Your last crack at a couple of festivals and a screwball on E-town stages, a small survey on a wet weekend

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

Live theatre lives in the moment (not a new thought but one to consider this wet weekend in Edmonton) It’s your last chance…

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•… And also your first, to see Sprouts, Concrete Theatre’s annual festival of new plays specially planted for kids, today at 12:30 and 2:30 p.m. in the Westbury Theatre. Let a kid take you to see three new plays in one hour, seeded and awaiting further growth. Little Crow and Magpie by Shyanne Duquette, The Club Conundrum by Jasmine Hopfe, and Hayley Moorhouse’s Wanda, Wendy and the What-If Walrus. Concrete’s idea, it being planting season, is to enlarge the Canadian repertoire of plays for kids, by tapping a diversity, in experience and ethnicity, of writing talents. Over the years, some of the authors are playwrights trying their hand at engaging a new and younger audience; some are actors or choreographers, journalists or novelists expanding their skill sets to include writing for the stage. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca. (And there are lobby activities before each performance).

Rachel Bowron and Mathew Hulshof in On The Banks Of The Nut, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

• … to catch (through Sunday) a sparkling homegrown screwball at the Varscona: Teatro Live’s revival of the 2001 Stewart Lemoine comedy On The Banks Of The Nut. You’ll have the fun of watching a take-charge heroine (Bella King) screw up people’s lives, on the principle that, sure, things could get more chaotic, but they also could be a lot more entertaining. The cast, including Sam Free, Rachel Bowron, Mathew Hulshof, and Karen Johnson Diamond, has a larky time with the Lemoine-ian sense of humour. Have a peek at the review. Tickets: theatrolive.com.

•It’s the grand finale weekend of Nextfest, the multi-disciplinary festival of emerging artists at the Roxy. The MainStage lineup includes Batrabbit Collective’s clown show Rat Academy 2: Gnaw and Order by and starring Dayna Lee Hoffmann and Katie Yoner as a pair of rodents up against it in a rat-free province. It’s a sequel to their much-travelled Fringe hit, and will be re-worked into a new version especially for the upcoming Fringe. The preview is here. I had a chance to see Mika Boutin’s Televangelists and The Most Beautiful Man by Kate Couture. I can recommend both: accomplished in structure, acted with go-for-the-gusto commitment.

The former takes us into the heart of darkness (in a stunningly visceral way) in the Canadian punk rock scene c. 1997. See the interview with Boutin here. The latter has a kind of heart-tugging hilarity about it: it’s a stage memoir in chapters of a young woman with a shift job as a Santa’s elf, a rich fantasy life, and a history of  bad experiences with men. There is, after all, a dark side to a guy in a red suit and fake beard, who invites strangers to sit on his lap and tell him their secret desires. You’ll want to see more of the eminently likeable, comically inventive Kelsey Jakoy.

The Roxy is crammed with Nextfest activity. Tickets and a full schedule: nextfest.ca.