Tag Archives: walterdale theatre

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.

King of the Yees

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Ruth Wong-Miller and Grace Li in Walterdale Theatre’s King of the Yees, haggling as Lauren and Whiskey Seller. Photography by Scott Henderson, Henderson Images. Costumes Karin Lauderdale, Set Leland Stelck, Lighting Rebecca Cave.

I haven’t been involved with working on the latest Walterdale Theatre production, King of the Yees, so I had the fun of seeing it for the first time on opening weekend, along with a delighted audience. Barbara Mah, Walterdale’s current artistic director, directed Chinese-American playwright Lauren Yee’s somewhat-autobiographical play, with a talented cast and team of local artists.

King of the Yees is partly a familiar story about a father and daughter – a father (Stanley Woo of Apocalypse Kow) who is immersed in the clannish culture of San Francisco’s Chinatown and the Yee Family Association that he manages, and a playwright daughter (Ruth Wong-Miller of Foote in the Door and other musical theatre) who has moved on, moved away, and lost connection with her parents and their culture. I found the frustrated banter between them very funny, and also poignantly relatable, and unexpectedly moving.

Mah’s production, and the script, also contain fantastical elements which are fun to watch and listen to, as well as bitingly-sarcastic riffs on assumptions about Asian actors by a couple of performers playing actors who have been hired to read the playwright’s work-in-progress (Kingsley Leung and Helen Massini). This is not quite as confusing as it sounds! Visual/audible spectacles include a lion dance (handlers Massini, Grace Li, Ivy Poon, Rupert Gomez) led by a Buddha Boy (Tsz Him Hymns Chu), an Erhu player (Poon), a troupe of elders doing tai chi, a flamboyant Model Ancestor (stage manager Tim Lo), and a Szechuan face changer (Massini). The beautiful set and costumes were designed by Leland Stelck and Karin Lauderdale and implemented by skilled teams of painters, stitchers, and builders.

Ensemble members Rupert Gomez, Helen Massini, Andrew Kwan, Grace Li, Kingsley Leung, and Ivy Poon form a mysterious wall, in King of the Yees. Photo Scott Henderson, Henderson Images. Set Leland Stelck, costumes Karin Lauderdale, lights Rebecca Cave.

The digital program contains some helpful and interesting contextual information that is worth reading for extra enjoyment. Some performances of King of the Yees are sold out on line, with a few tickets held back for door sales. The run continues until next Saturday, February 15th, and advance tickets are here.

There’s so much else on this weekend, too! Plan ahead!

  • Bea, at Shadow Theatre, closes Sunday
  • Angry Alan, at Northern Light Theatre, closes Saturday (tomorrow!)
  • After the Trojan Women, by Amena Shehab & Joanna Blundell, is at Backstage Theatre
  • The Citadel has Frozen and Does This Taste Funny?
  • U Alberta Studio Theatre has [Blank], by Alice Birch
  • Die-Nasty, the long-running improv soap opera on Monday nights at Varscona, is free on Feb 10th.
  • An Oak Tree, at the Aviary, produced by Theatre Yes
  • Script Salon, Sunday Feb 9th, has a reading of Linda Celentano’s Giorgi of the Jungle.

And next weekend there’s even more, all with short runs!

  • The Effect, by Lucy Prebble, at the Arts Barns Studio,
  • The Spinsters (Bigger and Badder) is in the Westbury
  • MacEwan University’s musical theatre program has Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812
  • The first PepperMUNT Cabaret, a production of Jake Tkaczyk’s new company MUNT Performance Association, will be at the Gateway Theatre on Saturday February 15th, at 10:30 pm – giving you enough time to see one of the shows in the above lists first! Trevor Schmidt and Mark Meer are hosting, with an assortment of talented guests, and tickets are here.

I’m not going to be able to see all of these, because I’m also busy working on Walterdale’s next show, Stag and Doe by Mark Crawford (April 23-May 3). See what you can! Maybe I will see you there!

Tiny Beautiful Stories

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Michelle Todd, foreground, and Michael Peng, Sydney Williams, and Brett Dahl, in Tiny Beautiful Things. Photo Marc Chalifoux.

If you haven’t already seen Tiny Beautiful Things, the Shadow Theatre production of the Nia Vardalos play currently running at the Varscona, do try to fit it in before it closes on Sunday afternoon.

Tiny Beautiful Things is a set of vignettes portraying the interactions of an advice-columnist, inspired by Cheryl Strayed’s essays based on her time writing as Dear Sugar. Michelle Todd is wonderful as the writer who lands the columnist gig, giving advice from her heart and from her own messy experiences. The character seemed so warm and human and honest, folding laundry in her house wearing mismatched loungewear/pajamas (Leona Brausen costumes), that I wanted to take her home.

The rest of the ensemble (Michael Peng, Sydney Williams, and Brett Dahl) portray people who write to her, and other people in her stories such as her mother. Each of them gets a chance to play people of various ages and genders, adding to the impression that there are a lot of different correspondents. I didn’t ever feel like any of the portrayals were caricatures.

During the performance, I was reminded of several other plays I’ve seen. The first comparison was with Veda Hille, Bill Richardson, and Amiel Gladstone’s Craigslist Cantata, the series of songs and sketches about transactional connections on an internet classified-ads site, but I quickly decided that Tiny Beautiful Things was less frivolous and more thoughtful, as the interactions through an advice-column were about seeking understanding, rather than finding second-hand property, missed-connections on a commute, or a metalhead roommate for a metal house (although that one was so catchy that now it’s an earworm again).

When I realized that the conversations between Sugar and the letter-writers, often physically located at Sugar’s kitchen table or in her living room, were being done without the actors touching, and usually facing towards the audience, I remembered Duncan MacMillan’s Lungs, also directed by John Hudson for Shadow Theatre, with Elena Porter and Jake Tkaczyk as an unnamed couple recollecting the milestones in their relationship, while speaking to an unseen listener and never touching, not even in the sometimes-hot sometimes-hilarious sex scenes. And then in one of Sugar’s conversations, they do touch, and it matters.

Sugar’s advice and support, completely grounded in love, and the heartbreaking range of the ordinary people’s problems, also reminded me of a newer script which none of you have seen yet, unless you’ve been in a rehearsal hall at Walterdale Theatre during preparations for next week’s new works festival From Cradle to Stage. The festival, running May 14-19, presents three staged readings each night, for a total of nine new scripts by local playwrights. I helped select them, so I think they’re all worth seeing – but the one that came to mind yesterday when I was watching Tiny Beautiful Things was Kristen M. Finlay’s Modern Day Saints. In Finlay’s script, ordinary contemporary women struggle to do the right thing in a range of difficult and painful and familiar situations, starting from a student without enough money to pay her tuition fees dealing with unsympathetic bureaucracy. As in Tiny Beautiful Things, the glimpses of compassion and hope in the ensemble vignettes are life-affirming.

Tiny Beautiful Things starts with an electronic tone, and then another – I thought, is that a message notification? is that a piece of original music? and then I thought, Oh, there’s a Darrin Hagen sound credit, I bet it is both. And it was.

It goes without saying that it made me cry. In a good way. It also made me feel grateful for having friends to tell life stories with, and for seeing how crafting an experience into a story helps make sense of it.

Tickets for Tiny Beautiful Things are here. Tickets for Walterdale’s From Cradle to Stage festival May 14-19 are here. Modern Day Saints plays on May 17 and May 18 – but descriptions of all the new plays in the festival, by Bridgette Boyko, Donna Call, Kristen M. Finlay, Grace Li, Shawn Marshall, Madi May, Blaine Newton, Logan Sundquist, and Michael Tay are here.

Amigo’s Blue Guitar: thoughts about refugees and migrants

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Sandy Roberts and Aldrick Dugarte, in Amigo’s Blue Guitar. Photo credit Scott Henderson, Henderson Images

I saw four good plays in the last couple of weeks, and didn’t make time to post about any of them before they closed: The Spinsters (Small Matters), The Drawer Boy (Shadow Theatre), Donna Orbits the Moon (Northern Light), and This is the Story of the Child Ruled By Fear (Workshop West / Strange Victory). I love theatre that reflects situations familiar in my community and my life and leads me to reflect on them, whether in a fantastical setting or a mundane one, and the four plays above all did that.

Joan MacLeod’s Amigo’s Blue Guitar, currently on stage at Walterdale Theatre, also portrays some real-world situations, in ways that are worth thinking about. The set (Leland Stelck) is a beautiful evocation of an offshore BC island cabin, with exposed wood and big windows, open to the mountains and the ocean, and a downstage dock. Text projected on the backdrop (director Bob Klakowich provided the projections) sets the context by providing information about the civil war and unrest in El Salvador in the early 1990s, and about refugees in general and their outcomes in Canada. The character Elias (Aldrick Dugarte) appears to the side, speaking Spanish and simple English, shifting from dreamlike musing about his memories to responding to immigration questions. 

The small-scale interactions and byplay among a family living on the island, with early-20s siblings Callie (Crystal Poniewozik) and Sander (Graham Schmitz) sniping at each other and defending each other, draft-dodger-fisherman father Owen (Richard Wiens) holding things together, and grandma Martha (Sandy Roberts) visiting from Oregon, are amusing and familiar. As the action opens, they are scrambling to respond as Sander’s well-intentioned scheme to sponsor a refugee from El Salvador is suddenly becoming real, with Elias due to arrive any minute. 

The action of this play takes place over the first six months that Elias is in Canada. The interactions between Elias (pronounced uh-LEE-uss) and the various family members start out embarrassingly awkward, as they don’t speak much of each other’s language and they don’t know much about each other’s country. It is fascinating to watch the superficial assumptions on all sides break down, as they gradually speak more and ask more questions. We see that Sander’s commitment to rescuing Elias, after hearing an inspiring speaker in his sociology class, was actually based on very little knowledge – “I imagined you every morning, living in a village atop a mountain”. “San Salvador is a large city”. As the other family members each get to know Elias better and appreciate him, Sander becomes distant and almost resentful. Sander is completely unequipped for dealing with effects of Elias’s significant trauma. I have been thinking ever since about good intentions not being sufficient, when dealing with any marginalized individuals. Meanwhile, Elias begins to make his own choices about his Canadian life and his future, not the ones recommended by the host family and immigration authorities. 

Graham Schmitz, Aldrick Dugarte, and Crystal Poniewozik in Amigo’s Blue Guitar. Photo credit Scott Henderson, Henderson Images.

Another theme running through the story is about Owen’s history as a US draft dodger during the Vietnam War. Forty years on, he’s still hurt by the memory of his parents rejecting him, and still dining out on his bravery in crossing the border. He wants to connect with Elias to validate the courage in his own migrant journey, which is both charming and patronizing. 

Richard Wiens and Graham Schmitz in Amigo’s Blue Guitar. Photo credit Scott Henderson, Henderson Images.

The cast and production team for Amigo’s Blue Guitar were supported in their work by cultural consultant Leo Campos-Silvius, a community cultural leader originally from Chile. After this Sunday’s matinee performance (2 pm), there will be a panel discussion with Leo Campos-Silvius, director Bob Klakowich, and discussion moderator David Goa. The audience will have the opportunity to listen and to ask questions of the participants. 

Amigo’s Blue Guitar continues at Walterdale Theatre until Saturday February 17th. Tickets are available here. 

More to see on local stages this weekend and beyond

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First, you have three more chances to see Flop! before it closes Sunday evening May 28th. If you haven’t yet been to a show at Rapid Fire Theatre’s permanent home, Rapid Fire Exchange on 83rd Avenue, this is a great reason to check out the venue. Ron Pederson and Ashley Botting bring an inspired variation on the musical-theatre-improv genre which uses the framing of two performers unexpectedly being stuck without script, lyrics, set, or costumes, just a musician (Erik Mortimer), so they call for audience suggestions and build a musical on the fly. Like skilled stage magicians, they increase the entertainment value of what they’re doing by making it look hard, sometimes stepping out of character between scenes to work out what to do next. I’m accustomed to improv troupes who appear to do impossible things easily – Rapid Fire’s own Off Book: The Musical, Gordon’s Big Bald Head – and I loved the extra layer of entertainment in seeing Pederson and Botting acting being terrible at something they are actually brilliant at. I hadn’t seen Ashley Botting on stage before – except in her recent guest appearance in Die-Nasty’s current improv drama Doctors – and she is delightful. Tickets for Flop! and future Rapid Fire shows are available here.

Boy Trouble, the new two-performer version of Mac Brock’s script, has two more performances in the Studio space at the Fringe Arts Barns, this afternoon at 2 pm, and this evening (which is showing as sold out on line.) I haven’t been able to see this one yet but I loved the solo version of it which inspired this retelling, at NextFest 2019 and then again at Fringe 2019.

Prison Dancer at the Citadel closes tomorrow afternoon. The performance this afternoon (Saturday May 27 at 1:30 pm) is the last audience-masks-required performance of the Citadel season. Tickets are available here.

Several years ago I attended a staged reading at the APN Script Salon of a new play called Anahita’s Republic, about women’s lives in contemporary Iran. Even in a music-stands reading in a plain meeting room, the script grabbed my attention and shook up some of my assumptions, so I was excited to see it fully staged. The company AuTash Productions, and playwriting team Hengameh E. Rice, have had two full productions – a recent one at Toronto’s Factory Theatre directed by Brenley Charkow, and this one directed by Brian Dooley, with a completely different cast and creative team. Roya Yazdanmehr is compelling as the eponymous Anahita, a woman who runs the family business and weathy household according to her own rules. From the first scene, when she strides in after a swim, applying lotion to bare legs, and then responds to her brother/business-partner (Yassine El Fassi El Fihri as Cyrus) who is pleading for money for his children’s activities, she did not fit my assumptions about how women live in that particular regime. But their history, and its effect on them, unfolds more slowly, making it more shocking to imagine this woman as a militant 16yo beside her late mother in a crowd of protesters. The next character who enters is a woman in a chador, Omid (Jennie George), but once again, my first assumptions about her life were wrong. Michael Peng plays Omid’s father, business associate of Cyrus and Anahita. Late in the play, when they are all in a situation with no good solutions, Anahita talks about different kinds of freedom and about how nobody is really free. Their situation has a resolution, but it’s not ideal. The play made me want to see more complex stories like this, coming out of a context I don’t know well but not limited by it. Program notes and vocabulary are provided through a QR code, and a large display timeline about event’s relevant to women in Iran on the lobby wall – including both mandatory “unveiling”, with enforcement, and mandatory “veiling”, also with brutal enforcement.

Tickets to Anahita’s Republic, playing until June 4th at the Fringe Backstage, are available here.

In a complete change of mood, last night I attended the opening performance of Elyne Quan’s Listen, Listen! as part of the Teatro Live! season. I giggled so much that another audience member commented to me and my companion about it at intermission.

Farron Timoteo plays a mall bookstore worker passionate about selecting background music, Nadien Chu plays a customer who objects to the music, and Nikki Hulowski and Alex Ariate play a hilarious collection of ensemble characters in the bookstore workplace. The play is set in 1986, which means that the sound designers (director Belinda Cornish and stage manager Frances Bundy) got to use all the catchy tunes of that era, costume designer Leona Brausen, fresh from designing for 10 Funerals, with half its scenes in that era, got to evoke memories of women’s soft-tie business blouses, asymmetrical hairstyles for young people, and leather ties, and the playwright got to stick in lots of dramatic-irony jokes about how people in 1986 expected the future to go.

Like many of Stuart Lemoine’s works performed by Teatro, this play was an affectionate portrayal of quirky characters, plot-driven but with lots of scope for entertaining character business. It was a lot of fun. Tickets are here.

Other theatre events coming up – I may not make it to all of them, but I’m noting them here for you –

Helen, the Euripedes comedy about Helen of Troy directed by Amy de Felice outdoors at the Queen Elizabeth Planetarium, runs to June 4th.

CHUMP, by Sue Goberdhan, is “about growing, grieving, and being Guyanese”. It is being workshopped and will have one public performance at the Fringe Studio June 11.

Nextfest, the annual festival of and for emerging artists, runs June 1-11.

The Sterling Awards nominations will be announced at 5 pm on June 5th at the Arts Barns, and winners will be celebrated at a more affordable event than the pre-pandemic Mayfield galas, also at the Arts Barns on Monday June 26th.

Walterdale Theatre’s 2023-2024 season launch event will also be held June 5th – doors at 7 pm, event at 8 pm.

And … in August it will be Fringe! Fringe 42: The Answer. (Do you know where your towel is?)

Ensemble in abstract Greek costumes: Penelope sits on the end of a bed, while an actress representing her son rests head on her knee. Four female servants listen.

The Penelopiad, one of Walterdale’s best.

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Alora Bowness (Penelope), Stephanie Swensrude (Telemachus), Monica Stewart, Karla Martinez, Sarah Spicer, and Katie Corrigan, in The Penelopiad. Photo Credit: Scott Henderson, Henderson Images

The lights come up on a simple set – a bed on a platform, white hanging panels lit to effect – and a young woman walks toward the audience. Now that I’m dead, I know everything, she says. After this intriguing statement, she goes on to explain that it’s not quite true – like everything else, it’s been simplified in the version we know.

Alora Bowness is Penelope In Walterdale Theatre’s current production of The Penelopiad. She caught my interest from these first lines, and continued throughout the performance, telling and illustrating her story with humility, determination, wry humour, and willingness to acknowledge the consequences of her choices.

But The Penelopiad, adapted by Margaret Atwood from her novella in 2007, doesn’t just examine the story of Penelope, but also of her enslaved maids. The narrative unfolds in short scenes, switching between Penelope telling the story, to ensemble members acting the story, to choral/choric recitation and dance by the maids, or sailors, or even at one point a flock of ducks. The story moves smoothly and with compelling pace, as directed by Kristen M. Finlay, from Penelope’s birth to a naiad mother (Mandy Stewart) and mercurial King Icarius of Sparta (Angela James-Findlay), through her childhood, her marriage to Odysseus (Katy Yachimec-Farries), move to Ithaca, and then what happens to her through the timeframe of Odysseus long journey to Troy and then home, as first told in Homer’s Odyssey.

I had seen the Citadel production of this play in 2013, using 13 talented young artists in that year’s Citadel/Banff Centre Professional Program. The Walterdale production is funnier than I remembered, and in the intimate Walterdale space I felt more engaged with the dangers and challenges of Penelope’s situation. I loved the costumes of the current production (Alodie Larochelle design) – all the maids wearing the same fabrics in grey and black, but in silhouettes that were different for each individual, with braided rope belts in different colours. The songs and poems of Atwood’s script were set to original music, lively or lyrical or haunting as appropriate (Gibson Finlay and Kristen Finlay, composition, Sally Hunt musical director).

Three things about the plot/theme struck me hard this time around. I’ve been thinking about them for days, and I’m planning to return this week for a second viewing, after which I will think about them some more.

  • The relationship between Penelope and Odysseus is shown as nuanced and mostly positive. Classic tropes/assumptions of a girl married off to an older warrior do not hold. It is refreshing to see Odysseus gentle with his new bride and wooing her with stories, and their reunion after the many years of voyaging is equally gentle and consensual. He’s still the product of that particular patriarchal society and family, though.
  • If one focuses on Penelope, it’s a relatively happy story – she overcomes early mortal danger, learns from many mentors and supports, manages the kingdom in Odysseus’ absence, and develops a famous ruse to protect herself from impatient suitors. But Atwood’s script and Finlay’s direction keep reminding the viewer that the story of the maids is just as important. Penelope’s monologue recounting life as an unappreciated girl-child of a royal mixed-marriage is followed immediately by a chorus of maids speaking bluntly to the audience. “We too were children. We too were born to the wrong parents. Poor parents, slave parents, peasant parents, and serf parents; parents who sold us, parents from whom we were stolen.” And the story of the maids is a tragedy. They do what Penelope asks of them – and it has terrible results for them.
  • Those terrible results are due to some of Penelope’s strategies and choices. She acknowledges her mistakes in monologues from her afterlife. But they are also directly due to the customs and expectations of that patriarchal culture. Odysseus acts to punish them using limited information and an offensive set of assumptions. But he gets that information from his son Telemachus, a young man by then, and from his old nursemaid Eurycleia. Both actors in the Walterdale production were compelling, Stephanie Swensrude as the spoiled boy turned resentful young man and Vivien Bosley as the nurse/governess who petted and encouraged young Odysseus and then spoiled his son, turning him against his mother Penelope. I was reminded of how important it is for any society to raise boys to be compassionate and justice-seeking, and how wrong things can go when this does not happen. Unfortunately, this continues to be a timely and critical reminder. And as we move closer to Mother’s Day, I’m thinking about how the responsibility of setting the next generation on a better path should not just be placed on mothers, but on all of us.

Alora Bowness as Penelope, Katy Yachimec-Ferries as Odysseus, Vivien Bosley as Eurycleia. Photo credit Scott Henderson, Henderson Images.

Thank you, cast and team of The Penelopiad, for making me think. The Penelopiad continues at Walterdale Theatre tonight through Saturday night, with an 8 pm curtain. Tonight, Wednesday, is pay what you can night; tomorrow, Thursday May 11, is limited capacity night, for patrons who would prefer more elbow room for better air quality. Masks are recommended but not required at all performances. Advance tickets are available here; some seats will be available at the door an hour before showtime.

The Realistic Joneses: absurdity with kindness

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Christoff Lundgren, Colleen Allen, Zack Siezmagraff, and Brooke Hodgson in The Realistic Joneses. Photo by Scott Henderson, Henderson Images.

Good storytelling often starts in the middle, and doesn’t explain everything right away.

The Realistic Joneses, a play by Will Eno currently on stage at Walterdale Theatre, does this brilliantly. A married couple sits in their backyard, having a frustrating conversation. Jennifer (Colleen Allen) tries to find more verbal connection with her spouse Bob (Zack Siezmagraff), and he bats away all the metaphorical volleys. “Why don’t we ever talk?” “We talked last week. About Belgium.”

A crash of garbage cans offstage turns out not to be raccoons but in fact the lively new neighbours John and Pony (Christoff Lundgren and Brooke Hodgson), bearing wine. This interrupts the previous non-conversation and introduces new levels of awkwardness. All of this is very funny and strangely familiar. Each character has practised routines of social behaviour, from John’s joking gestures and one-liners and Pony’s sidekick perkiness to Jennifer’s urge to fill silences with chatter.

In this script, there is a lot of playing with words, fumbling for words, and using words to distract and deflect. Some characters were keeping secrets, secrets that mattered. Some characters hinted at hardships, past and present. But these characters are not people who would explain things to each other, and not explaining to the audience is part of what makes this play so intriguing. There is some opening-up, some revealing and regretting, and a moving and hopeful ending.

The actors and director (John Anderson) convinced me early on that each character had some urgent needs driving him or her forward, strong motivations that were conveyed indirectly but compellingly. They almost never asked each other directly for anything, but each character had consistent intention and every scene was necessary towards each character’s goals. I was so involved with figuring out the characters that it was only afterwards I was able to think about the actors and their preparation, realizing that these portrayals happened because the actors understood the characters’ intentions and knew how to express them.

I was particularly taken with Zack Siezmagraff’s portrayal of a character who starts off cranky-awkward and becomes somewhat more transparent, never unlikeable but often frustrating. I could hear other members of the audience also being so engaged with whether Bob was saying the wrong thing that there were a lot of gasps and sighs and head-shaking around me.

As you might already know if you’ve listened to me talk about plays or tv shows I’ve seen, I love stories where the people are in difficult or sad situations but the characters are so consistently themselves that the dialogue is very funny. So The Realistic Joneses just hits the spot for me.

I also appreciated the mountain skyline in the set design (Joan Hawkins), the overall subtle sound design (Shawn Pallier), and one particular lighting effect which I won’t give away (Richard Hatfield).

The Realistic Joneses is running at Walterdale Theatre until Saturday July 16th, 2022. Tonight is 2-for-1 night, and next Wednesday (July 13) is Pay-What-You-Can night. Advance tickets are available through Walterdale’s website (no extra service charges), and walk-up tickets will be available at the door.

The 39 Steps at Walterdale

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Bradley Bishop, Lauren Tamke, Lucas Anders, and Samantha Beck in The 39 Steps. Photo credit Scott Henderson, Henderson Images.

During the last two seasons of theatre performance in pandemic times, I’ve seen a lot of small-cast productions – which makes sense, fewer people in the rehearsal hall means less potential exposure and easier distancing – and a lot of serious themes. Which also makes sense, as our society’s had time to think about some difficult issues over the last couple of years. I even got to direct a show fitting those descriptions.

When I watched Peter Pan Goes Wrong at the Citadel last month, I realized that I’d been missing the experience of watching a large cast do ridiculous and unexpected things on stage, along with my more thought-provoking theatre-going.

With Walterdale Theatre’s current production of The 39 Steps, directed by Kristen Finlay, I got that experience. There are only six actors (Lucas Anders, Lauren Tamke, and an ensemble of four: Samantha Beck, Bradley Bishop, Liam McKinnon, Rico Pisco), but I think there are more than a hundred characters. Some of them in disguise. All of them in different costumes (Nicole English) and many of them with different accents,

As for “ridiculous and unexpected”, I kept giggling with delight at what was happening in front of me. I’d read this script before, but there was so much happening on stage besides the dialogue. Even the movement of set pieces was fun and silly. And since the action took the protagonist Richard Hannay (Lucas Anders) from his new flat in 1930s London to a West End show, taking a train to Scotland, leaping from a moving train over the Forth Rail Bridge, to a Highland croft, a misty moor, and a few other atmospheric locations, what I thought were simple set pieces (set and prop design Taylor Howell) turned out to transform into convincing backgrounds for many locations. A complex atmospheric sound design (Anne Marie Szucs) helped to set the scenes clearly and added to the humour and the suspense.

One of my favourite little details was the way I could see quickly that the curved row of rehearsal boxes was a moving train, because of the way everyone’s movements illustrated the carriage’s bumpy movement. I also loved Margaret, Tamke’s understated portrayal of a young Scottish farm wife yearning for travel and cities and the for exotic visitor Hannay, and Mister Memory (Liam McKinnon), the quirky music-hall performer answering trivia questions from his audience (ensemble members who must have slipped in to the Walterdale audience). Lucas Anders plays only one character, the protagonist Richard Hannay, but maintains the high pace (often running across the stage) and clear motivation that drives the somewhat-farfetched plot to its not-quite-predictable happy conclusion.

Liam McKinnon and Rico Pisco hunting fugitives by air, in The 39 Steps. Photo credit Scott Henderson, Henderson Images.

This story originated as a 1915 adventure novel by John Buchan, British writer and parliamentarian who later became Governor-General of Canada. My father was fascinated by Buchan, and shared his musty hardcover copies of The 39 Steps, Greenmantle, and Prester John with me. I also remember Dad showing me the 1935 Hitchcock film adaptation, and delighting in the detail of Hannay being Canadian in the movie. This stage version was written by Patrick Barlow in 2005, and it pulls from both the book and the movie as well as from many tropes and expectations of film-noir, slapstick, and early-20th-century spy thrillers to create a great parody which is very funny whether or not you already know the source material.

The 39 Steps is playing at Walterdale Theatre until Saturday May 21st. You can get advance tickets at Tix on the Square. If a performance is not sold out you can also get them at the door an hour before showtime. Masks are required, house capacity remains limited, and auditorium ventilation has HEPA filters.

Watching Copenhagen in 2022

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image: Bob Klakowich as Niels Bohr, photo credit Scott Henderson, Henderson Images

In about 2004 I saw a production of Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen performed in the round and directed by Caroline Baillie of Critical Stage Theatre, in the atrium of a Queen’s University building dedicated to creative ways of doing engineering education. My memory of that production is overwhelmingly of circling and cycling, re-examining a memory from various directions with the characters orbiting each other like atomic particles.

Copenhagen is now on stage at Walterdale Theatre, in a production directed by Martin Stout on a set designed by Leland Stelck. With its gently-thrust stage floor and intimate audience seating the Walterdale space provides the opportunity for a more personal encounter with the characters and their questions and uncertainties, despite the Covid precautions of the 2-meter moat and the dispersed audience.

It’s mostly a recollective piece, with re-creations and re-tellings of meetings in the early 1920s, in 1941, and in 1947. The characters say directly early on that they are now all “dead and gone”, and they also help to anchor the individual scenes/memories in time by frequently mentioning the year. The characters are Niels and Margrethe Bohr, the Danish physicist and his wife/collaborator (Bob Klakowich and Donna Call), and Werner Heisenberg, the younger German physicist (Kendrick Sims). Most of the memories are set in the Bohrs’ home in Copenhagen or on the walking paths nearby, a city that in 1941 was occupied by Germany and under constant surveillance.

Donna Call as Margrethe Bohr side-eying her husband. Photo credit Scott Henderson, Henderson Images

I was pleasantly surprised to find myself laughing out loud periodically through this performance. Klakowich and Call’s dry delivery of ironic and witty lines, Sims’ expressive eye-rolling, and particularly Call’s full-body indignation when her contributions are ignored make the most of the precise and articulate script. The opening-night audience was full of sympathy for the Bohrs’ bitterness and rage at their occupiers in general, and at Heisenberg’s clumsy attempts to re-create their earlier social connections without acknowledging the current abyss between them. “Should I have Margrethe sew a yellow star on my ski jacket?” Bohr spits out in response to his colleague’s suggestion of an excursion to Norway. Later in the play, I came to identify with Heisenberg as well, trying to do the work he cared about under a hostile and then horrific regime, trying to minimize the long-term damage to humanity and hopefully looking forward to the prospect of a future not only after the war but after the Nazi regime.

Kendrick Sims as Werner Heisenberg in one of his meetings with colleague Niels Bohr. Photo credit Scott Henderson, Henderson Images.

Stelck’s set, and the props (Debbie Tyson), costumes (Megan Reti), and multimedia design (Darrell Portz) provide effective support for the action reminiscent of 1941 but not clearly rooted in time or space, while lighting (Adam Luijks) and sound (Dylan Mackay) contribute to the shifts in mood, with one particularly chilling air-raid siren.

I kept thinking of present-day Київ (Kyiv), but I also kept thinking of conflict scenarios closer to home. And the characters of Copenhagen reminded me of resilience, of scientists and engineers asking questions about the ethics of their work, and of hope. All of which I appreciated.

Copenhagen is playing through Saturday March 19th at Walterdale Theatre in Edmonton. Mask and vaccine requirements are still in place to protect performers, audience members, and other volunteers. Tickets are available at Tix on the Square, and at the door half an hour before show time.