Farren Timoteo, incoming artistic director at Teatro Live! Photo by Curtis Comeau
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
Teatro Live! has a new season — and, starting Sept. 1, a new artistic director.
“Comedy is powerful…. That’s my place in the universe!” declares Farren Timoteo, looking delighted (his at-rest expression) after a day auditioning actors for the season-opening Teatro Live! production of the virtuoso Hitchcockian comedy thriller The 39 Steps he’ll direct this fall (Nov. 13 to 30).
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Speaking of steps, he’s following in those of his great friend and frequent stage collaborator Andrew MacDonald-Smith, who’s leaving the Teatro Live! artistic directorship this summer to pursue his busy acting career.
Not only does Timoteo, an award-winning actor/ playwright/ director/ lyricist, and veteran artistic director, bring that unusual skill set to his new gig at Teatro, he brings blue-chip Teatro cred too. His 20-year history with the 44-season-old comedy company includes acting, directing, writing musicals (not to mention a particular fondness for the phrase “the Teatro spirit”). And it goes back beyond his first Teatro role, in the Stewart Lemoine/Jocelyn Ahlf comedy A Momentary Lapse in 2005, to the very first Fringe show he ever saw, at age 18.
It was Lemoine’s Cocktails at Pam’s, which returns as the finale of the upcoming season July 9 to 26, directed by the playwright, with Timoteo in the cast. Lemoine’s 1986 Fringe hit, with its real-time declension into chaos, became a signature Teatro favourite, revived at regular intervals. And for the teenage Timoteo, about to start the musical theatre program at MacEwan along with MacDonald-Smith, it was a life-changer.
“I had never seen anything like it. I had no idea Edmonton could have something so special. It was so funny, so stylish. The writing was so smart, so cheeky…. What IS going on? Every time thing you figure it out, it switches modes and does something else…. When I left Pam’s place I was not the same person!”
The upcoming season programmed by MacDonald-Smith in collaboration with Timoteo also includes a new Lemoine as yet untitled (Feb. 19 to March 8, 2026) and Becky Mode’s Full Committed June 4 to 21). The latter is a solo 40-character tour-de-force set in an elite Manhattan restaurant where an out-of-work actor is negotiating the chaos of the reservation line. MacDonald-Smith stars; Timoteo directs.
Timoteo arrives in his new job from 19 seasons as the artistic head, muse, and resident playwright/director of another theatre that leans into comedy. Alberta Musical Theatre Company is a purveyor to kid audiences of smart, irreverent, sassy original musicals spun from fairy tales, most recently this season’s 200-date tour of Rapunzel.
Timoteo didn’t write that one (it’s by Camille Pavlenko, music by VISSIA, “a magical pairing”). “I thought we could use a fresh voice,” he says. But the idea for “a 60s pop-rock musical Rapunzel” was his (“Hair is a musical from the ‘60s; Rapunzel is about hair …” he jokes). And he put the creative team together, as well as the cast of three “fast, funny, kind emerging artists…. It felt both fresh and energized. And I feel so happy to be leaving (the company) on that note.”
Citadel Theatre, graphic supplied
Timoteo’s own season, which has included opera (a role in Edmonton Opera’s Die Fledermaus), began in Vancouver … in pneumatic brocade bloomers. He was a show-stopping King Louis, in the funniest performance of Daryl Cloran’s Citadel/ Arts Club co-production of The Three Musketeers. And it’s been a season, too, of multiple runs across the country of Timoteo’s funny and poignant many-character solo hit Made In Italy — first at Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon and then under the Mirvish Productions banner in Toronto.
That held-over run at Mirvish in May and June was especially meaningful for a son of Italian immigrants. Not least because multicultural Toronto has the largest Italian population of any city outside Italy. “I can hardly find the words to express how special that felt, to take it to the biggest commercial theatre in the country,” he says, and find such an appreciation of “every cultural nuance and texture” of his play.
Farren Timoteo in Made In Italy, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.
Set in 1970s Jasper and inspired by Timoteo’s own Italian family history, Made In Italy premiered in 2016 in a tiny space at Western Canada Theatre in Kamloops where the Citadel’s Daryl Cloran was artistic director at the time. An Edmonton premiere in the Citadel’s intimate Rice Theatre followed in 2017. And it’s travelled the country ever since, including a return run to Edmonton in 2024, this time on the Citadel mainstage, where Timoteo has starred in such productions as Peter and the Starcatcher (in fine comic fettle as Captain Hook) and Jersey Boys (as Frankie Valli). And Made in Italy continues; it’s slated to launch the upcoming Theatre Calgary season next month.
Jason Sakaki, Kale Penny, Farren Timoteo (front), Devon Brayne in Jersey Boys, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.
“I barely remember the debut Kamloops run, because I was terrified!” Timoteo says cheerfully. “Two hours of singing and dancing … and memorization.” Ah, and wondering in advance if audiences would care about an Italian teenager’s coming-of-age crisis. That was before he’d discovered “a few doorways” into the Made In Italy story: “the immigrant experience” in this country of immigrants, “or maybe you’re an outsider, or maybe you have a complex relationship with your parents….”
In a way, he thinks, Made In Italy had some parallels to the “rules of kids theatre” in the fairy tale musicals he’d written with Jeff Unger. “Fast, comedy-forward, single actor playing multiple characters…. And my number one concern, even before (Italian) cultural pride, was the audience not being bored!” That’s a mantra he lives by, he says.
Although it’s physically all out (“my fear-based fitness program”), nine years of Made In Italy haven’t dimmed his pleasure in performing it, he says. “I feel lucky I get to look people in the eye and and see them smile and laugh…. I don’t take laughter for granted.”
Which is a thought Timoteo takes into his appreciation of Teatro Live! and the comedies of the company’s resident playwright Stewart Lemoine. They figure prominently in his own story. “Technically, my first time onstage in a Teatro show was Poki Talks,” a play fashioned around the jaunty comic Mittel-Euro character created by Jeff Haslam. Along with Brianna Buckmaster and Amber Bissonette, he was part of a fictional Eurovision pop band. They popped up to sing at Teatro holiday specials and fund-raisers after that.
In his first official Lemoine, A Momentary Lapse (co-authored by Jocelyn Ahlf) he was in an orange offender’s jumpsuit, doing “community service” alongside Teatro veteran Sheri Somerville, in the role of a smart, rebellious young man specially created for him by the playwright. “I was extremely intimidated, and had a great time. What a gift for a young artist. razor-sharp writing, intelligent comedy….”
Farren Timoteo, A Grand Time in the Rapids, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Ryan Parker.
Since then, Timoteo’s list of Teatro credits includes The Scent of Compulsion, A Rocky Night For His Nibs, Mother of the Year, Marvellous Pilgrims, A Grand Time in the Rapids, and the concert show Far Away and Long A-Gogo. And as director and lyricist he was part of the quartet of young Teatro artists — along with Ahlf, MacDonald-Smith and Ryan Sigurdson — commissioned in 2009 by Teatro. Their mandate? to create a New York-style book musical, “with catchy tunes, comedy, and set in Edmonton.” The result was Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, set in the E-town supper club scene of the ‘50s. And the four followed that up two seasons later with The Infinite Shiver, also set in Edmonton.
Andrew MacDonald-Smith in yellow shoes (left) and Farren Timoteo (right), in The Scent of Compulsion, Teatro La Quindicina. Costume designer Leona Brausen. Photo supplied.
What is the defining “Teatro spirit” that Timoteo wants to preserve as the new artistic director? “Stylish. Intelligent. Hilarious, I choose that word deliberately. And it’s ensemble-based,” as he says. From the start, at the very first Fringe, Teatro La Quindicina has always been “a troupe,” he points out. And it’s a troupe with a relationship to the audience. His analogy is “walking into an Italian restaurant in rural Italy and Nonna is in the kitchen….” You walk in to the Varscona, Teatro’s home base, “and Garett Ross is scanning your ticket, Jenny McKillop is behind the bar, both ensemble members,” and Lemoine might be selling the obligatory red licorice. “It’s a sense of ‘we’re all in this together’.”
“It’s more than just the show and the quality of the performances. It’s a theatrical experience…. That’s something worth preserving,” Timoteo says. And so is the “long-standing Teatro tradition of supporting the emerging (artist) community.” It’s part of Timoteo’s own early career start, and the mentoring that went with it. It’s built into Alberta Musical Theatre Company history, too, and the Edmonton cultural landscape.
Timoteo is committed, as well, to a central Lemoine presence, as a leader and a playwright, in Teatro’s upcoming seasons. “His scripts demand and encourage exceptional comedic performances!”
Timoteo sighs happily. “I do love the sound of laughter!” We part, on a wave if that very sound.
