The season on Edmonton stages, highlights part two

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

In a tumultuous season, Edmonton theatre got shaken and stirred: big changes, big news,  big anniversaries celebrated, experiments, a homecoming….

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Start with that. After years in exile, the Freewill Shakespeare Festival came home to Heritage Amphitheatre in Hawrelak Park, renos finally finished in the park. True, the resilient company was welcomed by historic levels of rain — true summer camping in Edmonton — for their double-bill of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (directed by Ian Leung) and a hit presentation of the Broadway musical Something Rotten! (directed by David Horak) by Edmonton Pops Orchestra and Shelley’s Dance Company that sold the thousand-seat joint out for several performances. Never underestimate the power of the musical theatre.

Shadow Theatre, Theatre Network, and Teatro Live! all have new artistic directors, and upcoming season lineups. More about Jenna Rodgers at TN and Farren Timoteo at Teatro and their plans coming up soon on ; check out our interview with Lana Michelle Hughes at Shadow, here).

And then, at Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre, the (very) sudden departure of artistic director Heather Inglis after seven seasons on the job. The sole notice of this was “an important announcement from the board of directors” on the company website: Inglis “has concluded her tenure with the organization and will be pursuing other career opportunities.” When contacted by , Inglis indicated “I can’t say much.” And managing director Martin Galba says the upcoming season at WWPT, a lineup, “put together by an Interim Artistic Programming Committee,” will be announced mid-September. The company will be looking for a new artistic director next spring, he says.

With the departure of the indefatigable duo of Mac Brock and Whittyn Jason, Common Ground Arts, supporters and enablers par excellence of indie theatre, enters the upcoming season with a new team: managing producer Rainier Pearl-Styles, Found Fest producer Salem Zurch, RISER producer Sarah Emslie, and season producer Hayley Moorhouse. More of this later!

Before this starts to sound like the Season That Will Not End (how is it July?)— and to trigger your own memories of the season just part — here are 10 memorable performances.

Kristen Padayas, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, Belinda Cornish and Kendra Connor in Cocktails at Pam’s, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Andrew MacDonald-Smith, currently hilarious as the host (and Pam’s husband) in Teatro Live’s super revival of Cocktails at Pam’s, plays 40 characters in Fully Committed, solo show that happens entirely in phone exchanges. The world of high-end restaurants and their entitled clientele through the eyes (and ears) of a workie, the put-upon reservation clerk. All at a break-neck, and neck-breaking, pace. A virtuoso performance in Farren Timoteo’s Teatro production.

Davinder Malhi in a fine, perfectly judged performance as the boyish title character of Life of Pi, struggling to survive and retain a sense of wonder in his own incredible story, a cross between a memory, a hallucination, a dream, a nightmare. Malhi keeps all the possibilities alive in Haysam Kadri’s Citadel/Theatre Calgary production.

Emily Howard and Nathan Cuckow, Casey and Diana by Nick Green, Citadel Theatre, photo by Nanc Price.

Nathan Cuckow as the AIDS patient central to the death-row humour of Casey and Diana, at the Citadel. A wonderfully layered performance, with subterranean veins of terror under a bright, worldly surface of gay repartee and smart-ass rejoinders. His counterpart, and roommate at Casey House, is snarly, young, fearful, wonderfully played by Josh Travnik. Their evolving relationship is a beautiful thing.

Scott Shpeley, as the mad genius with the shnozz in Amanda Bergen’s production of Cyrano de Bergerac at the Citadel. Slinging poetry with one hand, épee in the other. AND making it look easeful and fun in Jessy Ardern’s clever new, verse-filled adaptation.

Ryan Maschke and Alyssa Crockett in Footloose, Mayfield Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Ryan Maschke as the urbanite-turned-small town rebel Ren who leads a renaissance of joy, and common sense, in the vintage musical Footloose in Kate Ryan’s production at the Mayfield. A charismatic performance from an impressive triple-threat. And the show got an unexpected update (an Alberta special, and not in a good way) from the high school book ban in Footloose.

Michele Fleiger and Maralyn Ryan in Wildcat, Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre. Photo supplied.

Michele Fleiger returned to the stage after a long absence as the prickly, sardonic, aging protest movement veteran, who regains her resistance fighter status by leading an anti-agist caper in Nicole Moeller’s Wildcat, a (very) rare, possibly unique, contribution to the activist caper comedy genre. It premiered at Workshop West in a Heather Inglis production. By uncanny synchronicity, it opened the very week of the teacher’s strike, which should be remembered as an infamous chapter in Alberta history.

Mike Sadajewski, in a rueful and funny, and supple, comic performance as Dave, the appealing anti-hero of Stuart McLean’s story archive in Vinyl Café The Musical. The weight and tone were judged just right, and watching the guy perform from inside a Canada Post box is a sight not soon forgotten.

Michael Peng in An Iliad, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Michael Peng as the travelling storyteller, the Poet of An Iliad, who takes on the Homer epic (single-handedly, except for Erik Mortimer’s inventive live sound score) in John Hudson’s Shadow Theatre production. And in the telling he not only taps the story’s multiplying contemporary parallels (has war ever gone away?), but makes the experience theatre by a powerful sense of improvising on the spot, gathering evidence as he goes. Special award for pluck: he did on the run on a newly broken ankle.

Vanessa Sabourin and Jesse Gervais in Much Ado About Nothing, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2026. Photo by Brianne Jang

Jesse Gervais as a wry, charming Benedick in Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Ian Leung. It’s a very funny performance, in which Benedick’s worldly confidence is forever being taken down a peg by romantic complications he didn’t see coming.

Steven Greenfield in a bright, sassy performance as the iconic elbows-up Canadian hero/anti-hero in a Gerry Potter revival of the play/musical Billy Bishop Goes To War for the new (ish) Edmonton Repertory Theatre.

John Ullyatt in Death of a Salesman, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

John Ullyatt as Willy Loman, in a performance of desperate flickering hopefulness and a heavy load of disappointment, in Death of a Salesman at the Citadel.

It was a year of bold design choices in Edmonton theatre. Here’s a small selection:

•Three of Beyata Hackborn’s sets for Citadel productions: the magical water globe that dominated the stage in Life of Pi; the meaningful disconnections of a weathered facade  with invisible walls, part domestic realism part hallucination, in harmony with Daryl Cloran’s imaginatively abstracted Death of a  Salesman; an atmospheric stylized period deconstruction for Cyrano de Bergerac.

•Cindi Zuby’s beautiful classical multi-door round set for The Revolutionists, at Shadow Theatre.

•A Dave Clarke sound score for Northern Light’s Request Programme that gathered meaningful songs from local singer-songwriters, as radio broadcast to which the woman onstage tunes every night.

•Superb lighting from April Viczko to create the warm hues of a dry land life, then magical seascapes, for the storytelling of Life of Pi.

•A zoo of puppet animals created by Puppet Stuff Canada and led by Richard Parker the enigmatically named Bengal tiger, in Life of Pi.

•Leona Brausen’s gloriously entertaining costumes for Teatro Live!’s revival of Cocktails at Pam’s, including perfect hats and wigs to wear whilst drinking gimlets and gin fizzes.

•Daniel vanHeyst’s amazingly detailed, wood-panelled small-town curling clubhouse for Hurry Hard at the Mayfield. It felt authentic through and through.

And here are a couple of other categories the Sterling Awards somehow missed:

Aimée Beaudoin, Alexandra Dawkins, Kijo Gatama, Jacquelin Walters in The Revolutionists, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Most unexpected theatre critic: Cyrano, the manic swordsman poet from Bergerac, was one, to be sure, with withering views about hammy acting. And the spy Richard Hannay in The 39 Steps, has his opinions too, as he rises from retirement ennui with the need to see “something mindless and trivial. Something utterly pointless. I know! A trip to the theatre!.” But who knew about Marie Antoinette (Aimée Beaudoin with her comic dander up) in The Revolutionists at Shadow Theatre? Her pragmatic advice to the play’s struggling playwright character is that “if it’s not a romantic comedy nobody will come.” OK, maybe she’s more of a producer.

Phantom Limbs by and starring Kristi Hansen, Expanse Festival. Photo by Ian Jackson.

Three experiments of the season:

• In Kris Alvarez’s utterly unclassifiable Banana Musik (part of Common Ground Arts’ inaugural Prairie Mainstage series), there was original music, a memoir play about having aging immigrant parents. And this: Alvarez shared the stage with her actual parents, a charming older couple as her mom cooked special things  to share with the audience and her dad played live music with her.
• In Phantom Limbs, which premiered at the Expanse Festival, actor/playwright Kristi Hansen, who’s an amputee, premiered an dance-theatre piece cum memoir, inspired by the mystery presence of her missing limb in tracking by innovative Dot Box technology (Moment Discovery). Hansen used that fascinating strangeness as a metaphor for the way we’re haunted by the past.
• For Request Programme, a real-time ’70s era solo performance piece that’s entirely wordless — built not on a story but on the minutiae of an evening in the life of a solitary woman as she comes home from work and makes dinner — Northern Light’s Trevor Schmidt gathered a cast of 16 women, one per night. Since it was NLT’s 50th anniversary season, all the actors had a history with the company. I got to see the naturally charismatic Vanessa Sabourin, and she was mesmerizing.

Have you checked out ’s season highlights part one? It’s here.