Pam, cocktails, and other amusements

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Mathew Hulshof, Rachel Bowron, Belinda Cornish, Bella King, Oscar Derkx, Cathy Derkach, Kristen Padayas, Shannon Blanchet, Kendra Connor, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Troy O’Donnell, in Cocktails at Pam’s. Set design Chantel Fortin, lighting design Victor Snaith Hernandez, costume design Leona Brausen. Photography Marc J Chalifoux.

The production of Stewart Lemoine’s Cocktails at Pam’s currently on stage at the Varscona Theatre is the sixth Teatro production of the comedy since its premiere at Fringe 1986.

I’d never seen it before – and it was one of the funniest plays I’d ever seen from that company. Pam (Shannon Blanchet) frequently hosts cocktail parties in her 1967-stylish home, with the support of her husband Julius (Andrew MacDonald-Smith, genial bartender in cream jacket with a great line in quiet snark). Before the guests arrive, we learn that Pam is nervous about the party going well “I hope our little soiree will be a success. Just think of it darling – people drinking, talking to one another” and that she has absolutely no self-awareness.

Their guests include a Stratford-festival actress (Bella King), Pam’s overly-casual younger brother (Oscar Derkx), two couples who are longtime friends (Mathew Hulshof and Rachel Bowron, Troy O’Donnell and Kendra Connor), and another friend (Kristen Padayas) who brings along her own guest, a Divorcee with Issues, Belinda Cornish. Cathy Derkach plays a willing but not very competent maid.

Before the show started, my companion and I enjoyed identifying all the elements in the set design (Chantal Fortin) that reminded us of the heights of sophistication aspired to in our childhood. The curved nesting tables, the ashtray and table lighter, the objets d’art, the sunken living room and decorative glass screen … And when Pam first sweeps into her living room with an extra vase of flowers, she exclaims over the furniture she selected and how pleased she is with it.

In Leona Brausen’s delightful costume design, all the guests arrive dressed in their own version of cocktail-party clothes – except for Pam’s brother, in sweater, chinos, and loafers that he removes to put his feet on the couch. All the women guests wear gloves and carry handbags, impeccably matched to their outfits and shoes. Max and Denise (O’Donnell and Connor) are particularly formal, in tailcoat and fur stole respectively, which they explain by planning to go bowling afterwards. Virgil and Sara (Hulshof and Bowron) are severe and striking in black, he resembling a Vulcan in mufti and she a chess piece. And Padayas’ Lily is completely in orange, from levitating hat to bright-orange pumps.

Mathew Hulshof and Rachel Bowron in Cocktails at Pam’s. Set design Chantel Fortin, lighting design Victor Snaith Hernandez, costume design Leona Brausen. Photography Marc J Chalifoux.

The ill-assorted group argue, complain, break Pam’s rule against party games, flirt, make out on the sofa, and drink a lot of drinks provided by Julius. Other incidents and consequences less predictable also ensue, but spoilers are omitted.

The character portraits reminded me of descriptions in Robertson Davies’ books, particularly the Salterton trilogy. I was especially impressed by the character of Julius and his refreshing lack of misogyny or resentment towards his wife – it would have been easy for the playwright to make that character bitter, and he didn’t. And this fit the general tone of the play. The characters chafed against each other and prodded and complained, but the hostilities were superficial or temporary and the whole thing was just fun to watch, with enough left unresolved at the end to be intriguing.

Program notes point out that all the characters are new to their roles for the 2026 production. I was surprised to learn that Troy O’Donnell, coming straight from playing Leonato in Freewill Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, was a Teatro newbie, since his version of pompous bewilderment was ideal in this role.

Mathew Hulshof, Rachel Bowron, Belinda Cornish, Bella King, Kendra Connor and Troy O’Donnell, in Cocktails at Pam’s. Set design Chantel Fortin, lighting design Victor Snaith Hernandez, costume design Leona Brausen. Photography Marc J Chalifoux.

Before the opening-night performance on Friday, I’d been reminiscing to my companions about the rainy summer of 2016, when my two nieces came to visit me. After they spent their shopping budgets at the West Edmonton Mall, the next day we went to Taste of Edmonton (ate fried pickles and cheesecake, took refuge in the Citadel Lee Pavilion to eat when the skies opened), and then had arranged to meet some of my friends at the then-brand-new Varscona Theatre for Teatro la Quindicina’s Cocktails at Pam’s. We arrived in the lobby and found out that the power was out in the neighbourhood due to the heavy rain. We waited around for a while, and eventually they told us the play wouldn’t go on that night. So my nieces flew back home to Ontario, and I never did see that production.

And then — on Friday the performance start was delayed while the show team took safety precautions against a rapidly-moving storm, the show started, and about fifteen minutes in, the lights went out and the emergency lighting came on. We waited, telling stories of flooding at the Fringe and other weather issues. Someone in the audience shouted “Keep acting!” Andrew MacDonald-Smith called back, “We are! You just can’t see us!” After a short wait, company general manager Cassandra Duval told us that the power wouldn’t come back on until too late to have a performance that night. She said that the reception-food had already arrived, so we should eat some or take some home, and they’d email us to rebook. It was all handled very smoothly, and I was able to attend last night’s performance.

Unless anything else unexpected happens, Cocktails at Pam’s will continue its run until July 26th, with tickets here.

Other entertainment possibilities this week include

  • The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at the Citadel til August 2.
  • The Magpie Collection: A Dance Festival at Mile Zero Dance, includes performances from local and touring artists in a variety of dance/movement genres July 17, 18, 19 and July 24, 25, and 26, as well as drop-in dance classes weekdays and weeknights from 17 different instructors, Jul 13-24. ASL interpretation for all performances and classes. Tickets and schedules here.
  • Edmonton Elks host BC Lions at Commonwealth Stadium on Friday in CFL football. And because it’s the Dog Days of Summer promotion, there’s one seating section where people can bring their dogs (dog tickets are cheaper than people tickets).

Andrew MacDonald-Smith Fully Commits!

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Andrew MacDonald-Smith on the phone in Fully Committed. Set Chantel Fortin, Lighting Skye Grinde.
Photography Mark J Chalifoux.

Fully Committed is the solo comedy by Becky Mode currently playing in a Teatro Live! production at the Varscona Theatre, directed by Farren Timoteo.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith plays Sam, the overworked reservation-booker at an exclusive Manhattan restaurant. The 90-minute performance covers one long December shift. Sam arrives late morning to ringing phones and crises in progress. His colleague hasn’t shown up for work, he pesters the kitchen for a staff meal, the chef and the maître d’ are refusing to take calls, he’s hoping for a callback on a theatre audition, his recently-widowed father is pressuring him to come home to Indiana for Christmas … and patrons keep calling and calling and calling, hoping for bookings, asking for changes, and complaining. The whole play is Sam on the phones – but Andrew MacDonald-Smith also plays everyone he talks to on the phone. With shifts in body and voice and accent, he creates the other side of every conversation, dozens of different characters.

Fully Committed is like an epistolary novel, or a media-fic told in text messages and Facebook chats. At first each little conversation just seems like an illustration of how Sam can’t get a moment to breathe, between the intercom with the host stand and kitchen, the hotline to the chef’s office, the headset he takes reservation calls on, and his personal cell. But like the best epistolary novels, the plot builds up from the individual calls, and many of the individuals call back. On opening night, the Varscona audience started out quiet, but then began to laugh more as they recognized some of the frequent callers.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith in Fully Committed. Set Chantel Fortin, Lighting Skye Grinde.
Photography Mark J Chalifoux.

The set design, by Chantel Fortin, was brilliant. She took advantage of the high ceilings in the Varscona to create the impression of a crowded low-ceilinged basement room, with a staircase ascending at upstage centre, heating ducts over the main workspace, and ceiling beams off to the side reminiscent of those used in Autumn, as well as lots of appropriate clutter on shelving and desks. Sam uses the whole playing space energetically, with help from a wheeled office chair, even running up the stairs with a mop bucket to deal with an issue nobody else will tackle. Lighting design by Skye Grinde ensures that the office feels like a too-small too-full basement, but it is never too dark for the audience to get a sense of Sam’s environment and to see all the characters he talks to on the phone.

I saw a production of Fully Committed at Central Alberta Theatre (Red Deer) in 2022, with Ash Mercia playing the title role. So I wasn’t surprised by the character or the storyline. But Andrew MacDonald-Smith is a great fit as Sam, competent but underappreciated at this job while struggling with the rest of his life, and hilarious when he shifts to the other larger-than-life characters, from Chef and Jean-Claude the maître d’ to patrons like Carol Ann Rosenstein-Fishburn, Bryce the assistant to Gwynyth Paltrow, and the one who keeps reminding him that she’s a Senior Citizen. Interestingly, while I was engaged with watching Sam struggle to satisfy any of the people ringing him on multiple lines spread out around the stage, I forgot that the actor is tall, because Sam is so weighed down all day.

The performance runs just under 90 minutes. Resolution of many of the plot threads happens in satisfying ways that aren’t telegraphed ahead of time, but it’s still a slice-of-life reminder of the back-of-house lives unseen behind a pretentious and successful establishment. It’s very funny and it’s charming, a portfolio of ridiculousness for MacDonald-Smith and a tongue-in-cheek skewering of foodie culture, a good fit for the Teatro Live! season.

Fully Committed runs until June 21st, and it’s not fully committed (not sold out)! You can get tickets here.

Peter Quilter’s Autumn – delightfully specific

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Even Gilchrist’s set for Autumn, at Shadow Theatre, with lighting by Rory Turner.

Lana Michelle Hughes’ first directing gig as the new Artistic Director of Shadow Theatre is the poignant and relatable portrait of two bickering sisters, Autumn. Not “middle-aged sisters”, because as Rose (Karen Johnson Diamond) points out, sixty is only middle-aged if you’re going to live til a hundred and twenty. Oof.

Slightly younger sister Kathryn (Cathy Derkach) arrives for a planned visit, filling up the space with suitcases and drama. Rose tidies her away “You’re in the big bedroom” and settles her down and responds with gentle snark to Catherine’s criticisms of everything, from the snacks to the wine to the plans for the garden. Catherine mostly doesn’t even listen, busy with attention-grabbing stories about her current divorce and advice Rose hasn’t asked for.

We learn that this isn’t Rose’s home – they’re meeting at their late parents’ second home or retirement cottage. Many of the specific details in the set (Even Gilchrist) now make more sense – the main room is a cozy and appealing space with exposed beams and brick, but it feels like it was decorated in the 1980s or 1990s, with two comfortable non-matching recliners, shelving units holding everything from a cassette player and tapes to a worn Trivial Pursuit game, prints on the walls and a white-board calendar on the fridge.

And they’re meeting to plan and prepare for Catherine’s daughter Imogen’s short-notice (shotgun) wedding, which they’re going to host at the house. The action takes place in the 10-day period between Catherine’s arrival and the wedding. Long enough for the sisters to poke at each other’s sore spots, and get to know more about each other’s current lives, reveal some assumptions and address some conflicts.

When you hear the basics of this story – two bickering sisters, one daughter/ niece’s arrival anticipated, a handsome young neighbour to ogle while doing yardwork – you might recall one of the plays in last year’s Shadow season, Kristen da Silva’s Where You Are, a four-hander with similar characters. But I thought the concept was rich enough and the characterizations compelling enough in Autumn that I was completely engaged, and eventually satisfied. Both performers portrayed their characters with prickly affection and amusing consistency. The costume choices (Ami Farrow) helped me get to know who they were, Kathryn in blouses and blazer, skirt or dress pants and heels, tasteful solids, but Rose in colourful drapey things and Birkenstocks, undyed hair in braids.

But unlike Where You Are, in which the audience gets to see the sisters interacting with the daughter / niece (Nikki Hulowski) and the young neighbour (Brennan Campbell), in Autumn there are only two performers on stage. Kathryn’s daughter Imogen and her fiance Daniel, and the gardener Barry, are all part of the narrative, but we don’t exactly see any of them, and that’s not a distraction. Apart from a few stage-crew hands delivering props through doors, these three characters are evoked entirely by the very specific actions and gazes of Derkach and Johnson-Diamond, with support from the lighting (Rory Turner) and sound (Lindsey Walker) atmospheres. The set includes sliding doors to the yard, with lattice-top fence behind and barely-visible greenery behind that. The lighting and the music and sound selections make it easy to believe that a wedding’s taking place in the garden, and then that the newlyweds are passing through the cottage, collecting their motorbike helmets, and heading down the driveway, as we watch the relieved mother and aunt hover on the edge of the party and send them off. The director and performers have convincingly created the non-visible elements of the story and followed them through with consistency.

There are happy endings in Autumn, the kind of resolutions that are satisfying because the imperfect characters stay who they are, just with a little more understanding of each other and self-awareness. And maybe it landed more strongly with me because I’m thinking of my own faraway siblings and niblings in my birthday week – but I enjoyed it.

Autumn is playing at the Varscona Theatre until May 24th, with tickets here.

Request Programme – unique performances of nightly repetition

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Vanessa Sabourin in Request Programme, Northern Light Theatre.

Request Programme, originally written in German in the 1970s by Franz Xaver Kroetz and translated by Katharena Hehn, takes its title from a radio show, the kind of show where a host responds to song requests sent in by audience members by playing the songs, but also by responding in compassionate, almost-intimate ways to the glimpses of regret, sadness, hope, loneliness, and humour she gets in the letters and texts. It felt very familiar, like shows I’ve heard on CBC radio, or European selections played overnight on NPR on long drives, or Join the Conversation on Now! radio. It’s a structure that supports a different show every night.

I think that Request Programme, the current Northern Light Theatre production directed by Trevor Schmidt, must have a similar blend of an underpinning routine with specifics that vary each night, making it worth watching more than once during the run. I’ve only seen it once so far – I saw it on opening night, with Vanessa Sabourin as the sole performer on stage. Each performance has a different on-stage performer, all local female actors who have worked on previous Northern Light Theatre productions. The voice of the radio host is also significant to the story but isn’t explicitly identified in the credits – I’m pretty sure the voice I heard, warm and grounded, was Nadien Chu. And the playlist of artists in the radio programme is ten Edmonton singer/songwriters, all women, each with one recent original song.

The character on stage does not speak at all. But as in many effective movement-based performances, I could tell enough about what was going on and why that I was engaged in the character’s journey, and cared about their outcome. I’ve had similar experiences with wordless or near-wordless clown and physical theatre (such as 7 Ways to Die: A Love Story, by Keltie Brown Forsyth and Alex Forsyth, or Lost ‘n’ Lost Department, by Elaine Weryshko, Jed Tomlinson, and Kristin Eveleigh, with dance (Black Hair, Blue Eyes, a piece at Expanse Festival 2014 with Ainsley Hillyard, Mat Simpson, and Liam Cody, many of the Ballet Edmonton works, or Betroffenheit (Jonathon Young, Crystal Pite), and with theatre (Small Mouth Sounds, the Jim Guedo-directed play about people at a silent yoga retreat).

A woman comes home late in the evening to a small tidy apartment in a city. The apartment reminded me of one of the self-contained apartment setups in the IKEA store – set design by Schmidt – full enough that it felt like she actually lived there, but without much that was revealing or personal. Not enough kitchen for someone who enjoys cooking or eating, no photos except for possibly one on the kitchen table that we couldn’t see, the small clothes-rack of someone who has recently started over. I thought she was probably coming home from work, because she was wearing dress shoes and clothes more formal than the ones she changes into, but her totebag also contained a few basic groceries. As she passes the evening, I had the sense that she was struggling to settle to anything – whether eating the sandwich she makes, finding something to watch on TV, making tea, reading a book, or doing a jigsaw puzzle. She didn’t seem to have any inclination to human contact either – no letters in the mail, no landline or cell phone, no computer, no waving out the window. She was going through the motions.

But she turns on the radio just in time for the nightly Request Programme, and listens to the whole thing. I could see that some of the host’s commentary and request letters landed with her, and some of the song lyrics too. In “In a While” Cayley Thomas sang of losing a brother before his 25th birthday. Lindsay Walker’s “I Won’t Give Up” is an fiercely inspiring anthem to carrying on, and Alex Dawkins’ “Pretty Girls” evoked passion and regret. A couple of times I wondered if the listener whose note the host was responding to might have been Sabourin’s character – but I thought probably she wasn’t sufficiently engaged with even that version of community. The people who were writing to the radio programme wanted someone to hear their pain, their loss, their fears – and I don’t think the woman on stage saw any point in that.

I didn’t know the details of why Sabourin’s character was so alone, so restless, so numb. But I worried about her, to the point of barely breathing near the end of the show. I grasped at hints of the character planning for the next day such as putting the leftovers in the fridge and rinsing out her knee-high stockings, but maybe those were autopilot actions. The ending did not feel inevitable but it was not a shock and was not overdrawn. I want to see another actor’s version. I don’t know how detailed the play script is – how much of a movement score or blocking is provided – but I understand that each performer had limited preparation time and possibly did not get to hear the radio show music and narration beforehand. Request Programme is fascinating and disturbing, an evocation of the spectrum between alone and lonely, between self-disciplined routine and dissociation, between surviving and … not.

Request Programme continues at the Fringe Arts Barns Studio until May 16th. Tickets are here.

The Revolutionists: ridiculous and pointed

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Aimee Beaudoin (Marie Antoinette), Alex Dawkins (Olympe de Gouges), Kijo Gatama (Marianne Angelle), and Jacquelin Walters (Charlotte Corday) in The Revolutionists.
Costumes Rebecca Cypher, set Cindi Zuby, lights Ken Matthews.
Images Marc J Chalifoux Photography.

My previous knowledge of contemporary American playwright Lauren Gunderson suggested that The Revolutionists would be an inspiring feminist story based on real women in the French Revolution. It was. But it was also hilarious, absurd, fourth-wall-breaking, and full of self-referential mockery about playwrights, theatre, and the ridiculous concept of writing a musical about the French Revolution …

John Hudson directed The Revolutionists for Shadow Theatre – the founding artistic director’s last directing project before Lana Michelle Hughes takes over as Artistic Director.

The action takes place in 1793, after Marie’s husband, King Louis XVI was guillotined in January and before she met Madame Guillotine herself in the fall of that year.

The performance starts with Olympe de Gouges (Alex Dawkins), the only feminist playwright left in Paris, in her apartment, struggling to write her next play, and posturing for the audience about the hardships of being an artist and living through a revolution. Dawkins’ neo-bouffon skills serve her well in portraying a character who is not quite as important as she thinks she is, but who is very aware of her own voice.

Her first two visitors are more down-to-earth. Marianne Angelle (Kijo Gatama), activist and spy, is motivated to use the turbulent times to free her homeland of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) from the French Empire and end slavery. She wants Olympe to help her by writing pamphlets and declarations instead of plays. “What about a monologue?” negotiates Olympe. Charlotte Corday (Jacquelin Walters), younger than the others, is planning to take more specific action – she is going to assassinate the radical journalist Marat, hoping this will correct the course of the Revolution away from the Reign of Terror. And she wants Olympe to script her Last Words that she’ll be allowed to give from the scaffold before her inevitable execution.

Absurdity escalates when the next knock on the door is actually the infamous former Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, in a gown covered with bows, bustle, and other decoration, and wearing a recognizably-excessive wig. Aimée Beaudoin’s Marie is ridiculously self-centred and naive, completely unequipped to function as an ordinary citizen. She tries to get the playwright to write a play all about her. The contrast between Marie’s wishes and the other three continues throughout the play, providing a necessary levity. But they also find points of poignant connection – absent husbands, motherhood.

Early in the play we see the shadow of a guillotine over the set, reminding us that all of this is taking place in a situation of impending violence. I wondered how that mood shift would happen. I pictured scaffold speeches like Sidney Carton’s in A Tale of Two Cities (“It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go than I have ever known”). But in Gunderson’s play, the condemned burst into song, into full-voice amplified musical-theatre ballad song, which added a perfect touch of absurdity.

Costume design, illustrating the characters’ different vocations, social classes, and cultures, was by Rebecca Cypher. The constrained and ornate set was designed by Cindi Zuby, with sound by Darrin Hagen and lights by Ken Matthews.

Kijo Gatama and Alex Dawkins take on the patriarchy in The Revolutionists.
Costumes Rebecca Cypher, set Cindi Zuby, lights Ken Matthews.
Images Marc J Chalifoux Photography.

I’ve seen two other plays by American playwright Lauren Gunderson: Silent Sky, based on historical figure Henrietta Leavitt a female astronomer in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, a tribute-fiction contribution to the Pride and Prejudice universe, extending the story of bookish sister Mary and finding her a sympathetic happy ending. The characters in Silent Sky clearly push against the usual options for women and for deaf people at that time. As for Christmas at Pemberley, the Austen source material already provides a sharp outside eye on the society of the time; Gunderson’s play is clever pastiche and satisfying fanservice. Both plays include male-female romances with shared interests and minimal power imbalance.

The Revolutionists is my favourite of the three, because it handles serious material but doesn’t take itself too seriously. Playing at the Varscona Theatre until April 5th, with tickets here.

A new whimsy from Stewart Lemoine: I Meant What I Said

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Bella King as Dinah, foreground, with Neda Vanderham and Sam Free, in I Meant What I Said. Costume Design Leona Brausen, set Chantal Fortin, lights Rory Turner.

Image Marc J Chalifoux Photography.

Stewart Lemoine, the Resident Playwright of Teatro Live!, is one of the most prolific Canadian playwrights. But all of his works I’ve seen performed have surprised me, because of the wide range of mood and subject matter. Sometimes they have delightfully specific settings (contemporary St. Albert, Grand Rapids Michigan, 1950s New York City high society). Sometimes the plot goes past rom-com coincidence into magical realism (For the Love of Cynthia). Sometimes the comedy is poignant, and comes from flawed characters doing their best (the late Julien Arnold in Happy Toes).

But last night it occurred to me that one consistent description of Stewart Lemoine’s oeuvre is “whimsical”.

Last night Teatro Live! opened the world premiere of the newest Stewart Lemoine play, I Meant What I Said. (Lemoine also directed.) It started with a young woman (Bella King as Dinah) striding to the front of the stage and addressing the audience – or maybe letting us listen to her interior monologue? She demonstrates how her thoughts jump around without follow-through, and this makes it unclear what’s real and what’s just a thought. Dinah’s 30th birthday is approaching, so she’s thinking about changes she might make and projects she might take on, for this momentous change.

There’s her old friend Helen (Jayce McKenzie) – well, not really a friend, more of an acquaintance she runs into every now and then – someone she played ringette with as a teenager – so an old acquaintance? This of course reminds Dinah of Auld Lang Syne, so she adapts a few lines of the song to fit the story she’s telling, and then carries on. I was fascinated by Helen, whom Dinah describes as having “been 35 since we were 23”. McKenzie’s portrayal of a high-status formal adult, complemented by severe-cut hair, fur-trimmed cape, and high boots (costume designer Leona Brausen), contrasted strongly with the uncertain and casual Dinah.

There’s a young man walking by (Sam Free) – he looks familiar – is he an actor? or have they been dating, and he’s in a different line of work? Lighting and sound shifts add to the shimmery uncertainty. I didn’t know how much of this was in Dinah’s mind, but I found her narrative more and more entertaining.

There’s a cafe. And there’s a server (Eli Yaschuk as Juris). Dinah’s conversation with Juris is a little more real-feeling than the previous vignettes. He’s from Riga, Latvia. He struggles a bit with figurative expressions in English, and Dinah agrees to help him. But he draws a clear boundary when she asks why he left Latvia. I was intrigued at the way they made this both a Stewart-Lemoine-mystery to note for the plot, and a realistic cringe-inducing portrayal of well meaning thoughtless locals inadvertently evoking trauma.

The narrative generally becomes more coherent. Shifts in location are handled smoothly, bringing on some simple pieces of furniture and creating backdrops with projections on various set pieces (Chantel Fortin, set design). In one scene, several characters attend an orchestra concert. They’re portrayed sitting in chairs in front of the main theatre curtain, looking towards the audience, and I was reminded of the opera-box scenes in Evelyn Strange.

Neda Vanderham, last seen at Teatro in/as The Noon Witch, plays a variety of small amusing parts, but my favourite was her bit at the end of the orchestra concert, when she appears as an usher, collecting discarded programs and encouraging patrons to clear the house, while attempting not to show impatience. As an occasional theatre usher myself, I felt so seen!

Bella King, Neda Vanderham, Sam Free, Jayce McKenzie, and Eli Yaschuk in I Meant What I Said. Costume Design Leona Brausen, set Chantal Fortin, lights Rory Turner.

Image Marc J Chalifoux Photography.

Like many of Stewart Lemoine’s plays, this one has a gentle satisfying ending in which not all ends are tied up, but many of the hints dropped early end up fitting together. It’s a small affectionate tale, unusual in the use of interior monologue and imaginings and manifestation. And the cast does a great job. I was riveted by Jayce McKenzie’s portrayal of Helen, starting as an intimidating Glenn-Close-in-Damages or Helen-Mirren-in-Paramount-Plus-ad figure and then becoming a bit more vulnerable. I’ve so often seen McKenzie play awkward young girls, tomboys, tough kids, (Robot Girls, Candy and the Beast, Supine Cobbler) that it was fascinating to see her as such a different character. And Bella King is just great as a viewpoint character, not entirely reliable as a narrator but likeable and open.

The performance runs about 80 minutes with no intermission, and works well at that length. Dinah’s first monologue explains the title – what she thinks keeps changing, but what she says out loud is real. I Meant What I Said plays at the Varscona Theatre until March 8th, with tickets here.

An Iliad – the O.G. war epic, at Shadow Theatre

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Michael Peng and Erik Mortimer in An Iliad. Set and lighting design Scott Peters, costume design Leona Brausen. Photos Marc J. Chalifoux Photography

A plain wooden table and chair, centre stage, and white dropcloths covering furniture pieces in the background. Lights up on the empty set with a bit of fog. A slow shuffle thump stage right.

A weary man on crutches (Michael Peng) hobbling in, looking at the audience, and commenting that he’s been reciting this poem, telling this story, many times, in different formats and in different places. He has a version that takes a year to tell, and a version that takes three days. Some places people love it, and sometimes the audiences are weary of it. He’s wearing ordinary, 20th- or 21st-century clothing, but the places he names might be in the ancient world. I wasn’t familiar with the details of the source material, so at first I wondered if he might be representing one of the characters – maybe the Greek warrior Achilles if he survived the war, maybe the Trojan non-combatant Paris. The limp, the exhaustion, the wooden crutches and contemporary walking-boot – those all made sense to me evoking a former soldier. But eventually I figured out that as narrator, he’s representing the canonical poet Homer.

After a little while, he stops pacing, sits at the table, and starts to sing or chant in what I’m pretty sure was Ancient Greek, with a poetic metre. I guessed that it was the start of Homer’s original verse,

“Achilles’ baneful wrath resound, O Goddess, that imposed
Infinite sorrows on the Greeks, and many brave souls losed
From breasts heroic, sent them far to that invisible cave
That no light comforts, and their limbs to dogs and vultures gave;”

And then the poet launches into the story, in English and in casual prose, of a few crucial days after ten years of war. He switches viewpoints between the Greeks on the beach, with King Agamemnon, and Greek warrior Achilles and his companion Patroclus, and the Trojan royal family in their walled city, including monarchs Priam and Hecuba, their soldier son Hector, and his brother Paris, the one who started the war by eloping with (kidnapping? seducing?) Helen, who had been married to King Menelaus of Sparta at the time. I recognized all these names, because of various other versions of the source material, but the poet gave enough information to refresh my memory about who was on which side and why.

The characters and events are rich source material, used in Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, several of Charles Mee’s plays, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s novel The Firebrand, Madeline Miller’s 2011 novel The Song of Achilles, Jessy Ardern’s plays Prophecy and The Fall of the House of Atreus: A Cowboy Love Song, and many other plays, novels, songs, poems, and movies. In any versions, it’s always struck me as a big messy epic, hard to follow without conventional plot arc and harder to find a satisfying theme.

The version in Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s solo play that is built on the Varscona stage in this Shadow Theatre production (John Hudson directing) is surprisingly compelling. By giving us viewpoints from both armies, the playwrights don’t give us the option of dehumanizing one side and looking to rejoice with the others as “winners”. There is pride and revenge and anger and stubbornness on both sides. And there are gods and goddesses who take sides and make things worse, for their own motives. And there are horrific losses and betrayals. The script of An Iliad isn’t a selection of the source material that gives much agency or attention to female characters, focusing mainly on Achilles and Hector as well as kings and deities.

Partway through, I began thinking about ways that the back-and-forth, endless combat with no hope for peaceful resolution reminded me of more recent conflicts. Gaza. Ukraine. Minneapolis. And then later on in the play, the poet narrator appears almost overcome with the tragedy of the story he’s telling, and then he gets muddled. Oh wait, was that the Peloponnesian war, he corrects himself. Or the second battle of Sparta? He begins naming a few conflicts I’d never heard of, and then others I had, and he keeps going and going and going, to the eighteenth and nineteenth century and the twentieth, wars I’d heard of and wars I never had. And I found myself holding my breath – would he name the horrific conflicts of the New World, and the ones I’d encountered in LIFE Magazine and on TV news? He did name them, and he kept going, his rage and devastation building, repetition driving home that modern wars aren’t one-and-done either, Sarajevo, Afghanistan, Darfur, Sudan, Afghanistan, Gaza, Sudan, Gaza … It was brilliant and horrible.

Michael Peng and Erik Mortimer in An Iliad. Set and lighting design Scott Peters, costume design Leona Brausen. Photos Marc J. Chalifoux Photography

Despite the fact that the solo narrator spends much of the 105-minute performance sitting down at a table, I found it fascinating to watch and listen to. Musician and sound designer Erik Mortimer accompanies the poem from on stage with a keyboard, a lyre, and various other percussion instruments and looping apparatus. Set and lighting designer Scott Peters enhances the performance with interesting lighting shifts, lights on a backdrop/cyclorama thing evoking sunrise, a shield, and other outlooks with a base set in a sort of timeless pub, with stocked bar, stools, and a pool table. John Hudson, outgoing artistic director of Shadow Theatre, directed the piece, and Leona Brausen provided costuming. Effective use is made of a scarf in the poet embodying different characters. One of my favourite bits of stage business was the part where Achilles and the other Greek leaders are making plans, wielding the sceptre of power – which the poet explains is “like the original talking-stick, in this cradle of democracy” – and Peng naturally hoists a crutch above his head to represent the sceptre.

I learned from members of the production team that Michael Peng’s crutches and walking splint were a recent and necessary addition, due to an ankle injury late in the rehearsal process, and that the original blocking would have had him moving about the stage, standing on the pool table, jumping over the bar, and leaning on the piano. While I would have liked to experience that version, the less mobile narrator contributed to the sense of fatigue and despair and futility.

An Iliad continues at Varscona Theatre until February 8th. Tickets are available here. Matinees offer Pay What You Can pricing at the door.

The 2026 theatre season continues after this with the Citadel’s Death of a Salesman, Walterdale’s production of the Hannah Moskovitch play This is War, Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre’s My Testimonial (Greg MacArthur), and more.

“it’s not practice, it’s REHEARSAL”

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There’s a new Trevor Schmidt play, How Patty & Joanne Won High Gold at the Grand Christmas Cup Winter Dance Competition. It’s opening simultaneously at Northern Light Theatre in Edmonton, directed by Schmidt, and at Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary, directed by Bronwyn Steinberg.

I saw the Northern Light production. And it left me a little teary, in a contented, some-things-right-in-the-world way.

Jenny McKillop and Kendra Connor play Patty and Joanne, two students in an Adult Beginner Tap class at the Free Body Dance Station. You will probably recognize both performers from amusing shows with Teatro Live! or Fringe or other local companies, but they’re both new to Northern Light. And they have really great chemistry together – both characters mean well, but they start off awkward, not understanding each other and not comfortable together.

As the play starts, they’ve just gotten the message that their dance teacher, Miss Amber, won’t be back to keep teaching them. And the class, which started out full, has dwindled until – are they the only ones who still want to dance? they aren’t sure. Joanne and Patty take turns narrating the story to the audience and interacting with each other in the studio. Rae McCallum’s lighting design makes it clear to us when there’s a shift. The simple set design (Schmidt) makes clever use of the dance mirrors usually hidden behind curtains in the Fringe Studio Theatre.

Both women are middle-aged and have comfortable-enough secure lives, but we see that each of them is lonely and left out, wanting something more, something just for herself. Patty describes coming home from class to see her husband (Peter) and five children (Parker, Patrick, Petra, Poppy, and Emma) decorating cookies together in the kitchen, and they all run to greet her as she drops her dance bag by the kitchen door – and then immediately disperse to other parts of the house leaving her to do all the dishes. I found that bit one of the most poignant things Schmidt has ever written. And the measurement-for-costumes business was hilarious and relatable.

Joanne talks about how she came to love music and dance and especially musical theatre and movie musicals, with memories of being taken on a special movie outing with her parents, wearing a dark red velvet dress with white lace just like her mother’s. “She was beautiful. And on that day, I was a little bit beautiful.” Throughout the play, Joanne bombards Patty with musical theatre history facts and cultural tidbits. She corrects Patty, a sports parent, saying that for dance “it’s not practice, it’s rehearsal”. Their rehearsal outfits are consistent with their different backgrounds/expectations (costumes by Logan Stefura). Joanne is wearing a ballet-pink leotard and tights under a wrap skirt and cut-off CATS t-shirt, while Patty’s outfit includes cutoff grey sweatpants and a football jersey.

In the first scene they rehearse the tap routine that Miss Amber had been teaching them, to “All the Single Ladies”. (Apparently the women in the class would have been dressed as reindeer, with the man as Santa.) The moves are familiar to anyone who’s watched beginner tap classes. They aren’t very good. They keep running that routine periodically as the story progresses, and they get more in sync. Then they change to a piece better suited to entering “musical theatre duet” instead of the “adult group tap” competition class – Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You”. Their performance gradually improves, and their homemade costumes are both credible and fairytale-delightful. Jason Hardwick’s choreography works well to make the easy moves look hard and then have the dancers gradually master them. The soundscape (Lindsay Walker) evokes tap-dance performances and pop-music fun, right from the pre-show selections.

Like many of Trevor Schmidt’s scripts, I started out amused and then became engaged with the likeable but very distinct characters and their situation, realizing afterwards in conversation with my theatregoing companions that there were also some profound messages in the narrative. About the difficulty and awkwardness and necessity of making new friends in mid-life. About wanting “something just for me.” About how anything worth doing is worth doing badly. All of which are good reminders, especially before Christmas.

Running time is about an hour, with no intermission – which is just right for this quiet delightful two-hander.

Tickets to How Patty and Joanne Won High Gold at the Grand Christmas Cup Winter Dance Competition are available here. Performances run until Saturday December 13th. If you’re in Calgary, or if you loved this script so much that you want to road trip, the Lunchbox Theatre production runs at the Vertigo Theatre in Calgary until December 18th.

Guys and Dolls – a fun production of a famous show!

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Gambling scene in Guys and Dolls, with Big Jule (Connor Foy) in the centre. Photo Nanc Price Photography.

“It’s the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York”, goes the oxymoronic Frank Loesser lyric from Guys and Dolls, building the context for a world of drifters and grifters and permanently-floating characters in a New York City neighbourhood, probably in the 1920s. I had never seen this musical before, or done any homework, so I appreciated the context!

In the current production by Foote in the Door Theatre, directed by Joyanne Rudiak at Théâtre Servus Credit Union, the action opens on a lively urban streetscape (Leland Stelck design) with various characters going about their business. We see a boxer and his trainer, some teenage fangirls chasing any possible celebrity, couples and friends, a police detective, drunk men and women, and a Salvation-Army-like uniformed mission parade, with musical instruments. As in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, the early scenes created a busy and interesting locality – but unlike the Washington Heights neighbourhood of Dominican-American families, the Broadway setting of Guys and Dolls isn’t about families at all.

We meet a group of gamblers (Aaron Schaan, Brad Corcoran, Madison Lalonde) and then we meet Nathan Detroit (Russ Farmer), the host of the aforementioned crap game. The presence of a trenchcoated detective (Erwin Veugelers) makes it very clear to the audience that gambling is illegal. Nathan’s longtime fiancée Miss Adelaide (Ruth Wong-Miller) is the star dancer in a nightclub nearby. But he explains to his associates that he doesn’t want to get married, while she sings her frustration with waiting for him and waiting to have a married life with children in the suburbs. “Adelaide’s Lament” is a hilarious song, of the genre where I kept trying to guess the next ridiculous rhyme. I was reminded of some lines in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (also a Loesser/Swerling/Burrows creation), where Wong-Miller’s office-worker character Rosemary dreams of moving to New Rochelle (a Connecticut bedroom town).

Ruth Wong-Miller (Miss Adelaide) and Russ Farmer (Nathan Detroit) in Guys and Dolls. Photo Nanc Price Photography.

A delightful contrast to this cast of ne’er-do-wells and nightlife is the presence of a mission outpost. They’re clearly a Salvation Army tribute, with red uniforms, pseudo military ranks, and a marching band (made up of Brian Ault on trombone, Eilidh Tew on clarinet, one saxophonist I didn’t recognize, and several enthusiastic percussionists). Sergeant Sarah (Kit Kroeker) seems to be in charge, but also an upperclass misfit in the rough Broadway area. Kroeker’s voice is well suited to the mix of hymn-singing, trained solo belt, and duets in her role – a pleasing contrast with Wong-Miller’s character’s nasal dialect and less forceful voice. (I’ve heard Wong-Miller sing in enough other shows that I know it was the character, not the singer!) There were opportunities for jokes about well-meaning clueless missionaries, which landed just as well in 2025.

Sergeant Sarah (Kit Kroeker) and the Save a Soul Mission band, in Guys and Dolls. Photo Nanc Price Photography.

Like many traditional musicals, the story needs two couples with obstacles to romance, as well as a main plot objective (Nathan finding a new venue for his craps game). Nathan and Adelaide are one at-odds couple (see what I did there?) Sergeant Sarah is thrown together with high-stakes gambler Sky Masterson (Aidan Heaman), who tries to take her out on a bet, but then falls for her (of course!)

Some of the most fun scenes in this show are the large cast choreography filling up the big stage at Theatre Servus (Adam Kuss). I was sitting in the front row so I felt immersed (although never quite endangered) – sitting further back would probably let you appreciate the full scope of the action though! My favourite was the action at the plaza in Havana, where colourful salsa performers and restaurant customers danced joyfully and flirted and fought, while ASMs doubled as bar staff to crowd the plaza even more. Although the simulated dice-games in the sewer for “The Crapshooters’ Dance” were also great, with about 20 male-identifying characters incorporated in the action – Connor Foy and Aaron Schaan as featured dancers, and versatile ensemble members like Julia Stanski and Chelsea Makwae and Eilidh Tew just as captivating in trouser roles as in chorus-girl or “doll” roles.

Aidan Heaman, Sky Masterson, then glows in his spotlight with the classic “Luck be a Lady Tonight!”

I won’t give away the rest of the plot – suffice it to say that there are no big surprises. It turns out that for a show I didn’t know, a lot of it was already familiar songs and tropes, so it was fun to recognize them as they came up. It was also satisfying for me to recognize faces and names as people I’d worked with before, at Walterdale, for ELOPE, and for Foote in the Door. At least two of them have supported Walterdale productions in backstage roles, and maybe 10 of them onstage, and one playwright, for example.

Guys and Dolls continues at Théâtre Servus Credit Union (La Cité Francophone) until November 30th, with tickets available here. As well as a snacks-and-drinks concession, they are also selling Peace by Chocolate chocolate bars in show-themed sleeves. The chocolate is so good that I might go back tonight just to buy more!

The 39 Steps – a new Teatro classic!

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Priya Narine as Annabella Schmidt and Geoffrey Simon Brown as Richard Hannay, in The 39 Steps.

Photo Marc Chalifoux, costumes Brian Bast, set Chantel Fortin, lighting Rory Turner

The first play in the new Teatro Live! season, Farren Timoteo’s first as artistic director, is the hilarious, fast-moving, and farfetched The 39 Steps.

The 39 Steps was first a 1915 adventure novel / melodramatic thriller by John Buchan, who later served as the 15th Governor-General of Canada. I read the novel as a teenager, along with Buchan’s other works Greenmantle and Prester John, because my father had kept his childhood copies. It was adapted into a spy-thriller movie by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935, and had a few later film adaptations as well. In 2005, Patrick Barlow wrote this stage-play based on the earlier versions, but dialing everything up to the point of parody for 21st-century audiences.

The curtains open on emo-self-absorbed Richard Hannay, slouching in an armchair in his half-unpacked London flat, explaining that all his friends have moved away or died and he is bored. In this production Hannay is played by Geoffrey Simon Brown, who brings an amusing mix of bravado and bewilderment to the role.

Fortunately for the audience, his state of ennui doesn’t last long! A trip to the (vaudeville) theatre brings him an encounter with a mysterious woman (Priya Narine), who demands sanctuary in his apartment but ends up being murdered after entrusting him with vague secrets and missions.

Many many minor characters in the story of Hannay’s flight across England and Scotland are portrayed by two ensemble members (billed as Clown 1 and Clown 2), Michael Watt and Katie Yoner. Watt and Yoner are both noted physical-comedy performers in their own work as well as BFA-educated actors, and they were perfect for these roles, in which the quick-changes are acknowledged and sometimes flawed. Edmonton audiences rarely applaud transitions, but there was one shift that had Yoner’s character grabbing the four chairs and a table that had been representing a vehicle, and striking all of them in one trip, ending with crashing and banging in the wings.

Michael Watt, Katie Yoner, and Geoffrey Simon Brown in The 39 Steps. Lighting Rory Turner, Costumes, Brian Bast, Set Chantel Fortin. Photos Marc Chalifoux Photography.

Narine also portrays some other characters encountered by Hannay – an indignant rail passenger who reports him to the police, a lonely young Scottish crofter – sending up various tropes of women in early-20th-century thrillers.

I recalled a previous production of 39 Steps that I saw in the intimate space of Walterdale Theatre in 2022, where I kept swivelling my head back and forth to follow the fast-paced action of a train across the Forth Rail Bridge, a manhunt by air, a flight across misty sheep-pasture, and a final showdown back in a London theatre. I wondered how Timoteo’s direction in the larger traditional proscenium-stage auditorium would evoke the urgency and immersive nature of the script. And I was pleasantly surprised! Some of the action had me gasping and laughing because even with my vague memories of the story I hadn’t predicted what was going to happen next and how.

Design choices for this production all supported the action which was central to the play. Many set pieces (Chantel Fortin) were used in different creative ways. Lighting (Rory Turner), fog, sound, and Brian Bast’s costuming added atmosphere and affirmed the familiar tropes.

I found some of the dialogue hard to hear or understand, particularly when they were speaking quickly in unfamiliar accents over background sounds of trains or gunshots. But it wasn’t hard to follow. The plot was both farfetched and satisfying, and it was a great night out.

The 39 Steps is playing at the Varscona Theatre until November 30th, with tickets available here and at the door.

Next on my theatregoing calendar are two shows next weekend:

Guys and Dolls, the Loesser/Swerling/Burrows 1950 musical, a Foote in the Door production at La Cité Francophone / Théâtre Servus Credit Union, running Nov 21-Nov 30. Tickets here!

PepperMUNT, the bi-munt-ly late cabaret, will be on Saturday November 22nd, this time in the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market. Tickets here!