Tag Archives: liam lorrain

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.

Heathers: high school is more fun to watch than experience

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Scene from MacEwan University production of Heathers.
Photo Credit: Brianne Jang of BB Collective
Light Design: Heather Cornick, Set Design: Ross Nichol, Costume Design: Alison Yanota

Continuing on my recent run of seeing new productions of shows I’d seen in the past, tonight I watched opening night of the MacEwan University Musical Theatre program’s production of Heathers, by Laurence O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy, directed by Leigh Rivenbark. I saw the 1988 movie a long time ago, and the Citadel Young Musical Company production in 2016 (also directed by Leigh Rivenbark) but I didn’t remember them very well.

So I had the fun of encountering the musical almost fresh. Layne Labbe as Veronica and Jayden Leung as JD both had strong voices and compelling stage presence. Marina Mikhaylichenko was a disturbingly-mean Heather Chandler. Ashlin Turcotte (Martha, Veronica’s original best friend before her strategic social climbing) and Kara Adams (Ms. Fleming the hippie teacher) both had vocal solos that developed their characters and also demonstrated some impressive talents. It was also fascinating to watch the other ensemble members as high school students who all seemed to have distinctive characters, backstory, and connections with the others. Choreography (Courtney Arsenault) was well executed, and silhouette work behind windows was delightful.

I had forgotten how sharply satirical it was, skewering suicide-awareness campaigns, internalized homophobia, performative allyship, signing petitions without reading them, playing to the media, the misunderstood-loner-in-a-trenchcoat trope, bullying, bulimia, frenemies, and all the teenage stereotypes.

Heathers is playing at MacEwan’s Triffo Theatre all weekend. But if you don’t already have tickets, you’re probably out of luck. You might want to plan ahead to get tickets to the MacEwan production of The Prom, next March.

The Bridges of Madison County – catch it this weekend!

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Vincent Roberts, Liam Lorrain, and Nicole Gaskell in The Bridges of Madison County. Photo credit @karalittlephoto.

You might be familiar with The Bridges of Madison County as a novel written by Robert James Waller in the early 1990s, or as a movie starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood, mid 1990s.

It’s also a musical – book by Marsha Norman and music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown. The local musical-theatre company ELOPE is currently performing this musical in a short run at Varscona Theatre. If it sounds interesting to you, catch it soon – it closes Saturday night.

The Bridges of Madison County is a story of love, of longings and loyalties, and overwhelmingly a re-creation of a place and time. It’s set in farm country in Iowa, mostly around one farmhouse kitchen, in the 1960s. The main character, Francesca, (Nicole Gaskell) was a war bride who met her US serviceman husband Robert (Vincent Roberts) in Naples, and has lived in Iowa ever since. They have two children, Michael, 16 and restless (Liam Lorrain), and Carolyn, probably about 14, who loves 4-H and farm life (Cassidy Galba).

After an opening solo in which Francesca tells her story of moving to the US post-war, with hat, gloves, and suitcase, with a backdrop of black-and-white slide images, the action of the musical opens with family and friends bustling around Francesca in her kitchen, before she sends her family off to show a steer at the State Fair, looking forward to a few days of privacy and quiet. The first scenes show the affectionate and busy atmosphere, the co-operative farm community and the challenges of parenting teenagers. It’s easy to sympathize with the quiet woman wanting some alone-time.

But if you know the story, you know that while Francesca’s family’s away, she unexpectedly chooses a romantic liaison. National Geographic photographer Robert (Martin Galba) stops by looking for directions. She helps him out and finds out that he’s a solitary nomad who has photographed her hometown of Naples. They talk about the longings and losses in their lives, and find feelings for each other. I’m always a bit skeptical of instant-soulmate stories (even for teenage characters like Romeo and Juliet or Maria and Tony), so I tend to get stuck on this part of the plot. But I appreciated that the writers, director, and actors did not make Francesca’s husband Robert a caricature of unsympathetic husband either. Director Cory Christensen said “It was important to show that Robert isn’t stupid and mean, that he’s a good man, likeable.”

Details are elided, reproducing the novel’s feel as a poetic interlude, four days out of normal life. But the phone keeps ringing – Francesca’s husband, accustomed to sharing daily life with his wife, Carolyn and Michael, complaining to Mom about their lives, their father, and their future plans, and her neighbour and friend Marge (Erin Foster-O-Riordan) who has guessed what’s happening. We can’t forget that Francesca has loyalties and commitments, and neither can she.

It was clear that the story could not have a happily-ever-after ending for everyone. The ending it did have was honest and credible and poignant, although shifting time to show later-life outcomes for all led to a slower-paced ending. I was impressed by how the actors playing the teenagers shifted to being credible as 5-7 years older.

I thought all of the singers were very good, particularly Nicole Gaskell in the role of Francesca. Her program bio says that she’s recently returned to Edmonton from studying and working in the UK, and I hope to see her again on Edmonton stages. There were some ensemble musical numbers near the beginning where I found it hard to make out the words, possibly due to sound balancing difficulties. Joy van de Ligt, music director, led an orchestra of seven. Morgan Smith and Avery Neufeld completed the acting ensemble.

Design choices enhanced the storytelling in many ways, particularly the lighting design of Rebecca Cave, with spectacular Iowa skyscapes and kitchen-table intimacy. The kitchen was cleverly evoked in Leland Stelck’s set design, by a few moving pieces and a chrome-edged table and chairs. Director Christensen pointed out that the corn silhouetted against the sky was actually real corn stalks, obtained from a local corn maze.

This is the first time an ELOPE show has used the Varscona Theatre venue. The auditorium is smaller than the Westbury, and more intimate than Le Théâtre Servus Credit Union, with the audience closer to the stage and warm acoustics. The company has usually been doing one large musical a year (Rent, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat), but is expanding this season by adding this short run of a smaller-cast show. Their season will continue with a production of Amelie, June 26-July 5, 2025, at the Timms Centre, U of Alberta. Kristen Finlay will direct and Sally Hunt will be music director.

Shall I draw an analogy between Francesca’s impulsive grasping at her opportunity of connection with Robert, and a recommendation to book your ticket to this short run of The Bridges of Madison County before it closes Saturday night? Perhaps not – you have no reason to hesitate, and more chance of regrets if you miss it! Saturday also has a matinee. Tickets are available here.