Ellie Heath, Cathy Derkach, Brian Dooley in Jupiter by Colleen Murphy, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson.
By Liz Nicholls,
A big opening by a premier Canadian playwright, an improbable steal by big-budget theatre, a powerful verbatim-theatre production, a musical by a new-ish company — and another two-festival week on Edmonton stages, one devoted to the body in motion and another devoted to crazily inspired innovations in making stuff up. Intrigued? Keep reading.
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•A new play by Colleen Murphy is always a Canadian theatre event. Jupiter, premiering Thursday at Theatre Network, in a Bradley Moss production, sets a working class family (with dog!) onstage, in motion through three decades. The playwright, one of the country’s most fearless theatre risk-takers — did you see The Society For The Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius? — is trying something new with Jupiter, she says. had a fun, and as usual provocative, conversation with Murphy by way of preview for the new play. Moss’s production, starring Ellie Heath, Brian Dooley, Gabriel Richardson, Cathy Derkach, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, and Monk Northey runs through April 20 at the Roxy, 10709 124 St, the finale of the company’s 50th anniversary season. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.
Priya Narine, Gillian Moon, Alexander Ariate, Devin MacKinnon in Heist, Citadel and Grand Theatres. Photo by Nanc Price
At the Citadel, Heist continues to defy probability in a witty way with a play by Calgary-based Arun Lakra that steals, for your amusement, a genre right from under the nose of the movies. That would be the crime caper. And Haysam Kadri’s production, a collaboration between the Citadel and the Grand Theatre in London, Ont., references the cinema in its array of snazzy visuals — lasers, drones, aerial feats. The creative team, including Beyata Hackborn (set), Siobhán Sleath (lighting), Corwin Ferguson (video and projections), Richard Feren (composition and sound), costumes (Jessica Oostergo) are on the money. had a chance to talk to the eye surgeon-turned-playwright in this preview. And here’s the review. It runs through April 13. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.
At the U of A, Studio Theatre’s 75th anniversary continues with a production of The Laramie Project. The 2000 play, by Moisés Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Company, is a powerful verbatim-theatre response — fashioned from on-location interviews with townspeople — to the 1998 torture and murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. It’s been produced at professional theatres, community theatres, theatre schools, colleges, and high schools across the continent and beyond ever since. And, needless to say, at a fraught moment in our collective history, when human rights are teetering everywhere and the 2SLGTBQIA+ community is under pressure, it continues to be important, and timely. Melanie Dreyer-Lude’s student production opens Friday and runs through April 12. Tickets: showpass.com.
Screenshot, at Bonfire Festival 2025, Rapid Fire Theatre.
Rapid Fire Theatre’s Bonfire Festival, an annual play-with-fire excursion into irresistibly combustible innovations in long-form improv, returns Thursday at their Exchange Theatre headquarters in Strathcona. The festivities open with Made in Japan, which proposes reimagining your favourite book, movie, TV show as an animé. The audience gets to choose the world that gets improvised onstage. Crazy! In Nonsense and Sensibility, improvisers make up an entire Jane Austen novel, in all its Regency complexity and witty banter, on the spot. Clearly, impossible, or is it? Screwball is an improvised screwball comedy, in the great Preston Sturges tradition. Also intriguingly impossible. Poetrysports is a collaboration between Rapid Fire’s deluxe improvisers and the Edmonton Poetry Festival. Will a haiku be created, and set in motion, on the spot? Or (no, it can’t be!) a sonnet? Needless to say, you have to be there to find out; Bonfire is graduate studies in the unpredictable. Check out the whole roster of Bonfire shows and the schedule, plus tickets (pay-what-you-will): rapidfiretheatre.com.
Miles From Broadway, a three-year-old Edmonton theatre company devoted to the musical theatre repertoire, is bringing their production of the 2008 rock musical Next to Normal to the Gateway Theatre Thursday through Sunday. A Pulitzer Prize winner, the challenging, much-awarded musical by Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt broke new and rockier ground at the time for the musical theatre: it took us into the heart of a suburban family where the mother is struggling to find her footing in a treacherous and mapless terrain. Diane is bi-polar. And the ripple-effects tear through her family.
Martin Galba, the actor/director/artistic director who founded the company with the amusingly worldly name, directs the production of Next to Normal that stars Erin Foster O’Riordan. And he also plays Dan, the father, with his real-life daughter Cassidy Galba as Diane and Dan’s troubled daughter Natalie. And Galba’s cast also includes Liam Lorrain, Jayden Leung, Nicole Gaskell.
Miles From Broadway is not the first theatre company the enterprising and versatile Galba has started. The semi-professional Two One-Way Tickets To Broadway produced some 22 productions in its 10 seasons before its grand finale production of Rent in 2016. So far the Miles From Broadway archive includes The Last Five Years and Nunsense. Tickets: showpass.com.
Also continuing….
Sissy Fit: Battle Cry, by and starring Brett Dahl, Expanse Festival 2025. Photo supplied
•the 20th anniversary edition of Azimuth Theatre’s Expanse Festival continues at the Fringe Arts Barns. You can still catch Brett Dahl’s Sissy Fit: Battle Cry and Hot Dyke Party continue Thursday and Friday. Check out the preview here. Tickets (pay-what-you-can): fringetheatre.ca.
¶at Spotlight Cabaret, a riotously localized version of Romeo and Juliet, in a cabaret concoction by Aimée Beaudoin and Jeff Halaby. Will the young lovers prevail against the ancient grudge of the Hendays vs the Yellowheads? Romeo and Juliet’s Notebook runs through May 15. Have a peek at the review. Tickets: spotlightcabaret.ca.
After Mourning – Before Van Gogh, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and lighting design Ami Farrow, Costume design Leona Brausen, multi-media design Matt Schuurman.
•at Shadow Theatre, Michael Czuba’s new play After Mourning – Before Van Gogh, is a chance to be immersed in the visuals of the great artist’s paintings, embedded in the story of the persistent woman whose self-imposed mission it was to rescue the work of the troubled genius from dismissal and obscurity, and shine the light of history on it. Check out the preview interview with the playwright, and the review here. It runs through Sunday; tickets: shadowtheatre.org.
