Intermission’s over, take your seats: Act II of the theatre season is about to begin (prospects to intrigue you).

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

Wait…. There’s more. Act II of the theatre season is about to begin. And rehearsals are underway all over town.

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Goblin: Macbeth, a Spontaneous Theatre Creation, starts previews next week in the Citadel’s Highwire Series. How can you not be fascinated by the prospect on offer of goblins getting their mitts on Shakespeare’s swift and bloody tragedy? The Shadow Theatre production of Bea, a challenging theatrical proposition by the Northern Irish playwright Mick Gordon, is rehearsing at the Varscona. At Northern Light Angry Alan, Penelope Skinner’s a funny and furious solo exploration of men-inist conspiracy thinking and male grievances, opens this month too. (Stay tuned for more posts on the above.

And, for your nights out at the theatre,  here are 10 other upcoming shows — among many other possibilities — to be intrigued by.

After The Trojan Women, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo from website.

After The Trojan Women. A new epic by Amena Shehab and Joanna Blundell, inspired by the harrowing Euripides classic, one of the repertoire’s greatest explorations of the aftermath and inter-generational trauma of war. A cross-cultural chorus of women — modern Syrians and the ancient women of Troy ‚ find themselves on the shores of the Mediterranean on the Turkish coast, the point of departure then and now for other worlds and other lives. The Common Ground Arts production — a cast of nine (!) directed by Liz Hobbs — runs Jan. 31 to Feb. 8 at the Backstage Theatre. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

playwright Kole Durnford makes his Workshop West debut with Horseplay. Photo supplied.

Horseplay. The theatrical premise of this new play by newcomer Kole Durnford, a Métis actor/playwright from Stony Plain, is one of the season’s most intriguing. We meet a horse and his jockey: Horse and Jacques are as close as brothers, their lives intertwined. The pressurizing news the Horse will be sold unless they win their next race, is a test of their bond of love and friendship in a harsh world. Horseplay premieres at Workshop West, the season finale May 14 to June 1, in a Heather Inglis production. Casting announcement awaits. Tickets: workshopwest.org.

Jupiter. Any new play by two-time Governor General’s Award-winner Colleen Murphy is a bona fide Canadian  theatre event. Commissioned by Theatre Network where Murphy has a distinguished history, Jupiter, “a full-bodied family drama with a beautiful dog” as billed, rolls in three different time periods, 10 years apart. It takes us into the heart (and living room) of a multi-generational working-class family with dark secrets. Bradley Moss’s production, with a cast of seven and a dog, runs at the Roxy, the mainstage 50th anniversary season finale, April 1 to 20. The only actor announced so far is Monk, a handsome golden retriever. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.

An Oak Tree. Theatre Yes takes on this 2004 two-hander by the Brit playwright Tim Crouch, in which only half the cast will ever have seen the script before. There’s theatrical magic in the power of suggestion built into the premise: a stage hypnotist has accidentally killed a girl in his car. And the grief-stricken father, played by an actor who hasn’t seen the show, is the hypnotist’s subject. I saw An Oak Tree at the Edinburgh Fringe, with the playwright as the hypnotist, and it’s fascinating. The Theatre Yes production, directed by Ruth Alexander and starring Max Rubin with a different Edmonton actor every night, runs for eight performances at the Aviary (9314 111 Ave.), Feb. 5 to 12.  (In June Theatre Yes will also be bringing plays to you, at your place, a trio of new ones that you order online, in The Doorstep Plays). Tickets: theatreyes.com.

Alphabet Line. This new play by (and produced by) AJ Hrooshkin, the winner of this year’s Westbury Theatre Award, is prairie through and through. It’s set in Yonker, Sask. in the late 1940s, where a queer farm kid is reaching out from the isolation that all of that implies. It premieres in the Edmonton Fringe Theatre season April 22 to May 3. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

Radiant Vermin. If you ever doubted that renos are hell and real estate acquisition brings out the monster within … actually that’s no one. Anyhow, from Northern Light Theatre comes here’s a boldly dark satire by the controversial Brit playwright Philip Ridley. An heir to the grand tradition of Faustian bargains, it asks the question with reverb: how far would you go to get what you want? The season’s hottest newcomers, Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk, star as a couple with a dream home in sight, along with Edmonton fave Holly Turner as the Mephistophelean real estate agent. Trevor Schmidt’s production runs April 18 to May 3 at the Studio Theatre in the Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave. Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com.

Dance Nation, SkirtsAfire Festival 2025. Website image.

Dance Nation. The SkirtsAfire Festival 2025 mainstage production is a Pulitzer-nominated dance/theatre amalgam by the American writer Claire Barron. It takes us into the fiercely competitive dance world of 13-year-old girls, growing up on the momentous threshold between childhood and adolescence. And, perhaps most intriguingly, it calls on an intergenerational all-ages cast of adult women actors to be pre-teen girls. The cast of nine, directed by SkirtsAfire’s new artistic producer Amanda Goldberg, includes Sydney Williams, Kristin Padayas, Kijo Gatama, Kristi Hansen, Linda Grass, Kristin Johnston,  Veenu Sandhu, Jesse Drweiga, with Troy O’Donnell as dance teacher Pat. It runs March 6 to 16 at the Gateway Theatre (8529 Gateway Blvd). Tickets: skirtsafire.com.

The Noon Witch, Teatro Live! Photo supplied.

The Noon Witch. With this 1995 Stewart Lemoine comedy, set in 1920s Budapest, Teatro Live! revives one of the first plays the company staged at the Varscona. And it’s a gem of eccentricity, inspired by an oddball Hungarian legend. The title character is a supernatural creature who appears at mid-day, and lures men to a watery death by plying them with rich fatty snacks so that they sink. The original production of 30 years ago featured then-newcomers Jeff Haslam and Davina Stewart. The revival, directed by the playwright, features a new generation of theatre artists (Ethan Lang, Aidan Laudersmith, Nida Vanderham, and Eli Yaschuk, with Michelle Diaz). No word yet on the opening night goodies. It runs Feb. 21 to March 9 at the Varscona in a season that also includes the 2001 Lemoine screwball comedy On The Banks of the Nut, set in the Wisconsin hinterland of the 1950s and involving the music of Mahler. Tickets: teatrolive.com.

The Full Monty, Mayfield Dinner Theatre. Poster image supplied.

The Full Monty. The heartwarming 2000 Broadway musical, an underdog triumph classic based on the sleeper 1997 hit film, is part of the Mayfield Dinner Theatre’s 50th anniversary season. It re-locates its unemployed steelworker characters up against it from the north of England to rust-belt Buffalo. Inspired by their wives’ girls-night-out at a Chippendale show, they light on a bright (unclothed) antidote to their lost lives. Yup, they form a strip act. The clever catchy score is by David Yazbek (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Band’s Visit); the book is by the star American playwright Terrence McNally. Directed by the Mayfield’s new artistic director Kate Ryan, the production (16 actors plus live band) runs Feb. 4 to March 30 — with, as the theatre puts it, “the most anticipated closing number of the season.” Tickets: mayfieldtheatre.ca.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the 70s musical. You have to be intrigued by the Citadel’s playful, not to say polyamorous, relationship with Shakespeare this season. Goblin: Macbeth, a Spontaneous Theatre Creation (see above), arrives in the Rice Theatre this month. And inspired in part by the multiple cross-country/ cross-border successes of Daryl Cloran’s As You Like It, a rom-com partnership brokered between Will and the Beatles, the Citadel is premiering an original glam-rock era version of Shakespeare’s most popular comedy. It’s devised and directed by Cloran, with script-adaptation partner Kayvan Khoshkam from Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan. And you may well hallucinate  Puck channelled through Bowie, and Bottom and his stagestruck artisan pals as a struggling rock band. Finally, the BeeGees make their long-delayed Shakespeare debut. It runs Feb. 22 to March 23. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.

Madison Mosley and Justin Collette in Beetlejuice the Musical, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy

•There are big Broadway musicals this season, too (you know you love them). Beetlejuice is at the Jube Jan. 14 to 19, courtesy of Broadway across Canada. And Disney’s mighty The Lion King returns under the same flag in that same venue July 9 to 27. Tickets: ticketmaster.ca. Shrek is at the Orange Hub March 5 to 9, in a NUOVA Vocal Arts production. Tickets: showpass.com. Grindstone’s Byron Martin directs a MacEwan Theatre Arts production of The Prom March 26 to 30 at the Triffo Theatre. Tickets: tickets.macewan.ca.d

•Amongst the offerings at Edmonton’s theatre schools, always worth checking out, are two fascinating and unusual prospects. In the Studio Theatre 75th anniversary season at the U of A, Jan Selman directs the challenging DYI [Blank] by the English writer Alice Birch. Of its 100 scenes and vignettes, which take us into the world of women in the criminal justice system, the director makes a mix-and-match selection. Tickets: showpass.com. At MacEwan University Jim Guedo directs the innovative 2016 indie rock/ electropop/ folk musical Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812, with its story lifted from a 70-page segment of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It runs Feb. 12 to 16 in the Tim Ryan Theatre Lab. Tickets: tickets.macewan.ca.