “If it’s 4 a.m. and I think of something, I have to put it on my phone, or I’ll forget it.”

They’re both musical theatre triple-threats; they write and act; they’re instigators and activists. But somehow Tellier and Goberdhan didn’t meet doing a show. That story is pretty oddball, too. They were both pretending to be clients of up-and-coming lawyers.

And it’s not like they aren’t busy. Tellier is doing queer dramaturgy for MacEwan University’s upcoming (online) production of the big Sondheim musical your, now in rehearsal. He’s an arts educator at Jube School. Goberdhan is planning out her new Azimuth directorship. “I had COVID at one point,” she says. “And I still have residual effects, like brain fog…. Reading grant applications has been hard. But I can do this,” she says of theatre memes. It’s visual!”

“At the beginning it was really easy. Gecko on a Mieko,” says Tellier of their Mieko Ouchi meme. Another early fave is “Maquette on a Paquette,” with its set mock-up on the shoulder of director/stage manager Wayne Paquette, of Blarney Productions. And who will not smile to see “Clooney on a Mooney,” a meme shoulder tribute to Edmonton theatre legend Margaret Mooney?

Now the guessing game is getting trickier, sometimes more abstract, sometimes more specific. If you’re a Facebook friend of hers, check out actor/director Emma Houghton, with a tiny bear on her shoulder saying ‘I don’t know’.” It’s “Doubtin’ on a Houghton.” Sometimes the guesses are better than the original, says Goberdhan, of  “Dilemma on an Emma.” I’ll leave you to think about “Carousin’ on a Brausen.” (There’s a yours truly  meme too, and it’s a hoot).

“We’re approaching brain saturation,” Tellier laughs. “If this is what we can come up with by accident, imagine what we could do…” he trails off.  “We’ve stumbled on something that brings us together.”

And a time that’s been cruelly isolating for the Edmonton theatre community and artists who are, by profession and temperament, collaborators, has gotten warmer. “I miss everyone so much right now,” says Goberdhan.

Calendar orders: paypal.me/memequeensyeg.

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