The first line of your play is here: a public service from 12thnight

Posted on July 23, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight

The week in overheard lines (from walking alone), a selection of possible first lines for your play-in-progress.

The Fringe is coming. So feel free to use any of the following (since “Who’s there?” and “When shall we three meet again…?” are already taken):

•“Talking to him is like talking to someone who’s dead.” (possible thriller?)

•“In the end I did apply. And I haven’t heard a thing. NOT A THING. (pause) Typical.”

•“One hour 15 on hold….”

•“Fucking sourdough.”

•“My mother is on my case, just one thing after another….”

•“Don’t mind him…. He’s just being friendly.” (giant growling dog, rushing over, no leash).

•“I just think it’s going nowhere; I mean, I even hate his music.”

•“Start with going for coffee, then see….”

•“I mean, what the fuck.” (all-purpose)

•”She’s like ‘snap out of it’.”

•”Works better with gin than vodka….”

•”Even with the stairs, it’s still only, like, 8,000….”  (limited audience appeal)

•“I don’t know where I got it….” (no one wants to see this play)

•“Whatever….” (homage to Pinter or Beckett?)

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Thoughts on the Plain Janes’ Scenes From The Sidewalk the sequel

Posted on July 20, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Scenes From The Sidewalk – an inside-out cabaret relocated to the Westbury Theatre lobby, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You have to hand it to the catastrophe that is the pandemic: it’s impossible now to take for granted the “live” in live theatre. “Going out to the theatre,” a phrase to be tossed off expectantly in my line of work, has a newly minted kind of thrill to it. The feel of an adventure. If I ever took it for granted, I sure don’t now.

It’s exciting to go out and have theatre be your destination. Hell, it’s even a bit exotic finding parking in Old Strathcona.

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That’s what happened last night. The air was so coughable that the Plain Janes moved their Scenes From The Sidewalk “inside-out cabaret” inside — the Janes’ artistic director Kate Ryan called it “an inside-inside cabaret” — for the second of their sold-out two-performance run.

The sidewalk is where you hang when you can’t go inside. In the first instalment of Scenes From the Sidewalk last September, the performers were outside the Varscona, looking in at an audience of 20 with masks, clean hands and a temperature of 37 or less in the lobby, looking out. This time the “inside” was the lobby of the Fringe’s Westbury Theatre (everyone was masked, and that felt relaxing). And, hey, here’s a cheering thought: intermission, verboten in the depths of the pandemic, is back!

The intervening 10 months, isolating and scary, have ceded, if not quite given way, to a feeling that didn’t resonate in 2020. “Have you ever felt like nobody was there? Have you ever felt forgotten in the middle of nowhere?” wonder the cast together in one of the evening’s finale ensemble numbers (Found/Tonight, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Pasek & Paul). “Have you ever felt like you could disappear? Like you could fall, and no one would hear? Well let that lonely feeling wash away….”

Wash away it does in the togetherness experience that is theatre. Funny how musical theatre and even pop song lyrics take on new colours from their environment, one that feels different in a somewhat vaccinated summer, in sometimes subtle ways, from 10 months ago.

Beautiful City from Godspell, for example, sung by newcomer Logan Stefura, loses its carapace of pandemic edge in the hopefulness of the moment (“not a city of angels/ But we can build a city of man”). Ditto Feeling Good from The Roar of the Greasepaint the Smell of the Crowd, performed by the formidable triple threat/spoken word poet Althea Cunningham. Or I’m Not Afraid of Anything, an escalating anthem to self-confidence from Jason Robert Brown’s Songs For A New World, delivered with major impact by the charismatic Daniela Fernandez.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more darkly funny song about the ironies of death than My Dogs from the William Finn musical Elegies, written in the aftermath of AIDS 9-11. The wry Josh Travnik makes a meal of it — as he does with the breathless momentum of  One by One by One from the Adam Gwon musical Ordinary Days, whose frustrated protagonist, rebuffed over and over by urban passersby in his quest to distribute handbills for a visual artist who’s in jail, sings “the city tends to make me feel invisible.”

So are we ready to shed the cloak of invisibility that wrapped around us when all human contact was declared dangerous? As always the Janes mine the musical theatre and pop repertoire for songs that get at questions like that, in clever ways. Gwon’s Calm (sung by Rain Matkin-Szilagyi, who’s a real find) is playful about the frantic life that catapults towards a calm that feels all wrong.     

The seven-member cast  — including musical theatre composer/lyricist Graham, a sympathetic and lively accompanist at the keyboard — have chosen songs that speak to them. Graham, who’s off to NYU Tisch this fall, is a talent to watch, judging by the musical Marnie Day he wrote with cast-mate Sue Goberdhan, and his song In 50 Years, with its lyrical insights in how to approach a future that is anything but certain.

Time, suspended indefinitely during the pandemic, is back in operation. As the finale of Marnie Day has it, “We don’t got forever…. You just gotta do what you can with the time you’ve got….”

Back to the theatre, my friends, to discover the possibilities.

   

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The Grindstone is ready to crack you up: the Comedy Fest is back

Posted on July 19, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca    

In a laughter-parched land, there is hope.

After a year of set-backs, re-sets, contortionist pivots and ingenious work-arounds involving the great outdoors in all kinds of weather, the Grindstone Theatre in Old Strathcona launches a second edition of its Comedy Festival Wednesday.   

Try as he might, the Grindstone’s indefatigable artistic director Byron Martin had to cancel last year’s fest, all planned and contracted as it was. True, complicated logistics didn’t prevent him from throwing a last-minute five-day socially distanced “mini-Fringe” at the end of August. The Re-Set Festival had nine rotating improv, stand-up, and sketch comedy shows in two tiny venues, including the Grindstone’s 84-seat bistro headquarters on 81 Ave.

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After all, Martin himself, who must have been terrified by a moment of inactivity as a child, is a spontaneity specialist. A rare example of a triple-threat/impresario, he’s also an improv artist, the creator of (and participant in) the hit show The 11 O’Clock Number, an entirely improvised musical that’s part of the Comedy Fest. And improv artists are trained to say Yes.

“I reached out to the 2020 artists first,” Martin says of the lineup of talent for the the five-day festivities. He lost a couple of headliners in the intervening time, “but I’m excited and feeling hopeful about this year!”

The starry all-Canadian line-up includes John Dore (of self-titled meta-reality mockumentary-style TV series fame), Chris Locke (from Baroness Von Sketch and CBC’s The Debaters), Adrienne Fish, Andrea Jin, and Ryan Williams.

Local faves include the sparkling sketch trio Girl Brain, Rapid Fire Theatre’s Marv n’ Berry, Charles Haycock, and the elite virtuoso improv team Mark Meer and Ron Pederson. The latter, incidentally, leads a one-day improv workshop July 23 as part of Grindstone’s education program. Ah, and did I mention the Stand-Up Stand-Off Competition (the finals are on Wednesday night)?

The Comedy Festival has five days of indoor shows (two shows a night) in the Grindstone Theatre, plus entertainment on the new 250-seat Howl & Roar Records Outdoor Stage in the Trinity Lutheran parking lot next to the Grindstone (mask-wearing is “encouraged but not “enforced”). Creating that second venue outdoors was a response to pandemic vagaries: “we were locked down and re-opened so many times,” sighs Martin.

The Grindstone has also reno’ed a 120-seat venue under the Mill Creek Cafe, “down the hall” from the Sewing Machine Factory on Whyte. As Martin describes, the new Grindstone Studio is a rehearsal studio and stage, and contains the office of Grindstone’s “education manager.” Grindstone holds comedy classes of all kinds, and the upcoming Camp Grindstone is (July 26-30 and Aug. 23 to 27) is “a weeklong exploration of Grindstone’s signature classes” in improv, sketch writing, performance art, musical theatre.

Actually, Grindstone, which hosts “events” for every known holiday and then some, is home to no fewer than four festivals this summer. After the Comedy Fest comes a big outdoor dance party/disco party July 31 and Aug. 1, at Louise McKinney Park. Then Grindstone is a Fringe BYOV with two venues — the bistro theatre headquarters (the outdoor patio space will be the show lobby) and  the new Grindstone Studio — each with  five or six shows. Then, there’s the second annual Mural Festival…. Even the tireless Martin allows that “it’s a bit overwhelming now … but it feel great!.”

And all of the above, of course, is in addition to running a bistro and bar, with his brother Joses Martin, the Grindstone’s producer.

The idea of “an indie comedy festival to support local comedians” in a combo of improv, sketch, and stand-up, is irresistible to Martin. The Grindstone is where Girl Brain, for example, first gathered fans. He says mildly, “it’s a pretty safe bet you’re gonna laugh.”

PREVIEW

Grindstone Comedy Festival 2021

Theatre: Grindstone Theatre and Bistro

Where: 10019 81 Ave.

Running: Wednesday through Sunday

Full schedule and tickets: grindstone theatre.ca 

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Mamma Mia! here we go again: live theatre is back at the Mayfield

Posted on July 17, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It sounds like the blueprint for a door-slammer farce to be sure (the kind that the Mayfield Dinner Theatre propels across its stage from time to time). After closing and re-opening and re-closing the doors a dizzying number of times this difficult pandemic year and a half, the theatre is about to open them again.

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The Mayfield is back, starting in September, with a five-show season of live shows for real-live in-person audiences. And with four of the five productions, music — yes, singing! — is involved, in a lineup that leans deliberately into proven audience favourites, and the shows that got cancelled.

It starts small, Sept. 14 to Oct. 31, with the two-actor music bio-revue A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline, starring Sara-Jeanne Hosie and Sheldon Bergstrom as the narrator. And by next spring (April 12 to June 12, with an extended run possible), the lineup goes big and full-bodied: the Broadway blockbuster Mamma Mia! with its cast of nearly two dozen plus the band.

That hit was to have opened at the  Mayfield last spring. So “Here We Go Again,” laughs Mayfield artistic director Van Wilmott. Retaining the rights a year later was “tricky,” he says. The show is in big demand, a natural for the big Broadway touring companies when they’re back in action. “It’s a happy show to come back to.”

The Mayfield’s Yuletide slot November 9 to January 23) is occupied by a hit show originally scheduled for last summer. Wilmott has had to cancel Buddy – The Buddy Holly Story, a perennial Mayfield fave last seen at the theatre a decade ago, no fewer than three times.

Nashville Outlaws, which runs Feb. 1 to April 3, marks Wilmott’s return to his first Mayfield show as artistic director (and the first production he directed there) in 2007. The revue, by Will Marks and Sara-Jeanne Hosie taps a nonpareil hit catalogue: songs by Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson.

“Each show (in the season) gets a bit more complicated,” says Wilmott. “You just don’t know the audience comfort level. A big question mark.”

During the summer of 2022, July 5 to Aug. 1, Mayfield audiences will be watching a revival of Sexy Laundry, a comedy by Vancouver’s Michele Riml last seen at the Mayfield in 2011, when the run was shortened by the theatre renos of the time. It’s about a couple trying to jump-start a 25-year-old marriage, armed with a copy of Sex For Dummies. Casting for the new production awaits.

Like so many of Edmonton’s theatres, the Mayfield has been persistent and ingenious in the face of ever-changing restrictions. The lockdown of March 2020 meant that the musical Rock of Ages never hit the stage at the dinner theatre. When the theatre returned to action last summer, it was with a straight play (Playing With Fire: The Theo Fleury Story) since singing onstage was verboten, and an audience at tables separated by Plexiglass and reduced to about 25 per cent of capacity. After that, the original revue Keep Calm and Rock On, for which special Plexiglass booths were custom-made for individual singers, closed four weeks early in the big lockdown of last November. But, as Wilmott points out, since gatherings beyond households were not permitted (much less dancing in the aisles), the theatre’s usual Christmas party crowd couldn’t happen anyway. The upshot: the Mayfield with a massive Plexiglass surplus; some has been diverted to the washrooms.

“It feels so exciting to have a show onstage coming up,” says Wilmott. The plan is for full capacity in the 450-seat house, and a return to the theatre’s signature buffet. All kitchen and serving staff will be masked, with rigorous sanitizing measures in place.

Tickets are on sale soon at mayfield theatre.ca.

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Scenes From The Sidewalk: another Plain Jane “inside out cabaret”

Posted on July 15, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

The cast of Scenes From The Sidewalk (a second inside-out cabaret), Plain Jane Theatre. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“Something has got to start/ I am ready to be loved”….

— Ready To Be Loved, from Edges by Pasek and Paul.

Eleven months ago, a little indie company with a specialty in musical theatre — re-discovering, re-imagining, re-purposing, re-buffing the off-centre, the under-loved, the forgotten — had an ingenious work-around idea.

In the pandemic world of last September, when nearly the worst thing you could possibly do in public was sing (and inside a theatre? unthinkable!), the Plain Janes devised an “inside-out cabaret.” In Scenes From The Sidewalk, the audience, 20 of us, sat far apart in the Varscona Theatre lobby looking out the big front windows. The performers were outside wistfully looking in — and singing, dancing, storytelling, very separately, on the sidewalk. The city ‘hood was their stage.

The numbers they chose from the musical and pop repertoires felt reinvented by the constricting, isolating, mortality-soaked circumstances of our lives. And there were new creations, too.

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In this late-pandemic world, the Janes are back with another edition of Scenes From The Sidewalk, produced again by Kate Ryan. They’ve moved across the street to the Westbury lobby at Fringe Theatre headquarters. And for two shows, Sunday and Monday, a cast of seven — five performers from last time and two newcomers (Rain Matkin-Szilagyi and Logan Stefura, recent MacEwan grads) will be outside. They’ll be looking at the audience inside and “turning the neighbourhood into a block party,” as musical director Matt Graham puts it. The 30 “inside” tickets were gone in a flash, but you can bring a lawn chair and hang outside.

“The world felt so scary last time,” says Daniela Fernandez of Scenes From The Sidewalk I. “It felt like there was more to come.” There was an unmistakeable frisson to going out, queuing to have your temperature taken, seeing other live people out in the world, masked and distanced though they were. “Like a speakeasy,” laughs Sue Goberdhan. “Like you’d need a secret password,” Graham says.

“It was such a weird time to create anything!” he muses. A musical theatre composer/ lyricist himself (he’ll be leaving for NYU Tisch in August), Graham had been in “a song-writing slump, banging my head on the keyboard for a few months,” until the inside-out cabaret came along. In a middle-of-the-night revelation, he realized “it’s hard to be optimistic, but not impossible! This (show) is more … well, you feel the joy of the vaccine summer in the set list!”

Scenes From The Sidewalk: An Inside-Out Cabaret, part !, September 2020, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo supplied.

For one thing Scenes From The Sidewalk II is “twice as long”; the cast is doing two sets. For another, there are more group numbers than solos. And the cast had the thrill of rehearsing in person, on the garage pad of Althea Cunningham’s apartment. “Just hearing the voices together for the first time, without the lag of a Zoom call,” was “so beautiful it made you want to cry,” says Graham.

“I wanted to make everyone’s dreams come true,” he says of the song-gathering process. He asked the cast “what have you wanted to sing you haven’t been able to? What do you want to get off your chest right now? What song has been on your mind the most?”

Interestingly, though “none of us are particularly religious, there’s more gospel this time … rejoicing, making a joyful noise, I guess. Because we can!”

“The energy feels very different this time,” agrees Fernandez, “more optimistic, more hopeful, more alive. There’s more percolating. And because we’ve done it once, we’re pretty comfortable….”

No wonder actor/ playwright/ poet/ activist Cunningham picked Feeling Good (Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley) for one of her numbers: “It’s a new dawn/ It’s a new day/ It’s a new life/ For me/ And I’m feeling good….”

The song is quite precisely of this moment, says Cunningham, who’s working on a Nina Simone homage musical. “When I got my first jab, I was so emotional, I cried…. A time to celebrate!” As a black artist, her year has had the “double-whammy” of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. Her spoken word piece  Human First, First Human, “about the black experience,” is part of the show.

Goberdhan, the new co-artistic director of Azimuth (with Morgan Yamada), actually had COVID early in the pandemic. “You just realize things could have ended very differently,” she says simply. “It helps you take stock a little bit.”

She thinks the new show speaks (or rather sings) “to the ways we interact with the world, and the ways they’ve changed…. Being single during the pandemic, I’ve realized that any adverb you put in front of the word ‘single’ applies to me,” she laughs. What she wanted was “a song that invites the world into my world … a song that’s all about doors opening and things happening.” Ready To Be Loved from Edges: A Song Cycle by the Dear Evan Hansen team of Pasek and Paul is 15-years old. But it’s a perfect fit: “I think at last the cloud has moved aside/ I’ve spent a lifetime waiting/ Awoke today to find my arms are wide open….”

Lawrence’s wry and funky It’s Not All About You is on the money too. Goberdhan and Graham are doing it together. “It reflects just how much our (collective) patience has diminished,” she says. ”People have been on their own for months and months. And now you don’t know how to talk to people, how to listen to people. You have to re-learn social skills!” says Graham.

For Fernandez, this moment is about “facing fear, the fear that’s all around us…. “ And the song beautifully positioned for that is I’m Not Afraid Of Anything, from Jason Robert Brown’s Songs For A New World. She takes it to heart, since there are big changes happening in her own life — as a musical theatre triple-threat who’s moving into the male-dominated world of sound design (she’s a Citadel RBC Horizons Emerging Artist). “Scary but refreshing! Learning a new skill has helped me come into my own as an artist. The hardest part is getting started.”

Breathe from the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical In The Heights, an insight, both in Spanish and English, into overcoming the universal fear of falling short of people’s expectations, “is one of the songs in musical theatre that speaks most strongly to Fernandez, she says. “Welcome home, just breathe….”

As last time, there are original creations in the show, too. Graham’s In 50 Years is one, a reflection on the uncertainties of the future. Taste, by the queer pop duo Homofonik (Daniel Belland and Josh Travnik), is another. And the show includes the finale of Marnie Day, a 2018 musical by Goberdhan and Graham (did I mention they’re a musical-writing team?). “We don’t have forever, but let’s have a go!”

“There’s a big hug in that song,” says Graham. It’s one of the things that none of the cast will ever take for granted again.   

    

PREVIEW

Scenes From The Sidewalk II

Theatre: Plain Jane Theatre Company

Musical director: Matt Graham

Starring: Althea Cunningham, Daniela Fernandez, Sue Goberdhan, Matt Graham, Josh Travnik, Rain Matkin-Szilagyi, Logan Stefura

Where: Fringe Theatre, ATB Financial Arts Barn, Westbury Theatre lobby, 10330 84 Ave.

Running: Sunday and Monday 7:30 p.m.

Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca. pay what you will. Contributions to the show’s Gofundme Campaign are welcome.

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Summer, live theatre, and a message for you, theatre friends, from 12thnight

Posted on July 12, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

Hello theatre friends, and salutations of the summer season from 12thnight.ca!

Live theatre with live audiences. In person! Now there’s a concept that could catch on.

Exciting to see live theatre is en route back, re-emerging in a variety of ways, on a variety of scales, from the strangest, most trying 18 months ever for the art form we love, and its artists. If there’s an upside to the devastation of the pandemic year, it’s that the  astonishing resourcefulness and ingenuity of theatre artists — in stepping up to re-imagine the art and re-educate themselves — have been demonstrated so vividly. I learned the word “experimentalist” this year, and it has wide applications to the people I’ve talked to for 12thnight.ca.

Thank you, 12thnight.ca patrons, for sticking with me through this terrible, and also inspiring, year and a half. And you should know that your support of my Patreon campaign has been absolutely crucial in this hard year: the theatre coverage on the site wouldn’t have been possible without your monthly pledges. And I’m so grateful.

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I hope you’ve been enjoying the 12thnight.ca content (there is no charge to subscribe, and so far all content is free). There’s more, much more, to come as live theatre returns this summer. And it will be fascinating to see what experiments will be retained, and what will change, as the performing arts industry moves into the future in a new season.

If you haven’t been a patron before, I really hope, dear reader, that you’ll be able to join my 12thnight.ca venture outside the mainstream media — entirely funded by the readers — and help support continued coverage of the art form that is Edmonton’s special strength. And if you haven’t been able to contribute this past year, I’m hoping you’ll be able to reconsider as live theatre starts to go live.

Please join me as a Patreon patron by chipping in a monthly amount (you choose the amount) if you can. It makes 12thnight.ca possible: www.patreon.com/12thnight.

Many thanks, and see you at, or in, the theatre soon,

Liz

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Together We Fringe: A Fringe Event. Our beloved summer theatre binge is back, live, and modified for 2021

Posted on July 8, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

This year the Fringe is not going to look and feel like the adrenalized, crazy, big-ass monster you and thousands of your closest friends hang out with day and night in August (you know the rampaging giant I mean, that jostling, elbow-to-rib extravaganza of a summer theatre festival with a mind-exploding number of shows).

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But in the most trying, chaotic times theatre has known, creativity will prevail. So, yes! The monster is tamed, for safety, just this summer. But there will be live theatre, inside theatre venues (in addition to digital programming), at the upcoming 40th anniversary edition of the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival Aug. 12 to 22.

At a press conference Thursday, Fringe director Murray Utas, Fringe Theatre’s interim executive director Megan Dart, and Josh Languedoc, the Fringe’s new director of Indigenous strategic planning, outlined the modified configuration of the upcoming “Together We Fringe: A Fringe Event.” It’s a title that conjures the inaugural 1982 “event,” an unexpected grassroots eruption of summer theatre here when no one knew exactly what a Fringe would turn out to be be.

“Scenario #1 is the way it’s gonna roll,” says Utas. Along with Dart and the Fringe team, he’s spent the year since the digital edition of 2020’s The Fringe That Never Was planning, re-planning, re-re-planning 40th anniversary possibilities for the country’s oldest and biggest Fringe in this second pandemic summer— and arriving at a short list of five. #1: “We’re going inside.”

The Fringe in Edmonton, the oldest and still largest of its kind on the continent, is a perfect storm of large- and small-scale live gatherings, neither a go in pandemic times: huge outdoor crowds, approaching 800,000 in 2019, and 260 shows in some 50 venues, many of them intimate, shoulder-to-shoulder affairs between artists and audiences.

Fringe director Murray Utas. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography

This year’s return to Fringe live isn’t about a record-breaking show and audience tally, needless to say. It’s about safety, distancing (and masks) … and ingenuity. “We’re working with 60 per cent capacity indoors,” says Utas. As he explains, there will be three official indoor venues programmed by lottery (instead of 11 in 2019): the Westbury and the Backstage Theatres in the ATB Financial Arts Barn, Fringe HQ, and the Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre. First dibs on those venues went to the 2020 roster of artists.

At the fourth official indoor venue, the Roxy on Gateway, (temporary) home of Theatre Network, the Anishinaabe actor/playwright/activist Languedoc will preside over “a standing invitation,” as Utas puts it, to “be part of  conversations about rediscovering what a relationship between audience and artist means from an Indigenous perspective.” Join the circle. Bring your questions.

There will be BYOVs, too, bring-your-own indie venues acquired and outfitted by artists themselves, in five locations (instead of 39 in 2019), each curated with six or seven shows. The Varscona Theatre is one. Grindstone Theatre will run two or three venues. There will be two at La Cité francophone (one curated by Poiema Productions and Kenneth Brown, the other by Jon Paterson). Metro Cinema and Yardbird Suite are BYOVS, too, the latter curated by Rapid Fire Theatre.

So this return-to-live edition of the Fringe will have 63 or 64 indoor shows (“less than 25 per cent of a normal year” as Utas points out). The shows themselves will be announced when tickets ($13) go on sale Aug. 4.

As for fringing itself, with its packed beer tents and rib-to-rib squish of Fringers wandering through the site, put that right out of your mind. “No gathering spaces. No just coming down to the festival and walking around doing your thing….”

“We’re treating the ATB park (McIntyre aka Gazebo Park, next to Walterdale Theatre) as an outdoor venue this year,” says Utas, “not as a destination where you come to see street performers and hang out.”

For the first time “we’re gating the park, from the 83rd Ave. bike lane up to the Calgary Trail and down to the Strathcona Library.” Utas describes it thus: “You’ll buy a (timed) ticket. Once you’re inside the park, you’ll get “the Fringe experience for a couple of hours — entertainment, green onion cake.… It’s like you’re getting a two-hour pass inside. And I’m going to entertain you with some performances. But you’ll be able to wander around, buy some merch, get some snacks and some drinks, visit with your people.”

“I’ve curated the park for you,” says Utas. The shows “are specifically geared for outdoor performance … see some of the best in the world; see some different sensibilities.” Which is, of course, a stellar component of the Fringe experience.

There will be 22 outdoor shows ($20 a ticket), and seven music nights ($25).

Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s two productions, in rep on the Fringe’s outdoor stage

There’s no Kids’ Fringe this year. The theatre-for-young-audiences venue is a ticketed outdoor “youth stage” in the YES (Youth Emergency Shelter) parking lot at the north end of the usual Fringe site. During the day, it will run shows for kids. Every evening of the festival, in a new collaboration, the Freewill Shakespeare Festival will run its two offerings — 70-minute versions of Macbeth and Much Ado — in rep.

“It’s a great partnership for me,” says Utas of his Shakespeare connection. In addition to attracting an adult adult, the bold, fast Freewill productions address the 12 to 18-year-old demographic that hasn’t been singled out by Fringe programming.

In addition to live programming, the Fringe will continue to have its livestream channel, and digital content, “for those who aren’t comfortable with coming back yet.” The Nordic Studio (Studio Theatre) in the Arts Barn is the festival’s TV studio. Full content details await, but there will be interviews and conversations with Indigenous artists and community leaders (curated by Josh Languedoc). And actor/dancer/choreographer Amber Borotsik is creating “pop-up performances,” Utas says.

The big four-oh. As the Fringe turns 40, under unique circumstances that require unusual persistence and ingenuity, it’s the moment to think back on the unlikely birth and improbable exponential growth of Edmonton’s beloved and transforming summer theatre festival. Playwright Gerald Osborn, the Fringe Theatre manager and unofficial archivist, who’s a veritable repository of festival history and lore, has devised “an audio play journey,” as Utas puts it, “five to seven stories on the StoryHive platform, that will take you through the Fringe’s first years…. You the audience will walk to the first five venues, and listen to the stories.”

And Utas will make his debut as “Father Fringe,” aka lanky, pony-tailed laid-back Fringe founder Brian Paisley, whose bright off-the-cuff idea for a summer theatre binge in 1982 took hold here so startlingly. “It’s just me with more gravel in my voice,” says Utas modestly. “We just talk the same way.”

It’s nearly Fringe time in a place where that really matters. So welcome back. Stay tuned to fringetheatre.ca for updates. And that’s where the tickets will go on sale.      

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Close encounters of the puppet kind: Puppet Pub Crawl at Found Festival 2021

Posted on July 7, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

For its 10th anniversary edition (and return to live) this weekend, the Found Festival has found … puppets. Seven of them, actually, each with an original tale to tell.

Designer/ theatre creator/ scenographer Even Gilchrist, Puppet Pub Crawl. Photo by Janice Saxon.

We’ll meet them in a Found tour of seven outdoor Strathcona locales in Puppet Pub Crawl. Scenographer/designer Even Gilchrist, who’s doing a master’s degree in design at the U of A, is the dreamer-upper, creator, and curator of the project. And he gathered intrigued theatre artists, seven of them, around him. “We asked people we thought would be interested or curious … and they built their own puppets and created their own pieces!” And they’ll be performing them too.  Some are actors, some designers; for many, it’s their inaugural venture into puppetry.

“My puppet obsession runs back to school,” laughs Gilchrist who arrived here from Ottawa to study design at the U of A (he’s doing a master’s degree). “I became completely obsessed with revisiting that joy,” he says citing inspirations of puppet-mad artist friends. He’s still struck by Skeleton Key Theatre’s Swan River, in which the audience was led to the Ottawa River, to watch, in awe, as giant bird puppets, made of branches and materials found in nature, emerged from the water. “So incredible! says Gilchrist, who assisted on that project (set and costumes) and who’s assisted on some of Edmonton theatre’s most adventurous indie productions (Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play; All That Binds Us, Tracks among them).

Long regarded as the exclusive property of theatre for young audiences, puppets have been reclaimed for grown-up audiences by the likes of Ronnie Burkett and the Old Trout Puppet Workshop. They were inspirations for Gilchrist, too. “I just wanted to find unexpected ways of sharing puppetry with people,” he says, “to challenge their understanding of what puppetry can be.”

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Originally destined for Found Fest 2020, Puppet Pub Crawl isn’t quite Gilchrist’s first Close Encounter Of The Puppet Kind, as he puts it.  He’s had “brief dalliances … but this is my true puppet debut!” There’s no Gilchrist puppet in the show, incidentally, but there’s one waiting in the wings at home, a work-in-progress hopeful named Marty.

Even though it was conceived (just) before “The Great Pause,” as he puts it, the project seems specially made for the peculiar times in which we’ve been living.

Andrés Moreno, Puppet Pub Crawl, Found Festival 2021. Photo by Even Gilchrist.

“It was a simple prompt,” Gilchrist says of the original call to artists, “with the full understanding it was a flexible, movable prompt.” Namely, “connection … the desire, or the pressure, to form connections with strangers in different locations, those brief or meaningful or absurd connections you make or observe.… For me it was about hello’s and goodbyes.”

Gilchrist’s original plan for The Puppet Pub Crawl was for “a stroll down Whyte Ave, but restrictions and safety concerns canned that busy locale. Now the audience is guided to seven outdoor locations — including Viva Clayworks and Strathcona Spirits Distillery — all in the area around the Grindstone Theatre on 81 Ave.

Despite the challenges of rethinking the project every time COVID restrictions changed, “it’s been very fulfilling,” Gilchrist says. The stories aren’t thematically linked, really, but they share “the same journey of discovering connections.” And the audience has the fun of putting the pieces together.

Check out 12thnight’s survey of the Found Festival here.

PREVIEW

Found Festival 2021

Puppet Pub Crawl

Theatre: Common Ground Arts Society

Directed by: Rory Turner

Starring: Rebecca Cypher, Frances Girard, Skye Grinde, Abby McDougall, Andrés Moreno, Dill Prusko, Aaron Refugio

Where: seven locations in Old Strathcona, starting at Strathcona Spirits Distillery, 10122 81 Ave.

Running: Thursday through Sunday

Tickets: Common Ground Arts Society

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Found: the festival of surprising encounters is back to live performance

Posted on July 6, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Searching for a find at Found….

It’s the 10th anniversary of a festival that has taken audiences to unexpected encounters with art and artists — in places they never expected to find themselves.

The unconventional engagement, the reimagined connection between creators and their audiences … that’s what the Found Festival’s brigade of experimenters and fomenters is all about. The pandemic has been a test of that kind of creativity. And times being what they’ve been for a year and a half — let’s face it, isolating, uncertain, and weird — there’s a celebratory feel to the 2021 edition of the festivities, returning live to Strathcona Thursday for a four-day run.

“Artists have had to be really nimble and agile,” says Found Fest director Beth Dart of the ever-changing COVID protocols. And she has the Found programming to prove it. After a the 2020 Found that wrapped its creative ingenuity valiantly around pandemic lockdown (I’m remembering the drive-through folk opera Chamber Obscura and the “self-guided immersive outdoor experience” Home Suite) the 2021 edition marks a return to live performance, in front of a live (masked, capacity-reduced) audience, for nearly all its programming.

The festival gave the 2020 roster of artists the option of deferring a year or creating something COVID restriction-proof as an alternative, says Dart. Most took the deferral option, and it was offered again this year: “folks had to be prepared to be flexible depending on the restrictions.” 

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And flexible they’ve been. The free Music Series curated by Mustafa Rafiq, for example, happens as a live outdoor cabaret in the back alley behind the Backstage Theatre (at the ATB Financial Arts Barns). As Dart explains, the patio capacity of is reduced by 40 per cent to 50. That locale, incidentally, is where you’ll find the Found box office and info tent. And it’s where you can find yourself tucking into a drink and food (from the Fringe Grounds Cafe) with your household/ cohorts.

The Found Festival poetry showcase, Snap If You Can Hear Me, curated by Dwennimmen (artistic producer of the Edmonton Poetry Festival), is a kind of poetry stroll, a tour to four pop-up locations, with four poets in place performing at each. You sally forth from at McIntyre Park (aka the Gazebo Park) adjacent to Walterdale Theatre,

Frances Girard, Puppet Pub Crawl. Photo by Even Gilchrist

Puppet Pub Crawl is the brainchild of designer/ scenographer/ “experimentalist” Even Gilchrist, Found Fest’s Fresh AiR artist-in-residence. It takes us on a tour of seven hidden Strathcona locations to meet seven very different puppet tale-tellers, created (both the puppet and the tale) by seven theatre artists. “You’re out on the town, making fleeting connections with strangers,” says Dart, who describes Gilchrist as “a rising star as a creator and collaborator” (meet him in an upcoming 12thnight post).

The logistics are “pure Rube Goldberg, basically,” Dart laughs. There are only six tickets to Puppet Pub Crawl per night of the festival, one ticket per show, with each ticket good for up to six members of a cohort or household, with timed departures of successive audience clusters every 15 minutes.

The one place you’ve never been able to expect to find Found was an actual theatre. This year, that’s different, too. David Gagnon Walker’s interactive This Is The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear happens in the Arts Barns’ Studio Theatre.

This is the Story of the Child Ruled By Fear, David Gagnon Walker, Found Festival 2021. Photo supplied

Walker has been at the festival before. In 2017 he locked himself in an apartment and wrote an original play in 72 hours, while the audience watched the progress of his script on Google Docs. With This Is The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear, a reflection on the times to which we’re struggling to adapt, he invites the audience (a maximum of 14, 25 per cent of the theatre capacity) to take parts and tell the story with him. “There’s room for different levels of comfort in participation,” Dart reassures.

Civil Blood by Josh Languedoc, the Fringe’s new director of Indigenous strategic planning, gets a staged reading in ᐄᓃᐤ (ÎNÎW) River Lot 11∞ Indigenous Art Park, on Queen Elizabeth Park Road.

The staged reading of The Funeral by actor/ movement artist-turned playwright Marina Mair Sanchez at South Side Memorial Chapel (8310 104 St.) is a preamble. “We’re hoping to support its development and hopefully have it in full production at Found Festival next year,” says Dart.

Deviani Andrea in Running Live, Found Festival 2021. Photo supplied

Running Live is a creation — part live Zoom-based, part pre-recorded dance — of actor/ dancer/ choreographer playwright Richard Lee with movement artist Deviani Andrea. Billed as ‘a vlogcast/ river valley dream sequence/ digital hallucination,” it’s brought to us from their respective balconies. There’s a maximum of 30 tickets available for the live Zoom performance Thursday (where the audience can help shape the imagery); after a quick edit, it will be available for streaming during the festival.

As Dart explains there are three parts to Letter to Audiences, brought to the festival by artists Natércia Napoleão and April MacDonald Killins. “It includes a survey for Edmonton audiences about equitable representation on Edmonton stages and how they see themselves on those stages, podcast episodes discussing diversity and equal representation, and an invitation to artists and community members to have conversations on the subject.

Dart notes that it’s “the first phase, the data gathering and interviewing, to build toward a major project down the road…. It’s a pretty important conversation for us to be having right now. The Great Pause in the performing arts industry has given us time to reflect, to think about things. But reflection requires action as well.”

And, surprise!, there’s more. Someday Service a multi-media film presentation created by the artist known as exstepmom (and starring D’orjay the Singing Shaman), premieres late night Thursday on the roof-top patio at Boxer (10315 83rd Ave., 50 per cent capacity).

Let the finding begin.

PREVIEW

Found Festival 2021

Produced by: Common Ground Arts Society

Where: locations in Old Strathcona

Running: Thursday through Sunday

Full schedule and tickets: Common Ground Arts

 

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Backyard Bard, live and on demand: the Freewill Shakespeare Festival brings the plays to you

Posted on June 29, 2021 by Liz Nicholls

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You can have a fling with Shakespeare this summer. And, hey, he’ll come to your place to hang out.

As they announced on Will’s 457th birthday April 23, the Freewill Shakespeare Festival has had to take their famous resident playwright off his usual Edmonton stage, the Heritage Amphitheatre in Hawrelak Park. Big-cast full-length productions with all the al fresco trimmings (like intermission) are not in the cards in the unpredictable landscape of a second pandemic summer.

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Instead, for their 32nd season, Freewill will pack up their costumes and props, and come to you. They’ll bring inventively condensed, adrenalized, small-cast 70-minute adaptations of Macbeth and the great mid-period comedy Much Ado About Nothing to your backyard or community — wherever you are. This, as you will glean, pretty much redefines accessible Shakespeare.

In Macbeth and Much Ado, Freewill has stuck with the alternating tragedy and comedy originally planned for the season. Both plays are reimagined for two small fleet-footed multi-tasking casts of local professional actors. Freewill artistic director Dave Horak directs both ensembles.

Macbeth is performed by an all-female cast of three, in a version licensed from the U.K.’s Splendid Productions, which specializes in bold, accessible condensations. “We have permission to make it particularly ‘Edmonton’,” says Horak, “and adjust it to fit whatever COVID protocols are in place.”

A cast of five takes on more than 20 roles in the version of Much Ado About Nothing created by Horak himself.

The two productions are available Aug. 10 to 29. The suggested fee per performance is $500 (and the company is open to discussing payment options in these parlous times). To request a performance, email managing director Nikola Tonn:  md@freewillshakespeare.com.

They do but stay your pleasure.

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