Alexander Ariate as Horse in Horseplay by Kole Durnford, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and costumes Beyata Hackborn, lighting Sarah Karpyshin
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
Remembering the 2024-2025 theatre season — in its performances, its design inspirations, its risky experiments, its moments of magic (and/or crazy live-ness) — and its saddest, most irreplaceable losses.
Start with those. The passing of wonderful theatre artists Julien Arnold, Jim DeFelice, and John Wright, all accomplished and generous with their talents, all close to the heart of the Edmonton arts community.
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Memorable performances, in roles big and small:
•Alexander Ariate. A captivating performance, comical and heart-catching, as Horse in Kole Durnford’s Horseplay at Workshop West. Perpetually in motion (choreography Amber Borotsik), he created a character with questions to ask about the perplexing human world, and the bonds of friendship, love, loyalty — and grass. .
Ellie Heath, Cathy Derkach, Brian Dooley in Jupiter by Colleen Murphy, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson.
•Brian Dooley. As the alcoholic patriarch In Colleen Murphy’s epic family drama Jupiter, a working-class House of Atreus, his performance in the Theatre Network premiere production set the bar high in fearlessness — a memorably harsh, prickly, judgmental character, a veritable repository of grievances through three decades.
•Ron Pederson. In A Gentleman’s Guide To Love And Murder, the Broadway musical comedy produced by Grindstone in their new mainstage season at the Orange Hub, dies in inventive ways no fewer than eight times. In a bravura comic performance, he played almost all the members, variously snobby, vicious, daffy, and insane, of a blue-blood family who get murdered serially by a disinherited upstart. Surely Pederson must be wondering what an actor has to do to get a Sterling nomination.
Oscar Derkx in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Adam Goudrea
•Oscar Derkx. See above. A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder relies for its comic complicity on a serial killer who’s absolutely likeable and disarming. A performance of comic charm, dexterity, and finesse.
John Ullyatt as Bottom, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The 70s Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.
•John Ullyatt. Speaking as we are of death-defying death scenes, the single most prolonged and hilarious example in the season belongs to Ullyatt’s performance as Bottom, the bossy stage-struck weaver who’s gallantly offered to play all the roles in Pyramus and Thisbe put on by rustic amateurs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the ‘70s Musical at the Citadel.
•Garett C. Smith. A magnetic performance — witty, with commanding gravitas — as the title character of Neil Grahn’s new birth-of-an-activist play The Two Battles of Francis Pegahmagabow at Shadow Theatre. A remarkable (and remarkably unknown) historical character who returned from a star role with Canadian forces in World War I to find he couldn’t even vote.
Nikki Hulowski and Brennan Campbell in Where You Are, Shadow Theatre. Set and lighting Daniel vanHeyst, costumes Leona Brausen. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.
•Nikki Hulowski. As the estranged daughter In Where You Are at Shadow Theatre, a performance that negotiated with ease the artifices of a Kristen Da Silva sibling comedy that doles out its dark family secrets, like its one-liners, on the quota system. Always fun to watch.
•Cody Porter. An unerringly calibrated performance at Northern Light Theatre that gives this Penelope Skinner stinger of a play its chilling insight: how on earth an ordinary reasonable, even decent guy, gets red-pilled. A question for our Moment.
•Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk. In Radiant Vermin, the season’s “Modest Proposal,” this engaging and entirely watchable pair of newcomers brought a breezy charm to the couple who mysteriously acquire and continually get to upgrade their dream home — at a horrifying price. At the toxic centre of Philip Ridley’s withering Faustian satire is an insight about insatiable consumerist greed.
Mathew Hulshof, Bella King, Rachel Bowron in On The Banks Of The Nut, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux
•Bella King. Irresistibly bright and funny as the dauntless temp, an agent of chaos, who sets the Stewart Lemoine screwball comedy On The Banks Of the Nut in motion, and keeps it there.
Sydney Williams. A dexterous, unsettling performance in Trevor Schmidt’s Monstress at Northern Light, as a Frankenstein-esque doctor whose triumph in bringing a dead girl back to life is tainted by gathering doubts about stepping outside the boundaries of human morality.
Julien Arnold and Geoffrey Simon Brown, in rehearsal for The Woman In Black, Teatro Live! 2024. Photo by Cassie Duval.
•Julien Arnold. In the hit thriller The Woman In Black at Teatro Live!, the late great actor played an elderly solicitor with a dark secret, who then conjured, with remarkable precision, everyone his younger self encountered, a wild assortment of characters and accents, on a fateful trip to the eerie north of England. Masterful.
•Lindsey Angell. As Blanche in the Citadel’s A Streetcar Named Desire, a dispossessed Southern belle from a lost world, valiantly in performance mode in a new one.
•Ellie Heath. In Colleen Murphy’s Jupiter at Theatre Network, a performance that cuts to the chase of the inter-generational drama: from the promise of a bright, curious young girl through middle-aged disappointment and beyond.
Togetherness: the season’s memorable ensembles.
Michael Cox (centre) and the cast of The Full Monty, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.
•The Full Monty. Times being what they are, shattered male self-esteem isn’t, theoretically, in the top 10 of issues. And yet.… This 25-year-old Broadway musical about the desperation of a bunch of tough but fragile unemployed steel workers in Buffalo, depends on the chemistry of the ensemble for its humour and its charm. Kate Ryan’s Mayfield cast, led by Michael Cox, delivered.
•Stars On Her Shoulders. Hayley Moorhouse, Meegan Sweet, Dayna Lea Hoffman, Dana Wylie, Gabby Bernard in Stephen Massicotte’s memorable new World War I play, as nurses in a convalescent hospital in war-time France, struggling to re-imagine their lives and prospects for happiness on the threshold of a new century.
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. At the Citadel, a cast of 16 actors who sing, dance, and play instruments (led by Luc Tellier in vertiginous Fluevogs as agent of mischief Puck) preside over a plot with a lot of coupling — not to mention the pairing of Shakespeare and a jukebox full of chart-toppers.
Brick Shithouse, fenceless theatre, Found Festival 2024. Photo by Brianne Jang
•Brick Shithouse. The seven-member ensemble directed by Sarah J Culkin hurl themselves, literally, into the online universe in Ashleigh Hicks’ play to create the world of restless 20-somethings who can’t seem to get traction as they wait for the lives to really begin.
Kragva, Moog and Wug in Goblin: Macbeth, Spontaneous Theatre at the Citadel. Photo supplied
•Goblin:Macbeth. Spontaneous Theatre deposited three curious goblins in the Rice to undertake a version of Shakespeare’s swift and gory tragedy of ambition and corruption. Witty and smart, one of my favourite shows of the season.
•Dance Nation. In SkirtsAfire Fest’s mainstage show, Amanda Goldberg’s cast of nine women, ages 20 to 50-something, took us into the fraught world of dance-mad 13-year-old girls.
Experiments of the year
•From Theatre Yes to your backyard, The Doorstep Plays, three short plays by up-and-comers, in a different location every show.
•Workshop West’s ticketing initiative: every ticket this season was pay-what-you-will, and general manager Jake Tkaczyk calls it “a smashing success.”
•Common Ground Arts initiative to pair aspiring theatre producers in one-on-ones with veterans.
The 2024-2025 award in theatre versatility: Darrin Hagen, who added opera librettist (Silence at NUOVA Vocal Arts) and film (Pride vs Prejudice) to his long list of credentials. Runner up: actor/ choreographer/ playwright/ composer Mhairi Berg.
Ambitious indie production of the season: Amena Shehab’s After The Trojan Women, which added to the great Euripides anti-war play modern characters from the contemporary war-blasted Middle East.
A season of bold design choices, a small selection of highlights:
•Greg Morrison’s original score for Mump and Smoot in Exit at Theatre Network, an dramatic assortment of jagged dissonances and violin riffs, for the strange dark world in which the pair find themselves.
John Turner (Smoot) and Michael Kennard (Mump) are back, in Mump and Smoot in Exit, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson, Epic Photography
•Darrin Hagen’s score for Stars On Her Shoulders at Workshop West: whiffs of Edwardian music hall, and allusions to a new and fractured world.
•Kena León’s cross-hatched sound score for Dance Nation at SkirtsAfire, a capture of the confusing apparently chaotic world of dance-obsessed pre-teen girls.
•Beyata Hackborn’s simultaneously real and magical set design for Horseplay at Workshop West, a grassy knoll that’s the tip of the earthly globe for Horse and Jockey, overhung with dreamy flying horses in perpetual motion.
•Deanna Finnman’s dressed the cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The 70s Musical at the Citadel in a wardrobe of fabulous sparkles and denim. The memory of Bottom (John Ullyatt) in his bellbottoms, transformed to rock star, lingers in the mind.
•Bonnie Beecher’s superbly atmospheric lighting for A Streetcar Named Desire at the Citadel, spoke to the heart of a play that is, at heart about two worlds, and two kinds of lighting, real and romantic, in collision.
Sydney Williams and Julia van Dam in Monstress, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Briane Jang, BB Collective Photography
•Larissa Poho’s dramatic colour-drenched lighting for Monstress at Northern Light, a play about obliterating the boundary between life and death.
•Amanda Sieve’s golden, sepia-tinged lighting for The Ballad of Johnny and June at the Citadel, using vintage onstage lighting instruments.
•T. Erin Gruber’s theatrical lighting design for the thriller The Woman in Black at Teatro Live! created a semi-visible, shadowy world, full of unsettling flickers and murk, indispensable for the storytelling.
Little Dickens, Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, Theatre Network. Photo supplied.
•In Little Dickens, the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes at Theatre Network, Burkett’s costume designs, exquisitely executed by Kim Crossley, for the cast of diminutive actors appearing in their own version of A Christmas Carol, with aging showgirl Esmé Massengill as the flinty Ebenezer. Her “redemption gown” is a showstopper,
•Corwin Ferguson’s multi-media design for the thriller Heist at the Citadel, with swooping aerial views of Manhattan and computer circuitry, in a dizzying assortments of long-shots and close-ups.
Newcomers of the year: Sam Free, Rain Matkin, Kole Durnford, Donna Leny Hansen, Eli Yaschuk
Resilience award: Freewill Shakespeare Festival. They’re in Louise McKinney Riverfront Park till July 20 with As You Like It.
Did you see Remembering the season in Edmonton theatre, part 1, highlight productions? It’s here.
