Christine Lesiak and Tara Travis in The Spinsters, Small Matters Productions. Photo by Ian Walker.
Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Joel Schaefer in The Play That Goes Wrong, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
2024 (part 2). Here’s a small assortment of highlights — performances, moments, scenes, ideas — in the year of live theatre in Edmonton. But first, the year’s saddest news: as the current 2024-2025 season began, the loss of two much-loved artists, close to the collective heart of Edmonton theatre.
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The death at 87 of Jim DeFelice, actor/ director/ playwright and screenwriter/ theatre founder/ teacher/ community mentor leaves us without a community-builder and -connector with an encyclopedic knowledge of theatre, and the generosity to share it. The death of Julien Arnold, at 58, during a preview performance of this year’s edition of the Citadel’s A Christmas Carol, has taken from us, in a tragic way, not only a superb actor, but an exemplary artist whose expertise and passionate commitment onstage was matched by his open-heartedness and collaborative kindnesses with younger artists.
Belinda Cornish and Josh Meredith in Private Lives, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux
Performances that linger in the mind:
•Belinda Cornish, pitch-perfect as the tart-tongued Amanda in Teatro Live!’s production of Private Lives, directed by Max Rubin.
•Ruth Alexander. An outstandingly funny and sinister performance as one of a vaudevillian pair of Keystone Cops (the one with literary ambitions of her own) in the Theatre Yes production of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman. She located the piece so playfully and disturbingly on the axis of horror and comedy.
•Farren Timoteo. No one who saw The Three Musketeers at the Citadel will be able to forget the sight of Timoteo in inflatable brocade bloomers as King Louis (designer: Cory Sincennes, dance steps by Anna Kuman). The production’s single funniest performance.
•Christopher Ryan Grant, compellingly intense and dimensional as Johnny Cash in The Ballad of Johnny and June, a La Jolla Playhouse production of the new Des McAnuff/ Robert Cary musical that arrived at the Citadel for a tune-up en route to New York and London.
Oscar Derkx and Beth Graham in The Oculist’s Holiday, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.
•Beth Graham in The Oculist’s Holiday at Teatro Live!, in a nuanced, smart performance as a woman who’s not used to having her clear vision and habitual self-possession be blurred, so to speak, by romantic attraction.
•Ronnie Burkett as all the characters in Wonderful Joe, a stunningly memorable play about life in a multi-cultural city like Toronto or Edmonton.
Julien Arnold and Geoffrey Simon Brown, in rehearsal for The Woman In Black, Teatro Live! Photo by Cassie Duval.
•Julien Arnold in The Woman in Black at Teatro Live!, as an elderly solicitor with a dark secret, who then unleashes, with great precision and a prodigious store of accents, everyone his younger self meets on a fateful trip to the eerie north of England.
•Lindsey Angell as Blanche, trapped between a world that’s gone forever and a new one that has no place for softness, in the Citadel’s A Streetcar Named Desire.
Glenn Nelson, Reed McColm in The Drawer
Boy, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.
•Reed McColm and Glenn Nelson in Shadow Theatre’s The Drawer Boy, one of the signature pieces of the Canadian repertoire, as elderly bachelor farmers and friends forever.
•Andrew MacDonald-Smith, maximum dexterous hilarity in performances in The Play That Goes Wrong at the Citadel, and Pith! at Teatro Live! In the former, as the stage-struck brother of the corpse who won’t stay put; in the latter, as a vagabond seaman populating an exotic adventure for a gloom-laden recluse.
Larissah Lashley, Hayley Moorhouse, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie in Robot Girls, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.
All together now (ensemble chemistry):
•Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Mel Bahniuk, and Noori Gill as sisters in Mermaid Legs at SkirtsAfire, whose lives are upended over and over by the erratic behaviour of one of them.
•Hayley Moorhouse, Meegan Sweet, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffman and Dana Wylie as nurses in a World War I convalescent hospital in France. Funny and traumatized, struggling to regain their footing in a shattered world in Stephen Massicotte’s Stars On Her Shoulders at Workshop West.
•In Robot Girls at Shadow Theatre, the girls of the title: Larissah Lashley, Hayley Moorhouse, Abigail McDougall, Jayce McKenzie.
Wonderful Joe, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes at Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography
Moments to savour:
•Smoot picking up a skull, irresistibly drawn to play Hamlet in Mump and Smoot in Exit.
•The magical scene, exquisitely acted by the marionettes, between old Joe and a sulky skeptical teenage girl on a park bench in Ronnie Burkett’s Wonderful Joe.
•In Robot Girls, the very funny scene where the science club girls discuss the school production of The Crucible. “You mean the witches are the bad guys?” Vanessa (Jayce McKenzie) can’t believe it.
•In The Play That Goes Wrong, Andrew MacDonald-Smith’s lunatic, remarkably acrobatic tango with a telephone cord, so the show can go on.
In another memorable year for theatre design, here’s a small sampling of highlights:
•Design concept of the year by Adam Dickson and Ian Walker: the dresses of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters in The Spinsters (a Small Matters production at Edmonton Fringe Theatre), in which they spin, glide across the stage, and twirl like figures in a music box.
The Adventure of Young Turtle, So.Glad Arts at Expanse Festival 2024. Photo supplied.
•The award for cheap-theatre hot-glue ingenuity goes to S.E. Grummett’s ‘queer puppet musical for kids’, The Adventure of Young Turtle from So.Glad Arts at the Expanse Festival. With the exception of Young Turtle, the characters they meet in an undersea adventure are constructed entirely of … garbage: plastic cutlery, throw-away food containers, empty juice bottles, rubber gloves, scrubbies, a derelict umbrella.
•The award for playful big-budget ingenuity goes to Beyata Hackborn. The set for The Play That Goes Wrong at the Citadel is a tangible answer to that comedy’s built-in question “what could possibly go wrong?” A two-level faux-gothic gem of theatre engineering made to be dismantled and reassembled onstage. The star of the show.
•Even Gilchrist’s hanging caged lighting grid for Brick Shithouse.
•Tori Morrison’s unnerving sound, both “recorded” as the characters marvel and live for the thriller The Woman in Black at Teatro Live!, a human whisper, a whoosh of wind, a half-remembered shriek … all at various imaginary distances that made you know, disturbingly, that the room was occupied. T. Erin Gruber’s lighting had the same effect.
Sydney Williams and Julia van Dam in Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Briane Jang, BB Collective Photography
•Larissa Poho’s gorgeously weird, colour-drenched lighting for Monstress at Northern Light.
•Erik Richards’s bone-chilling sound for the interlocking stories of The Pillowman at Theatre Yes.
•Greg Morrison’s superb original score for Mump and Smoot in Exit, at Theatre Network, an evocation, through danse macabre violin riffs and jagged dissonances of the arrival of the pair in the mysterious land beyond the grave.
•Jason Kodie’s soundscore for Trout Stanley at L’UniThéâtre, a captivating mixture of romantic motifs and rock that nailed (without impaling) the kookiness of a play that’s part rom-com, part-murder mystery, part-existential fantasia.
•Brian Bast’s in-the-round design, with Matt Schuurman’s whirling projections, for Dead Letter at Workshop West, an audacious choice for a murder mystery that depends on what’s hidden.
Break out the new:
New artistic directors: (a) the Mayfield Dinner Theatre has a new artistic director: Kate Ryan of the enterprising indie company Plain Jane Theatre, an expert in musical theatre and the directing thereof. (b) the SkirtsAFire Festival has a new artistic producer, Amanda Goldberg, following the departure of co-founder and artistic director Annette Loiselle after a decade. df
A new festival: the first edition of Ribbon Rouge Foundation’s new Jabulani Festival, named for the Zulu word for “celebrate” and designed to do just that for Edmonton’s African, Caribbean, and Black Albertan culture, happened at Theatre Network. It even came with a new play Ogboingba Tries To Change Her Fate, the work of collaborators from seven cultures. And the joint was packed.
Hannah Wigglesworth and Julia van Dam in The Maids, Putrid Brat. Photo by Kyle Tobiasson and PoppyRose Media
A new indie company: Putrid Brat is named from a line in their debut production, Jean Genet’s 77-year-old play The Maids. Two highly watchable U of A theatre school grads, Hannah Wigglesworth and Julia van Dam, starred in the David Kennedy production.
New venues: the Pendennis Building downtown, a Theatre Yes discovery; the Orange Hub, where Grindstone Theatre has launched a mainstage season of musicals (currently Die Harsh: The Christmas Musical is running there).
New stars. Keep your eye on…
•Garrett C. Smith. His magnetic performance as the title character in Neil Grahn’s The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow at Shadow Theatre, brought to life a remarkable real-life character — a star Indigenous Canadian warrior turned activist when he returned from World War I and found he couldn’t even vote.
Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk in Sunday In The Park With George, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Photo by Lindsey Tran, @understudystudio_. Set design Ross Nichol, costume design Deanna Finnman, lighting design Travis Hatt, video design Matt Schuurman
•Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matkin. As the celebrated pointillist painter Georges Seurat and his model/muse Dot in Sondheim’s extraordinarily challenging musical Sunday In The Park With George, in Jim Guedo’s MacEwan University production.
•Will Brisbin. Charismatic as the disaffected teenager in On Golden Pond at the Mayfield. He held his own with such seasoned pros as Lora Brovold, Glenn Nelson, Maralyn Ryan, Collin Doyle.
•Sydney Williams. We’ve seen her onstage before, in Tiny Beautiful Things and Conni Massing’s Fresh Hell. In Trevor Schmidt’s Goth thriller Monstress at Northern Light, Williams commanded the stage as a female scientist, à la Dr. Frankenstein, whose relationship with the dead girl she’s brought back to life takes on disturbing questions about female drive and ambition.
Bold experiment of the year: Workshop West became only the second professional theatre in the country to make every ticket to every show in their season pay-what-you-will. In this they take the risk that removing any financial barrier to going to the theatre will pay off in audience and sponsorship expansion. Artistic director Heather Inglis reports that many people are paying the “suggested” ticket price, some higher.
Andrew Ritchie in Cycle, Thou Art Here Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson
Wall, what fourth wall? Here are two of the year’s boldest experiments in audience participation. (a) In This Is The Story Of The Child Ruled By Fear, at Workshop West Theatre for a short run last January, playwright David Gagnon Walker Cycle invited us to negotiate the dismaying darkness of the world by telling a story — the rise and fall of an imaginary civilization — together, out loud. Seven audience volunteers sat at tables, with scripts. The rest of us joined in (or not) as a sort of Greek chorus. (b) In Thou Art Here’s Cycle, creator and star Andrew Ritchie, who evidently has nerves of steel since he rides his bike everywhere in every season, performed atop a bicycle, accompanied by a six-member chorus of cyclists from the audience.
‘Multi-disciplinary’ show of the year: Mermaid Legs at SkirtsAfire, a “surreal theatre dance fantasia’ for three actors and four dancers, was a theatrical exploration of mental illness and its ripple effect on three sisters. A creative collaboration of playwright Beth Graham, director Annette Loiselle, choreographer Ainsley Hillyard, and designers Narda McCarroll (set), Whittyn Jason (lighting), Aaron Macri and Binaifer Kapadia (sound and composition), Rebecca Cypher (costumes).
Runner-up: Anthem of Life, Tololwa Mollel’s stage adaptation of Mazisi Kunene’s 300-page Zulu epic poem: gods, humans, animals, an entire creation mythology and cosmology came to life at Theatre Prospero in dance, chanting, drumming, songs. And that was only part 1 of a trilogy.
