Author Archives: Ephemeral Pleasures

Anything Goes!

Before last night, I would have said that the Westbury Theatre at the Transalta Arts Barns had a large stage. That was before I saw Strathcona Theatre’s performance of Anything Goes, which left me with the impression that the stage was just barely large enough for the cast of 50+ (I tried to count a couple of times, but they kept dancing!) A clever stage design evoked the multiple decks, spiral staircases, and porthole-covered swinging doors of an Art Deco cruise liner, while also providing space for the pit musicians to play on an upper deck. Last night’s preview show played to a full house, and since many of the family, friends, and fans of Strathcona Theatre got there earlier than I did, I was grateful for being able to watch some of the action as well as musicians not so far down from where I was sitting.

Early in the show, I thought that Sydney Williams, playing the nightclub singer and former evangelist Reno Sweeney, was dominating the show as a strong singer with good stage presence. Adam Houston, as Billy Crocker, seemed a bit outmatched at first, with a difficult first song, but he hit his stride quickly and was more convincing later in the show. The audience was particularly delighted with David Unsworth as Lord Evelyn Oakleigh when he broke out of his rather predictable exaggerated-aristocracy role late in the show (you can’t miss it). I will definitely keep an eye out for this young actor in future productions.

The lyrics and music of this classic show (first staged in … with several revivals and revisions since) are by Cole Porter. A few of the songs were quite familiar, especially “You’re the Top” and “I get a Kick Out of You”. P.G. Wodehouse (also known for Jeeves and Wooster) had a hand in the book, and you can tell. There were love triangles, gangsters, mistaken identities, tap-dancing sailors, an exceptionally well-behaved live dog in the cast (credited as Teddy Gorman), evangelists, missionaries, and converts, puns, innuendoes, and assorted happy endings. When two or three actors were speaking or singing, there were often many other characters on the edges of the stage doing things that were interesting but not distracting, adding to the sense that more was happening than we could watch.

I was a little uncomfortable with the portrayals of the two Chinese converts Luke and John (James Kwak and Spencer Lloyd), complete with Mao jackets and the stereotypical accents common in fictional portrayals of the early 20th century, and the later adoption of “Chinese” disguises by other characters. I’m not sure why the humorous portrayal of the English aristocrat didn’t disturb me the same way. Maybe it felt a bit like blackface. I would not be surprised if it had been toned down from Broadway versions, though.

Linette Smith is Director and Choreographer, and Stephen Delano is Musical Director. There were a few technical glitches in this first preview performance – some sound balancing or sound cuing that was a bit slow, and one door that came off its hinges distractingly – but nothing that should interfere with the audience’s appreciation during the run of the show. It continues until Saturday night at the Westbury Theatre, with tickets available at Tix on the Square .

Two fun shows I forgot to write about, or, a Blind Date with Billy Elliot

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In February I went to Rebecca Northan’s show Blind Date at the Club/Rice space at the Citadel Theatre. I giggled a lot, but I guess I didn’t have anything pressing to say about it and it slipped out of the posting queue of my brain. Like a real blind date, it was unexpected, occasionally awkward and embarrassing, and kind of sweet.

The show played last year around Valentine’s Day as well. The concept is that the main character, named Mimi, asks someone from the audience to participate in the play as her date. In the performance I saw, the participant was a very good sport and amusing fellow named Travis. There were also several minor characters; I can’t find my program to give proper credits but my notes say they were played by Jamie and Christian.

I think it might be a fun show to see more than once, to see how much it varies with a different participant. It would also be fun to do gender-flipped or with a same-sex date.

In late March, I saw the Broadway Across Canada production of Billy Elliot at the Jubilee Auditorium. I was lucky that I hadn’t got an opening-night ticket, as the first night performance got cancelled due to some of the trucks of properties got delayed at the border due to the snowstorm. The production travels with four actors taking turns as Billy, and two as Michael. We saw Mitchell Tobin (age 12) as Billy. The movie Billy Elliot, which came before the musical, overlaps in my memory with The Full Monty, Brassed Off!, and Kinky Boots as a genre of late 1990s-early 2000s comedies about working class people in England coping with hard financial times in creative ways – and the musical is the same story with an Elton John score. (That reminds me – am I the only person entertained by the bizarrely detailed genre categories that Netflix comes up with as it tries to work out what else I’d like to watch based on what I’ve seen so far?)

The show was polished, fun, and touching. There was at least as much wooden-chair choreography as in a production of Spring Awakening. In one particularly surreal dance number, there was a chorus of striking miners and a chorus of police with riot shields, sharing the stage with a crowd of little girl ballet dancers. The miners’-families Christmas party scene included some puppets like the Spitting Image political-caricatures.

I was disturbed that I had no recollection of the miners’ strike portrayed in the show at the time it was happening, even though background reading for the show illustrated its monstrous import in destroying coal mining in Britain. And although the show illustrates the excitement and determination of the new strikers, and the persistence and sacrifice as they held out, later history showed their efforts to be as heartbreakingly futile as those of the 1832 Paris Uprising shown in the plot events of Les Misérables.

Saturday excursions

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Last Saturday, the bookends of my day were two more Edmonton entertainment traditions, thanks to invitations from improv-class friends.

In the morning I went to Saturday Morning Cartoons at the Garneau/Metro Theatre. For $12 (cheaper for kids, seniors, and students) you get to sit in the semi-dark theatre all morning and watch an odd assortment of cartoons and vintage Saturday-morning TV ads, while replenishing your bowl from the lobby buffet of cereal and milk. Many of the patrons were in pajamas or reasonable comfortable facsimile. The entertainment seemed to mostly be from the 1970s, and the familiar-seeming bits were as odd as the parts I’d never seen before. An ITV ad showing the attractions of modern Edmonton, on a backdrop of brand-new concrete and artificially-green grass. Scooby-Doo. A classic McDonaldland ad. American public service announcements reminding people not to litter, smoke cigarettes, or light forest fires. Kid Power, which was probably considered (by white people) to be a charmingly progressive treatment of post-racial society in 1972, but which kept us muttering to each other, did they really say that?? There were lots of choices of cereal and milk options. The lights in the theatre were dim but not extinguished, so that it wasn’t difficult to come and go during the screening. I would definitely go again.

I’d also definitely go again to Oh! Susanna, a late night variety show at the Varscona Theatre hosted by the character Susanna Patchouli, who bears surprisingly little resemblance to Mark Meer, and her assistant the Duchess of Capilano, who sounds a little like Belinda Cornish. The friend who was with me goes to the show regularly. He was unsurprised that part of the show involved a bartender concocting a tasty mixed drink for the hosts and giving the recipe, and then handing out tastes of it to the whole audience, and that then something similar happened with grilled sandwich bites. There were several other guests discussing other shows and entertainment options coming up soon in Edmonton, with the most memorable being James McClennan, a tenor who will be performing in the Edmonton Opera’s Eugene Onegin, and Lisa Norton, who will be playing Odysseus in the Citadel’s Penelopiad. Both of them were interesting to listen to and seemed to be having fun with both the conversation about the arts and the more bizarre aspects of the Game they competed in.

When That I Was

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The Shadow Theatre production of When That I Was played earlier this month at the Varscona Theatre. I hadn’t been paying much attention to the various temptations of local theatre websites lately, so the first I heard of this one was on a LivingSocial discount ad. But it sounded interesting, so I bought a ticket with the LivingSocial voucher.

Like The Kite Runner, the program for When That I Was had lots to read ahead of time, with a page-long glossary of terms and definitions and a couple of pages of historical timeline. If you’re a Shakespeare fan, you might have recognised the title more readily than I did – it’s the first line from the song in Twelfth Night, “When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain”.

When That I Was was is a one man show (Christopher Hunt) about a character who has spent his life as an actor in Shakespeare’s company. It was written by John Mortimer and Edward Atienza, around 1981. It’s the same John Mortimer who wrote Rumpole of the Bailey. The show is mostly the character telling stories about Shakespeare, and acting bits of them out. He’s speaking from a perspective of being old and impoverished, hiding from the Puritans who had closed all the theatres, but when he’s telling a story from his youth his whole bearing and voice change so you can see him as a small boy, an ambitious young actor playing women’s roles, or an older man recounting events later in his life and in Shakespeare’s life.

As far as I know, the stories in the play are consistent with known canon. So the part about Hamnet was sad but not a surprise. I thought the treatment of Shakespeare’s relationship with Henry, the Earl of Southampton, was particularly deft, with the narrator explaining that he didn’t know for sure whether or not their love had been expressed physically but that he thought so himself. That left it open for the audience members to accept the possibility they preferred, and not to feel distracted by a story that didn’t fit the canon or their own previous ideas.

The narrator’s costume comprised various layers of ragged beige and brown garments, as well as hose which were in noticeably better shape. A more realistic creation might have included holes in the heels that were big enough to be visible above his slippers. He also must have had really impressive poacher’s pockets, since he kept pulling things out of a flimsy-looking worn jacket without ever losing anything or clinking anything. At one point I decided that the whole set was like a sort of Chekov’s mantelpiece, since it appeared to just be a mood-creating frame of dusty grey and beige abandoned space with the occasional red cloth, but I think that the character picked up and used almost every property during the play, mostly things that I hadn’t even noticed before he touched them.

The run of When That I Was is now over. The next Shadow Theatre production at the Varscona is Flight of the Viscount, a David Belke comedy which starts May 1^st.

The Kite Runner

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The current offering in the Citadel season is The Kite Runner, adapted by Matthew Spangler from Khaled Hosseini’s novel. I hadn’t read the novel or seen the movie, so the story had me biting my nails in worry and taking my glasses off to wipe off tears.

The story unfolds in mostly short scenes introduced and narrated by the present-day Amir (Anousha Alamian). The setting moves from Kabul, Afghanistan, in the 1970s, to San Francisco, and then to present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan. The different locations and moods are quickly and effectively evoked by lighting and simple props, and by music. Salar Nader performs original percussion music before and during the play. I wonder if it was difficult to adapt this storytelling format for the stage, making decisions about how many scenes and settings and characters were necessary and figuring out how to keep both the observer and the immediacy.

The play program has several pages of notes on the cultures, languages, and history illustrated in the play, showing the westernised or permissive times of the 1970s in Kabul and the discrimination against the Hazara people by the ethnic majority Pashtun, contrasting with the modern-day Taliban regime and its brutalities. The kite runner referred to in the title means someone who runs to salvage a prize kite after its string has been cut in a kite-fighting tournament – specifically in this story, the Hazara servant boy Ali (Parnelli Parnes) who grows up with the narrator Amir, son of a wealthy Pashtun merchant (Michael Peng).

But the crux of the story is universal. There’s a situation where Amir betrays Ali out of fear, and then Amir feels horribly guilty about it and does worse things to push him away. There was a heart-wrenching inevitability to that part of the story that had the audience gasping. Much later, there is a promise of redemption, and a dramatically-satisfying return to Kabul, but it is not a story with an easy happy ending.

The story is also about the awkward relationship between Amir, a boy who loves storytelling and kite-flying but is clumsy at soccer and fearful of bullies, and his confident intimidating father. Amir continues to feel like a disappointment to his father as he grows up in San Francisco and studies creative writing, but the closeness between the two of them gradually becomes more apparent as his father becomes old and ill. Amir’s love interest, Soraya (Dalal Badr), is a smaller part of the story, but we see enough of her to see that she’s a complex character with backstory of her own.

The Kite Runner is playing at the Shoctor Theatre until March 31^st. I won’t write my thoughts about the later parts of the story and the outcome of the plot, because if you don’t already know it, you might want to see it without spoilers.

Ephemeral gets mobile

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I haven’t been posting on Ephemeral Pleasures lately because the household of ephemeral pleasure has been preoccupied with buying a car, and then a large portion of the budget for ephemeral pleasures has been temporarily diverted to the costs associated with buying and operating a car. Fortunately, I had cleverly invested in a lot of theatre tickets beforehand, so there are still events to look forward to without second-guessing the expense, including the rest of the Citadel season. And I still have a small backlog of entertainment and adventures to report on, which I will get on with soon.

It’s been a long time since I’d owned a car. When I moved to Edmonton, people in my previous hometown as well as here said “well, you can’t live in Edmonton without a car…” and that sounded like a challenge, so I said “Just watch me.” I’ve lived a mostly-comfortable life in Edmonton for almost five years without a car, thanks to Edmonton Bike Commuters, Edmonton Public Transit, Yellow Cab, Budget Rent-a-Car Southside, and my friends who have given me many rides. I even played a season of hockey, after finding a teammate who was willing to pick me up and take me home.

But having a car is like … You know the video game Civilization, where the grid map is concealed in shadows until you explore each tile? And then it opens up, so that you have the feeling that the geography was always there, just never seen, and it changes your whole perspective? It’s like that. My mental map of Edmonton is opening up more and more from my initial tiles of Whyte Avenue and Downtown. All kinds of explorations suddenly become feasible, or at least feasible in the right weather. I’m even starting to get to know other parts of Central Alberta – I’ve explored Fort Saskatchewan and Vegreville and some of the villages on Highway 14, and I can see lots more nearby places on the map that I’m looking forward to checking out.

That is, after it stops snowing.

Ride the Cyclone!

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I saw Ride the Cyclone last weekend in a preview show. I wanted to watch it again before writing it up, but I also wanted to post fast to encourage other people to see it if it sounds like their kind of thing. So I’ll make some notes now, but also figure out whether the budget and the calendar can manage seeing it again later in the run.

By that you can conclude that I liked it, but that it wasn’t simple.

Ride the Cyclone is a new musical, by the company Atomic Vaudeville out of Victoria BC. It’s written by Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell, and directed by Britt Small and Jacob Richmond. The premise is that six teenage members of a school choir have been killed in a rollercoaster accident just before the show starts. The characters are actually dead, but they each get to sing in a competition to win a fresh start. These six songs, plus conversations in between and some other ensemble numbers, make up a fast-paced 90-minute show. One of the most fun things about the show is the wide variation in genre of the songs, with accompanying dance, costume-changes, and props, from gangsta rap to Ukrainian folkdance. I’m pretty sure that if I was more intimately familiar with the canon of musical theatre I might have picked out homages to lots of styles, writers, or specific shows – as it was, I was giggling away at the part that reminded me of Tim Curry in Rocky Horror (Picture) Show, and was touched by the bits that reminded me of “Journey to the Heaviside Layer” in Cats.

The writing and the actors were good at making the characters different from one another and all interesting. Shortcut characterizations were apparent from the start: the gay boy (Kholby Wardell), the would-be gangsta (Jameson Matthew Parker), the kid with elbow crutches (Elliott Loran), the fat sidekick (Kelly Hudson), the perky achiever (Rielle Braid), and the mystery Jane Doe (Sarah Jane Pelzer), each wearing Catholic-school uniforms but instantly distinguishable in how they wore them. But as the show progressed, each of the characters became more interesting and likeable and the ways they reacted to each other also changed. The main reason I don’t watch the TV show Glee (despite the fun music) is that when I did watch I found the characters flat and predictable, fitting various stereotypes about teenagers and teachers that I don’t find either true or helpful. But even within the limitations of a short musical performance, I thought these six characters became real and intriguing. Kelly Hudson’s song made me cry. Sarah Jane Pelzer’s performance as Jane Doe, the girl nobody remembered, was enhanced by a fascinatingly awkward physicality – nothing as obvious as a limp, but just a sense from her walk and gestures that she wasn’t quite connected to her body.

The narrative says interesting things about the trope of every kid being somehow a misfit with his or her own troubles, but it also shows some of the complexity behind the trope of growing up in a dead-end town.

A seventh character, represented by Carey Wass in voice and James Insell in puppetry, was the carnival fortune-telling machine who acted as the sort of MC for the show.

A four-piece musical ensemble accompanied them and contributed to the moods and the exploration of musical genres. In the first few songs the music was a bit too loud for me to hear the lyrics, but this problem was corrected later. There were also some video bits, most notable of which was projected not onto a backdrop screen but onto a white circular folkloric skirt extended by the character who was wearing it.

Ride the Cyclone is playing at the Maclab Theatre in the Citadel until March 10th. Tickets are available through the Citadel box office.

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CaptainAwkward’s thoughts about friendship, affection, hunger, taking care of each other, and Valentines’ Day. I hope you all find ways to acknowledge the love in your life, in whatever shape it comes in.

CaptainAwkward.com

Valentine’s day is tomorrow, right? These are pretty much still my thoughts about that. It’s a terrible night to eat out. Don’t buy anyone an expensive necklace that looks like two butts stuck together. People like to be told that they matter.

Today’s question is also a love story.

Dear Capt. Awkward,

I have depression. It’s diagnosed, I’m on happy pills and everything. It varies, sometimes I’ll be completely fine, other times I’ll have a sobbing emotional breakdown in the middle of a bar. The breakdowns don’t happen very often, and I’ve talked to my drug!shrink about my medication. Unfortunately it appears my options are to be more drugged during the good times in order to compensate for the bad times, which are sporadic and unpredictable. Since I don’t really like being on drugs in the first place, we decided to continue the meds I’m on and cope with the…

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The non-sparkly vampire swoops through Red Deer

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Red Deer College’s Theatre Performance and Creation program is producing Steven Dietz’s Dracula, a 1996 adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel.

I hadn’t read the novel or seen any of the movies or stage plays based on it, so I didn’t really know the story, just the cultural common ground about the bloodsucking Transylvanian count. This meant that some of the plot twists surprised me, which was fun.

Dracula starts off with a prologue at one edge of the stage delivered by Renfield, a woman in an elegant dress of a previous era (Daryn Tessier), being served wine and a meal by a servant while discoursing on Bram Stoker and immortality. The meal turns out to be a rat, and the woman is swept off to be clothed in rags and chains by attendants of an asylum. I was a little confused later on because a reference to a “men’s asylum” left me unclear whether she was supposed to be a male character, as in the original novel, although the part otherwise worked well as a woman in thrall to her master Count Dracula.

The other side of the stage is then revealed as the bedroom of a young woman, Lucy, (Kirsten Harper) as she talks with her friend Mina (Raegan Aleman) about Mina’s far-away fiancé and Lucy’s suitors. The middle and upstage is still dark, but then a small glimpse of a rocky fortress is starkly lit while we hear Mina’s fiancé Jonathan (Nathan Johnson) recite a letter he’s writing to her from his business trip to inaccessible Transylvania. The story progresses from there in brief scenes of foreboding and flashbacks, as Dracula (Callahan New) arrives in England and targets Lucy, and Mina, Jonathan, Lucy’s suitor and friend Dr. Seward (Mitchel Roelfsema), and Dr. Seward’s colleague Van Helsing (Steven Pecksen) try to protect her and then save her. Among the other characters, Natascha Shulmeister and Elise Dextraze were particularly noteworthy as “vixens”, or seductive thralls of Dracula.

The shocking and creepy story was complemented with lots of special effect cues, flashing lights, smoke, holes opening in floor, walls, and somewhere else that I won’t write in order not to spoil future audiences, blood, dead creatures, and so on. These all worked well and added to the horror. The many shifts of scene required lots of furniture moving, which wasn’t always silent but was speedy and smooth. The music was sometimes helpfully eerie, but sometimes that kind of minor-7^th organ chord that’s so cliché as parody suspenseful music that it kind of pulled me out of the story for a minute.

On the other hand, I was interested to notice that Count Dracula’s accent was much more subtle than the parodies on parodies of “I vant to suck your blood” that everyone thinks of as a Dracula accent. I have no idea if it was authentic, but it felt credible and not overplayed. Similarly, the other characters had various hints of English accents, and in the case of Van Helsing, Dutch, just enough to feel atmospheric and not enough to make any of them hard to understand for a Canadian audience.

In the first few scenes, I found Mina and Jonathan both a little hard to understand. I think it was because they were speaking quickly while being fairly far back on a large stage. After that I had no problem hearing or understanding any of the characters as the grisly tale unfolded.

Dracula continues through next weekend, on the Mainstage of Red Deer College Arts Centre. Tickets are available here.

Zodiac Arrest – a circus cabaret

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The Westbury Theatre is the big theatre space at the Transalta Arts Barns. I’d only ever seen it with the risers pulled out on one side and a flat proscenium stage, but the other night when I walked in, it was transformed with a few rows of seats on each of the four sides, zodiac symbols projected on a curtain on one side, and a big empty sprung floor, set up for a show by Firefly Theatre, the Edmonton troupe specialising in circus arts and physical theatre.

There were twelve performances, each introduced by patter from a costumed host evoking the characteristics of each zodiac archetype. About half of them were arial acrobatics acts, and they were all amazing – Kadri Hansen, Lisa Feehan, Danny Gorham, Kim Precht, Meghan Watson, Kristi Wade, Annie Dugan, Michalene Giesbrecht, and Kim Precht. The lighting, music, and costuming contributed to different moods from playful to romantic to creepy. I don’t have any interest (or aptitude!) to attempt arial work myself, but the Firefly Theatre website has lots of information about workshops and beginner classes in their various disciplines.

Other acts included some clown performances (Candace Berlinguette and Mike Kennard), some stage magic by Billy Kidd, a dance version of the story of Ariadne (including Jamie Cavanagh as an egregiously self-absorbed Theseus), and some contortionists cum rhythmic gymnastics performers (Mackenzie Baert and Caitlin Marchak)

I thought that some of these acts dragged a bit, and that the astrological monologues were likewise too long, but on the whole I had enough awe and delight to make it a worthwhile evening. Zodiac Arrest’s last show is tonight, Sunday at 8 pm, with tickets still available at Fringe Theatre Adventures.