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Fall 2025 Quick Takes

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What I’ve been watching, and haven’t made time to post about:

Nicole Moeller’s WILDCAT at Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre. The best thing about this play is the performers – Michelle Flieger and Maralyn Ryan as women a bit older than me, remembering their labour-activist past and frustrated in an increasingly-constrained present, Melissa Thingelstad as a lawyer daughter who works hard on taking care of her mum and not quite so much on figuring out what her mum wants, and Graham Mothersill as … well, as I said to a friend afterwards, Graham Mothersill pretty much has a lock on playing “nasty. ” Interesting and disturbing timely premise, with some points tweaked for the 2025 Alberta situation. I found the soundscape a bit intrusive, but that might be better for audience sitting further from the booth/back speakers. Heather Inglis directs. After a delayed start, WILDCAT‘s short run has two more shows, today (Saturday) matinee and evening, and tomorrow (Sunday Nov 9) matinee. Workshop West tickets and subscriptions continue to be 100% Pay what you will, online and in person.

25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, part of the MacEwan University Music Theatre season and directed by Ellen Chorley. Like all the MacEwan shows, this one had a short run last weekend, and it sold out the Tim Ryan Theatre Lab space every night. It’s a good choice for a student show, with most of the young-adult performers playing children and a few playing adults (parents and competition staff). The set design was playful and functional, with an evocative representation of an American school gym, worn basketball-marked hardwood floor to wooden climbing frame, swinging doors full of photocopied notices, and old-school wall phone with the longest most mangled cord ever. Choreography was fun and energetic. Jack Hunting (Olive Ostrosky) and Kohen Foley (Leaf Coneybear) were particularly memorable as characters. In 2013 I saw a production of this musical by local company ELOPE. I’m a little embarrassed that I wrote in this blog at the time that I didn’t recognize the actor names, because now they’re all performers whose names would make me choose to go see something they’re in. MacEwan’s next show is Carrie: The Musical. It’s in the bigger Triffo Theatre space so some seats are still available, for Nov 26-30.

According to the Chorus was Walterdale Theatre’s October show. The Arlene Hutton script was directed by Barbara Mah, and set in the crowded female-chorus quick-change room of a Broadway theatre in the 1980s. Costumes – both the over-the-top concepts the dancers wear to perform, and the flamboyant neon warmup gear they arrive in – were splendid and funny and appropriately period, thanks to costume designer Karin Lauderdale. Walterdale’s next show is Noël Coward’s Present Laughter, directed by John Anderson, December 3-13. The talented cast includes Randy Brososky, the multi-talented actor/creator/improviser/director, along with 10 other performers, some new to Walterdale and some familiar. Advance tickets are here.

Die-Nasty is Edmonton’s long-running very-long-form improvised soap opera, this year tackling The Bible. Or rather, stories from those settings which didn’t make it into the versions we know, either the Torah or the New Testament. Die-Nasty’s company and guest performers create characters and the director (Jake Tkaczyk) gives them bare-bones scene descriptions to fill in on a moment’s notice. And somehow this turns into fascinating character development, plot points which could be excessive or nuanced or both, and moments of hilarity that are hard to describe afterwards. Last year they built a gold-rush town, complete with saloons and schoolmistress, doctor and explorers and a matriarch of many sons … Company members this year include Little Guitar Boy brothers Jason Hardwick and Lindsay Walker, who bear some resemblance to musical collaborators John&Paul as well as to various disciple origin stories, the aforementioned Randy Brososky who seems particularly suspicious, journalist Myrrh Incense (Kirsten Throndson), and others, and recent special guests have included Matt Baram and Naomi Sniecus (creator-performers of Big Stuff at the Citadel). Paul Morgan Donald provides live music and sometimes the characters sing! You don’t need to follow from the beginning, as they give recaps and character intros at the start of each show. Tickets for Die-Nasty are also 100% Pay What You Will now, at the theatre or online. Varscona Theatre, Monday nights at 7:30.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to fit in everything I want to see in November, but the list includes

Tough Guy, by Hayley Moorhouse, at the Arts Barns, two last shows today Saturday Nov 8th, advance tickets here.

Castle Spectre, an adaptation by Lauren Tamke who directed this production for her Paper Crown Theatre, at Gateway Theatre, Nov 21-30, tickets here.

Beehive the 1960s musical, at St Albert Dinner Theatre, directed by Caitlyn Tywoniuk and music direction by Dalton Terhorst, tickets here.

Teatro Live doing The 39 Steps, with Geoffrey Simon Brown as Richard Hannay, Nov 13-30.

Northern Light Theatre has a new play by Trevor Schmidt, How Patty and Joanne Won High Gold at the Grand Christmas Cup Winter Dance Competition, with Jenny McKillop and Kendra Connor, Nov 27 – Dec 13. Tickets here.

Vinyl Cafe: The Musical, at the Citadel, Nov 8 – Dec 7, tickets here.

Stranger Sings: The Parody Musical

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Carly Pettit, as Barb, and Lucas Paterson, as Demigorgon, in Stranger Sings! the Parody Musical. Photo by Emily Rutledge.

To appreciate a parody, I should be familiar with the source material, I thought. So as soon as I’d booked a ticket to watch the DarkStage production of Jonathan Hogue’s Stranger Sings!: The Parody Musical this weekend, I re-upped my Netflix subscription and watched the whole first season of Stranger Things and part of the second. (then the allure of getting caught up with The Resident and Heartstopper distracted me…)

I’m glad I watched it, continuously, so I was familiar with not only all the main characters but their plot arcs in the musical. However, I did not expect that a much longer list of movie and musical source material would also help! After a while, I started trying to make a list in my head of all the references I recognized, and some that I was pretty sure were callbacks to other material but I wasn’t sure what. A version of Rainbow Connection from The Muppet Movie. A tribute to E.T. and his human friend cycle-flying across the sky in E.T. Heathers. Little Women. Gypsy. Breakfast Club. Beetlejuice. Winona Rider’s filmography in detail.

The Netflix series (2016-present) starts out as a nostalgic look at 1980s culture in a small homogeneous town starting a group of small boys on a D&D quest. Like a slightly-updated Stand By Me. But then, as in the comic-books / Amazon Prime series Papergirls, things turn science-fictional and X-Files-y. To enjoy the TV story, I kept having to ignore distracting thoughts about the handwavey pseudoscience and loose ends in the plot.

One of the things I loved about Stranger Sings!, then, was the way that the script and actions call out many of those unlikely bits in the source material. Using a folded-paper analogy to explain multiverse theory and figure out how to access a portal to the Upside Down. But Stranger Sings! points out how ridiculous this is. And the happy ending of Will’s rescue in the TV series, completely ignoring that another kid, Barb Holland, is still missing and unexplained. The musical version leans into this – Barb (Carly Pettitt), the popular girl’s less stylish sidekick, calls them all out for ignoring her while she becomes powerful in the alternate-universe and the love interest of the resident Demigorgon there. Pettitt’s voice is up to the challenge, and her characterization and physicality are spot-on.

Director David Son is a choreographer with a strong dance background, and that showed in the variety of well-done ensemble movement numbers. There was even a bit of tap! (Jack Hunting, recently seen in Walterdale’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, and here playing the inarticulate and telekinetic child Eleven).

The cast of ten portrayed at least twice that many characters, with costumes by Debo Gunning. The four little boys in the D&D group are Will, the one who goes missing early on, played as a puppet by Melenie Reid (who also plays his mother Joyce), and Renell Doneza, Jeremey Zimmerman, and Jason Wong. I was impressed by all of them. Jeremey, convincing as a nerdy awkward 12-year-old, had been an effective Tom Collins in ELOPE’s Rent last year.

Melenie Reid, puppeteer for Will, with Renell Doneza (Justin), Jason Wong (Lucas), Liz Janzen (Nancy), and Jack Hunting (Eleven). Photo by Emily Rutledge.

Other compelling main vocal roles are played by Liz Janzen (Nancy), Melenie Reid (Will’s mother Joyce), and Brian Christensen (Nancy’s two teenage love interests, bad-boy Steve and nerdy photographer Jonathan). Connor Foy (whom I last saw in Walterdale’s Austentatious) was consistently funny as Hopper, the sheriff with a tragic past he won’t let us forget, and Lucas Paterson was an expressively flamboyant Demigorgon.

The show is performed in the intimate black-box space of the Backstage Theatre at the Arts Barns. There is a four-piece live band in the wing, under the direction of Grace Huang, and the sound mixing was good enough that I didn’t miss any of the exceedingly clever lyrics.

The music, the lyrics, and the approach to a familiar story reminded me a lot of the Grindstone Theatre / Simon Abbott&Byron Martin body of work. I’ll watch for future work from this new company.

The run of Stranger Sings! continues to October 26th, and some shows are selling out. Tickets are available here.