Category Archives: Theatre

Female actor in draped purple costume playing The Witch

Back to the theatre and Into The Woods

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[Image above shows Nicole English as The Witch. Photo by Nanc Price Photography]

The other day, something reminded me of the feeling of watching a stage musical. I don’t remember if it was reminiscing about the Walterdale production of Light in the Piazza, looking at a Facebook memory of Chess, or watching tick, tick, BOOM on Netflix … but I was suddenly longing for that sensation of being in the room while live actors sang in harmony as part of a story that I cared about, especially when they were surrounded by a large movement ensemble in beautiful costumes lit strikingly on an interesting set.

So when I was offered the opportunity to attend opening night of Foote in the Door’s production of the Steven Sondheim musical Into the Woods, I signed up immediately.

And I got what I wanted. Into the Woods has music – lots of music, with hummable melodies and satisfying harmonies and lots of reprises of the good bits, and a backstage orchestra led by Daniel Belland. It has a movement ensemble bringing the forest to life (Julia Stanski, Andrew Kwan, James Velasco, Nick Davis). The large cast performs intertwined versions of several familiar fairy tales, with help from narrator Brian Ault and throughline of a Baker and Baker’s Wife (Jason Duiker and Melanie Lafleur) who are sent on a quest to acquire objects from the various archetypal characters in order to fulfill their wish for a child. The quest, and the other wishes in the familiar fairytales, are all complete by intermission, giving the impression of happily-ever-after.

Actor in gold and silver ball gown, with dancer moving tiny birds around her
Ruth Wong-Miller as Cinderella going to the festival, and Julia Stanski animating a flock of birds. Photo by Nanc Price Photography.

I had never seen the stage musical before, and had only vague memories of the movie, so I was very curious about what would happen in Act 2. And it turned out there was a lot to happen in Act 2 – mostly not tidy and definitely not all happy. While the quick pace and smooth dovetailing of plot bits in Act 1 was satisfying, Act 2 was more challenging and far less predictable. I have often thought that fairytale princes aren’t particularly inspiring or interesting – so I loved that the Into the Woods versions (Russ Farmer and Scott McLeod) became over-the-top prats and cads but were also completely bewildered about why they weren’t happy. Cinderella’s endearing down-to-earth sincerity was well portrayed by Ruth Wong-Miller. Due to an illness in the cast, Trish Van Doornum, the production’s director, was playing Jack’s Mother and Melanie Lafleur moved from that role to play the Baker’s Wife, including the powerful solo “Moments in the Woods”. One of my favourite characters was the Witch, played by Nicole English.

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Tickets for the short run in the Westbury Theatre at the ATB Arts Barns were sold through Eventbrite – but they may be completely sold out for the remaining shows in the short run.

Metronome: the lyric of memoir

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With our own 5@50 rehearsal cancelled due to bad weather and unsafe driving on Tuesday, I realized that I had an evening free for an excursion close to home, so I went to see the Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre production of Darrin Hagen’s new solo piece Metronome at the Backstage Theatre.

Metronome is lovely, a polished and moving example of the kind of solo performance I seek out at the Fringe festival. As part of the WWPT season in a spacious configuration of the Backstage space at the Arts Barns, it also has an exciting set design, floor to ceiling, from Beyata Hackborn.

Hagen is an relaxed performer and an understated writer, telling stories of growing up musical in a family without much money. The details of the Royal Conservatory examinations, (List A, List B, sight reading, ear tests, checking out the other candidates in the waiting room, wanting the extra 2% for being off-book) all came back to me with the memories of my own waits outside examination cubicles. The underscoring and the re-creation of teenage scenes cruising Main Street with the windows down or auditioning for some stoner dudes (sound design Jason Kodie) were all songs I didn’t remember until I heard them and then could hardly stay in my seat for the joy and movement they evoked.

I also appreciated that the story acknowledged the isolation and hazards of growing up LGBTQ+ in a small town in the 1970s, but left those as matter-of-fact background, a poignant reminder for those of us who experienced those settings and a gentle context-setting for those who didn’t, just as Hagen set the context of being less well-off than his classmates.

Metronome sold out on Friday and Saturday, but I believe there are a few tickets available for the closing performance on the evening of Sunday November 21st.

An evening of celebrating the Fringe

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Part of building and acknowledging a community is making and sharing art about that community. Fringe has always offered opportunities about that, and in recent years has been more intentional about expanding those opportunities to communities who haven’t always been recognized and celebrated in the same way – this year the venue pehonan is an exciting part of that intention.

But the Edmonton Fringe is itself a community. So of course there is art about the Fringe. The poster wall outside the Orange Hall is a lot shorter this year, but the sense of joyful celebration is extended by a complete set of posters commemorating every festival to date, with the imagery used that year for the program book and other publications. There’s an Instagram-ready set of brightly-coloured letters spelling out Fringe, in such a high-traffic area that it’s hard to take a picture without strangers in the way. (Unless, like me, you happen to be on site at 7:30 am.)

On Saturday, I went to three performances that were all celebrations of the Fringe culture. Gordon’s Big Bald Head: MasterThief Theatre is a long-running improv tradition, in which a small troupe of experienced performers uses the short description in the festival program to create their own version of another show. Their self-imposed rules include skipping over any sketch or improv show, since, according to Mark Meer, that would collapse the space-time continuum. (they might also skip music-based performances too.) The troupe members are currently Jacob Banigan, Mark Meer, and Ron Pederson. It’s easy to see that they know each other well and are having fun together, as they set each other up to do some preposterous stunts while building and resolving a complex plot.

With no printed program book this year, and a relatively small number of suitable shows to choose from, they chose to start from a big stack of program books from past years, using a pseudorandom selection process to choose one show. So the audience (close to or at the 60%capacity limit in the big Varscona theatre space) probably isn’t going to be familiar with the source material. But that didn’t seem to matter. On the night I attended, the inspiration was Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down, from a Toronto company in the 1994 Fringe. This allowed the performers another layer of comment/comedy about period customs and about what was okay to say in 1994 and not today. These are some of the best improvisers I have ever seen, and just fun to watch. Some of the remaining performances aren’t sold out. And no, I don’t know why it’s called Gordon’s Big Bald Head.

Die-Nasty is another long-running Edmonton improv troupe, this one in the soap-opera tradition of long convoluted character-driven stories. In a typical season, they have a 50-hour marathon show in the fall, then a series every Monday night all year, and every night of the Fringe there’s one episode of a story that unfolds at the Fringe. I don’t believe they’ve announced their 2021-2022 season plans yet, but the Die-Nasty at Fringe was just as I remembered. A collection of about 8 memorable characters – they have different guests added in each night – sweeps through a Fringe of beer tents, podcast reviews and mistaken slander, rehearsals and life-changing events, hints of romance and darker hints of murder. The night I saw it, the performers included Tom Edwards (a cowboy playwright trying to produce a musical cross between Oedipus and Best Little Whorehouse in Texas), Belinda Cornish as a famous actress, Hunter Cardinal trying to break away from his soccer-mad family to explore the arts, Stephanie Wolfe as a very strange psychotherapist, Mark Meer as a sort of Hunter S Thompson-esque podcaster, Wayne Jones, Jacob Banigan, and so on. The funniest moment was when one of Wolfe’s patients asked her a question about whether she can make people believe in a different reality or something like that, and she says “oh yes, I’ve been in charge of a whole province’s public health during a pandemic”.

Die-Nasty is sold out for tonight but seems to have some tickets available for tomorrow (Saturday Aug 21.)

The third tradition of performances celebrating the Fringe is Late Night Cabaret. In the Backstage theatre space as the last performance of the night, in a normal year it runs all through the week, filling the space with enthusiastic audience members who are still wide awake. An amazing house band, Ze Punters, with Audrey Ochoa the trombonist, entertains before and between the talk-show hosts and guests from various Fringe shows.

This year LNC has only four performances – on the Fridays and Saturdays of the Fringe. They all sold out quickly, but I was lucky enough to get a ticket for one of last weekend’s shows. The music and energy filled the space, but the limited admission meant that there was lots of space for safety and comfort (also short bar queues and no bathroom lineups). It was great to see familiar sets of eyes in the audience, and performance guests both familiar and new to me.

Edmonton Fringe continues until Sunday early evening, August 22, in its small careful format. I’m very glad to be here – and it’s time to head to a show.

Liminality

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Liminality is a solo performance by Dr. Steven Andrews, at the Grindstone Studio,a small well-appointed space underneath the Mill Creek Cafe (82 Avenue and 96 Street), entrance from 82nd Ave. (Same building as Sewing Machine Factory.) I last saw Steven Andrews in Kristine Nutting’s site-specific performance Devour Content Here in 2015.

I loved it and I don’t know why.

It’s a simple solo storytelling performance. I started to write that I hadn’t seen anything in this genre for ages, but then I realized that I’d seen quite a few solo shows online and in person since covid made close contacts and cohorts complicated – from We Had A Girl Before You, the last live indoor show I saw in 2020, to Woman Caught Unaware, which is playing at the Varscona Theatre this Fringe, and Deafy, Chris Dodd’s solo at the Backstage space. So why was this different?

Maybe what entranced me about Liminality was that it was so close to failing. The creator/performer was vulnerable, not just in telling anecdotes that purport to be about himself and his personal limitations and fears, but in performing them for paying audiences who might be expecting something more polished, funnier, or more conventionally structured with tidy connections that all fit together at the end. I kept doing the work of looking for the throughline and the callbacks. I found some but never was sure why some of the stories were included. There were a few important props and set pieces, and some sound and lighting cues helped reinforce the beats – possibly suggesting some insight or conclusion that might be drawn.

But like I said, I loved it. You might not.

Two more performances, Saturday and Sunday – and Liminality is also available online, pay what you will.

New local work from diverse perspectives

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Edmonton Fringe is a great place to discover new work by local artists. The program (2021: the digital listings on the Fringe website) flags new work and indicates the hometown of the producing company (2021: they’re almost all local or nearby this year, with very few touring artists).

Yesterday I saw three new works by local artists, One Song, Chanzo, and Deafy. All of them were fictional narratives in various genres, and all of them benefited from the lived experiences of the creators.

One Song was advertised as a staged read or workshop performance of a new musical, but was significantly more polished than that description suggessts. Daniel Belland (composer and co-lyricist) played keyboard to accompany the four singer/actors, Jaimi Reese, Manny Agueriverre, Ceris Backstrom, and Josh Travnik. The actors carried scripts but moved through the story and knew the music well. The mood of the story reminded me a bit of Dear Evan Hansen – kind young people getting themselves into believable awkward difficulties, well-meaning adults on the sidelines being vulnerable themselves. Jaimi Reese is spot-on as the wise and feisty single mother to a young lesbian (Agueriverre) with an open door/ear for her daughter’s best friend (Travnik) – even before the song Not This I was thinking the mother probably had her own interesting story. Ceris Backstrom plays three of the mother’s friends, brought in (consensually) to provide some queer perspectives beyond the mother’s own expertise. Backstrom’s acting was good, distinguishing between music-nerd Paul in bow-tie, drag-queen Toast, and lesbian AIDS activist Jen. All of them provided some LGBTQ+ context and incidental education (the QR-code-accessed show program provided some footnotes for audience members curious about some of the details). Agueriverre and Travnik’s characters are about fourteen. Through them we explore some nuances of sexuality-coming-out decisions without the high-stakes consequences of bullying or romance, with a clear message of everyone getting to make their own choice of how/when to share this news. Calla Wright wrote the script and co-wrote the lyrics.

The melodies and accompaniment were interesting, melodic, and in a modern-musical-theatre vein. The duet between Reese and Agueriverre late in the show was particularly strong. I thought there was a bit too much info-dump from Backstrom’s characters, but at the same time I appreciated learning a bit more about LGBTQ+ musicians and activists.

Chanzo is a play written by local playwright, dramaturg, graduate student, and director Mukonzi Musyoki. The title character (David Shingai Madawo) returns from Canada to Kenya after his father’s death, without warning his sister (Onika Henry) that he’s bringing his white Canadian girlfriend Charlotte (Jasmine Hopfe) with him. Henry’s character Bezo speaks many of her lines in Swahili, but no translation is needed to see that she is furious with her brother and the situation and full of contempt for who she thinks Charlotte is. Predictable conflicts ensue and secrets come out. The characters were compelling and I longed for them to understand each other and come to a good resolution. Yet as a viewer I was also satisfied with the more ambiguous ending of the script. One thread of the plot was familiar from a scene written by Musyoki and performed by Madawo in the late-2020 roving theatre piece Here There Be Night.

Deafy is a solo show written and performed by Chris Dodd, directed by Ashley Wright, with choreography by Ainsley Hillyard. It’s told in a mix of spoken English, ASL, and supertitles/captions. The character Nathan Jesper, on an informational speaking tour about being Deaf, decides to abandon his usual lecture script and tell stories about communication. Many of the stories are amusing anecdotes about how he and his friends get by in a hearing-centric world – the one about his friends helping him take his drivers’-license road test is particularly funny while still disappointing me with how unhelpful the bureaucracy is. The stories gradually begin to focus on his search for belonging, in a world where he is too deaf or in a group where he is not Deaf enough, as the choreography, music (Dave Clarke), and arguments with the unseen captioner escalate to express his increasing distress. As with the Swahili in Chanzo, I didn’t feel I was missing too much because I don’t understand ASL.

Brilliant Women on Stage

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Two of the plays I saw early in Fringe 2021 featured familiar women on stage in sympathetic nuanced portrayals of women in their middle years. Both, unsurprisingly, were directed by Trevor Schmidt.

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Woman Caught Unaware, by Annie Fox, is a solo performance by Davina Stewart. The art history professor is in her office, planning to head home to her partner, when a student appears outside of office hours. I enjoyed the the confident academic’s wry observations on student behaviour and the changing expectations for faculty members as the student seems reluctant to confide about a problem, and the professor runs through the recent advice on what to do about cyberbullying and other issues. (I was reminded of Professor Kate Fansler in Amanda Cross’s mystery novels.)

But the student has come to tell – and show – her instructor that it’s actually Professor Conté’s nude image that’s being shared on-line, with harsh comments about her aging body. And while the narrator tries to ignore it, she discovers “allies” all around her, each responding in well-intentioned but self-centred ways to adopt a cause. A protest! A petition! A nude calendar!

We get to see why the professor anticipates the sanctuary of home, in brief affectionate images of her partner Gail (“I’m like a pin, she’s like a pincushion”), their cottage, their garden, the savoury aroma of Gail’s beef bourguignon on the stove (“we’re pescatarian in public, but …”). And she eventually addresses the issue directly (this is me resisting the full-frontal metaphors), in ways that left me satisfied about an articulate older woman taking back power. I loved watching and listening to Davina Stewart in this role.

Woman Caught Unaware has performances Monday through Sunday at the Varscona Theatre with some tickets available for each.

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Destination Wedding is a Whizgiggling Productions work, written and directed by Trevor Schmidt, and performed by Cheryl Jamieson, Kristin Johnston, and Michelle Todd.

Three women meet up after many years, having all been invited to be attendants at an old friend’s destination wedding in a tropical resort location that Honey (Jamieson) insists they not name. Johnston’s Marlene is an artist seated with powerful stillness in black. Todd’s Britt is a lesbian, a successful businesswoman, and the one who slips naturally into curbing the worst of Honey’s impulses (“No, you can’t go get your hair braided on the beach / wear a bride’s tribe t-shirt, that’s appropriative”) her affect suggesting that she does this all day long and she doesn’t expect Honey to learn.

With the three fascinating characters, this premise would be enough to make an entertaining Fringe show – as if the mother’s-friends-chorus in Mamma Mia were distinct interesting people. But it turns into a darker, more ambiguous, story. Various details were mentioned – the kinds of breadcrumbs that a less subtle narrative would explain as Clues. At one point I noticed that the painted backdrop of a resort veranda scene now seemed to have a dark sky and a stormy sea, which I guess was some magic of lighting design (also Schmidt).

While the three are waiting for their old friend the bride to show up, they meet some other significant characters, providing opportunity for these three talented actors to demonstrate their skill distinguishing multiple roles, and for the audience to be even more entertained and diverted from what was turning into a central mystery. I particularly liked Johnston’s Amy, the bride’s daughter, all eye-rolling and vocal fry.

The hints weren’t all tidily wrapped up into clues and exposition, but left in a delicious suspension. I wished I’d gone with a friend to have fun figuring those things out afterwards. Maybe I should go back. But if I do, I better buy a ticket soon, since some of the remaining seven performances are already sold out.

Both these shows are also available for online viewing.

Curio Shoppe – disturbing and virtual

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When we started to think about how the pandemic precautions and customs would affect our autumn traditions, some people thought about Thanksgiving, and how they could find safer alternatives to the sense of joy and connection they found in sharing a big meal with family and friends. Some people thought about Hallowe’en, what to do about the custom of children touring the neighbourhood in costume collecting candy. But I thought about Dead Centre of Town, the site-specific scary shows created by Catch the Keys, where creepy footnotes of local history are recreated and enhanced into spine-tingling ghost stories and haunting performances by Megan Dart and Beth Dart. In recent years, the productions have been held in different parts of the living-history museum Fort Edmonton Park. Colin Matty is the gravel-voiced host Wilf, providing a bare minimum of narration, and a handful of “henches” (Christine Lesiak, Adam Keefe, Vincent Forcier, et al.) lead or lure or chase the audiences from one scene to the next. The weather’s usually cold, but there’s usually a chance to warm up before or after the show at a bonfire. And I realized that this year we were going to miss out on all of that.

Dead Centre of Town has done epidemic stories before – there was the one about the young teacher (Bobbi Goddard) last seen in 1920, while walking across the High Level Bridge to quarantine herself in a Spanish Flu sanitorium. And there was the one with the scary nurse (Elisa Benzer) telling about delivering the diphtheria vaccine by airplane in the North. And someday, I’d like to see what stories this team can tell about a pandemic like ours – but not yet.

This year, the Dead Centre of Town team has a virtual / multimedia production, called Curio Shoppe. As they say in their promotions, you can participate from “the discomfort of your own home”. It’s an interactive video stream, that works similarly to the performance platform used for Vena Amoris/Fringe virtual production Tracks last spring. The audience logs in from home, watches, listens, and clicks to make some choices of which stream to follow. But you also get text messages and phone calls from the characters at appropriate points in the performance, which adds immediacy.

It’s so cool. Parts of it are seriously disturbing – the warnings at the beginning mention violence, gendered violence, gore, and swearing, and they are warranted. And parts are just intriguing. Colin Matty introduces the performance in the character of a fussy formal Curio Shoppe owner sharing some artifacts and memories, but glimpses of his less-civilized alter-ego Wilf seem to break through the surface. And head henches Christine Lesiak and Adam Keefe are also looming.

The story that’s told – at least, the story that unfolded through the choices I clicked on – starts from one of the historical horrors that’s been examined in a previous version of Dead Centre of Town, a serial-killer story. It then adds in a contemporary story (which I really hope is fictional!) and ends in an ambiguous but somewhat satisfying way. The audience member gets to see and hear various bits of documentary evidence along with atmospheric video encounters with the historical characters.

Morgan Yamada and Jake Tkaczyk play the principals and the investigators. They are supported by a chorus of ghost voices, radio interviewers, and so on.

The ticket price for Curio Shoppe, for however many household/cohort members want to cluster around a computer screen, is about the same as the single-ticket price for last year’s Dead Centre of Town XII show at Fort Edmonton Park. The producers recommend that you put on headphones, turn out your lights, and log out of distractions – but you actually don’t have to, if that way seems too scary. Curio Shoppe is playing until (of course) Hallowe’en, every night except Mondays, and you can get tickets through Eventbrite. Some performances are already sold out.

Horizon Lab: Where are your stories?

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I went to the theatre tonight.  Six months ago that would not have been unusual.  But this is 2020.  Tonight I went to the Citadel Theatre with my mask on, gave my name to the front-of-house staff instead of handing them a paper ticket, and I was back.  I saw some familiar (covered) faces in the audience, including at least two other arts bloggers and many regular theatregoers.

Horizon Lab:Where are your stories is a set of performances celebrating the stories of Albertan BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and disabled artists.  Citadel Associate Artists Mieko Ouchi, Helen Belay, and Tai Amy Grauman welcomed the audience, with Grauman giving a moving personal acknowledgement of the land, the Treaty peoples, and her connection to the land.  Then there were five ten-minute performances, with a stage crew member rearranging set pieces and mopping anywhere that had been touched, in between.  During the third interlude, audience members were actually applauding the stage crew member.

My favourite parts of the performances were the parts where the performers acknowledged pandemic life or acknowledged that something unusual was happening on the stage in this production.  “I’m always a consultant here; I didn’t believe you actually wanted me to be a performer now” says Carly Neis in Part of This World, which she created along with Patricia Cerra and Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks.  The disabled actor, accompanied by her service dog Oakley, demonstrates some barriers to theatre attendance from the box-office counters to the elevator design, spars with stage-management on God-mic, and concludes by acknowledging that performing on this stage is the start of her happily-ever-after.

In The Boy and The Sun, created by Lady Vanessa Cardona and Todd Houseman, Sheldon Stockdale plays a racist Alberta farm-boy who has died of COVID-19 after hosting a 300-person Big Valley Jamboree on his property (“COVID doesn’t kill people!” he exclaims indignantly) and is being held to account by a Trickster figure (Christina Nguyen).  Please Don’t Put Me in a Situation, by creator-performers Elena Belyea and Mohamed Ahmed with Mahalia Carter-Jamerson as an additional creator, was the most non-linear of the pieces, jumping exuberantly between scenes of different stories and then tying them together.  The Book of Persephone, performed by Tasana Clarke and created by Clarke and Mac Brock, was a clever retelling of the mythical character Persephone in a country-music context.  I liked the performer’s use of a plaid shirt, to represent the men they dated and also their own empowerment.  I occasionally had trouble hearing the performer and would like to see this one again to get what I missed.

The last performance, Delay, by Richard Lee Hsi and Morgan Yamada, starts with the two performers, in grey cloth masks, expressing their inner narratives of self-doubt and uncertainty during the pandemic through pre-recorded voice playback.  Will I remember what to do with my hands when I get back on stage?  Are they hiring me because I’m talented or because of tokenism?  How do I learn all those lines and what if I forget?  As you would expect from these two performers, the piece also included some lyrical and powerful movement.  They walk in the river valley – with untouched snow early in the pandemic,  “detouring around a 15-person picnic” more recently – and sit on the edge of the stage evoking the old End of the World viewpoint.  At one point the performers touch hands.  On August 2020, I found that simple gesture profoundly unsettling, and was reassured that they soon reached for hand sanitizer and did an ostentatious and humorous version of the familiar purifying ritual.

Admission was free, with the Citadel requesting donations to their BIPOC Artistic Fund.   Theatre is not really back to normal, but theatre is moving forward, and that’s a good thing.

How DO you solve a problem like Maria? Straight Edge Theatre has a new answer

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In this surreal time of isolation, fakenews and fakeshows, the Straight Edge Theatre team is bringing to the Fringe that Never Was another of their brilliant and uncomfortable musical productions in Nun F*cks Given.  Or they would be if the Fringe that Never Was, was.  With book and lyrics by Steve Allred and Seth Gilfillian, composition and music direction by Daniel Belland, this premiere is gonna be something.  Not quite sure what  – director Bethany Hughes must be under the seal of the confessional – but the team that dressed the splash-zone audience in PPE for Evil Dead and forced their ensemble to sing while working out on spin bikes in Cult Cycle is bound to have something unique in their robes.   The creative team includes Bethany Hughes (director and choreographer), Chance Heck (fight director), and Jordan Campion, the stage manager who keeps them all in Holy Order.   Straight Edge has booked many amazing performers you haven’t seen on stage in months.  Casting the divine Sue Goberdhan as God was an inspired choice.  Jaimi Reese gives a standup performance as Father Long Johnson. The rest of the cast includes

  • Mother Superior – Seth Gilfillian
  • Mother Inferior – Steve  Allred
  • Mother Posterior – Lilith Fair/Zachary Parsons-Lozinski
  • Mother Anterior – Matthew Lindholm
  • Choir Mistress – Amanda Neufeld
  • Altar Boys turned zombies – Geoff Ryzuk, Mark Sinongco, Anthony Hurst, Josh Travnik
  • The Dancing Monks who become possessed – Daniella Fernandez, Ruth Wong – Miller, Larissa Pohoreski , Alyssa Joy, Aly Horne, Kendra Humphreys, Brittany Hinse and Bella King

After I had read this far in the promo materials, I must confess that I was actually sorry The Fringe That Never Was is not actually having real performances, because I want to see this show!   The plot teaser provides even more tease.  “After the breakdown of the nearby nuclear power plant, the nuns at a local nunnery start to realize that they have developed new abilities. The timing of these superpowers could not have come at a better time, as the clergy at the next door Catholic monastery have all been possessed by the spirits of dead saints turned evil. They must use their new powers to protect the city from the possessed monks and stop the source of the leak before their mutation leads to inevitable spontaneous combustion. Packed with nonsense, nun chucks and nun puns. So so so many puns. ”

Want to see it?  Out of luck.  Want to support the Edmonton Fringe and pay tribute to the work of Straight Edge Theatre?    Click here. Want to make a habit of it?  Keep clicking on the Fringe website and find more shows that don’t exist that you’d buy tickets to if you could.  Taken a vow of poverty?  Share the links.  Devout followers, novices, and skeptics alike should make a pilgrimage to Nun F*cks Given.

The Garneau Block: Local, timely, and delightful!

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Video is not typically ephemeral, but this one is.  If you’re intrigued by my description, check it out before tomorrow, May 3rd, at noon MDT.  That’s … hmm … 15 hours from now.  If I type fast.

The Garneau Block Act 1  #CanadaPerforms

I have a ticket on the shelf by my keys, for the first ticketed performance of The Garneau Block at the Citadel Theatre, on Saturday March 14th.  I didn’t get to use the ticket because the performance was cancelled sometime after the previous night’s dress rehearsal, that week when the theatres all went dark.

I’m always excited about Citadel new work, but I was especially looking forward to this one.  Shortly after I moved to Edmonton I borrowed Todd Babiak’s newish (2006) novel The Garneau Block from the Strathcona Branch library.  Like Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, it was originally a series of affectionate and funny newspaper columns about characters in a fictionalized neighbourhood – only he was writing about a neighbourhood I rode my bike through every day en route to work.  Just like Janice MacDonald’s mystery novels and Gayleen Froese’s Grayling Cross, Babiak’s novel affirmed my sense of belonging here, because the setting and the people felt so familiar.

When I heard that Belinda Cornish was adapting the novel for the stage, I decided not to re-read it.  I didn’t remember much about the novel, and I wanted to enjoy the play for itself.

With support from the National Arts Centre’s #CanadaPerforms program, the Citadel did a live Zoom reading of Act 1 the other night, and it’s on Youtube until tomorrow morning.  And it’s great.

I almost don’t want to read the novel again and find out how many of the timely quips about the mixed-gentrifying neighbourhood near the university were in the original work and how many were from Cornish’s clever observation.   But there are a lot! I recognized trends, local businesses, and even a subtle reference to the Make Something Edmonton campaign that Babiak inspired as Magpietown around 2012.  There are no overt big-picture provincial or world politics in the characters’ concerns but it could easily have been last summer.

The casting and characterization were so good.  Julian Arnold as a philosophy professor who thinks he understands #MeToo.  Stephanie Wolfe being performatively-woke but excruciatingly uncomfortable seeing an indigenous homeless person (Ryan Cunningham).  Andrew Kushnir as theatre artist Jonas Pond, friend to Madison (Rachel Bowron).  It was lovely to have a gay character who wasn’t a flamboyant caricature.  Nadien Chu, Alana Hawley Purvis, Shawn Ahmad, George Szilagyi – the characters were all familiar but not completely predictable.  By the end of Act 1 some things were explained and some were hinted at, and I am so impatient to see where the story goes after this.

During this time of social distancing, I’ve been fortunate to participate in some on-line script reading.   From that experience, I can say that this on-line distanced presentation was very well done.  The necessary props were managed smoothly – there was even a small dog on screen! – and everyone was audible with good lighting and background.  The stage directions were read by director Rachel Peake.  She mentions at the end that the set (Narda McCarroll), costumes (Joanna Yu) and sound design (Matthew Skopyk) are waiting at the Maclab Theatre for rescheduled performances as soon as they can open their big wooden doors again.

But for right now – and for free! – you can enjoy Act 1.  Do it.