Goblin: Macbeth, Spontaneous Theatre. Photo supplied.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
In Goblin:Macbeth, the brilliant Spontaneous Theatre production that came to the Citadel’s Highwire Series this season, one of the goblin stars wonders aloud what the strange human ritual called theatre is actually for, anyhow. And he concludes, tellingly, that it’s something about humans sharing, breathing together.
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In a season when the world has delivered non-stop anxiety and polarizing chaos, live theatre, again and again, has offered … human connection, gathering, a tangible demo of community — by very definition.
But you already know that if you’ve been in a theatre this season. So this is all about remembering some of the highlights onstage.
2024-2025 has been a challenge for live theatre. Building costs and running expenses have risen enormously, while grants are frozen and sponsorships are ever-harder to come by. The tension between negotiating this rocky terrain and remaining broadly accessible to audiences is tricky. Theatres have launched fund-raising campaigns and ticketing initiatives of various configurations. The boldest initiative of all is Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre’s move to make every ticket pay-what-you-will.
Remarkably, despite it all, this has been an excellent season for new Canadian work — long assumed to be the riskiest theatre fare — premiering at companies and on mainstages of every size in this theatre town. Horseplay, Stars On Her Shoulders, The Two Battles of Francis Pegahgamabow, After Mourning – Before Van Gogh, Jupiter, Mump and Smoot in Exit, Monstress, Heist, Cycle, Alphabet Line, Brick Shithouse, The Noon Witch, KaldrSaga, After The Trojan Women, Krampus: A New Musical, The Doorstep Plays … the list goes on.
Having the continent’s oldest and still biggest Fringe festival of its kind for 43 summers — in 2024 it sold 127,000 tickets and gathered a crowd of some 750,000 — arguably has something crucial to do with our hospitality to new Canadian plays. We’re an audience that knows what it’s like to be excited, or at least intrigued, by the new.
Here are 11 memorable productions from the season just past. I’m hoping they’ll trigger your own memories of the theatre you saw this season. And stay tuned for another contribution coming soon, about memorable performances and designs, experiments, initiatives.
Alexander Ariate as Horse, Lee Boyes as Jacques in Horseplay by Kole Durnford, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifousl Set by Beyata Hackborn, lighting by Sarah Karpyshin
Horseplay. There are two best friends, a horse named Horse and a jockey named Jacques. at the centre of this irresistibly imaginative, funny, heart-tugging play by newcomer Kole Durnford. It’s a jock-ular relationship, you might say, that gets tested under the competitive pressures of the human world. Ambition, dreams, love, coming-of-age … it canters lightly in that expansive paddock. And it got an ingenious, physically exuberant premiere production at Workshop West, starring the outstanding Alexander Ariate and Lee Boyes, directed by Heather Inglis. Choreographer Amber Borotsik counts as an enabler, big time. The review is here.
Goblin:Macbeth. What happens when a trio of curious goblins decide to have a go at theatre, and take Shakespeare’s tragedy in hand, attracted by the ghosts, the witches, and all the blood? We found out in the course of this playful, macabre, and funny Spontaneous Theatre creation, in Citadel’s Highwire Series in the Rice. The production, starring Rebecca Northan, Bruce Horak, and Ellis Lalonde, expert improvisers all, actually turned out a compelling, intelligible three-goblin production of the Scottish play, against all your expectations. Yes, the F-word (Fun) applies. I say give the goblins a Chekhov to play with. The review is here.
Meegan Sweet and Gabby Bernard in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux
Stars On Her Shoulders. Stephen Massicotte’s richly layered new World War I play is poised on the threshold between centuries, the Victorian sense of a woman’s lesser place in the human cosmos and a new world of possibilities for equality between the sexes. We meet five nurses in a convalescent hospital in France, a captivating ensemble in Heather Inglis’s Workshop West premiere production. It was set forth, meaningfully, on a gangway stage; what we saw was both a memory track and a glimpse of each other, now. It’s the season’s most profound, elegantly woven exploration of whether happiness is possible in a hopeless, shattered world. Now, there’s a question for us all. The review is here.
Brick Shithouse, fenceless theatre at Common Ground Arts Society. Photo by Brianne Jang
Brick Shithouse. The characters of Ashleigh Hicks’ riveting body-slammer of a play, which premiered at Common Ground Arts Society’s Found Festival in a Sarah J Culkin production last summer, are between worlds, too. They’re restless, frustrated 20-something underachievers, who’ve been biding their time working shitty jobs, waiting for their ‘real lives’ to begin. And they take matters in their own hands, by live-streaming their fight club confident they’re safely anonymous behind a paywall. It’s a dangerous world out there in the online ether. Their coming-of-age has come and gone, and this is a group portrait of a stalled generation. The review is here.
Dance Nation. The play, by the Pulitzer-nominated American writer Claire Barron, takes us into the fraught, funny, confusing world of pre-teen girls, competitive dance division, between girl- and womanhood. It comes with this unusual theatrical plié — an all-ages ensemble of actors play young dance-crazy girls, onstage and off-, coming of age in the locker room, at home, in the future and the past. Goldberg’s kick-ass nine-actor ensemble production, her first as the new artistic producer of the SkirtsAfire Festival, was led by the thorny friendship between two girls, a talented and a nearly-talented dancer, played by Sydney Williams and Kristen Padayas, both excellent. The review is here.
Ron Pederson in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudreau.
A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder. The wicked, not to say killer, musical comedy of the season, the Tony-winning Broadway musical by Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak, concerns the homicidal upward mobility of a penniless distant relation to the aristocracy en route to an earldom. The Grindstone Theatre production directed by Byron Martin, which marked the emergence of Grindstone Theatre into full-scale mainstage musicals at the Orange Hub, was ideal for the remarkable multiple comic talents of Oscar Derkx as the creatively aspirational D’Ysquith and Ron Pederson as an entire gallery of upper-class twits, buffoons, buffoon, and grotesques, who get offed in the course of the evening. In a selection of G&S and Noel Coward patter songs and ballads, the pair, backed up by an amusing Greek chorus, nailed the music too. Check out the review here.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ’70s Musical. Luc Tellier (centre) as Puck, Citadel Theatre. Costumes by Deanna Finnman, set by Hanne Loosen, lighting by Jareth Li. Photo by Nanc Price.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The ‘70s Musical. This highly (and to me, at least, unexpectedly) entertaining Daryl Cloran creation, which followed the multiple successes of his Beatles-scored version of As You Like It, ingeniously paired Shakespeare’s most popular romantic comedy with a jukebox crammed with chart-toppers that are actually part of your DNA whether you know it or not. So the Bard’s lyric poetry ceded to the fun of seeing what happens serious actors apply their dramatic chops to songs with lyrics like “that’s the way I like it, uh-huh.” The rustic artisans, those perpetually hilarious amateur thespians preparing a production for a court audience, were the house band. And they rocked. And the sparkly visuals of the irresistibly danceable glam-rock era were a treat to see. Check out the review here.
Cody Porter in Angry Alan, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography
Angry Alan. This smart, stinging little 2018 solo play by the English writer Penelope Skinner fastens its beady eye on a socio-cultural mystery: how does a reasonable, even decent, guy get radicalized by the whackjob claims of the ‘men’s movement’? It got a crack Northern Light Theatre production directed by Trevor Schmidt, starring the terrific Cody Porter in an utterly convincing performance as a man whose festering grievances take a fateful turn to radical men-inism when he finds himself in the dark online labyrinth. Funny and scary. The review is here.
Sam Free and Bella King in On The Banks Of The Nut, Teatro Live! Photo by Ryan Parker
On The Banks Of The Nut. The tickle of this 2001 Stewart Lemoine screwball comedy, revived by Teatro Live!, starts with the premise: a hapless federal talent agent for the state of Wisconsin. He finds himself on a hinterland who’s who expedition in search of “a citizen of exceptional ability.” The aphrodisiac quality of great music — specifically Mahler’s Third Symphony — is crucial to their success. Funny and intricate in signature Lemoinian ways, with a mix of top-flight Teatro veterans and an excellent younger cast of stars, including Sam Free as the agent and Bella King as the take-charge heroine who instinctively knows that romantic chaos is fun for people. The review is here.
Ellie Heath, Brian Dooley, Monk Northey in Jupiter by Colleen Murphy. Photo by Ian Jackson
Jupiter. Colleen Murphy’s new play, which premiered at Theatre Network, seemed to fall into a now-rare category of old-fashioned inter-generational family drama. That family is working-class, close (maybe too close), and haunted by loss, grief, grievance, ghosts, and a toxic secret. Powerfully acted by the ensemble of Bradley Moss’s premiere production, it moved through time with an inexorable Greek sense of inevitability. What happens to the promise of young people? Murphy, as usual, steps up unflinchingly. Have a peek at the review here.
Stafford Perry, Heidi Damayo in A Streecar Named Desire, Citadel Theatre/ Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price.
A Streetcar Named Desire. An atmospheric Daryl Cloran production brought Citadel audiences a highly atmospheric sepia- and jazz-tinged version of one of American theatre’s greatest plays about illusion and delusion. It seemed to unfold at a great distance upstage, like a sort of mirage, powerful but not quite involving. And as lighted (and dimmed) brilliantly by Bonnie Beecher, Lindsey Angell’s valiant but fragile Blanche DuBois, the embodiment of charm, its cruelties and limitations, stepped out of the shadows of her past into a semi-visible present. Check out the review here.
Stay tuned for ’s Season in Edmonton Theatre, Part 2 — performances, designs, moments, experiences!
