Tag Archives: lindsay walker

“it’s not practice, it’s REHEARSAL”

Leave a reply

There’s a new Trevor Schmidt play, How Patty & Joanne Won High Gold at the Grand Christmas Cup Winter Dance Competition. It’s opening simultaneously at Northern Light Theatre in Edmonton, directed by Schmidt, and at Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary, directed by Bronwyn Steinberg.

I saw the Northern Light production. And it left me a little teary, in a contented, some-things-right-in-the-world way.

Jenny McKillop and Kendra Connor play Patty and Joanne, two students in an Adult Beginner Tap class at the Free Body Dance Station. You will probably recognize both performers from amusing shows with Teatro Live! or Fringe or other local companies, but they’re both new to Northern Light. And they have really great chemistry together – both characters mean well, but they start off awkward, not understanding each other and not comfortable together.

As the play starts, they’ve just gotten the message that their dance teacher, Miss Amber, won’t be back to keep teaching them. And the class, which started out full, has dwindled until – are they the only ones who still want to dance? they aren’t sure. Joanne and Patty take turns narrating the story to the audience and interacting with each other in the studio. Rae McCallum’s lighting design makes it clear to us when there’s a shift. The simple set design (Schmidt) makes clever use of the dance mirrors usually hidden behind curtains in the Fringe Studio Theatre.

Both women are middle-aged and have comfortable-enough secure lives, but we see that each of them is lonely and left out, wanting something more, something just for herself. Patty describes coming home from class to see her husband (Peter) and five children (Parker, Patrick, Petra, Poppy, and Emma) decorating cookies together in the kitchen, and they all run to greet her as she drops her dance bag by the kitchen door – and then immediately disperse to other parts of the house leaving her to do all the dishes. I found that bit one of the most poignant things Schmidt has ever written. And the measurement-for-costumes business was hilarious and relatable.

Joanne talks about how she came to love music and dance and especially musical theatre and movie musicals, with memories of being taken on a special movie outing with her parents, wearing a dark red velvet dress with white lace just like her mother’s. “She was beautiful. And on that day, I was a little bit beautiful.” Throughout the play, Joanne bombards Patty with musical theatre history facts and cultural tidbits. She corrects Patty, a sports parent, saying that for dance “it’s not practice, it’s rehearsal”. Their rehearsal outfits are consistent with their different backgrounds/expectations (costumes by Logan Stefura). Joanne is wearing a ballet-pink leotard and tights under a wrap skirt and cut-off CATS t-shirt, while Patty’s outfit includes cutoff grey sweatpants and a football jersey.

In the first scene they rehearse the tap routine that Miss Amber had been teaching them, to “All the Single Ladies”. (Apparently the women in the class would have been dressed as reindeer, with the man as Santa.) The moves are familiar to anyone who’s watched beginner tap classes. They aren’t very good. They keep running that routine periodically as the story progresses, and they get more in sync. Then they change to a piece better suited to entering “musical theatre duet” instead of the “adult group tap” competition class – Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You”. Their performance gradually improves, and their homemade costumes are both credible and fairytale-delightful. Jason Hardwick’s choreography works well to make the easy moves look hard and then have the dancers gradually master them. The soundscape (Lindsay Walker) evokes tap-dance performances and pop-music fun, right from the pre-show selections.

Like many of Trevor Schmidt’s scripts, I started out amused and then became engaged with the likeable but very distinct characters and their situation, realizing afterwards in conversation with my theatregoing companions that there were also some profound messages in the narrative. About the difficulty and awkwardness and necessity of making new friends in mid-life. About wanting “something just for me.” About how anything worth doing is worth doing badly. All of which are good reminders, especially before Christmas.

Running time is about an hour, with no intermission – which is just right for this quiet delightful two-hander.

Tickets to How Patty and Joanne Won High Gold at the Grand Christmas Cup Winter Dance Competition are available here. Performances run until Saturday December 13th. If you’re in Calgary, or if you loved this script so much that you want to road trip, the Lunchbox Theatre production runs at the Vertigo Theatre in Calgary until December 18th.

Day Seven – sketch comedy, improv, and magic

Leave a reply

Sketchy Broads: Choosing the Bear is a sketch-comedy show written by five local multidisciplinary comedians: Nikki Hulowski, Lindsay Walker, Kristen Welker, Jules Balluffi, performers, and Jennie Emms, who is in the booth as stage manager and appears in one cameo bit. My favourite sketch comedy shows are the ones with so many funny bits that they don’t linger on any of them, just – punchline! boom – and then a lighting shift and segue into a different scenario with different characters. Sketchy Broads did this very well. There were some sketches in which they performed male characters, and some in which they were women dealing with men (offstage or onstage). There was also one very funny small child character. There was laugh-out-loud silliness, there was a recurring bit about a har-har eavesdropper taking conversation out of context, and there was a surprisingly-poignant scene set at an anti-feminist convention.

Let’s Go to the Phones is an improvised radio call-in show by the Irrelevant Show crowd, in the Spotlight Cabaret restaurant. The performance I saw had Peter Brown hosting and familiar comedian/improvisers Cody Porter, Dave Clarke, Donovan Workun, and Chris Borger alternating as guest experts and circulating through the audience with microphones for the questions. Peter Brown started by getting topics from the audience, as mundane as possible, and the ones we ended up with were “how to pair your bluetooth devices” and “coffee grounds”. The pace of this kind of show is slower, giving the performers opportunities for developing odd characters and successfully recreating the call-in show atmosphere.

Yesterday I also watched Keith Brown’s magic show 100% Wizard. The magic / illusions were impressive and mysterious, and Keith Brown connects with audiences in a relaxed and respectful way. He used lots of audience volunteers, including some younger ones. I don’t think he did any of the same things he’s done in previous shows – and if he did, I didn’t mind. With use of the large monitors on either side of the stage to enhance the audience view, and one video camera for a closeup of his hands in some bits, the performance worked very well for the large cabaret-seating room of the Sea Change Granite Club venue which is also hosting the Late Night Cabaret this year.

Four-Show Fringe Monday

Leave a reply

James and Jamesy in Easy as Pie: Performers Aaron Malkin and Alastair Knowles have entertained Fringe artists for several years. In the opening of this year’s show Easy as Pie, the two are preparing to fulfill a longtime dream of performing as clowns, putting on costumes and reviewing the order of bits in their turn. Unlike much classic physical comedy, the characters James and Jamesy do talk to each other, but they also make great use of amusing actions and creative props and effects. The performances are in the Westbury Theatre, and the scale is large enough to work in the large full auditorium.

Local Diva: The Danielle Smith Diaries is also in the Westbury, on a large bare stage with one chair used as a prop. The script, by Liam Salmon, had a previous production five years ago, but some topical/timely material has been added to acknowledge the ways in which life has gotten more worrying since then. Performer Zachary Parsons-Lozinski strides in and self-introduces as drag queen / “drag thing” Tragidean, here to recount the events leading up to their current court case. Parsons-Lozinski owns the stage, pacing, pirouetting, posing, telling stories of growing up gay in small town Alberta, then finding community in gay bars and fulfillment in drag performance, while periodically erupting in rants about current events and homophobic and destructive actions.

I’ve seen and read previous solos with an angry narrator building up the story of provocation to some consequences. I think one about an angry man was by Daniel MacIvor, but Donna Orbits the Moon by Ian August, that Northern Light did last season, was about an angry/grieving middle-aged woman who had done some apparently-illogical things, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen others. In this story, Tragidean’s provocations are both personal and systemic. The personal stories – high school ridicule, thoughtless micro-aggressions of young adults – were smaller and quieter, with the all-out chair-throwing rage reserved for ways in which they see their world being destroyed (timely examples including genocide in Palestine, wildfires in Jasper, and various recent provincial-government attitudes and policies). The character’s eventual eruption over a personal offence appears hugely disproportionate without knowing what else they have to be angry about. And I’m still not sure what I think about that.

Ink Addicted is a solo storytelling performance by Chris Trovador of Orlando, a tattoo artist turned comedian/actor. It was genuine and entertaining. The scenes on stage are interspersed with recorded video of him playing his parents and other characters, and interviewing other tattoo artists and clients. He starts by asking the audience which of us have tattoos and to the others, why not – and then people responded eagerly to the participation bits in his story. He incorporates rap, poetry, music, and a gradual reveal of some of his own tattoos. The unfamiliar specifics of his story (his Puerto Rican mother going from hating tattoos to getting permanent makeup and becoming his chief marketer, disrespectful customer demands) were told in a way that made them easy to relate to. Walterdale Theatre.

I also caught a couple of nights of Die-Nasty. The improv-soap-opera troupe, enhanced by several familiar performers for the Fringe edition, plays every night at 10 pm at the Varscona Theatre, in a story set at the Fringe and populated with Fringe-related characters. Each performance starts with a monologue by that night’s director (Jake Tkaczyk or Peter Brown) which is often laugh-out-loud funny on its own, and musical accompaniment is provided by the amazing Paul Morgan Donald. As in previous years, Kristi Hansen portrays reviewer Liz Nicholls, but this year she has an estranged sister, Whiz Nicholls (Lindsay Walker). Other characters include politicians campaigning for Mayor of the Fringe, the staff of the massage tent, classically trained actors with ‘Downton Abbey accents’, a lounge singer (Jacob Banigan), an improviser from Toronto, a sheriff (Tom Edwards), Kids-Fringe leader Alyson Dicey (Kirsten Throndson), Rachel Notley (Shannon Blanchet), Murray Utas (Randy Brososki), and several others. Guests I’ve seen included Isaac Kessler (directing WINNING:Winning this year and with a memorable Fringe-comedy resume) and Patty Stiles (former Rapid Fire artistic director). The pace is quick and the energy is high, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t know what happened to date. The 60-minute show goes quickly and there’s usually a large and responsive crowd. Oh, and the merch: for $10 they are selling soap. Really nice soap.

Various remixes on Day Two

1 Reply

Image: Fringe 2024 poster designed by Yu-Chen (Tseng) Beliveau – drawing including universal aspects of Fringe and specifics of many previous festival themes. (You might not see the image on some phones – you might see my usual blog header of ticket stubs and the contents of my pockets.)

I fitted three more performances into a busy Friday – two productions hard to describe and also worth seeing, and one new incarnation of a Fringe tradition.

Unkl Stiv’s Looping Machine was on the program last Fringe – I saw an intriguing sample at Late Night Cabaret, but couldn’t fit it into my schedule. So I was happy to see it in the list of Fringe-lottery choices for this year, scheduled into the Yardbird Suite, venue 7. The performer, Steve Pirot, explained that before the start of the pandemic he had been performing several short spoken-word poetry pieces, and then rather than create new pieces for digital performance he decided to work on stitching together his extant work into something longer. Which is now a live non-stop piece almost an hour long. It was fascinating to listen to and watch, but very hard for me to remember details. Pirot uses rhyme and sounds as deftly as a rapper, and plays with words and meanings in ways memorable of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (which he refers to once or twice). For some of it, I let my mind drift as the echoes and reverberations washed over me. For other parts, I loved the way the sounds and concepts fitted together and tried to remember them – particularly the part about the 24-hour cat cafe – but I can’t. When I first started exploring the local theatre scene, early in the previous decade, I figured out quickly that if Steve Pirot was credited on a project, it was going to be what I called “weird theatre” – and I meant that in a good way! Steve Pirot expanded my appreciation of live performance in 2013, and this Fringe show did that again. If this might be your thing – if you’re even curious about it – try it. He also has a show for kids at this Fringe, called The Empire of Sand.

I think I was probably in the middle of the target audience for Who’s Afraid of Winnie the Pooh?, the Clevername Theatre production playing at venue 18: The FOH Pro Stage, a Lutheran-church hall across the avenue from Grindstone Theatre’s main performance space. A printed program distributed before the show provided a bit of context about the Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne’s life, in particular the way his real-life son Christopher Robin Milne responded to being immortalized in his father’s books as the quintessential imaginative solitary child endowing his stuffed animals with life. I had read about that history previously, but it did help to have it top-of-mind during the show.

I was also quite familiar with the tropes and plot points of both source material of this strangest of adaptations. I’d savoured the Winnie-the-Pooh short stories and poems from having them read to me, touching the Ernest Shepard pencil drawings, through watching the Disney animations with younger siblings and reading aloud with the next generation. And I’d worked on a Walterdale Theatre production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, so I’d heard the venomous barbs and unfolding awful secrets of that script many times while operating the lighting cues, and then watched another production in the Citadel audience.

I have no idea how the Minneapolis theatre artist Alexander Gerchak ever came up with the idea of casting the storybook characters Winnie and Piglet (Thomas Buan and Stephanie Johnson) as the viciously-bonded couple like George and Martha, entertaining a young couple named Hunny (Victoria Jones, costumed as a Pooh-story honey-pot and echoing the naivete of Albee’s Honey) and Christopher (“he looks like a Mormon who collided with a haberdashery shop”, Nick Hill) who seemed to be the analogue of Nick. But it worked. Later on, references were made to other Pooh-universe characters like Eeyore, Rabbit, Owl, and Kanga. The narrative on stage had callbacks to many plot points in both canon stories, and included both absurd physical humour (instead of the many alcoholic drinks of George’s hospitality, Winnie licks out a honey jar with his hands and serves up “nectar” and “condensed milk”) and a lot of what I remember as increasing horror as I came to realize the history behind the intolerable present, highlighted by cringey lighting effects (maybe I just noticed those because of how I first encountered Albee’s work?)

After the performance, I looked them up – and found out that it’s been well received at Fringe festivals in the US. If you are familiar with both sides of the source material – whether or not you actually like either of them – you should definitely see this. It would probably also be worth seeing if you just have a rough awareness of both stories as cultural phenomena – but it was recognizing the specifics and then realizing how the stories were going to dovetail that really sold me.

Late Night Cabaret has moved, this year, from its longtime home in the Backstage Theatre (do you remember when that space acted as storage the rest of the year but was tidied up as a performance space for the few weeks of Fringe?) to a new venue offsite, the Granite Curling Club on 107 Street. The new venue is about twice the size, and the new arrangements include extra late-night trips of the historic streetcars through Old Strathcona from the Fringe grounds, and an earlier house-opening that might be serving to spread out the loud energy of the old queue that would form along the north wall of the Arts Barns every night with ticketholders vying for front-table seats and artists hoping to get free tickets. I was hesitant about whether the larger offsite space could re-create the happy community feel of the old LNC, a place where I felt completely included and safe as a solo patron but at the same time felt like I was in a dark nightclub of pulsating music at midnight, where I kept running into people I knew.

Late Night Cabaret 2024’s first show was last night. And I will definitely go back. Enough of it is the same, and a lot of it is fun. I didn’t know ahead of time that there’s a kitchen selling nachos and tacos, so I had picked up fast food – but what I saw looked awfully good. There were no risers around the edges filled with single seats, but I was able to see and hear well enough from a cabaret table partway back, and didn’t need to plan ahead about who to sit with because I ran into so many friends. As usual, there are high-energy hosts (Kelly Turner and Kevin Gillese last night), an amazing 7-piece house band and a musical guest (last night Arlo Maverick the rapper) and an assortment of guest performers and repeating features. As in previous years, Lindsay Walker curates the music, Jake Tkaczyk curates the guests, the hosts are affiliated with Rapid Fire Theatre, and the Next Act family of restaurants sponsors things.

Other Fringe checklist notes from Friday: first green onion cake, first volunteer shift in the beer tent, first time mis-remembering a schedule and getting to a venue far too early. And I spent some time trying to find an ATM on site and failing – does nobody need cash for outdoor performers any more?

Today I’m hoping to see Rob & Chris / Bobby & Tina, the Matt Graham musical adaptation of Collin Doyle’s brilliant script Let the Light of Day Through, NachoPals Theatre’s Dick Piston Hotel Detective in Prague-Nosis, as well as the newest Guys in Disguise comedy Microwave Coven and Trevor Schmidt’s musical Mass Debating. The black-comedy musical I’m working on, Regression, has a performance at 4 pm at venue 30, the Playhouse. Hope your Fringe weekend is great! Say hi if you see me!

A full Saturday at Fringe 2023

Leave a reply

On the final weekend of Fringe, I’m in “just one more!” mood. Saturday ended up including Ken Brown’s Life After Life After Hockey, Natasha Mercado’s Tree, into a black shirt into the booth for a performance of i carry your heart with me, then the last episode of Die-Nasty and the last Late Night Cabaret.

Life After Life After Hockey was a masterclass in solo narrative, with a throughline, clear transitions, and interesting actions. The creator-performer Ken Brown takes us through the creation, performance, and lengthy touring career of his 1980s solo Life After Hockey, and about how it led to the next things in his life, with challenges and joys. There are familiar experiences and recognizable names in the hockey parts of his story, but also in the parts about becoming a theatre creator and inspiring generations of other local theatre creators through his time teaching at Macewan and afterwards. For a solo, it had a lot of special guests – but that is not a complaint at all, they were delightful. Holger Peterson playing harmonica, Dana Wylie singing and playing guitar, Edmonton’s former poet laureate Pierrette Requier reading a poem about Edmonton, etc. Stage 13, La Cité – Servus Credit Union Théâtre.

Natasha Mercado’s Tree was a charming solo about a tree who longs to be human. Lots of low-key audience participation (“now I need a babbling brook through the forest – just this side of the room”) and a bit of a twist that I thought was going to turn into The Giving Tree. (It didn’t – which is good because I can’t stand that book). A game-show “Would You Rather” explored some of the possibilities available only to humans, good and bad. Stage 7, Chianti Yardbird Suite.

Die-Nasty’s Fringe series wrapped up with a few more deaths, everyone in jail exonerated especially Liz Nicholls (Kristi Hansen) who was recognized as the Spirit of the Fringe in an inspiring song, and the traditional port-a-potty hookup between Liz and the gonzo podcaster Fisher T Johnson (Mark Meer). Die-Nasty’s fall season opens its curtain on Monday October 23rd, set in a 1920s circus sideshow, and the first one’s free! (a successful marketing ploy for many substances …)

Late Night Cabaret was crammed full of special guests, stunts, contests, and inside-jokes that include the whole Fringe community as the insiders, which is the best thing about LNC. (@lnc_yeg, as the hosts often remind us.) Last night was also the last performance ever of Zee Punterz, who have been the cabaret’s house band for more than ten years. A slideshow gave us glimpses of many of their performances and paid tribute to the late Brett Miles, saxophonist through most of that time. They ended their last set, and the night, with a great rendition of Stairway to Heaven, along with the musical guest Lindsay Walker. And then they gave us an encore. Before the lights came up and the Fringe technicians started striking the band’s set, as a reminder of what will be happening today and all through the next week, as the Fringe grounds gets returned to its usual uses as a park, an alleyway, a parking lot, a road and bike path … and the theatres go back to being rehearsal spaces and classrooms, music performance rooms, bars, dance studios, lecture halls, a Masonic hall, and … and a lot of theatres preparing for their upcoming 2023-2024 performance seasons.

But that’s for later! For today, I’ll put my lanyards back on and find my sunglasses and head out to watch some theatre before our 5 pm performance of i carry your heart with me (Stage 27, Sugar Swing Upstairs). First stop, Multi-Vs. 2 pm at Stage 11, Varscona Theatre.

Amor de Cosmos, and Puck Bunnies

Leave a reply

It’s a little harder to find a connecting theme for these two – Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical is a fantastical recounting of the biography of a not-very-famous figure from Canadian history. Puck Bunnies is a play about contemporary young women who are hangers-on of a local minorleague hockey team. One’s a new work written by Richard Kemick with music and lyrics by local singer-songwriter-actor Lindsay Walker, and the other is a remount from local playwrighting team Darrin Hagen and Trevor Schmidt.

Amor de Cosmos: A Delusional Musical is not in the printed Fringe programs because it was a late addition off the waitlist. And it’s a little hard to describe, but it’s quirky and charming. Cody Porter, who directed the show for its Toronto-Fringe run, stepped into the performing role for Edmonton, which is a treat for his fans here. I loved the way he changed characters as Walker (accompanying on keyboard and narrating some parts from newspaper headlines) flipped him different hats, with physicality, dialect, and eye-twinkles to match. The elliptical/heightened text recitation reminded me a bit of Jonathan Christenson’s work, and was delivered with such clarity that I didn’t realize until afterwards that a lot of it was iambic pentameter. The main character was born into a mining family in New Brunswick, made his way to California as a photographer, and ended up in BC as a newspaper publisher and then politician. I was fascinated by the way the writers included acknowledgements of where this character stood or would have stood on various issues of the day that now we see as injustices (e.g. Indian Act, Immigration Act) and was cracked up by a throwaway anachronism about the right of homosexuals to give blood. Stage 8: Kick Point OSPAC, in the schedule slots showing as Ruby Rocket in the printed program.

The Guys in Disguise play Puck Bunnies debuted at the Fringe in 2017, and the playwrights won Outstanding New Work Fringe at the Sterling awards that season. In this remount, Jake Tkaczyk is playing Tammy, the new mother bringing her baby to the game as a visible reminder of her claim to the team captain Cliff. Tanya, played by Trevor Schmidt, seems to be the one making the rules for the group calling themselves the Puck Bunnies – providing hair/fashion consultation, relationship advice, and decreeing who can sit where. Newcomer Tina, played with adorable well-intentioned bewilderment by Jason Hardwick, used to sit with the “loser girls” but has been invited into the clique as a replacement for someone they’re shunning. As they watch the intersquad game from the stands (the bleachers are facing the audience) we learn more about their lives and their relationships and a lot of it is troubling. As I probably wrote when I saw the original production in 2017, I knew people like this when I was growing up in hockey rinks in the 1970s, so it’s troubling to see the same “put the boys first” mentality in a setting contemporary enough to have Google and selfies and pussy hats. Like other recent scripts by this writing team or by Schmidt, there’s a layer of poking gentle fun at the characters, but underneath there are some pointed messages about society and glimpses of hope. Even for these young women with their limited outlook and unsupportive environment, by the end we see hints of how things can change for them and for the people around them. Stage 11, Varscona Theatre.

Today I’m excited about catching Lesbihonest, Lady Porn, and Agent Thunder. How about you?