Category Archives: Theatre

Next to Normal

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I knew I wanted to see Next to Normal as soon as a friend in California recommended it last year.  So when I saw that it was part of the Citadel Theatre’s 2012-13 season I bought a pair of tickets right away, thinking that for this show I’d probably want company.  Unfortunately a cascade of complications overcame all my would-be companions, and I ended up going by myself to the last show of the run.  I thought it was great.  I’d been listening to the Broadway recording for a few months, before the show.  When it looked like I wasn’t going to have company, I decided to protect my emotions by reading the plot summary on Wikipedia.  I don’t know whether I regret that choice.

My general impression of the set was shiny.  Shiny, and the opposite of cozy.  The play was set in Seattle, so sometimes there were shimmery metallic representations of rainfall seen out the windows.  Most of the scenes were in and around a two-story house designed by an architect, and the rest were in medical settings, so it made sense that the framework was all shiny metal trusses (probably they were polished aluminum and lit to look like chromium) and the furniture was all glass, chrome, and black leather.  When I noticed the lighting, it was on the blue side.  There was a shock-therapy scene emphasised by flashing lights which didn’t seem at all out of place in the rest of the set and lighting.   What we saw before the play started was magical – it appeared to be a lighted house far away in a field of stars, and then somehow it looked like that faraway house became the stage set.

I was prepared for the story to be powerful and disturbing.  But it was also much funnier than I expected.  The protagonist Diana, played by Kathryn Akin, was witty, angry, and very likeable.  The actor’s timing and body language showed the character in a wide range of mental, biochemical, and emotional states.  Her daughter Natalie was also easy to identify with, while the Henry character was mostly a humorous contrast and distraction.  I found the husband more self-serving than sympathetic, which certainly made the story more interesting than if he had fitted that stereotype of patient spouse.

The narrative moved quickly, with very short songs and lots of echoes and reprises, and not much dialogue between them.  The voices and orchestra were good and well-balanced.

The performance at the Citadel Theatre was a co-production with Theatre Calgary, directed by Ron Jenkins.

Spring Awakening: two local productions

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This year I’ve seen two local productions of  Spring Awakening, the Duncan Sheik/Steven Sater Broadway musical based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 stage play.  I know there was a Citadel Young Company production last year, but I didn’t see that. I haven’t seen or read the original play, but I’m going to get the script from our library and read it.  I saw the Strathcona Alumni Company production at the Fringe festival, and then the Grant MacEwan Theatre Arts production in early November directed by Jim Guedo.

It’s interesting, seeing two productions so close together and comparing them.  The sets, staging, and dance moves were very similar.  One thing that’s bothered me since encountering the play for the first time at the Fringe was how much the story seemed focused on the two main male characters, Melchior and Moritz, rather than the main female character, Wendla.  But after seeing the MacEwan production, I had a more balanced impression.  I don’t know if it was because the actor playing Wendla in the MacEwan production, Kayla Nickel, was stronger, or whether there were some directorial choices involved, but I was more comfortable with that aspect of the MacEwan production.

When I first saw the Fringe production, not knowing the story ahead of time, I felt like parts of it dragged a bit.  This second viewing was at an advantage for me, then, because this time around it felt like a stark compelling series of events rushing to some awful conclusions.  And I was better able to take in some nuances, because I wasn’t quite as busy being shocked.  For example, in the scene about disclosure of child abuse I hadn’t noticed before that the abuse-victim and the abuse-survivor finish the song together in a way that feels like support and solidarity, the only possible way to make that bit at least somewhat hopeful.

I didn’t find the Moritz character quite as likeable in the MacEwan production as I did in the Strathcona Alumni one, but I don’t know why.

Bloodless

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On a business trip to Toronto, I read the tourist magazines looking for some kind of theatre event that would fit in my schedule and my budget.  I considered The Normal Heart at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, but it was sold out at the only times I was free.  I ended up choosing “Bloodless: The Trial of Burke and Hare”, a new Canadian Theatre 20  musical about the serial murderers in 19th century Edinburgh who sold their victims’ bodies to a medical school.  It was at one of the big Mirvish theatres, the Panasonic Theatre, which is a modern functional space on Yonge Street with a tiny lobby and the bathrooms in the basement, rather than one of the ornate refurbished theatres like the Elgin or Royal Alex.  I picked this show because it seemed less predictable or tourist-oriented than most of them. People who go to a matinee of a musical on a weekday seem to be mostly old people or school groups.

Reviewers didn’t like it much, but I enjoyed it. I thought it was neat that it got its start as a Winnipeg Fringe show three years ago.  There were about 14 people in the cast, with the ensemble smoothly filling various minor roles and moving scenery between scenes.  I liked the way that it started out with a sort of likeable-scoundrels tone but gradually darkened as it drew us in, showing conflicts between the conspirators as they attempt to define and redefine what’s not okay, and showing the disturbing class-based double standards, depending on who the victim was and also contrasting the doctor who purchased the bodies and the hand-to-mouth labourers who provided them.

The sets were simple and not distracting.  The period costumes were fun to look at.  The production is new enough that it doesn’t have a page on Wikipedia or a cast recording on iTunes, and there wasn’t any souvenir merchandise for sale in the lobby either.

A Few Good Men

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Last weekend I saw Aaron Sorkin’s play A Few Good Men at the Citadel Theatre. Maybe I should have bought a season subscription, but I was more excited about some of the offerings than others, and I couldn’t buy a subscription on line or see the prices by the time I thought about it. So I got one really fabulous seat for the first performance, instead. (Row C, centre).

I never saw the movie, so I didn’t know more than the basics of the story beforehand. I thought it was really good. The thing that impressed me the most was that although everyone was in uniform with the bearing of military personnel and the expressionless faces of enlisted Marines, the actors managed to convey a lot of information about the characters just in small changes in stance or facial movement. And because we knew that they weren’t going to make those things obvious, the audience (or at least me) was working hard at paying attention.

The set was not elaborate but it set the mood and it made it easy to tell which scenes happened in which location. It made use of a rotating thing in the middle of the stage to bring different bits to the front.

The story had a satisfying resolution, but it also brought up a bunch of more complicated questions about right and wrong. And I liked it that the one female character (Lora Brovold), her story didn’t turn into a romance.

Since then, I’ve also watched the 1992 movie, which is full of famous actors. It was good, and very similar, but I actually preferred watching the play. Because instead of letting me find out from scratch who the characters were, it felt like the Jack Nicholson character was just loudly Jack Nicholson, and so on. Again, I was hugely relieved that although the Demi Moore and Tom Cruise characters come to respect each other, they didn’t end up romantically engaged.

The tragedy of Fanny Gabor, and theatrical asides

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I saw the musical Spring Awakening at the Fringe, and I liked it but found it depressing. Parts were compelling and parts sort of dragged. I also really liked some of the music. Since then I’ve been listening to the Broadway-version soundtrack and the music’s really grown on me, and I’ve been hearing a lot about the show from an actor friend who is very fond of it. So I guess I’ve changed my mind about not wanting to see it again.

Grant McEwan is going to be performing Spring Awakening at the end of October and first weekend of November. I’m going to go see it on the first Saturday in November.

Also, I’m going to see Next To Normal the weekend after that – that’s the musical about the effects of mental illness on a family, which a friend in California recommended last year.

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In Spring Awakening, in the song “And Then There Were None”, the despairing teenage character Moritz has written to his best friend’s mother, asking her for help, specifically money to flee to America which he thinks is the only solution to his problems. The friend’s mother, Fanny Gabor, responds to him in a spoken-word monologue, and he sings his anger and frustration about her answer, now seeing no way out except suicide.

The play is about the teenagers and their troubles. It’s not about Fanny Gabor. But I keep thinking about her. She’s only in a few scenes of the play, but you can see that she’s a kind person who pays attention to her son and his friend, who respects them and wants the best for them. She won’t give Moritz the money to escape, partly because she doesn’t have it and partly because she doesn’t think it’s a good idea. She reassures him that she likes and respects him, she offers to intervene with his angry parents, she points out that lots of successful men had trouble in school, and she directly addresses his veiled hints of suicidal plans. She does exactly what I’d hope to do in that situation.

As far as I’m concerned, Fanny Gabor does everything right.

It’s not enough.

And because the play isn’t about her, we don’t see any more about that, except that she’s one of the people putting a flower on Moritz’ grave in the next song. She goes on to worry about her own son, who’s got himself in a different kind of mess, and nobody in the play has an unequivocally happy ending because it’s not that kind of play.

The more I listen to the recording, the more Fanny Gabor reminds me of me, though. I like supporting and appreciating young people and like Fanny Gabor I’m flattered when they consider me a friend. And when they’re in trouble, I worry about them and I do what I can to help them, and I try to make choices for that help that are balanced and appropriate.

Some of my friendships are more balanced and reciprocal than others. Some of the help I’ve provided has been rewarding for me. And sometimes I’ve been sad and angry to discover that the person is unwilling or unable to take my advice, or that the help provided isn’t sufficient to enable the person to rescue himself or herself in the way I’d envisioned.

Fanny Gabor’s story reminds me that those are the costs of being a compassionate person and an amateur helper. And her story also reminds me that maybe I’ve been lucky so far. I haven’t yet encountered a situation where my help wasn’t enough to deter someone from suicide. But I might. No matter how good I am at saying and doing the right things, that’s not going to be within my control. And that would really suck.

All I can do is to be thoughtful about who I reach out to and what I do and say, to have realistic expectations of how I might make a difference for my friends, to let them know how I want them to treat me, and to take care of myself.

Five musicals at the Fringe

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In 2012 I saw five musicals at the Fringe theatre festival.

Middleton a folk musical.  This was of uneven quality. The accompanying recorded music was sometimes amplified too loud to be able to hear the lyrics. It didn’t quite work for me and I’m not sure why not. There were some comic/heartwarming characters typical of a musical, there were some big issues and some funny bits, there was one very good song about being a victim of domestic violence, but I ended up restless and disappointed. Middleton is the town in the Annapolis Valley where I bought my brown apple-applique quilt on my bike trip.

Spring Awakening: a musical, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson:  Both of these had large casts of local young people. Both of them had professional microphones and amplification used properly, and the music was by live small orchestras, all of which was an improvement over Middleton, which I saw the first  weekend of the festival.

Both of them had musical scores that I would call alt-rock or punk, which at first seemed bizarrely anachronistic in the period pieces, but then I realised that any other kind of “show tunes” would be equally anachronistic. And I liked the music a lot in both shows. Spring Awakening had more songs that I could see buying and listening to again though.

Both of them had extremely partisan crowds of young friends who were very responsive. In Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, there was a bunch of appropriate heckling from the back that I couldn’t tell if it was scripted or spontaneous.

If you look up Spring Awakening on Wikipedia, you can see that it was originally a scandalous stage play of the late 19th century, made into a Broadway musical about six years ago. I can see why it was scandalous, if it was anything near as explicit about sexual issues of adolescents and their consequences as the musical is. It was mostly not a happy story, and it couldn’t have been with integrity. I thought it was a good show well done, and I might buy some of the music, but I don’t really want to see it again.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson had a very different mood, that I don’t know how to describe. Way beyond tongue in cheek to making fun of everything. There were a few serious points, like the problems of direct democracy and the disconnect between a Washington elite and the needs of the frontier people, and it was clear that the main objection to Jackson that the scriptwriter and performers had was his role in the Trail of Tears and earlier ruin of Indian nations.

I’m curious about the economics of Fringe shows. I’m assuming that they only reason these two companies can afford to put on these large-cast shows is that the actors don’t need to make enough money to put food on the table etc, and that their producers might also be getting donations for costumes and stuff – and also, they must have a waiver or subsidy of royalties. Spring Awakening was done by a company of recent alumni from Strathcona High School, with a director and music-director who teach and run student theatre there. The production felt more polished and disciplined than Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

Fiorello! – I missed this in the regular Fringe time, but it was an unofficial holdover at the Varscona Theatre. It’s a musical about Fiorello LaGuardia, the anti-corruption New York politician in the 1920s and 1930s. I enjoyed it. It had some cutesy-stereotype-y stuff but the pace was good. The number where he was campaigning on street corners in different neighbourhoods, in English in one verse, then in Italian in the next and in Yiddish after that, was great. Donovan Workun, a local improv guy, played the title role.

Reefer Madness – In the holdovers weekend I went back to the Westbury for Reefer Madness, the 1998 musical. I didn’t see any programs, but I was more caught up in it than for many other shows. It was really funny. Some of the music was catchy and some wasn’t my thing. There were 6 actors each playing 1-2 main characters and some other attributes and chorus. There was a hilarious blasphemous bit with Jesus in gold lamé shorts. I kept thinking about the similarities with Rocky Horror Picture Show – the innocent young couple subverted and seduced in a den of depravity, the didactic lecturer telling the story, the other characters in the reefer house and their interactions with the boss, etc. At one point the actor playing the didactic lecturer was then playing Franklin D Roosevelt, in a push wheelchair with a lap blanket, so that made me think even more of the guy in Rocky Horror. I guess Rocky Horror Picture Show (1977) was playing on the tropes of the original 1936 scare-tactics movie and others of that genre – but since I’d never seen it, I didn’t realise it until now.

One of the reviews, I think in the Vue, alluded to how the dramatic warnings about marijuana are now known to be so ridiculous that it’s easy to laugh at, but that it’s disturbing to be realising that if you substituted heroin or crack, they are or might be true. Which was creepy, for me too.

Fringe holdovers

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Reluctant to let go of having fun at the Fringe festival and get on with the next things, I remembered that every year they pick a few shows to hold over in the bigger venues the weekend after the festival ends. Always before I’d been ready to move on to other pursuits, but this year I went through the lists of holdovers and bought four tickets.

Fiorello! –  reviewed in the next post.

LOON – this non-speaking mask show had been well spoken of by reviewers and by my actor friend, and it played to a near-full house Thursday night at Westbury, the big auditorium in the Arts Barn. It’s still not my preferred genre but it was fun to watch. The program notes said that the company had benefited from a Kickstarter, so that was neat.

The Minor Keys – I hadn’t really been inclined to see it during the Fringe, and I just added it to my list of holdover shows in a sort of what-the-heck thought of filling up my Friday night. It was playing in the downstairs arts space of the Holy Trinity Anglican Church in the neighbourhood just east of the railway tracks. I didn’t like it much. It was … it was the kind of show that’s like a staple of summer-theatre, just a set of not-too-nuanced funny characters revolving around each other. The setting was a run-down jazz club in the late 1960s. There wasn’t very much music in it. The actor playing the professor, Tom Edwards, sounded and looked really familiar but I don’t think I’ve seen any of the shows mentioned on his resume in the program. The actor playing the young accountant was Kendra Connor, whom I’d seen a few nights earlier as Marie in Fiorello! David Belke wrote it. With an intermission it was almost 2 hours long, which was draggy after the faster-paced shows of the Fringe.

Reefer Madness – also reviewed in the next post.

Holdover shows cost more – $18 with the Fringe capital fee. And in some ways it’s not as much fun, just showing up for one or two shows in an evening without a surrounding carnival; it’s more like an ordinary theatregoing experience. There are three shows playing tonight, for the last night of holdovers, but they’re all shows I’ve already seen. So I guess that’s it for me for Fringe 2012 – 31 performances during the festival and 4 afterwards, for a total of 35.

Last day of the Fringe

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I remember feeling wistful after Folkfest this year too, that writing up the end of the weekend was like saying that now it was over and I needed to get to work.

Anyway, on the last day of Folkfest my plan to rendezvous with a perfomer to get another copy of last year’s CD turned into seeing four shows and being there right til the end. This meant that I’ve seen 31 performances.

The weather was good, shortsleeves weather but not too hot. I went to the main festival site to pick up my tickets, then back to Wunderbar to see Joel’s show again. But I was actually super early so I sat outside the A&W in the shade, talking to a family member on the phone and eating mini doughnuts. Then I got inside and had another great conversation with Craig the bartender (owner?) about ales. He says I need to check out Keg and Cork. I also talked to the merch guy (whom I’d met at some other shows) about intellectual property etc.

Divide – I actually liked Joel’s show even better the second time through, understanding the pacing and looking for how it flowed together.

Improv-a-palooza – this was another improv show at the Varscona Hotel. Jim Libby whom I’d seen in another show, Wes Borg from the Three Dead Trolls, and some other local improv guys built up an improbable ridiculous story involving Freud, a mother kidnapped in Mexico, a long-lost brother, a father who was an unsuccessful salesman, and some spontaneous musical numbers, by playing a board game to get premises for their story.

However, because of the unpredictable nature of improv combined with trying to finish the game, I got out of there 6 minutes late, giving me only 9 minutes to get by bike from the Varscona to Phabric (which is on 80 Avenue at about 101 St (down from the A&W.) I rode on Whyte Avenue and ran a turning light and boy when I read about the cyclist fatality this afternoon it hit even closer to home than usual. Anyway, I made it in time.

Apocalypse: a Period Piece – a charming original two-man show, both funny and poignant, with Chris Craddock and another guy being little boys in the cold-war era but also being various characters that the little boys pretended to be: their dad, Elvis, JFK, etc. It is held over and I recommend it and might be convinced to see it again.

Then I had a bit of time to spare before my last show. I paid one last visit to the beer tent, watched the festival grounds empty out some, watched artists give one last handbill-pitch, and ate a taco in a bag (taco makings added to a bag of Doritos).

A Wake – the venue of this show was the Southside Memorial Chapel, the funeral home just across the street from the gazebo park. The show itself was okay to well done, musings on death, grief, death ritual, and life, in dance and music and poetic fragments and a few dialogues. But the use of the space and the participation of the funeral home’s owners were just fabulous. I have written to the owners to thank them. I have not lived in Edmonton long enough to attend any funerals or visitations yet, but if it were up to me someday I would definitely do business with these people. After the scripted performance, they invited the audience to see an installation in one of the visitation rooms, and/or to come have refreshments in their reception room and talk to the performers and the owners, and having that kind of grounding and aftercare was probably valuable for a lot of the audience.

It was still daylight. My bike was still there. The vendors were taking down their booths. I rode my bike home and spent the rest of the evening chatting on line about the experience.

Sharing my Fringe

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Yesterday a couple of friends from Calgary were in town, so we made a plan to meet for lunch and then figure out what to see at the Fringe. We had early lunch at Maki Maki (I convinced them that for the authentic try-anything Edmonton experience they needed an erotic roll). Then we got out the program and the Fest Finder app and the ticket-buying website, and I suddenly realised (and said) that trying to find one play to show people how cool Edmonton Fringe was, was harder than trying to pick a movie together on a date with someone you didn’t know very well yet. Fortunately, they didn’t have to rush right back to the family they were visiting, so we did the Fringe my way. That is, we wandered Whyte Avenue, comparison-tasted cupcakes from fuss and from the Fringe vendor (I still think fuss is the best, although the Fringe vendor had some creative icing flavours such as brightly coloured bubble gum), watched a juggler, organized our routes to use the nice indoor bathrooms in the Arts Barn at every opportunity, ate frozen chocolate bananas, and went to five plays.

After that, I wanted to stay around to go to the midnight cabaret show, and we had a couple of hours in between, so we had supper and nice decaf coffee at Famoso. So we said goodbye just before midnight and I got in line for the cabaret show where I was supposed to meet one of the performers to pick up a CD he was burning for me, but unfortunately the show was very very sold out. The first time I’d tried to buy a ticket at the door and it didn’t work! Ah well. While I was hanging around outside seeing whether tweeting the piano player would pull any strings (it didn’t), I also had a nice conversation with the artist of Charlie: a hockey story and told him my family’s version of some of the stories.

So I collected my bike where I had stashed it in the morning, and went home. I am not sure if I’ll go to any performances today, or whether I’ll get on with recovery and life.

Also, at one of the plays we met up with my actor friend (by design) and saved seats for him and his friends and he and I caught up a bit more on what we’d each seen since we last saw each other. So that was fun too.

The five plays:

The Lesson – the Ionesco play. Classic Theatre of the Absurd works well at the Fringe.

Scratch: The Revengeance – this two-person, many-character original comedy by local artists was hilarious. I’ve never seen any sketch-type comedy where things didn’t drag at all between jokes; it just zipped right along being funny on funny, and incidentally occasionally obscene.

Cockwhisperer – a one-woman show, mostly telling various stories related to her sexual history. It was interesting that she grew up in Hamilton and was about my age. And some of it was funny or moving. But the whole thing was a bit disappointing to me because it could have been a lot more sex-positive, especially given the title and writeup.

Fatboy – this was funny in a very weird way. All the characters were in whiteface makeup and were sort of exaggerated archetypes. We were trying to figure out what genre it reminded us of, and I thought it was like the pantomime, what with the judge and the yelling couple and so on. One of my companions said, only with a lot more bad language and violence. We then looked up the description and it said that it was reminiscent of a Punch and Judy show and of Ubu Roi, “an 1896 precursor of theatre of the absurd”. Random, and I mostly liked it.

Rocket Sugar Factory Improv – We went to an improv show because I hadn’t been to one yet this year. This one mostly went on a theme of “today in history”, they’d get people to call out a year, then they’d look up what events happened on that day’s date that year and act it out. The events included Galileo Galilei demonstrating his telescope, the first version of Linux, and Pulcheria becoming empress of the Byzantine Empire.

The festival ends today. I don’t know if I’ll go … but I still want to meet up with Joel to get that cd, so hmm.

Fringe and nothing else

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I continue to do nothing but go to plays at the Fringe. The cold or whatever it is takes away more of my stamina, so I spent a couple of days doing pretty much nothing but sleep. And still, I think I’m up to 22 performances so far. I haven’t had enough discount beers to cover the cost of the cup, but I’m okay with that.

Anyway, here are some more shows I’ve seen.

Sexed – or maybe SexEd? My adjectives are all like adorable, wholesome, earnest, but I’m pretty sure the creators/performers thought they were being radical and on the edge. I said in a tweet that I thought they should go perform it on campuses, because it’s the kind of play that is well received in orientation week or sexual-awareness week or whatever. Anyway, they covered all the sexual issues contemporary young women are likely to encounter, and I didn’t disagree with any of their facts, and I laughed.

Cages – This was a solo storytelling show by an interesting man probably in his early 60s. His topics ranged from having been a member of the Vermont legislature to having supported his nonagenarian mother as she committed suicide with help of the Final Exit Network.

A Bronte Burlesque – I’d never been to a burlesque show before, and I’m not sure this quite counted because it had a plot, rather than being a vaudeville/variety type show. As you might imagine, there was a lot of artistic unhappiness while scampering around in frilly undies. And Branwell kept his pants on. One side benefit of the Fringe is that it gives me an excuse to look around inside various local establishments which get used as venues, and this one was in New City Legion, which turns out to be a poorly-lit basement bar underneath Hudson’s or maybe under the yarn store, I lost track.

Big in Germany – Apparently they’re heading back to Toronto to have a run at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. It should do well there because although it’s light, it’s full of jokes about growing up in Downsview in the 1980s. It’s about a couple of guys trying to be rockstars, but it doesn’t really have much music in it.

Vernus Says SURPRISE – This was another recommendation by the aspiring actor I met in line last weekend. There was one actor, playing a cheerful frail confused old man, playing against a soundscape of perfect sound effects and occasional conversation. The audience was so caught up in his difficulties that people kept sighing and gasping and saying awwww and o no! The performer’s speech to the audience afterwards was just as charming as the play.

Dead Wrong – This was a total change of mood. It was a solo-artist recounting of a fictionalised situation where an assault victim’s memory and a less-than-ideal suspect identification process led to a wrongful conviction. Compelling.

Spring Awakening: the musical – reviewed in a later post

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson – also reviewed in a later post

Grey Matter – My actor friend recommended it, and then a woman in the beer tent offered me a ticket she couldn’t use, so I went. Flashback, flashforward, flashlights, electrical crackles and hisses, all probably a metaphor for dementia.