Monthly Archives: February 2025

Quick takes on short runs – Keith Alessi and MacEwan

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Keith Alessi, in Tomatoes Tried to Kill Me But Banjos Saved My Life

First, the one that you still have chances to see! Keith Alessi’s solo Tomatoes Tried To Kill Me But Banjos Saved My Life is playing this weekend at Gateway Theatre, as an extra to Workshop West’s subscription season. There are performances tonight (Friday night), Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon at 1:30. It looks like the Saturday show is sold out, so act quickly if you want to grab tickets to one of the others.

I’ve heard lots of solo memoir pieces, and this was one of the best. The performer/creator, Keith Alessi, is humble and authentic, with a ready store of banjo jokes to cover any time he spends re-tuning his instruments. Yes, instruments, plural. There are several on stage at top of show, but more are brought in later. His story and delivery are compelling, with more laughter than tears. Erika Conway is credited as director and producer, and is responsible for the dramaturgy that shaped the story and focused the message. Gateway Theatre, the blackbox venue home to Workshop West, is a great choice for acoustic music and storytelling with an intimate supportive audience.

A shorter version of this show appeared at Edmonton Fringe in 2018 and 2019 – I didn’t see it then so I can’t tell you how it’s been improved. But this version has an intermission, and afterwards Keith is joined on stage by Bruce Ziff (retired U of A law professor and not-retired banjo player), since as Keith explains banjo history, it lends itself to playing in jams and circles, to community and to people playing together, whatever their experience/skill levels. A timely reminder!

Tickets are $25 – and all the proceeds of the tour are divided between arts organizations and cancer charities. At this stop, the beneficiaries are Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre (with its mandate of nurturing new Canadan plays/playwrights), and Wellspring, the set of supports for patients, survivors, and families affected by cancer. Remaining tickets are here.

Last weekend I caught another short-run show, and ever since I’ve been running into people talking about it. “Did you see Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 at MacEwan?” “Wasn’t that GOOD?”

This large-scale musical by Dave Molloy hit Broadway in 2016 and won some Tony awards then. It hadn’t been done in western Canada before this production with Jim Guedo directing students in the Musical Theatre program at MacEwan University. The story comes from a segment of the Tolstoy novel War and Peace. I loved how the script acknowledges the challenges of following a large sweeping novel, with the prologue song addressing the audience, telling us to follow in the program and then introducing each character with a repeated catchphrase “Natasha is young, Sonya is good, Andrey isn’t here” and so on. I was reminded of other large-cast novels / operas / musicals where I could have used this kind of acknowledgement and clues – Les Miserables, two versions of Eugene Onegin, a lot of Shakespeare …

Set design (Daniela Masellis) and direction (Guedo) have the audience seated on two sides of a raised alley stage in the Tim Ryan Lab black-box – but the actors are not contained on that stage, or on its extensions to accommodate musicians – they use all the lobby entrances, they swish or strut or slink between cabaret tables and engage with audience members, they carry stools around the audience area and stand on them … I felt immersed in this world of 19th-century Moscow.

Lead roles are played by Lisa Kotelniski (Natasha), Matthew Gregg (Pierre), and Liam Lorrain (Anatole), with Layne Labbé a standout as Hélène in an ensemble of 14 student-performers.

I was particularly impressed by the handling of sound mixing and amplification. With fourteen singers moving around the room, including some playing instruments, and eight additional musicians located at two ends of the stage, I was always able to hear and comprehend the lyrics of the songs. Sound designer Dave Bowden and audio lead / live mix operator Alex Delaney are to be commended.

The last production in MacEwan’s mainstage series is The Prom. It plays the last weekend of March, with tickets available here.

King of the Yees

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Ruth Wong-Miller and Grace Li in Walterdale Theatre’s King of the Yees, haggling as Lauren and Whiskey Seller. Photography by Scott Henderson, Henderson Images. Costumes Karin Lauderdale, Set Leland Stelck, Lighting Rebecca Cave.

I haven’t been involved with working on the latest Walterdale Theatre production, King of the Yees, so I had the fun of seeing it for the first time on opening weekend, along with a delighted audience. Barbara Mah, Walterdale’s current artistic director, directed Chinese-American playwright Lauren Yee’s somewhat-autobiographical play, with a talented cast and team of local artists.

King of the Yees is partly a familiar story about a father and daughter – a father (Stanley Woo of Apocalypse Kow) who is immersed in the clannish culture of San Francisco’s Chinatown and the Yee Family Association that he manages, and a playwright daughter (Ruth Wong-Miller of Foote in the Door and other musical theatre) who has moved on, moved away, and lost connection with her parents and their culture. I found the frustrated banter between them very funny, and also poignantly relatable, and unexpectedly moving.

Mah’s production, and the script, also contain fantastical elements which are fun to watch and listen to, as well as bitingly-sarcastic riffs on assumptions about Asian actors by a couple of performers playing actors who have been hired to read the playwright’s work-in-progress (Kingsley Leung and Helen Massini). This is not quite as confusing as it sounds! Visual/audible spectacles include a lion dance (handlers Massini, Grace Li, Ivy Poon, Rupert Gomez) led by a Buddha Boy (Tsz Him Hymns Chu), an Erhu player (Poon), a troupe of elders doing tai chi, a flamboyant Model Ancestor (stage manager Tim Lo), and a Szechuan face changer (Massini). The beautiful set and costumes were designed by Leland Stelck and Karin Lauderdale and implemented by skilled teams of painters, stitchers, and builders.

Ensemble members Rupert Gomez, Helen Massini, Andrew Kwan, Grace Li, Kingsley Leung, and Ivy Poon form a mysterious wall, in King of the Yees. Photo Scott Henderson, Henderson Images. Set Leland Stelck, costumes Karin Lauderdale, lights Rebecca Cave.

The digital program contains some helpful and interesting contextual information that is worth reading for extra enjoyment. Some performances of King of the Yees are sold out on line, with a few tickets held back for door sales. The run continues until next Saturday, February 15th, and advance tickets are here.

There’s so much else on this weekend, too! Plan ahead!

  • Bea, at Shadow Theatre, closes Sunday
  • Angry Alan, at Northern Light Theatre, closes Saturday (tomorrow!)
  • After the Trojan Women, by Amena Shehab & Joanna Blundell, is at Backstage Theatre
  • The Citadel has Frozen and Does This Taste Funny?
  • U Alberta Studio Theatre has [Blank], by Alice Birch
  • Die-Nasty, the long-running improv soap opera on Monday nights at Varscona, is free on Feb 10th.
  • An Oak Tree, at the Aviary, produced by Theatre Yes
  • Script Salon, Sunday Feb 9th, has a reading of Linda Celentano’s Giorgi of the Jungle.

And next weekend there’s even more, all with short runs!

  • The Effect, by Lucy Prebble, at the Arts Barns Studio,
  • The Spinsters (Bigger and Badder) is in the Westbury
  • MacEwan University’s musical theatre program has Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812
  • The first PepperMUNT Cabaret, a production of Jake Tkaczyk’s new company MUNT Performance Association, will be at the Gateway Theatre on Saturday February 15th, at 10:30 pm – giving you enough time to see one of the shows in the above lists first! Trevor Schmidt and Mark Meer are hosting, with an assortment of talented guests, and tickets are here.

I’m not going to be able to see all of these, because I’m also busy working on Walterdale’s next show, Stag and Doe by Mark Crawford (April 23-May 3). See what you can! Maybe I will see you there!