New faces in theatre: smile, here’s sketch and improv star Sydney Campbell

Posted on February 3, 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 sketch comedian/ improv star/ comedy writer Sydney Campbell. The series so far has included  designer/scenographer Elise CM Jason, techno whiz Bradley King, and triple-threat Chariz Faulmino. Look for others upcoming in this 12thnight series. 

Sydney Campbell, of Gender? I Hardly Know Them. Photo by Mike Tan. Make-up by The Raven Virginia.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

SYDNEY CAMPBELL, sketch comedian, improv star, comedy writer

“This holiday season marks one year since I made a life-changing decision,” says an earnest personage gravely, against a soulful sound score. A major change in career, you wonder?  A new sexual identity, perhaps? Rehab? A cult?

This life-changer, it transpires, is the decision to stop eating turkey. And the short sketch that follows sets forth the motivation: a home invasion by hordes of blood-thirsty turkey vampires exacting a revenge carnage fantasy.

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If you’ve been laughing at short sketches from the queer comedy duo Gender? I Hardly Know Them, on Instagram or TikTok — and if you haven’t, you’re missing out — you’ll already know something about Sydney Campbell’s sense of humour. Along with their sketch partner actor/playwright Elena Belyea (they co-created the online production httpeepee), it’s a sense of funny that plays along the spectrum between the satirical and goofball, revelling in deadpan and anti-climax, and taking shots at the political and the cultural status quo from oblique angles on the way.

“I thought it would be hard to create a lot of content,” says Campbell (they/them), a comedy writer/ sketch comedian/ Rapid Fire Theatre improv star and teacher, who’s a buoyant and droll conversationalist on the phone. They have the kind of laugh that makes you want to say something funny and hear it again. “But the thing is, you need to create less. I’d create a minute-long sketch then challenge myself to cut it in half…. The smaller, the funnier.”

And speaking as we are of ‘smaller,’ “It’s great to work with Elena,” they say, “the only person in the world who is smaller than me. Finally, I get to be the tall one!”

comedy writer/performer Sydney Campbell. Photo supplied.

Campbell, who came to sketch comedy via improv, and improv via theatre, “grew up watching Grease with my mom every weekend, wanting to be Rizzo…. I was never really into musical theatre, but really into theatre. My degree is in drama. But theatre had a huge fall from grace for me,” prompted by the self-assessment that “I’m not as good as other actors. I wouldn’t be great….” A life in comedy wasn’t exactly a comedown. “Nothing could be as fun as comedy —  surprise surprise!”

And Campbell, in their ‘20s, has already made a notable career creating it, directing it, forming it into new shapes, writing it, making it up on the spot — and coaching/ encouraging/ inspiring kids to create that kind of bond with audiences too.

Campbell did improv all through high school, and into university (the U of A) even when they were taking drama courses.” And “this beautiful outlet” took over. “I wanted to make poop jokes. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to have a show that looked as messy as it felt! That transparency — ‘we don’t really really know what we’re doing, any more than you know what you’re gonna see’ —  is so fun, so joyful.”

Sydney Campbell. Photo by Mike Tan. Make-up by The Raven Virginia.

Getting onstage without knowing what’s going to happen sounds to most people (like me), absolutely terrifying, the stuff of actors’ nightmares. Campbell concedes “yeah, terrifying.” But adds “people forget that the audience also knows that you don’t know what you’re doing. So anything you do that’s even slightly funny they’re like ‘o my gawd I can’t believe you created that right off the top of your head’….”

“You get to live in this really special world where you can fail, yes, but where the margin for success is enormous.”

One reason improv in this town is deluxe is the overlap of improv and theatre. Campbell laughs. “It’s a great place for actors with low skills: joke!” In improv, they muse, you’re looking to “tell an honest narrative and have genuine moments onstage. And you have to allow yourself to be surprised, moved, changed” — prime actor skills.

Campbell met Belyea met when the latter hired them as an “assistant stage manager” for Tiny Bear Jaws’ Everyone We Know Will Be There, a play about a teen party that actually was a teen party, in a big suburban house. Campbell’s unique debut in stage management was to “be an audience partner, and take them through everything,” and nudge them to the basement, or to “impromptu” gatherings around the fridge or in a bedroom. Stage management: “not my skill set or forte,” they say firmly. But a creative partnership was born.

When Belyea’s Cleave premiered in 2018, Campbell was the assistant  director to Vanessa Sabourin. “A crash course, Vanessa was very cool to work with, and I learned a ton really quickly.” What they discovered, says Campbell, is “I love directing…. I was like OK, this is what you’re aiming for!”

And they’ve applied that to directing for sketch and improv. In the latter, where “directing” sounds like a sort of showbiz oxymoron, “it’s about curating the tone of the show, the shape, the genre…. it’s ‘I want the show to look like this, however it gets there. And I’m excited to be on that journey’. You’re telling stories, yes, but the fun thing is you never have to do it the same way twice.”

“The director is in cahoots with the audience: ‘I’m here with you. And I’m gonna get you want to see from these improvisers’.”

Campbell is in a cluster of RFT improv troupes. One is Motion, “where we take turns being the director.” Another, a Campbell fave, is Sphinxes, an RFT ensemble of women, female-identifying, trans and non-binary performers. The audience is invited to (anonymously) share a personal moment in their lives in response to three questions, from which scenes are spun onstage. “It’s something really special that this really cool space has been made for women and trans people in comedy. And the audience holds us so tenderly…. It’s a really nice show.”

Sydney Campbell

For five years Campbell has been part of RFT’s outreach program run by Joleen Ballendine. A highlight for them is the live improv comedy classes at the Boyle Street Education Centre. The youth there “have a lot going on their lives; the last thing they’re thinking about is giggling in the afternoon with us…. Boy did I fall in love with that!,” says Campbell of the feeling of providing people with skills “to be listened to by other people.

”I find the biggest joy in the moment when they say something and other people laugh, and you watch them be so proud…. You could be the most cynical person alive but it warms your damn heart.” Besides, they laugh, “I get to play games all day. Which is really up my alley.”

Meanwhile, Campbell and Belyea are equipped with a grant to continue with pre-production for their upcoming seven-episode first season of Gender? web series, to be filmed as soon as that’s feasible. The pilot, was shot (just before the pandemic hammer came down last winter) in a two-block radius of Campbell’s place. “We love that it’s set in in Edmonton; we love the prairie landscape. That’s our vibe.”

“We’re getting together a writing room over Zoom,” they say. “So who’s gonna order the greasy pizza?” Both the writing and the acting ensemble will feature other Alberta talent. “It’s cool not to act in every one, to sit back and watch it all happen!”

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The Situation We Find Ourselves In, and other theatrical possibilities for your weekend

Posted on January 29, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Daniel MacIvor, co-creator of The Situation We Find Ourselves In Is This. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

And for your cold winter weekend … theatre to the rescue. Yes, there are plays, two-minute films, a new book club — all online, from Punctuate! Theatre, Northern Light, Theatre Network, Play The Fool Festival, Catalyst.  Here are some suggestions for your theatrical entertainment.

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•The Situation We Find Ourselves In Is This (a title that’s also a mantra for the times): Saturday you have a One Night Only! chance to catch something special online. The Situation We Find Ourselves In Is This is a solo play about the time playwright Matthew MacKenzie (Bears, The Particulars, The Other) spent with the star Canadian dramaturg Iris Turcott in the last two weeks of her life.

Dramaturg? What sort of job is that? I hear you ask. Fierce, funny, rigorous, a champion of Canadian theatre and its writers, Turcott literally wrote the Merriam-Webster definition of dramaturge, according to the announcement by Punctuate! Theatre, a co-producer of the online production. The way Turcott created it, dramaturgy was a kind of one-on-one mentorship, an inspiring relationship custom-tailored for every playwright and fledgling play she encountered. Which made her so impressive, fun (and formidable) to talk to, as I found on any occasion I had the chance.

I remember MacKenzie telling me that Turcott would say to her to playwright charges: “get yourself a six-pack. You’re going to need it.”

Matthew MacKenzie and Daniel MacIvor, co-creators of The Situation We Find Ourselves In Is This. Photo supplied.

The evening is a collaboration between MacKenzie and the celebrated playwright/ dramaturg/ director Daniel MacIvor. And it’s produced by the partnership of Punctuate!, reWork Productions, Cape Breton University and The Theatre Centre. The YouTube Live Event (it’s free) starts at 5 p.m. here.

•If there’s any plus to the dreadful situation in which live theatre finds itself, it’s got to be the chance to see what’s happening in the big wide world. And here’s a stunning example. Don’t miss a chance to catch The Approach, from the Project Arts Centre in Dublin (presented by Landmark Productions and St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York).

In this mysterious and intricate little piece, by (and directed by) the Irish writer Mark O’Rowe, we meet three women. Two of them are sisters, and they’ve all been roommates in their younger years. Now they meet up in a cafe for tea, intermittently and in pairs of shifting alliances, leaving with promises to catch up soon that seem never to be kept. The actors, two at a time, sit distanced at a table on a big dark stage hung with overturned chairs.

And in the weave of banal small talk fragments, shards of memory, and real-life minutiae, multi-layered relationships emerge and, strangely enough, mingle. Are they co-opting each other’s memories? Love, friendship, evasions, betrayals, lies, grievances — it’s all there, in a thrilling and tense hour. The three Irish actors (Cathy Belton, Aisling O’Sullivan, Derbhle Crotty) are superb.

Streaming tickets for the production (available till Sunday) are available at stannswarehouse.org.

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

•Northern Light’s filmed production of The Look, a solo play by Australian screenwriter Alexa Wyatt that is admirably suited to the online world, continues through Sunday afternoon (1 and 3 p.m.) on Vimeo. And it looks good: check out the 12thnight PREVIEW with director Trevor Schmidt and star Linda Grass and the REVIEW. Find tickets and the weekend schedule of performances at northernlighttheatre.com.

Darrin Hagen in Hosanna, Theatre Network, 2005. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

•Theatre Network is launching its new Book Club (for plays) this weekend. The debut edition this month is led by playwright Darrin Hagen, who chose Michel Tremblay’s Hosanna. Hagen, MacEwan U’s new writer-in-residence, talked to 12thnight about his choice HERE.

•A seven-minute video of Catalyst’s until the next breath, an epic-scale Grand Act of Theatre that ran live and outdoors in early October, continues to be up and on YouTube, available through the National Arts Centre site. It’s part of the NAC’s cross-country invitation to a dozen of Canada’s most innovative theatre companies to create something big, memorable, outdoors, and COVID-safe that speaks to the time. Then check out the amazing array of strikingly different responses to the NAC provocation from other companies. Here’s the 12thnight PREVIEW  with Catalyst artistic director Jonathan Christenson and designer Bretta Gerecke. And 12thnight reported back from that frosty October night HERE.

Chronicles of a Mime, two-minute film by Shawn Koski for Play The Fool Short Film Festival.

High-order amusement for short attention spans: did you ever check out the winners of the Play The Fool Festival’s first annual Short Film Competition in the fall? You’ll get a big kick out of the array of the two-minute (and under) award-winners still online. I loved Chronicles of a Mime, an insight (by Shawna Koski) into what mimes do when they’re just hanging out (the people want to know). A clown homage to Beckett, Tapes Last Krap (by Jesse Buck) is excellent too. And for the COVID-ian moment we’re in, Lady Rona in ‘Don’t Change Your Lifestyle’ by Ross Travis. The films are at playthefool.ca.

You should, incidentally, be hard at work on your own two-minute clown film. The deadline for this year’s Short Film Competition submissions is March 7.

•The Métis version of Mary’s Wedding, adapted by Tai Amy Grauman from the beautiful Canadian love-and-war story by Stephen Massicotte, continues on streaming video, from the Citadel, through Nov. 30, 2021. Meet Grauman HERE, and check out the 12thnight REVIEW.

  

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The play that haunts Darrin Hagen: the debut edition of Theatre Network’s new online book club (for plays)

Posted on January 28, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Darrin Hagen in Hosanna, Theatre Network, 2005. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In February of 1983, a kid from Rocky Mountain House, newly arrived in town, went with a pal to the theatre. The play Darrin Hagen saw that winter night would linger in his mind over the years, in every detail. And it’s come back to haunt him periodically, as a writer and actor, ever since.

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Which made Hosanna, a 1973 groundbreaker by the star Canadian playwright Michel Tremblay, a perfect Hagen choice for the debut edition of Theatre Network’s new online Book Club (for plays!) he will moderate this weekend. The monthly series is designed as a meet-up of theatre-lovers led by notable Edmonton playwrights, to discuss a Canadian play that’s been important to them. And Hosanna, Hagen points out, is still contentious, politically important,” still regarded by some commentators as a metaphor for Quebec separation.

Is the story of Hosanna’s humiliation at the hands of his lover and their friends a portrait of a society? Hosanna is multi-faceted, juicy raw material for discussion. “It’a measure of a great play that everyone finds themselves in it,” says Hagen.

Darrin Hagen. Photo supplied.

Hosanna was “one of the first plays I saw in Edmonton,” he says of the Workshop West production (starring Richard Gishler and Jack Ackroyd) in the Rice Theatre downstairs at the Citadel. “I’d never even heard of Michel Tremblay. It was the first play I’d ever seen that fractured stories, and played with time.” A landmark for Canadian theatre, it came at a seminal moment in Hagen’s own life. “It was about a drag queen. And I was on the verge of starting my own career,” says Hagen of his entrance, in sequins and size 14 pumps, into the entertainment scene at Flashback, the late lamented gay club.

A decade later Hagen saw Hosanna again, this time in a David Mann production starring Glen Gaston and Timothy Sell. And it felt different to him. By this time “I’d been through everything and come out the other side,” says Hagen of the trials and triumphs of his drag queen family life. “It marked two different periods in my life.”  The arc that forces the beleaguered Hosanna to think about “who I am underneath?” as Hagen puts it, “resonated with me differently…. The meaning keeps changing for me.”

Darrin Hagen in La Duchesse de Langeais, Guys in Disguise. Photo by Ian Jackson.

By 1990 Guys in Disguise, Hagen’s drag troupe that had evolved into a bona fide theatre company, had produced other Tremblays, La Duchesse de Langeais and Damnée Manon Sacrée Sandra. And at Theatre Network artistic director Bradley Moss had given Hagen Tremblay novels — News From Edouard and The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant among them — that flesh out the lives of the characters in Tremblay’s plays. And Hagen was struck by them.

Darrin Hagen in Hosanna, Theatre Network, 2005. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography.

Then, in 2005 at Theatre Network, Hagen starred in Hosanna alongside Jeff Page as Hosanna’s biker-stud lover. It was a capital M moment, “my favourite acting experience of my life!” Hagen declares.

“It’s visceral, it’s truth — so real and so truthful,” says Hagen of the play. And it took bravery in the early ‘70s, in a country that had only recently de-criminalized homosexuality,  “to talk about the violence, the cruelty, the meanness of that world…. And Tremblay does it without judgment,” says Hagen in admiration. There was an important playwright’s lesson in that, he thinks. “Yes, you can show the foibles, the cracks, without judging the characters…. Let them be wrong; let them be flawed; let them be angry!”

Meanwhile, in this pandemical year, Hagen, one of E-town’s premium sound designers and theatre composers (you can hear his latest theatrical work in Northern Light’s online production of The Look), is “writing music for me,” he says. A series for piano and string quartets is his quarantine venture: “a chamber suite?”. And he continues his deep-dive into queer history, that’s already resulted in two plays, Witch Hunt at the Strand and The Empress and the Prime Minister. A total-immersion researcher, he’s transcribing interviews and assembling documents and social context for his upcoming play (and book) — working title Pisces — about the ignominious 1981 police raid on the Pisces Bathhouse.

And through April, Hagen is the writer-in-residence at MacEwan University an appointment that follows his year as the U of A’s writer-in-residence and before that a writer’s residencies at the Edmonton Public Library). It’s an appointment timed to coincide with Pride Week, and to sync with The Queer History Project based at MacEwan. “Residencies are fascinating for a writer,” Hagen has found.“Working with other writers is good for your own work!” His Zoom office hours (by appointment) are Mondays.

Next up for Theatre Network’s book club is a play to be picked and introduced by the playwriting team of Hunter Cardinal and his sister Jacquelin Cardinal. Register at theatrenetwork.ca (it’s free; donations are encouraged).

   

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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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