Tag Archives: lana michelle hughes

A lovely musical about memories: Morningside Road

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[Posted without imagery due to web-host issue]

Last night I was able to attend the preview performance of Morningside Road, the musical created by Mhairi Berg and Simon Abbott. It’s the first production of Shadow Theatre’s new season, and it was directed by incoming artistic director Lana Hughes.

I was enchanted. Right from entering the auditorium and seeing the set – I thought to myself, I bet that’s a Daniel van Heyst design, and I was right. The set includes a realistic homey kitchen nook with tea things and a collection of family photos, but also a more abstract area with bits of low stone wall, which becomes various outdoor city locations.

I stayed caught up in the story with three likeable characters, Elaine (contemporary Elaine was played by Maureen Rooney and Elaine of memory was played by Mhairi Berg), the Girl (Elaine’s grand-daughter, Mhairi Berg), and the Lad (Cameron Kneteman). It wasn’t the first “how my grandparents met” play that I’ve seen – Megan and Beth Dart’s Ursa Major was another memorable one – but the story was engaging and the structure worked very well, shifting between now and back-then, between a kitchen in Canada and a city street in Edinburgh. The pacing was appropriate – I never felt like a scene or a song was too long, and I appreciated the various musical callbacks and familiar riffs adding to the continuity. Partway through, I realized that part of what I was admiring was deft lighting design (Liekke den Bakker), with smooth shifts between times/locations/moods and no heavy-handed dimming of areas I was looking at. Costuming (Kat Evans) was that kind of deceptively-simple that perfectly suited the characters and setting but didn’t distract. Of course practical-grandmother Elaine would be wearing slacks and long cardigans and the same comfortable shoes that my own mother wore for years, rather than more old-fashioned housedresses and aprons, and the other performers wore vaguely-timeless outfits that weren’t out of place in 1940s Edinburgh or in the more modern scenes.

The live musical ensemble of Simon Abbott, Curtis den Otter, and Viktoria Grynenko is located upstage centre behind a screen, which worked very well for sound balance and also allowed for the actors to include them in some scenes more actively. One of the songs, That Blessèd Wedding Day, was a lively catchy community-storytelling piece with dancing, in a folk-song idiom like Great Big Sea.

Rooney’s Elaine has clearly been telling stories about her life to her granddaughter for many years. The two of them are allies, more strongly connected than the offstage daughter/mother in between. I was reminded of my own late (great-)Aunt Elaine, who came to Canada from Scotland as a war bride and remained a daily crossword-puzzle fiend well into her 90s. The motif of one person’s story becoming common property, so that the younger generation might object or correct when the grandparent tries telling the story differently (“that’s not right!”) was also familiar and fascinating. Suggestions of Elaine beginning to lose her memory / memories and executive functioning were also done with a light touch.

The music was lovely and it contributed to the storytelling and the character portrayals. I had not heard Rooney sing before, but I was very impressed.

I wasn’t able to see the version of this musical that Berg and Abbott presented at last year’s Fringe festival, so I can’t tell you how the Shadow Theatre production differs. But I was very pleased with this one – it is nuanced, affectionate, and wistful.

Running time is a bit under 2 hours – and just the length it needs to be. Tickets are available here, for the run continuing until November 6th.

Lives around an artist – After Mourning – Before Van Gogh

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Andrew Ritchie as Vincent Van Gogh in After Mourning – Before Van Gogh. Set and light design Ami Farrow, costumes Leona Brausen. Photo Marc J Chalifoux.

If I’d been asked to do a mind-map of what I knew about Vincent Van Gogh, I would have mentioned sunflowers and madness, Starry Night, Starry Starry Night, losing his ear, eating paint, self-portraits, suicide, and not getting recognition while he was alive. I’d remember looking at the outside of the Van Gogh museum on my short visit to Amsterdam and deciding that after exploring the Rijksmuseum all morning I needed lunch more than another gallery. And I’d thank Erin Hutchison for reminding me of a couple of those in the script of her musical Regression, from last summer’s Fringe, in which Tom Blazejewicz played the spirit of Van Gogh.

Calgary playwright Michael Czuba’s After Mourning – Before Van Gogh includes the artist Vincent Van Gogh (Andrew Ritchie) as a character, but focuses more on the family members who support him, especially his brother Theo (Steven Greenfield) and his sister-in-law Joanna Bonger (Lora Brovold and Donna-Leny Hansen).

The action unfolds in a non-linear way. At first, it was very disjointed, resonating with both Theo’s and Vincent’s struggles with mental illness. Projections by Matt Schuurman convey the characters being surrounded by Vincent’s paintings, in their home and in their minds.

Vincent’s sister-in-law Joanna is portrayed by two actors, Lora Brovold and Donna-Leny Hansen. Vincent’s brother Theo had struggled to set up gallery placements and viewings for Vincent’s paintings, but after both of them die young, Joanna inherits the challenge, along with inheriting Vincent’s work in trust for her young son Vincent Willem.

Donna-Leny Hansen and Lor Brovold in After Mourning – Before Van Gogh. Set and light designAmi Farrow, costumes Leona Brausen. Photo Marc J Chalifoux.

The use of two performers to show Johanna’s narrative arc was fascinating. Brovold and Hansen have a strong resemblance, enhanced by similar body language, and their portrayal of a passionate and determined woman of another era is thoroughly satisfying.

The split wasn’t as simple as, the older portrayal is completely recollective and the younger one is active, either. Brovold’s Johanna engages with her now-grown son Vincent Willem (Andrew Ritchie), by turns protective and petulant, and is shown making decisions of how to translate and market Vincent’s letters, and which paintings to sell where. She also reminisces, talks to her deceased husband Theo, and shifts into and out of overlapping scenes with her younger self. The younger Joanna of Hansen also has her share of recollections, as her first husband Theo becomes ill soon after their marriage. While honouring his memory and Vincent’s she must raise her young son alone, support her household financially, and act as Vincent’s artistic executor to find him the recognition he deserves. The script shows her brother Dries (Fatmi Yassine El Fassi El Fihri) urging her to accept their father’s invitation to move in and be cared for – but she chooses to move to a town where she can open a boarding-house for artists.

One of the most visually-effective moments is when the grieving widow plunges a white garment into a washtub, dying her clothes black for mourning. Another effective detail is the way the older Joanna hides her arthritis-cramped hands in her shawl after a session of translation work.

But, as in the title of the play, there is more to Joanna’s character than either mourning or making Van Gogh famous. At one point she muses about all the other things she could have accomplished – she could have worked for women’s rights, advocated for women’s health – and it did not feel anachronistic, but consistent with the determined woman we saw. She is also explicit about Theo not being the only/last love of her life – even though it makes her son uncomfortable, she reminisces about her relationship with second husband Johan (El Fassi El Fihri), and about other men she’d been with in between.

I was enjoying watching the performance – at one specific point I was so captivated by the beautiful projections that I forgot there were actors on stage – but for a time I thought I wasn’t seeing enough narrative arc to recognize what would be a satisfying ending. Yet I was wrong – I’d seen the threads leading to resolution wound through the other scenes, and the ending worked for me.

After Mourning – Before Van Gogh has two co-directors, John Hudson and Lana Michelle Hughes. This production is its premiere. It runs until April 6th, and tickets are available here.

Mr Burns: a post electric play

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Patrick Howarth as storyteller Gibson, Jake Tkaczyk as Sam listening. Photo provided by production. Set &  costume design Brianna Kolybaba, lighting design Tessa Stamp.

It’s hard to tell you about Mr Burns: A Post Electric Play because you haven’t seen it yet.  What I really want is to talk to someone else who’s seen it about all the cool things I noticed and figured out, and hear what they figured out that I missed.  And I want people to go see it – but to go see it without knowing any of the surprises ahead of time, because for me the surprises and the figuring-outs were part of the fun.  Anne Washburn wrote it, Andrew Ritchie directed it here as a co-production of Blarney Productions and You Are Here Theatre, and it’s playing at the Arts Barns Westbury Theatre until December 7th.

So, what can I say that will reinforce my memory, but not give everything away?

Everything means something.  Even the audience seating.  There are two intermissions, but I chose to stay immersed in the realities of the worlds we were visiting rather than make my way out to the lobby.

Communal storytelling and retelling matters.  The first act is set in the plausibly-near future, with a small group of survivors after a disaster entertaining themselves around a fire by collaborating on retellings of shared stories, especially the 1993 Simpsons episode Cape Feare.  There are lots of cultural allusions that I recognized, and some that I didn’t  but it didn’t matter.  Lots of the hints of the first act get mentioned later – which makes sense in the story and is also helpful for audience members.   It felt very natural, since I’ve been in lots of campfire conversations re-telling favourite movies and TV shows or trying to figure out the lyrics of popular songs without internet.  Many current plays and movies are successful partly because the audience already has some expectations of and history with the story.  So many seasonal adaptations of A Christmas Carol (and I have my ticket for the new David Van Belle Citadel version tonight).  The star-crossed lovers from warring factions of Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, Shakespeare’s R & J, and whatever Shakespeare’s own story sources were.  The “Hallmark Christmas movie” trope.  Every Christmas pageant ever.  And the Simpsons itself is full of cultural callbacks and pastiche – I never think of 2001: A Space Odyssey without the image of Homer floating through a spaceship cabin chomping potato chips in Deep Space Homer.

Understated ritual is effective. Mr Burns is a post-disaster or post-apocalypse story, but it doesn’t wallow in the horror like Walking Dead or prolong the despair like Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Life As We Knew It series of young adult novels.  But there is one custom of the post-disaster world, after many deaths and the loss of mass communication, that portrays the essence of unlikely hope and longing of that time – and it too is seen in the later acts.

The Simpsons matter.   Some audience members I talked to afterwards – possibly even a few members of the company or production team – said things like “I’ve actually never seen an episode of the Simpsons” or “I’ve seen a few, but I was never a regular watcher”.  But the characters and routines of the series (1989-present) were familiar enough that everyone in the audience was laughing with recognition.   When the cartoon series first came out, I was a graduate student without cable at home.  I heard that children were prohibited from wearing Bart t-shirts to school because he modelled disrespect and intentional under-achievement – but when I was able to watch a few episodes, I thought it was wholesome and funny, just very satirical.  In the program Director’s Notes, Ritchie notes that the taboo around the show was part of what originally attracted him to it.  In the second act, set seven years after the first, the characters are rehearsing to perform escapist re-creations of pre-disaster culture that their audiences will remember and want to see – and the narrative confirms that The Simpsons is more popular/enduring material in that situation than Shakespeare.

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Paula Humby, Nadien Chu, Madelaine Knight, Murray Farnell, Jake Tkaczyk. Photo provided by production. Set & costume design Brianna Kolybaba, lighting design Tessa Stamp.

Design and collaboration build the world.  Actors and directors bring it to life.  Watch for these names again.  Megan Koshka did some fabulous mask creation.  Ainsley Hillyard choreographed.  Brianna Kolybaba created brilliant sets and costumes that highlighted what found materials might have been available to the characters in those three settings, one of them reminding me subversively of the set for a particular Edmonton Opera production…  Lana Michelle Hughes provided sound design for moments of terror and humour.  Mhairi Berg’s musical direction and composition.  Sam Jeffery’s fight direction.  Tessa Stamp’s lighting design (and whoever created and executed the perfect glimpse at the very end explaining how they even had those lighting effects, just in case we got caught up in the story and forgot that there hadn’t been an electrical power grid for 80+ years by that point.)

And I haven’t even mentioned the actors yet! They are a strong ensemble of ten performers:  Nadien Chu, Murray Farnell, Kristi Hansen, Patrick Howarth, Madelaine Knight, Jenny McKillop, Paula Humby, Elena Porter, Rebecca Sadowski, Jake Tkaczyk.  I’ve seen them all on stage before – but when I was watching Mr Burns, I kept forgetting who they were, because I was so caught up in the layers of storytelling – this one’s an actor who is rehearsing as Homer, this one’s a director, now this is an actor of a later generation playing Bart as a hero in a tragic opera … Director Andrew Ritchie and Assistant Director Morgan Henderson made it work.  They all made me laugh, think, appreciate the need for art in terrible times, and leave feeling hopeful.  Which is probably their intent.

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Patrick Howarth as Mr Burns / or maybe Sideshow Bob / or Archetypical Villain. Photo provided by production. Set & costume design Brianna Kolybaba, lighting design Tessa Stamp.

Advance tickets available through the Fringe, accessibility considerations including a relaxed performance on Tuesday and pay-what-you-will arrangements.  I’m definitely going back.

Have you seen it?  What did you notice that I missed?

Birdie on the Wrong Bus!

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The other night I went to a performance of Promise Productions’ Birdie on the Wrong Bus, a delightful and satisfying story written by Ellen Chorley and directed by Andrew Ritchie.  I wish I’d been able to share the show with my 9 year old nephew, because I think he would have loved it and learned a lot that would have enhanced a visit to Edmonton.  Maybe I can lobby for a remount when my nephew is visiting?

I also liked it a lot myself.  For me there is something deeply satisfying about seeing or reading a story for young people that has elements I didn’t get enough of as a kid.  A young female protagonist who is bright, stubborn, and not overly cute.  An adventurous kid who isn’t punished by the plotline.   An odd kid who isn’t shown as being bullied.  Celebration of women in sports (I just about squeed myself out of my seat and elbowed the stranger beside me in delight when the Edmonton Grads came into the story.) Siblings who are impatient with each other but not mean.  Local mentions, places I know.  And an overall message of the rewards of discovering the city for yourself and acquiring a personal story of “Why I love Edmonton”.

The premise of the story cleverly set up the situation of a kid stuck on a wrong bus, with an explanation that fearful kids and worried parents alike could buy into without worrying that a similar thing could happen by accident.  Being on the wrong bus alone is intimidating, scary, and/or embarrassing for anyone, but that shouldn’t deter people from supporting kids to ride public transit.  Birdie, the earnest and anxious protagonist, was played convincingly by Mari Chartier.  She first jumps onto the wrong bus to defy her older sister, as the usual routine has the Grade 4 and Grade 6 siblings expected to travel home together on nights a parent can’t meet them, and the bus departs before she can get off again.

Other roles – teacher, sister, bus drivers and passengers – were all covered by Lana Michelle Hughes and Ben Stevens, with some impressively quick backstage costume changes.  Within the environment of a moving bus, Birdie encounters several people she first misjudges and then learns from – a Goth teen with big headphones is not actually a scary vampire, a homeless person collecting drink containers for the deposit money is interesting and friendly, everyone is passionate about some locations in the city because of personal meaning and memories.

Since I was young I have also loved realism in stage set elements, too.  The simple portrayal of seats on a bus, with a hint of the proper window shape and the signal cord, gets increased authenticity with a real ETS bus-stop sign, advertising placards, and farebox.

Brontë Burlesque, revisited

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Earlier this month I saw the final show of A Brontë Burlesque, the Send in the Girls show that played at the Roxy Theatre.  I remembered seeing a version at Fringe 2012, in a basement space south of Whyte Avenue, but the bigger stage and better-designed auditorium improved the viewing experience a lot.  The show was directed by Lana Michelle Hughes.  Ellen Chorley and Delia Barnett were returning to the show as producers and performers (playing Emily and Anne Brontë), and the other two performers were new to the show, Chris W Cook as Branwell Brontë and Samantha Duff as Charlotte Brontë the eldest surviving sibling.

The scenes jump around in time, but are announced by the year “It is 1848” or whatever, and I soon got perspective on those dates by comparing them with the death dates of the various characters.  And, well, they all die.  But they don’t disappear from the stage – the scenes of the latest-surviving character have the spirits of the others clustered around the deathbed.

The interplay of the various combinations of characters was fascinating.  (I have several siblings myself, so I recognised some of this, but I hope my manipulations were more benign.  And we haven’t run about in our underwear since we were small children playing superheroes, either.)   The characters became distinct for me very quickly.

The conventions of burlesque allowed the costume designer (Tessa Stamp) to show us several layers of approximately-period clothing along with coloured draping used as props for the dancers.  The dance piece where the three sisters put on men’s dress shirts and ties to portray their literary noms de plume was particularly well done.  Each of the performers had a solo dance at some point during the show, and the choreography provided for character reveal as well as artistic allure.  The new performer for Branwell, Chris W. Cook, danced his solo with good audience rapport and apparent enjoyment, so it was a little disappointing to me that he didn’t disrobe further than slipping off his tie, dress shirt, and braces, when the female dancers had gone farther.

I can’t remember the previous production well enough to say for sure what is different.  The set detail of a portrait with faces that fade in and out (a Matt Schuurman video design detail of course) was in the previous production but it was done better this time.

As several of the characters in the story died of tuberculosis or related lung problems, the stage convention of a bloody handkerchief was used more than once.  I do not know whether people in previous eras ever coughed blood and didn’t die, because on stage and screen that convention always means Anyone seeing this now knows this person is about to die.   And I saw this device again the other night in Nevermore.