Tag Archives: erika conway

Quick takes on short runs – Keith Alessi and MacEwan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Then, the Lights Went Out …

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The first show of the Walterdale Theatre’s season is And Then, The Lights Went Out, written by Andy Garland and directed by David Johnston.   It’s partly a funny story about a writer’s life and partly a hard-boiled detective tale using all the tropes of that genre.

John Evans plays Thomas, a young novelist who is running out of ideas for his detective-story series.  Erin Forwick-Whalley and Jennifer Peebles are his landlady and neighbour, providing stakes, comic relief, and encouragement for him to finish his seventh novel for tomorrow’s deadline.  The rest of the characters in the play are the characters in Thomas’s work-in-progress, ‘tried and true archetypes’ of the trenchcoat-wearing private detective (Kyle Lahti), the mysterious alluring woman (Erika Conway), the thug (Chance Heck), the perky sidekick police officer (Hayley Moorhouse), and a menacing Southern not-such-a-gentleman who reminded me of a Die-Nasty character from the Tennessee-Williams-pastiche season (Curtis Knecht).

At first, there is some amusement in the concept of the characters having life outside of the story and having opinions on the writer’s work, especially the thug who wants to be different.  But I’d seen that done before.  I was reminded of stories about moviemaking, like Make Mine Love, or the Die-Nasty marathon weekend where everyone was a soap-opera character and also an actor.  I noticed that most of the characters spoke with different accents when they were “on stage” in the story, accents that evoked the hard-boiled stories of Raymond Chandler and Humphrey Bogart in Maltese Falcon, and then shifted to speech similar to Thomas’ own when they were not acting out the story.  Lights Went Out got more interesting and satisfying when the characters started pushing Thomas to make them more than stock characters, and then as he wrote they played out a story which had a satisfying and not entirely predictable ending.

And Then, The Lights Went Out continues at the Walterdale Theatre until this Saturday (October 25th).  Tickets are available at the door, or in advance through Tix on the Square.   The next show on the Walterdale stage will be John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, in early December.  I’ve been helping out with that one, and I think it will be good.