Dance inspired by stage design: Mile Zero Dance’s season-opener is an experimental cabaret

Posted on September 11, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Iterate, Mile Zero Dance. Photo by Mike Borchert.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s a sassy what-if? streak in the Mile Zero Dance DNA. And you’ll see it in action Saturday night in a new way when the new MZD digital season, De-Program, comes to life on Zoom.

What if … design came first? 

Trent Crosby, step away from the console! Iterate, the season opener, is an “experimental cabaret,” part live part filmed, dreamed up and curated by MZD’s multi-talented (and well-connected) technical director/ production manager, who’s also the technical/production whiz kid at Punctuate! Theatre and L’UniThéâtre. As Crosby explains, Iterate is an adventure in match-making — designers with dancers. Inspired by his experiences at the Prague Quadrennial in 2019, an international showcase of cutting-edge stage design, his what-if? flips much of traditional theatre creation on its head: “let’s get designers to design something first, and then let’s bring that to the dancers and see what they can create….” 

Trent Crosby, Mile Zero Dance. Photo by Alexis McKeown.

“I was both excited and a little terrified,” says match-maker Crosby, a lighting designer himself who’s part of Iterate, in tandem with choreographer Leah Paterson.“But the response was so much better than I expected….”

Originally a MacEwan and Banff Centre theatre production grad — with a lighting specialty and “a particular passion for dance” — Crosby explains that his time in Prague was an eye-opener in different ways of making art. European companies, for example tend to be “not so reliant on the impetus (for performance) coming from the text or from choreography.” Iterate was born in that thought. Enter the designers. Crosby approached them first.

Erin Gruber, whose stunning scenographic creations for theatre companies here reveal a particular flair for sophisticated technology in video and projection, proposed a design in which silhouettes and projection imagery figure prominently. As Crosby puts it, she’s intrigued by “re-interpreting something controlled in a small space but with large images.”

He paired her with Shrina Patel, the dancer/choreographer/founder of the company ShaktiFlow, with a stylistic bent for “big contemporary Bollywood” movement, as Crosby puts it. She’ll perform live from MZD’s front gallery space on 95th Street.

For his own design contribution to the evening, Crosby proposed “three tubes … isolation chambers that are also projection surfaces, constrained spaces overlaid with images with daily life.” And inspired by this space, an allusion to the frictions of the current moment in time, Paterson choreographed for a trio of dancers (Brett Bowser, Camille Ensminger, and Michelle Alannah).

Veteran designer Marissa Kochanski, whose bold, colourful work has graced stages large and small in Edmonton, “came in with something quite personal,” says Crosby, “from going through her deceased father’s stuff and using materials she’s collected.” He paired her with performance artist Migueltizina Solis.

Dancer/actor Zoe Gassman created a dance film from short pieces she filmed every day, based on an emotional state. The result is paired with musician/musicologist Daniel-Akira Stadnicki, who improvises live.

The only piece ‘from away’ is a filmed contribution from Toronto-based designer Rachel Forbes with dancer/choreographers Katherine Semchuk and Mateo Galindo Torres.

Musical interludes are by Aladean Kheroufi, a musical artist of the neo-soul/R&B persuasian. 

“We’re trying to figure out how to present our work digitally, in interesting, dramatic ways,” says Crosby. “How to bring the scrappiness of MZD into a digital space…. And how to keep it moving.” It’s “a learning curve” he says of a variety of inspirations including Club Quarantine, the underground queer nightclubs on Zoom.

In the new pandemic world , MZD presented the last two productions of its 2019-2020 season in the digital world. Going into the new season and battling Zoom fatigue, says Crosby, “every show is a chance to think ‘how do we step this up?’”

PREVIEW

Iterate

Company: Mile Zero Dance

Curated by: Trent Crosby

Where: Zoom

When: Saturday, 7 p.m.

Tickets: free or “pay what you want.” Guests must register in advance to receive login info.

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Impossible? EDMONten, a showcase of full-length 10-minute plays

Posted on September 8, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Playwright Marina Mair Sanchez, whose play Rooftop Murmurs is part of EDMONten. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If we didn’t know it before, we do now, after six months of theatre trying hard and being ingenious on screen, size isn’t everything. (And as for duration, haven’t you asked yourself what’s happened to your attention span?).

Brevity is an achievement; it’s like simplicity that way, a lot harder than it looks. And EDMONten! is the showcase to prove it. An entire full-length play in ten minutes? With a beginning, a middle, and an end? How can it be possible? 

Playwright Amanda Samuelson.

After a half-year delay, EDMONten!, a showcase of original un-produced ten-minute plays originally slated for March, is opening this week. The actors and playwrights are live (and socially distanced) at the Grindstone Theatre. You the audience are at home and online.

When they put out the call for blind submissions, The Short & Suite Collective — two playwrights (Connie Massing and Michele Vance Hehir) and a dramaturg (Tracy Carroll) — were blitzed by the submissions. Six got chosen, and as it turns out they were penned by a mix of veterans and emerging artists: Gate D98 by Amanda Samuelson, Fledglings by Beth Graham, What/For by Evelyn Rollans, All The Way To Pluto by Liam Salmon, Rooftop Murmurs by Marina Mair Sanchez, and Rumspringa by Nicole Moeller. Honourable mention: The Disney Afternoon by Mark Stubbings.

playwright Evelyn Rollans

Each playwright gets $250 plus two staged readings of their play by the actor ensemble: Isaac Andrew, Linda Grass, Jameela McNeil and Paul Morgan Donald. The performance run Friday (7:30 p.m.) and Saturday (1:30 p.m.).

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The $10 tickets for EDMONten! are available at the online Grindstone box office. 

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Playing With Fire: the Mayfield straps on the blades, live, with the Theo Fleury story

Posted on September 3, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Shaun Smyth as Theo Fleury in Playing With Fire, Persephone Theatre 2016. Photo by Electric Umbrella/Liam Richards

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The show that skates (really!) onto the Mayfield Dinner Theatre stage next week — live — is the story of a small-town prairie boy from a neglectful and chaotic family, who makes a big life-changing discovery.

It’s quintessentially Canadian: when six-year-old Theo Fleury, from Russell, Man., puts on blades and ventures onto ice, he finds what  he’s been missing. Joy.

As Playing With Fire: The Theo Fleury Story reveals, that first fateful discovery is followed by others. The big talent and big dreams that took that kid to improbable NHL stardom were sabotaged by the fallout from the horrific boyhood abuse that landed Western Hockey League coach Graham James in jail. The way a fierce and funny hockey star, haunted by his past, blew up $50 million and (very nearly) a career in spectacular fashion, and how he regained his life and himself … they’re part of the story too.

The hit production fashioned by the award-winning director Ron Jenkins from Kirstie McLellan Day’s solo play (based on Fleury’s candid 2009 autobiography) stars the charismatic actor Shaun Smyth, a U of A theatre grad who left the West Coast three years ago for a Hamilton home base. He’s put on his skates, left one first, exactly as the small and feisty ex-Calgary Flames forward did — and slammed into the boards across the country, ever since the show premiered at Calgary’s ATP in 2012.

On the phone from his home town of Sydney in Cape Breton (where he returned from Alberta in 2017), Jenkins is conjuring the night Fleury himself came to see the show at the Citadel in 2015. Lights up, standing ovation, someone spots the hockey great and yells “We love you Theo!” All hell breaks loose. Suddenly everyone is cheering and crying. 

Smyth’s wife Jennie (actor/writer/director Jennie Esdale) and I were bawling our heads off. So was (Citadel production manager) Cheryl Hoover, the whole crew, everyone….”

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In Montreal, at the Centaur Theatre, Canadiens players and Dick Irvin, “the voice of the Habs,” came to see the show. In Calgary, at ATP where Playing With Fire premiered, the Calgary Flames came, and brought their families. Audiences showed up in their Flames jerseys. “The theatre was a sea of red,” says Jenkins. The show broke ATP’s beer sales records. Whenever Shaun left the “stage,” the usher standing by would high-five him. “So moving.” Jenkins chokes up a bit remembering.

The production, which has been at many of the country’s regional theatres (and was slated for a Blyth Festival run this summer until the shutdown), takes place entirely on “ice,” with Smyth on real skates. The Mayfield season-opener marks the return to town of an actor who went to theatre school here, and a director/writer whose resumé includes 10 Sterling Awards and a stint as Workshop West artistic director.

For these pandemical times, the 450-seat Mayfield has been dramatically reduced for 150 patrons, reconfigured with plexiglass between socially distanced tables and booths. Masks are de rigueur to enter or move. The signature buffet has been replaced by table service. The show has been tightened to an intermission-less 90 minutes. 

Shaun Smyth as Theo Fleury in Playing With Fire, Persephone Theatre 2016. Photo by Electric Umbrella/Liam Richards

And as for the stage, it’s sprayed with a synthetic ice called EZGlide before every performance. As Jenkins laughs, Playing With Fire is the only show this year where  plexiglass between the stage and the audience actually makes narrative sense. Since we’re at the rink, puck after puck cracks against it; the sound is pure hockey.

Jenkins, a hockey fan who played pick-up games with other theatre guys during his time in Edmonton, remembers getting invited by McLellan Day’s agent to read the memoir he’d been hoping to get for Christmas. “I barrelled through it,” he says. “It’s a great book! There was so much I didn’t know. So revealing and so brutally honest about everything and everyone. Mostly himself.”

At the time, the script was set in a hotel room. “The story points were all there. But it had to happen on an actual rink! Look, this is a completely compelling story!” Rollerblades, the usual solution for other hockey plays like Life After Hockey, Kenneth Brown’s love letter to pickup backyard hockey, were out, Jenkins thought. Too theatrical for Fleury’s story. “It’s the NHL; it has to be on hockey skates!” Luckily, EZGlide, that magic elixir, had been invented by then.

Smyth, says Jenkins, was the obvious choice of star. “He’s a great actor; he looks like Theo. Same height, same weight.” Only one question remained for Smyth. “Have you played hockey?”

Well, yes. I remember the engaging Smyth telling me that, yes, he could skate, and he could even skate backward. But as for playing an NHL hockey great? That kind of authenticity in every cross-over took a huge commitment in sweat equity. Smyth commandeered a patch of asphalt in the only playground on Bowen Island, then rented the indoor rink at the end of his street in Vancouver. Hour after hour day after day he roller-skated.

Smyth’s in-laws were, as Jenkins puts it, “steeped in hockey. Jennie’s father was a coach of the Golden Bears; her brother was a pro player. And they helped him train.”

Fleury’s story has a power that’s hard to shake. Jenkins muses on its appeal. “Canada is hockey. Hockey is Canada…. There’s an innocence about a boy with a dream. And someone comes into his life who turns a dream into a nightmare.”

“He was 15 years old. And people were talking about him. Hey, there’s this kid from Russell, Manitoba. And he’s incredible!… Graham James held that dream over his head, in a way. Even when the shit hit the fan (as Sheldon Kennedy came forward to identify himself as a victim of the junior hockey coach), Theo kept (the secret) and kept it and kept it. How do you go through $50 million? He was blowing up his life. And nobody really knew why.”

It’s profoundly poignant, Jenkins finds, that “at the end of his career when he quit, Fleury didn’t call anyone. He just disappeared…. All he needed to do was make one phone call, say ‘I think I’m going to retire’ and he’d have had $4 million from the Montreal Canadiens.”

“The way he gains some power, and his life, back makes people feel like cheering,” Jenkins says of Playing With Fire. Now there’s a sound in short supply these days.    

PREVIEW

Playing With Fire: The Theo Fleury Story

Theatre: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

Written by: Kirstie McLellan Day, based on the book by McLellan Day and Theo Fleury

Directed by: Ron Jenkins

Starring: Shaun Smyth

Running: Sept. 8 through Oct 25

Tickets: 780-483-4051, mayfieldtheatre.ca

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And back to the live! a horizon-expanding experiment at the Citadel

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Horizon Lab, Citadel Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

On Friday March 13 I went to the theatre — the Varscona, to see Shadow Theatre’s production of Heisenberg, starring Amber Borotsik and Glenn Nelson.

I haven’t stepped into a theatre since. Until Saturday night.

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Which is not like nipping out for a leg stretch or a breath of fresh air before Act II, you have to admit. Five-and-a-half months: A lot has happened in the world since then (and there’s been a lot of not-happening and staying home, too). 

It was the second of the sold-out two-night run of Horizon Lab at the Citadel, a collection of five original 10-minute pieces by five teams of BIPOC, LGBTQ and disabled artists. They, along with designer Elise CM Jason, were prompted by a simple but probing question. “Where are your stories?”

The Citadel closed its doors March 13, right after the dress rehearsal for The Garneau Block, which would have gone into previews the following night. An entire industry was, abruptly, cancelled. As the idea of live theatre blurred into some sort of distant ever-receding horizon, it  felt strange to be out on a Saturday night. In actual clothes. With shoes and a destination. Even pulling into that parkade under the Citadel, where I’ve kvetched about shelling out money  thousands of times (yup, 10 bucks is still the evening rate), seemed almost exotic.   

Instead of the usual queue at the box office in the lobby, there was a welcome desk just inside the south door: two masked people with smiling eyes, a clipboard, hand sanitizer. The instructions: Go up to the Shoctor lobby, stay distanced, wait to be ushered into the theatre, one (or one party) at a time, stay put for the duration in the seat assigned.

Small clusters of masked people stood around, expectantly. I recognized a playwright here, an actor there, a theatre couple over by the windows. In theatre, where the hug is the universally recognized equivalent of the handshake, the greeting was the wave. Plus a lot of eyebrow acting. 

Hand sanitizer bottles where the glossy programs are usually stacked. More hand sanitizer applied by the masked usher at the door of the Shoctor who pointed to the masked usher inside, who assigned a seat.    

Horizon Lab, Citadel Theatre.

Only 100 tickets, free but reservable, were available for Horizon Lab, for socially distanced seats in the 681-seat Shoctor Theatre. Being part of a 100 per cent masked and distanced audience felt reassuring. But the distances seemed vast (the couple in front of me was five rows away; the theatre-goer “beside” me was 10 seats away). But there we were, inside the wood-lined plush-seat venue. I’ve been there so many times in the decades; I haven’t really looked at the place in years. And, as a playwright/actor I know said to me, in the lobby before, “you’ll find it kind of weird at first, but as soon as the lights go out you’re home.” He was right.

Oddity: there is no one beside you, shoulder to shoulder, laughing along with you, clapping in unexpected places, and just breathing in with you at crucial moments. Theatre is, after all, based on the live communal feeling of being part of a crowd. Bonus: there is no one beside you coughing and fishing around in their purse for a candy to unwrap loudly and a cellphone to check surreptitiously. Along with all of you, I’ve been in audiences of way less than 100, but in intimate spaces, not 681-seat houses. 

Under circumstances that felt oddly formal (and very safe), but celebratory too, the Treaty 6 land acknowledgment had an unusual resonance, as presented by the exuberant Metis-Cree artist Tai Amy Grauman, one of the trio of summer Citadel artistic associates (including Helen Belay and Mieko Ouchi) who’d dreamed up the Horizon Lab initiative.

The impulse was part of the Citadel’s program of welcoming diverse, marginalized artists, who’ve often been excluded from theatre-making. The most graphic was the opening piece, Part of This World (a collaboration between Carly Neis, Patricia Cerra, and Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks). “Can we get Carly Neis to the stage?” says a stage manager voice.

Maybe, but it’s tricky. Neis’s story — the story of disabled artist, whose day job is administration and box office at the Citadel — was demonstrated as a physical odyssey towards the ever-elusive stage, a dangerous and often discouraging quest full of obstacles and delays for her and a remarkably calm, stage-savvy support dog Oakley. How do you find your light, centrestage, when your motorized wheelchair might not fit in elevators, or doors, or be visible over high counters? “Don’t worry about it. I’m still OK down here,” she sighs, after every setback. “When will other folks catch up to my normal?”

This show, she says poignantly, is “the start to my happily-ever-after….”

For The Boy and the Sun (by Cree artist Todd Houseman and Latinx artist Lady Vanessa Cardona), the three disks of Jason’s lovely design, glow like planets. An exasperated Sun (Christina Nguyen) calls out an “Alberta boy” (Sheldon Stockdale). “Look asshole … you’re a racist and racists go to hell….”

The most whimsical, a sort of fantasy coming-of-age adventure quest for a plucky kid and a single father, is Please Don’t Put Me In A Situation. It’s created and performed by queer multi-disciplinary artist Elena Eli Belyea and Sudanese-Canadian actor/ writer/musician Mohamed ‘Moe’ Ahmed.

The Book of Persephone, by Mac Brock and Tasana Clarke and performed by the charismatic latter, finds in the myth of Persephone, who disappears “over and over again,” a powerful image for the longing to be reinvented, to find another self, “stop running,” and be home.

In the finale Delay, created and performed by Richard Lee Hsi and Morgan Yamada to their own musing voice-over text, the quest for a livable, meaningful identity in these strange times comes home … to the theatre.  Both are eloquent physical actors and both are masked.

Am I still an actor?” wonders Lee Hsi. “I’ve forgotten what to do with my hands?” Yamada revisits questions she once mocked, like “how do you memorize all those lines?”

As actors, robbed of their raison d’être by a virus, they’ve discovered “a delay between mind and body.” And in beautiful synchronized sequences, their bodies “act” that delay out. When they connect hand-to-hand it’s briefly, and followed by hand sanitizing.

“I wake up and every day is the same day,” says Lee Hsi. We all know now what that means. And we know now that we’ll be back in the theatre — in a strange new way perhaps, but we’ll be back.

Stay tuned. The Citadel will be posting a digital version of Horizon Hub soon. 

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We’ll meet again: Melanie Gall returns to active duty in her Vera Lynn show

Posted on August 28, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Melanie Gall as Vera Lynn in We’ll Meet Again. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In her TV address of April, when Queen Elizabeth encouraged the British people to be strong and stay resolute in a new kind of Blitz, she was invoking the spirit of the wartime 40s — and its most famous song.

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“We will meet again,” declared the Queen, an allusion to Vera Lynn’s biggest hit in a 93-year career. “We’ll meet again/ don’t know where/ don’t know when….”

“Even Vera Lynn couldn’t make it through 2020 unscathed,” as Melanie Gall notes. The iconic English singer died, at 103, in June. 

Her most galvanizing song has a particular resonance during these virus-battered, isolating times. After five months hiatus, Gall, the Edmonton-based much-travelled star of such solo Fringe hits as Edith Piaf: The Sparrow and the Mouse and Red Hot Mama: A Sophie Tucker Cabaret, is back live and singing (outdoors and at a safe distance) this very weekend. Her award-winning tribute show We’ll Meet Again: Vera Lynn, the Forces’ Sweetheart comes to the outdoor parking lot of the Jasper Place Curling Club Sunday, 2 p.m.

Gall’s startlingly far-reaching international touring schedule (Europe, Africa, Australia, South America) has long been set in motion by annual appearances at the Edinburgh Fringe. After a sold-out run of Ingenue: Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland, and the Golden Age of Hollywood at the Adelaide Fringe in March (it won the Best Musical award there), it’s been a whole season of tour cancellations for Gall. If times had been different, audiences in Durbin’s home town of Winnipeg would have seen the show at the Fringe there in July, before a run at the Edmonton Fringe earlier this month. 

Melanie Gall in Piaf and Brel: The Impossible Concert. Photo supplied.

Gall, who grew up in St. Albert, is as funny and engaging in conversation as she is onstage. A classical opera singer by training, she graduated from the U of A, then moved to Toronto and then New York. It was in the Metropolitan Opera training program she started fretting at the constraints. “In opera,” she said, you didn’t get to make your own artistic choices,” she says. “It’s strictly music-mandated; I loved the music but (opera) didn’t make me happy, and everyone was mean.” She laughs.

She made money in New York doing stints in Law and Order, “as a body double for someone pregnant.” And then she met Kirk Fitzpatrick, “a meta-clown with a weird act, who suggested doing the Fringe.” And that decision has been her bread-and-butter, Gall says. “I use the Fringes to sell to theatres.” In Edinburgh, a magnet for agents and festival and theatre managers, Gall is a rare example of a performer who not only gets gigs, but actually makes money. “I have an agent there, I got my Australia tour there, and I even got an Off-Broadway run through Edinburgh….”

“I learned as I went,” she says of a musical theatre path that began a decade ago. “And some shows were better than others.” Her Irving Berlin show, for example, that focussed on his early “quasi-naughty” songbook were out of copyright restrictions in the States, but not in Canada. Who knew? A cease-and-desist order ensued. 

Since Gall writes the text that glues the songs of her hour-long shows together (“40 minutes of singing, 15 minutes of writing”), she gradually developed an appetite for historical research. Her go-to libraries are the New York Performing Arts Library and the British Museum in London. “You’re living the research while you’re doing it,” she says of the experience of handling old programs, diaries, newspaper articles.

The leading expert on wartime knitting songs, Gall has fashioned not one but two shows  — Stitch in Time: A Knitting Cabaret and More Power to Your Knitting, Nell! — from “the lost knitting songs of World Wars I and II.”

“I tell stories and sing,” says Gall, who now has two CDs of knitting songs (mostly British, with one French and one Czech song). She knits onstage, and invites audiences to bring their own knitting to the show. “In Winnipeg, someone stopped the show” and rushed onstage to help, insisting that she’d dropped a stitch. “What do you do?” Needless to say there is nothing in the operatic handbook to cover the exigency of re-claiming your needles.

This summer’s premiere would have been The Lost Songs of Prohibition. As she points out, drinking songs would be a natural for cabarets in licensed venues. Next year’s show is an homage to Noel Coward.

Melanie Gall, We’ll Meet Again. Photo supplied.

Gall loves the Fringe tour. “It’s really fun, and it’s a level playing field! You get to play with the cool kids — and be one!”

Gall’s Vera Lynn show, which premiered in 2017 when the singer was a sprightly 99, was inspired by her grandfather’s love of the repertoire. “The BBC data base is full of great personal stories of World War II…. She didn’t walk away from the fans. She was there for them.”

“Vera Lynn,” incidentally, is Cockney rhyming slang for gin. And the singer had to take a spirits company, Halewood International, to court when they tried to use her name on the label.

At Sunday’s show you can expect to her a dozen or more songs from the 90-song Vera Lynn archive (including, of course, White Cliffs of Dover), “depending on the timing.” A parking lot venue doesn’t faze Gall in the least. “In Milan, I pretended to be American for a July 4 show.” In Chad she played outdoor at an international francophonie festival. “I’m willing to go anywhere!”

The Queen and Vera Lynn were right. We’ll meet again.

PREVIEW

We’ll Meet Again: Vera Lynn, the Forces’ Sweetheart

Created by and starring: Melanie Gall

Where: parking lot, Jasper Place Curling Club, 16521 107 Ave. (free parking, “lots of room to socially distance”).

Running: Sunday, 2 p.m.

Tickets: suggested price $20

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Heart + Soul: EPCOR’s good news for the performing arts

Posted on August 27, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

EPCOR’s initiative

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Every theatre company (and performing arts organization) in this live theatre town has sustained a devastating blow in the sudden, and continuing, shutdown of the industry six months ago.

In a bleak landscape for live performance, here’s welcome news: theatres, take note. EPCOR has launched a new $1.25 million community recovery fund in support of the city’s hard-hit arts/ culture/ recreation sector. The well-named Heart + Soul Fund invites applications for a one-time grant in three sizes: $5,000, $25,000 to $50,000, and $100,00 to $200,000.

As Thursday’s press conference revealed, the impetus behind Heart + Soul is to help charitable or not-for-profit organizations either to re-shape their existing programming for the new pandemic reality of 2020, or to create custom-made new initiatives. The idea, as EPCOR CEO Stuart Lee put it, is to invest in “re-energizing the community” — a community that relies heavily for its vibrancy, and indeed its identity, on sectors hit the hardest by pandemic reductions and closures.

The fund tops up EPCOR’s emergency relief funding to about $2 million, in addition to yearly $1 million contributions.

Launching digital platforms to transform the in-person to the virtual, re-modifying theatrical venues to accord with pandemic restrictions, mitigating risk, finding new ways of generating revenue, covering ruinous current expenses, leveraging matching funding … all are viable proposals for Heart + Soul. 

Capital projects are not eligible; Heart + Soul is designed for the operational. And the projects must be launched in 2020, in accordance with EPCOR’s fiscal year, so the fund is not available for summer festivals. Applications will be accepted starting now, till the $1.25 million is used up. Go for it, theatre companies. 

More information about how to apply is available at epcor.com/heartandsoul.    

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The Free Willies: the ‘sounds and sweet airs’ of travelling troubadours

Posted on August 21, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

The Free Willies, Billy Brown, Chariz Faulmino, Jameela McNeill. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Some time before the end of the month, it will happen. You’ll be in a park. Or a community playground. At a farmer’s market. Or chilling on a front deck. And suddenly, a little troupe of actor/musicians will pop up. They’ll sing songs, play instruments, tell jokes, do scenes from Shakespeare, taking their cue from the travelling players of the Bard’s own time.

They’re the Free Willies, a trio of young triple-threat troubadours presented under the joint flag of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival and Thou Art Here, the latter a “site-sympathetic” company dedicated to bringing Shakespeare to wherever you are. And in a series of 20-minute pop-up shows, the Free Willies mission is to raise your spirits, festival-deprived fellow citizens, while following all the COVID safety rules. It’s not your money they’re after, it’s your smiles.

The Free Willies. Photo supplied.

“Think of it as a late-summer dessert, an ice cream cone of a show,” says Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s new artistic director Dave Horak.  “Something fun and light” for a heavy time. And something live for a time of screen images.  

The three 20something up-and-comers in The Free Willies —   Jameela McNeil, Chariz Fulmino, and Billy Brown — “play versions of themselves,” says Horak. The spirit is cheeky; they take material from Thou Art Here’s larky Shakespeare puppet shows, which co-opt  contemporary songs for Shakespearean purposes. I Will Survive, for example, turns out to be about Hamlet. Who knew? Taylor Swift’s Fifteen is a Romeo and Juliet interpretation. The cabaret variety is a collaborative effort that owes much to Thou Art Here’s Alyson Dicey, says Horak.

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There’s even a song to works in the scrupulous COVID safely protocols in physical distancing and masks: “these are a few of my favourite things,” borrowed from The Sound of Music. The free Willies perform in face shields (better acoustically than masks), and they travel with a wagon equipped with an amplifier and speakers.

The Free Willies. Photo supplied.

Since the 2020 Freewill Shakespeare Festival was delayed by a year (Macbeth and Much Ado About Nothing won’t open in Hawrelak Park till June 15, 2021), the company was looking for an outdoor theatrical experience in the meantime, something to tickle both aficionados and those who are “a wee bit Shakespeare-curious,” as Horak puts it.

The Free Willies rehearsed in Horak’s garage, much to the enjoyment of his neighbours. Which says something about the classic showbiz impetus of the whole enterprise; you know, ‘my dad has a barn; we have a flashlight; let’s put on a show!’. 

There’s already been a lot of interest, Horak reports. Which means he’s up against an unusual theatrical problem: how to not attract a bigger crowd. That’s why the locations aren’t announced till an hour or two before showtime. Look for them on the Freewill and Thou Art Here social media feeds: @FreewillPlayers and @ThouArtHere. 

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Fringe FOMO: House of Hush burlesque goes live

Posted on August 20, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

House of Hush cast, Fringe FOMO. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Take it off! No, wait….

In the age of COVID, burlesque, a teasing vaudeville involving the playful progressive doffing of apparel, can remove just about everything — everything, that is, but the mask. 

Masked showgirls: now, there’s a new look for burlesque, and a new definition of Clothing Optional. And Delia Barnett, aka LeTabby Lexington, is amused. In Fringe FOMO, the live House of Hush Burlesque show that comes to Metro Cinema headquarters at the Garneau Theatre (aka Fringe BYOV 20) Friday night, LeTabby and Violette Coquette will be wearing masks for their (socially distanced) duet number onstage.

Barnett describes it as “a double fan dance.” The inspiration comes from the Golden Age of Hollywood: the Pickford girls, “America’s sweetheart” Mary and her fun-loving sister Lotte. In a better world, you would have seen the number in a Fringe show from Send in the Girls, another burlesque troupe co-founded by Barnett (with Ellen Chorley), devoted to exploring burlesque as theatre. 

“Violette is the stunner, the tall beautiful one. I’m the goofy clown one who follows her around,” says Barnett, whose personal perspective on burlesque is that it’s a heightened form of clowning.

Barnett has been in Fringe shows for the last dozen years, and produced them for the last nine. She says Fringe FOMO was designed as an antidote for Fringe deprivation syndrome.  “When the Fringe was cancelled we were really sad,” she says. “Then we thought it might be nice to have some time off. And then (as the Fringe time approached), devastation set in again….” Ah, the Fringe cancellation cycle; I know it well.

In the interests of COVID safety she and Violette looked around for the biggest venue with the biggest stage they could book. And the Garneau fit the requirements to a G (string). “The performers won’t remotely be within six feet of each other,” Barnett points out. In a 520-seat house, only 100 tickets will be sold. “They’ve planned it out really well, with single seats space, and spots for groups of two or four who come together…. So, 100 in the audience and five onstage; there will only be 105 people max in that big room.” And except for moments when audience members are drinking, or eating popcorn, it will be a masked assembly.

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Founded by LeTabby and Violette in 2017 as a way to package solo burlesque acts and get more rent-sustaining corporate gigs, House of Hush is nothing if not resilient. “Prior to shutdown we were having our most lucrative spring ever,” sighs Barnett. There were monthly burlesque shows in the retro cocktail lounge at the Crash Hotel, a downtown boutique hostelry on 103 St. across from the Rogers arena. In March, they switched to livestreaming the shows every two weeks, attracting performers from across Canada and the U.S. “It went super-duper well!” says Barnett, who has an appealing kind of buoyancy about her. “But when the weather got nice, business dropped off. So we thought it’d be fun to do a live show!” 

Barnett, who moved West from St. Catherines Ont. in 2007 to go to the U of A theatre school, says she was “too shy, too uncomfortable” to even think of performing burlesque when she was invited to audition for a troupe in Hamilton. But she was an admirer of the early 20th century German performance artist pioneer Valeska Gert, whose “erotic grotesque” credo was an inspiration. Barnett’s burlesque debut in 2010 was at a Nextfest Smut Night. “It was more performance art than burlesque, I think…. I talked about my mom and my childhood,” she laughs.

It was at Nextfest that Barnett met Ellen Chorley, now the Nextfest director. Both history buffs, they learned burlesque together, coached by a childhood friend, in her living room. Send In The Girls was born in their first duet. And in 2011 Barnett produced the troupe’s first big hit, Tudor Queens, a clever burlesque uncorseting of the wives of Henry VIII (she played Katherine Howard, the teenage bride who paid heavily for her amorous free spirit). 

“There is so much body-shaming; we’re not taught to love ourselves and our bodies,” Barnett says. Correcting those damages is one of her principal goals when she teaches burlesque. “Sometimes just moving your hips around brings up a lot of emotion!”

“Now the most comfortable I ever am onstage is in burlesque…. You pick your costume, you pick the music, you pick the choreography. You’re performing on your own terms,” she says. “You’re in charge.”

You’re even in charge of your own christening. Her burlesque alter-ego LeTabby Lexington is “a grown-up bolder version of my clown,” says Barnett, who has spent the last couple of seasons in the cast of the improv troupe Die-Nasty (most recently as a burlesque showgirl named Daisy Darling). Tabby was a nickname a university classmate (actor Mary Hulbert) gave her. “I reminded her of a tabby cat, and I thought it was funny to mix French and English.” Lexington is her favourite gargoyle from the Disney animated TV series Gargoyles.

Friday night’s Fringe Fomo features a variety of performance styles, as Barnett describes. Silk E Gunz, says Barnett, “does a fan dance to a rock song she loves.” Scarlett Fussion has “a hilarious mermaid act.” Luna LaPeal’s preferred style is jazzy; “her movement is so good.” For her solo, Violette Coquette does Cry Me A River, in “an amazing spectacle” that features 15 feet of fabric. In addition to her duet with Violette Coquette, LeTabby Lexington is the emcee. 

“Burlesque is bold, brave, funny, playful. What you see is a heightened version of me!”

PREVIEW

Fringe FOMO

Theatre: House of Hush Burlesque

Starring: LeTabby Lexington, Silk E Gunz, Scarlette Fussion, Luna LaPeal, Violette Coquette

Where: Metro Cinema at the Garneau Theatre

When: Friday, 9 p.m.

Tickets: metrocinema.org

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And back at the castle: a radio play version of Guys in Disguise’s Dragula

Posted on August 18, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Trevor Schmidt and Darrin Hagen in Dragula, Guys in Disguise. Photo by Ian Jackson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It sounds like a sublime punchline: a drag show, in all its be-wigged glam-frocked glory, as a radio play?

True, there’s a certain captivating perversity about the Guys in Disguise revival of their hit Fringe show Dragula  — opening aurally this week.

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But when you hear the very funny trailer for the radio play version of Darrin Hagen’s and Trevor Schmidt’s spoof-y gothic romance, with its creaky doors, eerie whooshes, and strange echoes — not to mention the wooden high-pitched tones of the dimbulb virginal heroine — you’ll catch the drift of the pluses, too.

Guys in Disguise, a company with more a three decade-plus archive in bending gender and match-making drag and theatre, premiered Dragula 10 Fringes ago on the Varscona stage. The absence of that massive showcase, where Guys in Disguise are bona fide stars, is the immediate impetus behind this new version (though they’d been thinking of re-doing it as a podcast, Schmidt says).

If it hadn’t been for COVID, there would be a new Schmidt/Hagen hot ticket running at the Fringe as you read this, starring its two creators along with Jake Tkaczyk and Jason Hardwick. “Crack in the Mirror,” which we are now officially missing, “is set in a women’s community group in the late ‘70s,” says Schmidt of the might-have-been. The theme of the monthly meeting is “mirror mirror on the floor.” The principal prop? Hand mirrors; you can take it from there.

Dragula, explains Schmidt, “marries gothic to the Hammer (horror) films from the late ‘60s…. Everything looks gothic except the hair!”  He’s amused to remember a prime question from every radio interview he and Hagen have done about their Guys in Disguise Fringe productions. “‘Can you describe to our audience what you’re wearing?’ Darrin would be in his cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirt and I’d be in a tank top and whatever. And we’d lie!”

So in a nod to this venerable media tradition, I ask Schmidt (who’s also the resident Guys in Disguise costume designer) on the phone what he’s wearing as virginal heroine Virginia Hymen, possessor of the hilarious voice, “dumb as a sack of hammers, quite blank.” He obliges: “A perfect dress. A seersucker-sucker stretch gothic gown, empire waist. Lace gauntlets. A beautiful antique lace negligee with a long train. Off-white….. And a huge beehive.”

The poster art is a tip-off, and owes its inspiration to “pulp novel covers,” says Schmidt. “Almost always a young woman running away from a castle. Usually at night.”

Trevor Schmidt and Darrin Hagen, Dragula. Photo by Ian Jackson.

The gist of Dragula, he says, is “young virgin goes off to castle and discovers intrigue,” etc. Naturally, Virginia, who’s playing with more than a few cards short of a deck, “takes a candle and wanders the castle at night, through towers and dungeons….” As sound designer/actor Dave Clarke has fashioned this abode, it’s a veritable repository of aural effects: wind, screams, barking dogs, slamming doors….

OK, you can’t see the garlic sausage in this aural version. Or the spooky lighting, or the giant picture frame the actors carried around the stage to change the setting. Or the two wooden stakes, one big one small, “for the Big Moment,” as Schmidt says. But, says Hagen, “you feel the set and taste the costumes…. And Trevor’s voice is so funny! He wasn’t sure people would realize how jaw-droppingly stupid his character is” without the visual accompaniment of blank looks. Hagen assures us that we will. The heroine’s “wooden flat delivery, without subtext of any kind” is a show-stopper for aural theatre.

The castle’s proprietor, as you will have surmised, is the Countess (imagine the statuesque Hagen in a selection of glamorous goth attire) with the sinister outgrowth in dentition. Virginia’s uncle Professor Dick Von Dick (Clarke) is a manly vampire-slayer. Wilma Fingerdo (Davina Stewart) is the Countess’s henchperson and former lover (“we don’t sleep in the same coffin any more”). Needless to say Wilma is a bit snarly about the arrival of a rival, especially a young and virginal one with a girly high-pitched voice. The narrator is voiced by Patricia Darbasie.

As in so many Guys in Disguise comedies, the serious — feminism, sexual politics, thoughts about the patriarchy, gender politics — is approached playfully, outrageously. “Sneaky fun,” says Hagen, whose play 10 Funerals is the grand finale of the upcoming Shadow Theatre season. “I really like to tackle big subjects with humour, and slip in the ‘lesson’,” says Schmidt.

Playwright/actor/activist/ queer historian Hagen calls Dragula “an allegory of homosexuality,” and vampire lesbianism is centrestage. Von Dick is the representative of the patriarchy, “saving women from their own lust…. Hey, a battle of good and evil!”

“It’s the first play where we purposely didn’t have swears,” says Schmidt, who’s currently working on a Bollywood-style indie film. “We wanted to see if we could do it.”

Have a peek at the trailer: https://guysindisguise.bandcamp.com/releases. That link is where you can get the $10 tickets soon. And hey, it’s a bargain. Hagen pictures you and your pals listening in your backyard “after midnight.”

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Signs of life: live theatre is coming back, with cautious first steps

Posted on August 15, 2020 by Liz Nicholls

Shaun Smyth in Playing with Fire: the Theo Fleury Story, at Persephone in Saskatoon, 2016. Photo by Electric Umbrella/ Liam Richards.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

And they’re back!

Very cautiously, of course, experimentally, a little tentatively, with ultra-sanitized jazz hands. And not full-blast: nary a large-scale musical in sight, needless to say. But live theatre is starting to be back … live and with live audiences.

For an arts industry whose raison d’être is the excitement of real live in-person experience, it’s been a wintry four-and-a-half months. And you’ve got to admire the resourcefulness, the resilience, the sheer tooth-gritting persistence of our theatre artists, who’ve devised ways to translate performance onto screens.

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But 2-D imaging does whet the appetite for 3-. Three theatres are up for the complicated challenge of inviting real live audiences, albeit a fraction of their usual capacity, back and on location: Edmonton’s biggest playhouse, the Citadel; Edmonton’s tiniest, Grindstone; and the venturesome Mayfield Dinner Theatre.

Start with the smallest first. Next week Grindstone Theatre in Old Strathcona is launching a Re-Set Theatre Fest in person (or online). As the company’s tireless artistic director Byron Martin describes, Re-Set is a mini-Fringe of sorts. Nine sketch, stand-up and improv comedy shows rotate five performances each, from Wednesday through Aug. 30, at the Grindstone’s bistro headquarters (10019 81 Ave.) and the nearby Sewing Machine Factory (under the Mill Creek Cafe, 9562 82 Ave.).

A socially-distanced audience of 36 max at either 84-seat venue, will catch sketch comedy troupes like The Debutants or Marv N Berry. Or a BIPOC standup showcase, Black Laughs Matter, hosted by Natasha Lyn Myles. The lineup includes You Might Notice Something Different About Me, from trans standup comic Cindy Rivers. There’s an improvised Yeg DND, to make the nerd crowd happy. And there’s even a puppet talk show, Gabbin’ With Gobber, with Malachi Wilkins. See the whole line-up and schedule at grindstonetheatre.ca  

It’s not exactly curated. Word got out, “people applied, and we waived all producer fees” in favour of a $2 surcharge on tickets, Martin explains. “Ever since Phase 2 in July, we’ve started exploring the possibilities with our producers,” he says of the Grindstone’s weekly roster of troupes. “Everyone feels differently; everyone has a different comfort level.”

The pandemic check-list is reassuring, both in detail and enforcement. “The audience must wear masks. So, distancing and masks, sign-ups (at the start of every show) for contact tracing, hand sanitizing, separate entrance and exit, someone to seat people and make sure the rules are followed… We have to have a staff technical director onsite for every show, and we used to let the producers bring their own.Technicians have to wipe down everything between shows.” The list goes on. “And it’s a lot of work,” Martin admits. “But people are hungry for a live experience. And we’re very glad to be able to be open.”

Can the money work with an audience of 36?  “We have an average audience size of 30 anyway,” says Martin. “It works with 20 people watching.” And if your basic pandemic anxiety level isn’t tuned down yet to venturing forth in person, the shows will be live-streamed, with digital tickets available.

•The Citadel’s return to live in-person performance after the long intermission is their experimental two-night Horizon Lab, a two-night “celebration of Albertan BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and disabled artists’ stories,” on the Shoctor stage Aug. 28 and 29. One hundred (free) tickets a night are available for masked, socially-distanced audiences in the scrupulously sanitized 681-seat Shoctor Theatre. For those not ready to gather, a video version will be available a couple of weeks after the live run.

Helen Belay, Cinderella, Globe Theatre Regina. Photo by Chris Graham.

The summer’s artistic associate team — Helen Belay, Tai Amy Grauman and Mieko Ouchi — has already launched a Horizon Series, now underway at citadeltheatre.com, in which they interview leading BIPOC artists about their work, their experiences working on Canadian stages, their plans. Now the three have assembled five teams of BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and disabled artists, to devise a 10-minute piece each, in a months, for Horizon Lab. 

The prompt they offered artists was a question: “where are your stories?,” inspired by If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground, by the Canadian writer J. Edward Chamberlin. “The teams could choose to be their own performers, or bring others in,” explains Belay. 

Designer Elise Jason created a stage environment full of possibilities, “a palimpsest of artistic creation,” as Belay puts it. “There’s a hint of it in the graphic (above): A trio of celestial … suns? presences? in the sky. In beautiful rich course evocative of the landscape.”

“We asked ourselves what can we do right now that can serve the community. After the kind of miasma we’ve all been slogging through … everyone feels a real need for a 3-D space to gather. We’ve been inundated by screens. We just felt we had to incorporate a live element.”

“AND we wanted to put some money in the pockets of artists we believe in.”

Teams like Todd Houseman and Lady Vanessa Cardona (who created a piece for Christina Nguyen and Sheldon Stockdale), had worked together before. You may have seen their show The Whiteface Cabaret on FringeTV’s opening night Thursday. Other connections are new, “to plant seeds for future collaborations, to invest in relationships, and hopefully to change the landscape we live in, long-term,” says Belay. In the case of playwright/actor Mac Brock and Pepper’d co-founder Tasana Clarke, “they were two up-and-coming artists doing cool things…. Let’s see if they’d be interested in working together!”

The teams include a diversity of talents: Richard Lee Hsi and Morgan Yamada, both expert physical performers; Patricia Cerra, Carly Neis and Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks; Mohamed Ahmed and Elena Eli Belyea with Mahalia Carter-Jameson.

Says Belay “It’s been so fascinating, a privilege to be part of this moment, which hopefully will roll over into something for the future. Quite the illuminating experience!”

Tickets are free but required, with donations encouraged: citadeltheatre.com.

• The hit solo show Playing With Fire: The Theo Fleury Story is up on its skates once more — and back in a hockey-mad town staring Sept. 8. That’s when the Mayfield Dinner Theatre re-opens, in a socially distanced new configuration — with the magnetic Shaun Smyth as the NHL star haunted, and nearly derailed, by dark turbulence of his past as a victim of sexual abuse.

Ron Jenkins’ electrifying production, which happens entirely on skates on a specially designed rink, was on tour at the Citadel five years ago.  It returns, with Smyth in the title role, to tell (and show) the story of a small-town kid from a chaotic home life, with an extraordinary talent in a world that celebrated it, and then threatened it.

It runs Sept. 8 through Oct. 25. The Mayfield buffet has been replaced with table service. And theatre-goers can only remove their masks once they’re seated at the table.

Tickets and a list of precautions: mayfieldtheatre.ca or 780-483-4051.   

  

  

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