Doomed to tell and re-tell the story of the Trojan War: Michael Peng stars as the Poet in An Iliad, at Shadow Theatre

Posted on January 20, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Michael Peng in An Iliad, Shadow Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A traveller arrives onstage Thursday at the Varscona Theatre, suitcase in hand, with a story to tell. He’s been telling it for, oh, about three thousand years.

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“And every time he tells it he hopes he won’t have to tell it again,” says Michael Peng, who plays that game, eternal storyteller/poet in John Hudson’s Shadow Theatre production of An Iliad.

As Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, the American co-creators of An Iliad put it in their introductory notes, the storyteller is “doomed to keep telling the story of the Trojan War, in all its glory and devastation and surprise … until the day when human nature changes, when our addiction to rage comes to an end, when the telling of a war story becomes unnecessary. A day that has yet to come, of course.” After all, says Peng, “the one thing we do well as a species is kill.” And at the heart of it: “why we’re so angry, why we fight, why it’s it’s in our nature to fight.”

A one-person stage adaptation of Homer’s epic anti-war poem, compressed into the last 40 days of the 10-year siege of Troy by a Greek coalition, is, one way, an improbable theatrical enterprise, to be sure. Peng has found himself playing not only Achilles and Hector, the leading warriors of the narrative, but “all the gods, the heroes, the soldiers, their wives, Helen whose kidnapping started the whole brouhaha, and Paris who stole her. At one point Hector’s baby.…” In short it’s an all-ages, all-genders enterprise. “Epic, yes, but also intensely personal.”

“It’s a lot,” laughs Peng, fresh from the Citadel production of A Christmas Carol. “A lot of words. Intense, dramatic work. I’ve done a couple of one-person shows. But this is as emotionally and physically demanding as anything I’ve ever done.” He shares the stage with a Muse, musician Erik Mortimer, who plays his original score live. “Part of it is planned,” says Peng. “Part of it is us connecting onstage.”

Peng, who arrived here in 2006 from his southern Ontario home turf to get a master’s degree in directing at the U of A, began his theatre career as an actor, albeit an actor who started a theatre company, Lost and Found Theatre, in his home town of Kitchener before he moved here. He and Edmonton actor/playwright/director Chris Bullough launched an indie company, Wishbone Theatre, in 2010 with a production of Evelyne de la Chenelière’s Bashir Lazar, starring Peng as an Algerian immigrant substitute teacher in Canada. The Wishbone signature, as its inaugural 2010-2011 season — Falling: A Wake and Waiting For Godot — revealed, was challenging, hefty work, the opposite of lightweight. And Peng and Bullough took turns directing.

More recently, Peng has done more acting than directing. And the dark tonal palette for which he’s mostly known by Edmonton audiences, lightened when he spent last summer at Cape Breton’s Theatre Baddeck in two comedies. Dan Needles’ Ed’s Garage (“quintessential Dan Needles,” he says of the Wingfield playwright and  a “sweet, tender play full of prairie wisdom”)  was one. In the other, “a goofy Cape Breton comedy He’d Be Your Mother’s Father’s Cousin, “I spent most of the play looking for my keys and my glasses.”

“It was a delight to be able to do comedy,” Peng says. But now, he’s finding it especially rewarding “to be sinking my teeth into an important, timely story.” A story, as he puts it, “about fury and power,” both of those aided and abetted materially by social media. “If there’s one thing social media has fanned the flames of, it’s anger…. We’re so angry at one another all the time. Nobody talks any more. Nobody listens. There’s no civility. No compassion.”

Michael Peng in An Iliad, Shadow Theatre. Promotional image.

The travelling storyteller Peng plays in An Iliad has been on the road for 2700 years. But he acknowledges modern realities, and idiomatic language, at every turn. The audience is us; the setting is the brick-lined Varscona. “There are five or six times in the play when the Trojan War could have been avoided” if people hadn’t made bad choices.

And it’s not as if war has gone out of currency. “It’s very much of today,” Peng says, “almost shockingly modern, a story that continues to have meaning.” And authors Peterson and O’Hare encourage producers to update references. Wars and the anger that fuels them never end, so An Iliad doesn’t have a final resting place. Which makes the poet a sort of “embedded war reporter,” witnessing and recording.

Unlike movies, the Brad Pitt flick Troy among them, there’s no romanticizing the violence in An Iliad, no falling in love with it. When Peng began talking to director Hudson about the play he asked what the play meant to him. “The story is a warning” was Hudson’s answer. “It was ‘don’t do this; let’s find another way’…. It’s not escape; it’s immersion.”

PREVIEW

An Iliad

Theatre: Shadow

Created by: Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare

Directed by: John Hudson

Starring: Michael Peng with Erik Mortimer

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Feb. 8

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org

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What’s Calgary got that we don’t have? Under the spell of the Dream Machine, at the High Performance Rodeo

Posted on January 19, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Allison Lynch, Andy Curtis, Denise Clarke, Geoffrey Simon Brown in Dream Machine, One Yellow Rabbit. Photo by Benjamin Laird.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A question for this theatre town of ours: what has Calgary got that we don’t have?

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A: One Yellow Rabbit, an influential multi-disciplinary troupe of brainy incautious artistic renegades of the experimental stripe, with their own way of creating performance, and their own impromptu and unexpected international connections. Ah, and an annual January gathering of unexpected performance pieces, by them and others, that they gather under the banner High Performance Rodeo.

Photo by Donna Christensen

Edmonton met the Rabbits first at the Fringe here when no one knew exactly what Fringe was, much less what it could be — a natural pairing of the early ‘80s. And sure enough, the wildest stuff at early Fringes was Rabbit offerings. As the late great Rabbit Michael Green put it, “we had to be there.” The invitation to “just come, and do whatever you want,” as Fringe founder Brian Paisley always said,  was Rabbit bait. And it was irresistible.

In Edmonton we had a big regional theatre, and a startling proliferation of little theatres that became mid-sized theatres, and an unmatched assortment of indie theatres and co-ops inspired by the Fringe. But, damn, we didn’t have One Yellow Rabbit.

The High Performance Rodeo has turned 40 with this January’s 2026 edition. And in honour of the big four-oh, they’ve revived a signature Rabbits piece, their much-travelled 2003 Dream Machine. So I went to Calgary to see it.

The Dream Machine itself, a kind of modernist magic lantern with flickering light invented in 1960 by Beat poets Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville was built to mesmerize, to induce a drug-less high in the viewer. According to the program, “it never caught on.” And there it is, an accurate reproduction on the Big Secret Theatre stage. It’s a prop, the campfire so to speak, around which the eight-member cast of writer/director Blake Brooker’s production gathers from time to time in Dream Machine.

At the time, the idea of the show, according to Brooker’s program notes, was to see if the Rabbits could create a musical without characters or a story. It’s an homage to the Beats of the ‘50s, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gysin, and the rest, and their spirited waywardness — the individualist resistance to the forces of capitalist conformity in all its forms, aesthetic, sexual, commercial.

It’s a kind of free-associative amalgam of text, movement (choreographed by Denise Clarke), and the late David Rhymer’s fascinating music, sometimes lyrical sometimes jagged. It erupts into songs at times, or accompanies free-verse spoken poetry, or declarations like “I wanna play a killer in a movie.”

Andy Curtis, Denise Clarke, Geoffrey Simon Brown, Kris Demeanor in Dream Machine, One Yellow Rabbit, High Performance Rodeo. Photo by Benjamin Laird.

With some exceptions like Calgary poet Kris Demeanor’s delivery of the 1958 Ginsberg poem America at the outset — an attack on American ruthlessness that lands with uncanny precision more than half a century later — the spoken text and lyrics are by Brooker. “If words are a virus maybe I’ve caught it.” And they’re in the style and capture the rebellious sensibility of the Beats. Which is to say they’re clever, poetic, with a playful, witty turn of phrase about them. They enjoy the sounds of words, and unmooring them from their usual resting perches (“our ambitions are injurious”).  They take up the rhythm of repeating choruses (“take a drink, have a sniff, walk the park, in the dark …”).

Dream Machine isn’t what anyone would normally call a musical. Brooker prefers “song cycle,” or “oratorio.” The dreamy state that was the goal of the machine inventors leaves meaning with the audience to unwrap, or not. And it does take some patience to follow the show’s long, meandering route through lyrical passages with jagged, unexpected edges, all captured in the strange bursting diagonals of Clarke’s choreography.

If you let the experience wash over you, you make out recurring motifs. One is that you are your own light source. And it’s closely related to another: creative inspiration — where to look for it, how to keep it going, how to be a creative individual. “Our minds are focussed on a map that’s never been drawn.”

Brooker’s excellent cast includes Clarke herself, a choreographic and theatrical muse for the company; the long-time One Yellow Rabbit performer Andy Curtis; the actor/playwright Geoffrey Simon Brown, and actor/singer Allison Lynch, with three fine musicians, Jonathan Lewis, Peter Moller, and Augustine Yates.

Dream Machine was a highly unusual theatrical undertaking in 2003. And a couple of decades later, in a world that’s turned back the clock and seems bent on curtailing freedom and repressing heterdoxy, it still is. “We’ve come to celebrate but we can’t remember what.” Ah, but there’s a 40th anniversary Rodeo to jog your memory. (It runs through Jan. 24. Tickets: oyr.org).

Dot, High Performance Rodeo. Photo by Donna Christensen

Human evolution of another kind is the exploratory impulse of Dot, a prop-heavy work-in-progress from the Canadian Academy of Mask and Puppetry. The idea is promising, a chronicle, at first playful then solemn, of our improbable human development from our originals as a small speck in a vast map-less cosmos.

The protagonist of Elaine Weyshko’s Dot bouncing upstairs and down valleys at the outset — surrealist aerobics? — is, yes, a dot. That small but game ink dot, created live by a human hand with a paint brush, takes on challenges, joins other dots, and they evolve into dimensional beings. puppets with their own gibberish language. Yearning, love, struggle, loss, absurdity and tragedy are all within the compass of the domesticated former dot in its (his? their?) expansive new life off the screen…. The scenes, though, at least so far seem laborious and over-extended, a repetitive showcase series for puppetry techniques. A dramaturgical tune-up in the storytelling is in order. Kudos though to the electronic score, delivered onstage live by the Hair Control duo of Rebecca Reid and Ryan Bourne.

Dot, Canadian Academy of Mask and Puppetry at High Performance Rodeo. Photo supplied.

Week 2 of the Rodeo is coming up. And with it Edmonton Fringe fave Monster Theatre arrives from Vancouver with the fun of Juliet: A Revenge Comedy, in which the Capulet girl takes charge of her own destiny, assisted by other Shakespeare leading ladies. There are cabarets, a solo puppet show (Body Concert),  a new dance theatre piece from Decidedly Jazz Danceworks (Rare Beauties), a concert collaboration between a pop star and a symphony orchestra (Vivek Shraya: One Night Only), a new punk musical (Hucksterland). The list goes on.

Miss Rita’s Lucha Vavoom, High Performance Rodeo. Photo by Ron Lyon Photography.

Some of the country’s most distinguished theatre artists will be there. Daniel MacIvor’s Your Show Here is a solo exploration of the relationship between actor and audience. Pochsy fans take note, a dark, funny new work-in-progress from the great Canadian satirist Karen Hines (My Name Is Karen). And here’s the beauty of the Rodeo: you just can’t predict  what will happen in the theatre, A.I. begone!. when Miss Rita’s Lucha Vavoom (“think telenovela meets WrestleMania meets a horny fever dream,” hmm) arrives onstage Saturday, hosted by Rebecca Northan. Or three curious goblins, the ones who undertook productions of Macbeth and Oedipus, take charge of a gala, with a human in tow (Goblin:Gala). You just have to be there.

The High Performance Rodeo runs in venues of every size and shape through Jan. 31. Tickets: oyr.ca.

    

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Those Belle Époque bohemians are the party people: Moulin Rouge The Musical, a review

Posted on January 14, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Moulin Rouge The Musical, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Those Belle Époque bohemians sure know how to party. Your retinas will be dazzled the moment you enter the theatre. And that, mes amis, isn’t going to stop, or even pause, for the next two-and-a-half hours of Moulin Rouge, the glittering, sexy, gloriously gaudy and lavish 2019 Broadway jukebox musical that’s arrived on tour at the Jube.

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In the jukebox archive there are musicals that are ingenious about either scavenging familiar pop songs to paste into some sort of plot, à la Rock of Ages, or making up a thinnish drama to suit the song list (we’re looking at you Mamma Mia!). Has there ever been a jukebox musical so crammed with pop songs, 75 or more (about love, the falling into, the loss of, the hopes for, etc.) on a hyper-adrenalized spectrum from Offenbach to Beyoncé, Lady Gaga to Piaf to Katy Perry (sometimes characters have whole medleys as their calling cards)? The music credits take up nearly two pages of the program, in print so fine you’d need a magnifying glass if you were keen to nail them down.

Justin Levine, a virtuoso among music supervisors, has evidently updated the list with new music since 2019. And the packed and enraptured opening night crowd laughed with pleasure every time they identified a song.

That’s the thing about the pop repertoire; it doesn’t take massive contortions to repurpose love and love-lorn songs for a story like this one. Thank you Puccini. Based on the 2001 Baz Luhrmann film, which borrowed its story from La Bohème, Moulin Rouge the musical is your invitation to the fantasy version of the demi-mondaine Parisian nightclub and courtesan hang, c. 1899. In Alex Timbers’ production, reproduced for the Broadway Across Canada tour, it comes to us as a giant glowing red velvet valentine in Derek McLane’s stunning design, which unfolds as a series of heart-shaped prosceniums draped in red, that frame heart-shaped perspective projections of Paris roof-tops or street scenes from time to time.

Ah yes, the story. To cut to the chase, it’s a love triangle, with a bit of capitalism/arts push-and-pull thrown in. Christian (Ryan Vasquez), a poor and naive composer from Ohio who arrives in the City of Light to make his fortune with his tunes, has chance encounters with two crazy fin-de-siècle artistes, an Argentine tango specialist and gigolo (Danny Burgos) and the artist Toulouse-Lautrec (Kevyn Morrow) who are creating a show, Bohemian Rhapsody, for the Moulin Rouge. Which is how Christian falls in love with the establishment’s star attraction Satine (Gabriela Carrillo), a consumptive singer-dancer who’s being pursued by the ruthlessly libidinous, and well-heeled, aristocrat the Duke of Monroth (Andrew Brewer), who’s being pursued by the seedy/glam Moulin Rouge master of ceremonies Harold Zidler  (Bobby Daye) as a potential patron to stave off bankruptcy.  

Anyhow, we know that Christian and Satine are deeply, madly, in forever love mainly because they keep singing songs about exactly that. But before that, the opening sequence, which introduces us to the showbiz world in question, is a big, splashy, transporting production number from a cast with legs for days,  putting Lady Marmalade to good use.

Moulin Rouge The Musical, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

The real takeaway? The visuals, which are a knockout. It’s the moment to salute the endless array of Catherine Zuber’s extravagantly beautiful costumes, which memorably reinvent underwear, and then keep going, with ravishing frocks and topcoats, hats and feathers. And Sonya Tayeh’s choreography never stops being a cleverly allusive marriage of fin-de-siècle and contemporary, delivered by a come-hither cast of great dancers.

In classic fashion, at the outset, everyone’s saying hey, great, just wait till you meet Satine. And sure enough, Satine, the vedette played by the stunning, strong- and supple-voiced Carrillo who’s perfect for a role that includes torchy songs and ballads, knows how to make an entrance. She arrives on a trapeze, a vision of corseted sparkle, singing Diamonds Are Forever, Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend, Material Girl, and other diamantine ditties.

Andrew Brewer in Moulin Rouge The Musical, Broadway Across Canada. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

Christian Vasquez, also a terrific singer, won’t be everyone’s idea of a poor boy from the Ohio sticks since he looks as well turned-out as a barrister. Daye is terrific as the ingratiating MC whose good humour is a veneer for showbiz desperation. Burgos and Morrow as Santiago and Toulouse-Lautrec are excellent as ‘colourful characters’. The former gets a sizzling tango (with stage partner Kaitlin Mesh) as the moody Act II opener. The latter, who has a lovely rich voice, has a wistful Nature Boy number in which he sings about his big regret vis-à-vis Satine. He gave up his romantic hopes, he says, as a disabled person (he has a cane for heaven’s sake).

As I say, the design is spectacular, along with Justin Townsend’s striking lighting, a melodrama in itself in painterly images in backstage and onstage scenes, romantic tête-à-tètes in Satine’s boudoir, smoky Montmartre cafes.… Bohemian poverty never looked so good, or so expensive. And it comes with a terrific orchestra, too.

Moulin Rouge The Musical, Broadway Across Canada Touring. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

It’s all so excessive and driven (and OK, a wee bit tiring) you might wonder whether it’s having its gateau and eating it too: there’s a sassy hint of send-up in its prolonged matching of period setting and modern songs, especially in the playfulness of Act I before things get, you know, tragic in the longueurs of Act II. The alternate lyrics to The Hills Are Alive (“with the sounds of the proletariat”) are a case in point. The creators of Moulin Rouge, including playwright John Logan (of Red fame), are smart. Harold talks cheerfully about “dire and glorious poverty” — and then there’s a big catchy “shut up and dance with me” dance number. 

Sometimes the expert if way over-ample theatrical glitz and beauteous stagecraft wrap themselves around the music (or is it vice versa?) so uncannily you have to give your head a shake. The lurid red lighting of the number set to Roxanne, amplifying Satine’s ambiguous entertainer/courtesan career, is a knock-out. Talk about burning down the house.

And that’s how it is when you come to the cabaret (oops, wrong musical). Give yourself over to a hothouse over-the-top fantasy spun from the music engraved in your brain. As the MC says at the start, Moulin Rouge isn’t a place, it’s “a state of mind.”

REVIEW

Moulin Rouge The Musical

Broadway Across Canada

Book by: John Logan

Directed by: Alex Timbers

Starring: Gabriela Carrillo, Ryan Vasquez, Bobby Daye, Kevyn Morrow, Andrew Brewer, Kaitlin Mesh, Danny Burgos

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca

 

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Intermission’s over! Act II of the theatre season, and 10 shows too intriguing to miss

Posted on January 10, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Bella King, I Meant What I Said, Teatro Live!

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Intermission’s over, and Act II of the theatre season is about to begin.

Your nights out at the theatre are in progress. Rehearsals are happening in theatres across town. At Shadow (opening Jan. 22) Michael Peng shares the stage with musician Erik Mortimer, to star in An Iliad, a multi-award-winning modern re-telling of the Homer epic, an amazing concept in itself. The Citadel pays tribute to its 60-season history with a return to one of the 20th century’s greatest, and most enduringly powerful plays, produced in the theatre’s very first season. Death of a Salesman, in preview Jan. 24, stars John Ullyatt as Willy Loman, with Nadien Chu as his wife Linda. And more…. Broadway Across Canada’s touring Moulin Rouge, a splashy stage musical inspired by the Baz Luhrmann film, touches down at the Jube Tuesday. Look for upcoming 12thnight posts on all of the above.

And here are 10 other shows, in a long lineup of much-anticipated productions, that look too intriguing to miss.

Countries Shaped Like Stars. Created by Emily Pearlman and Nicolas Di Gaetano of Ottawa’s Mi Casa Theatre, the oddball enchantment of this whimsical fairy tale cum musical love story between two people who live on neighbouring peninsulas have made it a hit at festivals across the country. It was at the Fringe here in 2013, and I loved it (it’s just one of those theatrical Fringe shows that land lightly and stay with you), for its imaginative use of simple props, for its music … and its way of unhinging words from their usual mooring as it takes us to a time when anticipation grew on trees. Murray Utas directs a new Fringe Theatre production starring Dayna Lea Hoffmann as dragonfruit salesperson Gwendolyn Magnificent and Michael Watt as Bartholomew Spectacular, purveyor of fish popsicles. It runs Feb. 17 to 28 at the Backstage Theatre. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.

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I Meant What I Said. There is much that is still mysterious about Stewart Lemoine’s first new full-length play in five years, premiering at Teatro Live! Feb. 20 to March 8. This I can tell you: it’s a comedy (OK, not a surprise, for a company and a playwright who devoted to adventures in expanding the frontiers of comedy). And the cast, directed by the playwright, is a quintet of Teatro’s younger generation stars led by Bella King and including Sam Free, Jayce Mckenzie, Eli Yaschuk, Nida Vanderham. Tickets: teatrolive.com.

And speaking of mysteries, Shakespeare is back in the park, forsooth. BIG NEWS from the Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s artistic director Dave Horak. After three summer’s exile from the Heritage Amphitheatre in Hawrelak Park, forsooth, they’re back in the park, the first group in the re-opened Heritage Amphitheatre, “with two full productions” June 18 through July 12. Their identity is to be revealed in the fulness of time (late January), “but I will tease that we are partnering with two other organizations so that we come back to the amphitheatre bigger than ever!” says Horak. “I’m hoping to make a big splash to welcome everyone back…. We’re even talking about fireworks for July 1st!”

Bouée (buoy or lifeline in English). What happens when a bunch of scientists undertake an up-date of humanity’s place in an infinite cosmos? “Cool, quirky, very physical,” as L’UniThéâtre artistic director describes this absurdist, highly theatrical play by Céleste Godin. The six-actor touring show from Satellite Theatre in Moncton NB takes L’Unihéâtre, Edmonton’s francophone theatre, for the first time across the river to the Roxy Theatre (10708 124 St.), where it runs March 6 and 7, with English surtitles. Tickets: lunitheatre.ca.

Cyrano de Bergerac, Citadel Theatre. graphic supplied.

Cyrano de Bergerac. The Citadel has commissioned a new adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s late-19th century high-romance swashbuckler from Edmonton actor/playwright Jessy Ardern, as the finale of their 60th anniversary season (May 2 to 24). The playwright retains the 17th century setting of a romantic adventure where wordplay meets swordplay — poetry by proxy — and in a nimble virtuoso touch has written it in rhyming couplets in homage to the elaborate verse form of the original. Amanda Goldberg directs this premiere production, starring Scott Shpeley as the great swordsman with the seductive poetic dexterity, and the epic nose. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com.   

Everyone Is Doing Fine. Two art school friends land a job with a rich-guy hedge fund manager in this new comedy-drama by Calgary rising star James Odin Wade. Set at the treacherous, high-speed urban intersection of art, capitalism, sex, and ethics, the play was first seen in fledgling form at Workshop West’s 2023 Springboards Festival. The upcoming Workshop West premiere production (May 6 to 24) is directed by the company’s artistic producer Heather Inglis, who’s described it as “fast, smart, sexy, sophisticated.” Tickets: workshopwest.org.

Cry–Baby. Among the big Broadway musicals of this half of the season — The Wizard of Oz at the Citadel, Footloose at the Mayfield, 42nd Street at ELOPE, Once at Walterdale, A Chorus Line at MacEwan University — here’s a rom-com musical comedy we’ve never seen in these parts. A 2008 rock n’ roll musical based on the 1990 John Waters film, Cry-Baby it tells the story of a bad-boy rebel who falls for an upper-class square in 1950s Baltimore. And it comes with blue-chip creative cred. The book is by the Hairspray team of Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan; the music is by the late Adam Schlesinger, co-founder/muse of the terrific rock band Fountains of Wayne. Lauren Boyd directs a cast of 18 up-and-comers in a production from the enterprising indie company Uniform Theatre (they did Assassins at last summer’s Fringe). It runs in Theatre Network’s Phoenix Series at the Roxy (10708 124 St.) March 14 to 22. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca.    

Casey and Diana. At the Citadel, finally Edmonton gets to see a hit play, by actor/playwright (and U of A theatre grad) Nick Green that premiered at Stratford in 2023 and has since played to full houses and critical raves across the country. We know Green from his plays like Happy Birthday Baby J and Coffee Dad, Chicken Mom and the Fabulous Buddha Boi. Casey and Diana is set in the AIDS crisis of the 1990s at Casey House, the Toronto AIDS hospice where the residents and staff are preparing for a visit by Princess Di, whose public compassion helped dislodge the exclusionary harshness of the era. The Citadel production April 4 to 26 is directed Lana Michelle Hughes, Shadow Theatre’s new artistic director. Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.    

Request Programme, Northern Light Theatre. Graphic supplied.

Request Programme. In a tribute to its unusual shape-changing 50-year history, the season finale at Northern Light Theatre is a wordless performance piece that celebrates the large-scale experiments undertaken in the ‘90s by Trevor Schmidt’s artistic director predecessors D.D. Kugler and the late Sandhano Schultze. The 1973 piece, by the German avant-gardiste Franz Xaver Kroetz, follows a solitary woman who arrives home at her solitary apartment and does her usual solitary evening routine, makes dinner, cleans up, tunes in to a call-in radio show. And something happens that makes Request Programme a gut-grabber. And here’s the thing: the NLT production has a cast of 17 women artists of all ages — all actors with Northern Light credits on their resumés — one per performance. And since they do what they do onstage, every performance will be different. There is nothing like it in the season. Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com.

Ms. Pat’s Kitchen by Jameela McNeil, SkirtsAfire Festival.

Ms. Pat’s Kitchen. A featured production at the upcoming 14th annual edition of the SkirtsAfire Festival, Jameela McNeil’s play, set in Edmonton and celebrating our considerable Caribbean community, explores the fracture lines of an inter-generational mother-daughter relationship in a Jamaican family. And it steps up to the cultural and generational complications of the thorny issue of consent. I saw an early version at Nextfest; it’s been at the RISER New Works Festival, and now its mainstage premiere (March 5 to 8) at the ArtsHub Ortona (SkirtsAfire’s first venture into that river valley venue) is directed by Patricia Darbasie, and stars Noreta Lewis-Prince, Michelle Todd and Rochelle Laplante. Tickets: skirtsafire.com.

So, there’s 10. But there are so many more, including the return (July 10 to 26) of a signature Teatro Live! comedy, Stewart Lemoine’s Cocktails at Pam’s, a large-scale cocktail party in real time, directed by Teatro’s new artistic director Farren Timoteo who’ll be onstage in the cast of 11. The return of Chris Bullough Undiscovered Country in its latest incarnation at Theatre Network’s February Festival Weekend (Feb. 19 to 22),. Indie productions are still hatching, awaiting funding and sponsors….

And at our theatre schools, where some of the season’s most interesting work always happens, two classics of their kind. Tartuffe (directed by Kate Weiss) is at the U of A’s Studio Theatre (Feb. 5 to 14), and A Chorus Line (directed by Jim Guedo) at MacEwan University (March 25 to 29), in honour of this influential musical’s 50th anniversary.

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2025: the year in Edmonton theatre, part 2

Posted on January 5, 2026 by Liz Nicholls

Brennan Campbell and Braydon Dowler-Coltman, As You Like It, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

2025: here’s a small selection of performances, design inspirations, moments, experiences, bright ideas (in no particular order) that have stayed with me. You will have your own personal assortment (feel free to let your mind wander through its memory tracks).

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A small sampling of performances that linger:

Alexander Ariate in Horseplay (at Workshop West), an exuberantly imaginative and physical performance as a horse named Horse dismayed to find that pursuing a dream means giving up something, too, in a pressurizing world that’s hard on the bonds of friendship. “It’s hard to be grown up and know the world.” Ariate’s performance as the amiable career slob and Oscar in The Odd Couple (at Teatro Live) was another gem.

Simon Abbott, Cameron Kneteman, Mhairi Berg, Maureen Rooney in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Mhairi Berg in a charismatic double-performance as both Girl and the younger self of Girl’s Granny, both feisty both quick-witted, in Morningside Road, the intricate new “Canadian Celtic” musical she wrote with composer Simon Abbott.(Speaking of doubling, Berg in a balletic pas de deux and as a tap-dancing FBI agent, among an assortment of other characters in Grindstone Theatre’s Die Harsh lodges in the mind too).    

Michele Fleiger as an old Alberta labour activist fallen into disrepair, re-discovering her skills, her sense of outrage, and her playfulness in  Nicole Moeller’s Wildcat at Workshop West.

Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Troy Feldman, Davinder Malhi in The Life of Pi, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Davinder Malhi, compelling as the precocious human star of Life of Pi (at the Citadel), panic-stricken but resourceful, traumatized but wonderstruck in his 227-day ordeal adrift at sea in a tiny life-boat with a Bengal tiger.

Mike Nadajewski and Patricia Zentilli in Vinyl Cafe The Musical, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Andrew Nadajewski’s funny and endearing performance as the easy-going, rueful but ever-hopeful, Dave whose seasonal misadventures are at the heart of the Citadel’s new holiday musical Vinyl Cafe The Musical.

Cody Porter in Angry Alan (at Northern Light Theatre) brought an essential quality of reasonable “ordinary” even likeable decency to a character whose chronic disappointments in his life make him prime recruitment material for the men’s rights movements. Without a performance as nuanced as this one, the play would be de-fused and fail to fire.

Katie Yoner and Michael Watt in The 39 Steps, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Michael Watt who committed to an outlandish assortment of characters, of every age, gender, profession and accent (along with his stage partner Katie Yoner) in The 39 Steps (Farren Timoteo’s introductory production as Teatro Live!’s new artistic director). A performance of riotous comic physicality in a dizzying high-speed four-actor take on Hitchcock’s spy thriller.

Chariz Faulmino and Mark Sinongco in Disney’s Frozen: The Broadway Musical, Citadel Theatre and Grand Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

In a cast with high-power musical theatre talent (including Chariz Faulmino and Kelly Holiff) and a spectacular array of technical achievements in theatricality, Mark Sinongco’s performance as a nice-guy ice retailer, sidekick to a scene-stealer of a reindeer, had impact in Disney’s Frozen the Broadway Musical (at the Citadel).

In a scarily inflammatory ensemble Marguerite Lawler as the quick-witted sardonic Sutton, the wiseass of a circle of queer friends reeling after a shooting in a queer nightclub in Hayley Moorhouse’s Tough (at Edmonton Fringe Theatre). Their performance was an index to the play’s signature combination of rage and humour.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Alexander Ariate in The Odd Couple, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith in The Odd Couple brought a whole arsenal of precision comic physicality to Felix, the morose neurotic neatnik of Teatro Live’s very funny revival of the Neil Simon comedy classic of mismatched roommates. A veritable sight gag in himself, whether wielding a vacuum cleaner or lowering himself into a chair.

Brian Dooley as the working-class patriarch unravelling in booze and grievance through three generations in Colleen Murphy’s Jupiter (at Theatre Network) in a memorably harsh and committed performance.

Braydon Dowler-Coltman’s fine-tuned performance, romantic and comic, as Orlando in Dave Horak’s Freewill Shakespeare As You Like It in Louise McKinney Riverfront Park brought a delicate layer of discovery to the plight of the young romantic hero who falls madly in love, and races through the Forest of Arden pinning ardent verses to trees.

In a bravura comic performance, Ron Pederson, as all (but one) of the blue-blood D’Ysquiths, assorted upper-class twits, snobs, grotesques and buffoons who meet their maker in an octet of ingenious ways in Grindstone Theatre’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.

And Oscar Derkx brought precise comic timing to the the other D’Ysquith, the charming and likeable serial murderer of all the above in appealing performance crucial to the success of the kooky-macabre faux-Edwardian musical.

Sam Free and Bella King in On The Banks Of The Nut, Teatro Live! Photo by Ryan Parker

Bella King as the bright instigator of comic chaos, who takes charge of the professional and romantic fortunes of everyone else in the screwball comedy On The Banks of the Nut, revived by Teatro Live!

Lora Brovold, in a glowing, expressive performance in Michael Czuba’s After Mourning – Before Van Gogh (Shadow Theatre) as the older version of Van Gogh’s stubborn sister-in-law Joanna — on a heroic obstacle-strewn mission to make the world recognize and appreciate the “worthless” paintings of an obscure genius.

In a sparkling ensemble led by Luc Tellier as Ziggy Stardust as Puck the fairy party organizer, John Ullyatt as the bossy stagestruck weaver Bottom who magnanimously offers to play all the parts in the play-with-in-a-play staged by a gaggle of rustic artisans in Midsummer Night’s Dream The 70s Musical at the Citadel. 

Moments that lodge in your 2025 memory bank (collecting interest)

As the caregiver character in Bea, Michael Watt’s very funny monologue explaining A Streetcar Named Desire, and Stanley’s particular appeal, for the benefit of his client patient. “I do like a good intermission.”

As one of the 13-year-old dance-mad girls in Dance Nation (at SkirtsAfire Fest), Kijo Gatama’s monologue late in the play, that starts in the proposition that “I might be frickin’ gorgeous,” escalates into an impressive, even scary, manifesto of power ready to be unleashed on the world. “What am I going to do with all this power?”

The father-son scene in Goblin: Macbeth in which Banquo’s teenage son is much put out to be ordered to stop playing Smoke on the Water on his accordion.

The double drag-act in Cardiac Theatre’s KaldrSaga, a moment of boisterous rapport for a fractious father-teenage son relationship. The latter is sulky because dad nixes his changing his major from martial arts to musical theatre studies “Hammerstein to Hamilton.”

In using only rope and April Viczko’s superb lighting, the mountain-climbing scene in Rachel Peake’s production of Disney’s Frozen The Broadway Musical is a theatrical counterweight to an essentially cinematic property. It’s gorgeous.

Bottom’s death scene, a veritable cadenza of morbidity from John Ullyatt, a ne plus ultra moment in Midsummer Night’s Dream The 70s Musical.   

Newcomers of the year:

Kole Durnford, the Métis playwright from Stony Plain AB whose mainstage debut Horseplay — playful,  cleverly meta-, funny, and heartbreaking — about a friendship between a horse and a jockey was an imaginative insight into the high price of dreams and ambition.

In After The Trojan Women,  Amena Shehab, actor-turned-playwright, drew from her own experience as a Syrian refugee to find a continuity between the displaced survivors of the Euripides tragedy and the contemporary Middle East.

Comeback artist of the year (which makes her a newcomer too): Veteran actor Maureen Rooney made a welcome return to the mainstage after many a season — in Morningside Road as the tart-tongued Scottish Granny whose stories of growing up in Edinburgh in the ‘30s constitute a whole life philosophy for her Canadian granddaughter.

Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus in Big Stuff. Photo by Dahlia Katz

Wall? What fourth wall? It was a year of particular invention by theatre artists who found creative ways to include and interact with the audience. The elite improvisers of Rapid Fire did that with The Blank Who Stole Christmas, an original musical partly scripted, partly improvised, different every night since the star villain is an invited guest unknown to cast or audience in advance. In Big Stuff, one of my favourite nights in a theatre in 2025, the sketch comedy duo of Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus created a warm hospitality in which audience members felt truly at ease sharing their own stories about their stuff in the story of grief, loss, and love that emerged from the stuff onstage. Magical.

Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Troy Feldman, Davinder Malhi in The Life of Pi, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Puppet actor of the year: Richard Parker, the ferocious Bengal tiger at the centre of Life of Pi, as set in motion by Braydon Dowler-Coltman and Troy Feldman (honourable mention to Olaf the snowman, shepherded through his small but impactful role by Izard Etemadi in Frozen).

Jenny McKillop and Kendra Connor in How Patty And Joanne Won High Gold At The Grand Christmas Cup Winter Dance Competition, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang.

Five, Six, Seven, Eight… Choreography has a wonderfully creative year in Edmonton theatre, aesthetically, narratively, dramatically. A very small sampling includes Amber Borotsik’s exhilarating airborne pas de deux for two friends, a horse and a jockey, in Horseplay. Ainsley Hillyard’s ingeniously choreographed fight scene (Orlando and Charles the wrestler) in Freewill Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which played out as virtual reality combat. Jason Hardwick’s very funny choreography for two mis-matched renegades from an adult beginner tap class in How Patty and Joanne Won High Gold At The Grand Christmas Cup Winter Dance Competition (Northern Light Theatre). Robin Calvert’s astute choreography for unemployed steel workers who don’t actually know how to dance, as they worked up a strip number in the Mayfield’s The Full Monty. Gianna Vacirca’s fun, richly allusive movement choreography for the four subplots of Midsummer Night’s Dream the 70s Musical at the Citadel.

 The most unusual casting of the year: In Banana Musik (Common Ground Arts’ new Prairie Mainstage Series), Kris Alvarez’s charming, free-form memoir about her immigrant parents, the playwright appeared onstage with her actual mom and dad, non-performers, as they cooked, ate, and made music together.

Design inspirations of the year:

Director Trevor Schmidt’s design for Radiant Vermin with expert collaboration from Larissa Poho’s lighting and Matt Schuurman’s video. The design itself chronicles the incremental “dream home” upgrades that are part of the shocking Faustian bargain set forth in the play (at Northern Light), a (very) dark and snarky satire that’s made for the age when “affordable housing” is an oxymoron.

Eli Yaschuk and Rain Matkin in Radiant Vermin, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography. Set and costumes Trevor Schmidt, lighting Larissa Poho, video and projections Matt Schuurman

Lieke den Bakker’s striking set, evoking both nightclub and boxing ring, for Tough Guy, along with Kena León’s pounding and visceral score, both danceable and violent.

The stunning visuals of Haysam Kadri’s production of Life of Pi at the Citadel, its sea- and skyscapes, its theatrical evocation of exotic worlds and storms which play across a kind of outsized bubble, is the work of set designer Beyata Hackborn, lighting by April Viczko, video by Corwin Ferguson.

Maya Baker, April Cook, Kelsey Verzotti, Sarah Horsman, Layne Labbe in Legally Blonde. Citadel Theatre and Theatre Calgary. Photo by Nanc Price.

Beyata Hackborn’s design for Legally Blonde at the Citadel, a veritable arcade of light-up arches in popsicle colours (lighted by Renée Brode), with riotously pink costumes by Rebecca Toon, are a considerable part of the fun of a fizzy musical.

Daniel Van Heyst’s dreamy design (set and lighting) for Where You Are (at Shadow Theatre), is a detailed evocation of rural Ontario at its most genial.

Dave Clarke’s sweeping soundscape for After Mourning – Before Van Gogh, Darrin Hagen and Morag Northey’s soundscape for Jupiter, a combination of lyrical riffs and the ticking of time, and Joelysa Pankanea’s compositions are examples of the really expert sound design that happened on Edmonton stages this year.

Mhairi Berg’s lovely settings for the songs in As You Like It, one of Shakespeare’s most music-filled plays, take the Act I electronic rock riffs (by Darrin Hagen) into the pastoral, and acoustic, world of the Forest of Arden, in the al fresco Freewill production.

 

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2025, and live theatre as the prize human connector: the year in Edmonton theatre, part 1

Posted on December 31, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Kevin Klassen, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Troy Feldman, Davinder Malhi in Life of Pi, Citadel Theatre/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Lighting by April Viczko, projections by Corwin Ferguson, set by Beyata Hackborn. Photo by Nanc Price

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

2025: What a crazy, scary year it’s been. The world seems impossibly fractious, incoherent, unrecognizable. Can anyone really say they feel at home there?

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But the full-throttle invasion of screens of every size by A.I. has made the liveness of live theatre, where you share a room with real live people — more demonstrably authentic (and uncontrollable by algorithm) — more precious than ever.

It felt like that kind of year in Edmonton theatre. Challenging, yes, in every way, but energizing in placing a high value on human connection through storytelling. As a song in one of my favourite shows of the year, the new homegrown musical Morningside Road, has it, home is a place “built of stories we call our own.”

Our theatre artists, ingenious adventurers in the field of making much with little, took us to experiments in surprising venues — an off-the-track music club (An Oak Tree), the basement of a house on a tranquil urban street (Lucky Charm), a brick-lined hall in an old armoury (KaldrSaga)….

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

They’ve invited us to reflect on the anxieties and chaos of our socio-cultural moment in ways that seem absolutely current, no matter the vintage of the play. Northern Light Theatre’s Radiant Vermin, for example, took a 10-year-old play about housing prices and greed, and found it flammable now. In a big year for new Canadian work on Edmonton stages Nicole Moeller’s new crime caper Wildcat at Workshop West was strikingly local in its references and hopeful about re-animating our atrophied capacity for resistance and change. Hayley Moorhouse’s Tough Guy, which premiered at the Fringe, set about unearthing ‘queer joy’ in the non-stop traumatizing harshness of the age.

Goblin: Macbeth, Spontaneous Theatre. Photo supplied.

There was delight to be found in the creative drive of artists to re-animate the classics — whether by pairing a rom-com hit of the 1590s with Supertramp in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the 70s Musical at the Citadel, or handing over a tragedy to a trio of curious goblins (Goblin: Macbeth), or relishing the perfectly mis-matched roommates for Belinda Cornish’s hilarious revival of The Odd Couple at Teatro Live!. Ah, or launching a new company (Edmonton Repertory Theatre) in these parlous times with the (very) Canadian classic Billy Bishop Goes To War.

Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Alexander Ariate in The Odd Couple, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

And the artists who brought work to the 44th annual edition of the Fringe, our mighty summer live theatre extravaganza, seemed to lean into plays, as opposed to “Fringe shows,” in a way we hadn’t seen in a while — and sold 138,500 tickets doing it.

It’s been a memorably non-static year in Edmonton theatre. New artistic directors at the Mayfield (Kate Ryan), Teatro Live! (Farren Timoteo), Shadow Theatre (Lana Michelle Hughes at the end of the current season). New companies (Edmonton Repertory Theatre). The return of hibernating companies (Cardiac Theatre), and changes pending at Theatre Network with the departure of artistic director Bradley Moss after 30 seasons, and at Common Ground Arts with the joint departure of managing producer Mac Brock and Found Fest director Whittyn Jason.

To jostle, I hope, your own memory bank of highlights from a tumultuous year, here are a dozen of my favourite shows, in no particular order. It’s Part 1. Stay tuned for Part 2, an assortment of memorable performances, designs, experiments, and moments.

Bailey Chin, Daviner Malhi, Kevin Klassen in Life of Pi, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.

Life of Pi. Both the fantastical story itself (borrowed from a 2001 Yann Martel novel, adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti) and the thrilling theatricality of how it gets told made a captivating experience to launch the Citadel’s 60th anniversary season. Haysam Kadri’s beautiful Citadel/Royal Manitoba Theatre production was a stunning collaboration of humans and puppets (Puppet Stuff Canada), lighting, projections, sound, set, by artists at the top of their game — all to tell a magical story about stories, about a boy, a quartet of zoo animals, and finally a ferocious Royal Bengal tiger adrift together in a lifeboat on the fathomless Atlantic for 227 days. The 12thnight review is here.

Mhairi Berg and Maureen Rooney in Morningside Road, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Morningside Road. This funny, heartbreaking, and beautifully sculpted new homegrown “Canadian Celtic” musical cum memoir, by the combined forces of playwright Mhairi Berg and composer Simon Abbott, is an intricate time-travelling story about stories, and the way they’re populated, in colour, by memory. In the present is Girl (Berg) immersed in the oft-repeated stories Granny (Maureen Rooney), a peppery sort of Gaelic sage, tells about growing up in pre-war Edinburgh and beyond. And stories, like the songs, are layered in its complicated, fascinating archaeology of time. It’s for three actors (including Cameron Kneteman) and a live band of three who seem to float in memory in the Shadow Theatre premiere production directed by the company’s new artistic director Lana Michelle Hughes. This is a gem with a future. Check out the 12thnight review here.   

Alexander Ariate as Horse in Horseplay by Kole Durnford, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux. Set and costumes Beyata Hackborn, lighting Sarah Karpyshin

Horseplay. This irresistibly imaginative funny, heart-wrenching coming-of-age story of love, ambition, a friendship tested by crushing competitive pressures from the world, is about two BFFs, a horse named Horse (Alexander Ariate) and a jockey named Jacques (Lee Boyes). It got an outstanding premiere production at Workshop West, directed by Heather Inglis. And it introduced us to a stellar newcomer, playwright Kole Durnford. Have a peek at the 12thnight review here.

Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus in Big Stuff. Photo by Dahlia Katz

Big Stuff. This appealing original, by and starring the married comedy duo Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus, starts with the thorny relationship we have to our ever-accumulating stuff — to toss or not to toss, that is the question. And somehow, magically, it includes their relationship and our connection, via stuff, to the people, the moments, the motifs we’ve lost. How can a show about grief be so funny? And how does this delightful, amused and amusing pair establish such a warm rapport with us and our own stories about our own stuff, and our own people. There was a kind of magical embrace going on in the Citadel’s Rice house.

Goblin: Macbeth. This creation of Spontaneous Theatre, outrageously puckish as a concept, is one of the great surprises of the theatre year. Not that the expertise by Rebecca Northan, Bruce Horak and Ellis Malone was unexpected. But the three curious goblins who get intrigued by the odd human activity called theatre and have a go at Shakespeare’s tragedy did turn out a compelling, affecting, thoroughly intelligible three-goblin Macbeth in this fun, playful, smart show. Fingers crossed the Citadel is signing up for the new Goblin: Oedipus as you read this. Check out the 12thnight review here.

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

On the Banks of the Nut: The premise of this 2001 Stewart Lemoine screwball, revived with a younger generation of actors at Teatro Live!, has a madcap comic value all its own: an expedition by a hapless federal talent agent (Sam Free) and a bright and breezy office temp (the dazzling Bella King) through the rustic wilds of Wisconsin in 1951. They are in search of “a citizen of exceptional talent” (aren’t we all?). And the intersection of this airy quest and the aphrodisiac effect of great orchestral music make for a hilarious adventure, with an all-star cast directed by the playwright. And Mathew Hulshof with his dander up does have a certain unmistakeable resemblance to Gustav Mahler. The 12thnight review is here.

new  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. Matchmaking Shakespeare’s most popular rom-com with Supertramp and the Everly Brothers and a 25-song jukebox of danceable 70s hits is arguably an idea too kooky to resist. And this nutso ingenuity, devised by Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran, has, it turns out, a hilarious aptness to it you (I mean I) didn’t really expect. Will and Marvin Gaye, who knew? Great chunks of lyrical poetry vanish into stardust; instead, the hothouse intensity of love and love-gone-wrong get power ballads, rocking laments, and the exhortation to “give a little bit, of your love to me.” A cast of serious actor-singers dig in. And the ultimate theatrical pay-off is the transformation of the artisan garage band, led by John Ullyatt as Bottom the weaver, into rock stars. Major fun. The 12thnight review is here.  

Cody Porter in Angry Alan, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

Angry Alan. A surprising little stinger of a play by the Brit writer Penelope Skinner sheds light on one of the great mysteries of our time: how on earth do reasonable, even decent, guys get seduced, recruited, radicalized, by the preposterous claims of the men’s rights movement? In Trevor Schmidt’s Northern Light production Cody Porter, in a terrific performance as chronic underachiever Roger, stumbles onto the website of the title, and tumbles headlong into the Google vortex where explanations of his disappointing life, caged by rampant feminism, await. Utterly plausible, and scary as hell. Check out the 12thnight review here.

Ellie Heath, Brian Dooley, Monk Northey in Jupiter by Colleen Murphy. Photo by Ian Jackson

Jupiter. A new and fulsome epic from the feisty and fearless Colleen Murphy takes us into the heart of a working-class family haunted across the 30-year multi-generational fault lines of dysfunction and dark secrets. It premiered at Theatre Network in a production directed by Bradley Moss, and his  cast (which included the canine star of the season Monk) was led by Brian Dooley as the booze-soaked patriarch and Ellie Heath as the bright high school brainiac who fades into disappointed middle age. It made a lot of the Canadian family dysfunction repertoire seem pretty insipid in comparison. The 12thnight review is here.

Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse, Persistent Myth Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Mat Simpson.

Tough Guy. In this muscular and accomplished play by Hayley Moorhouse five queer friends are trying in five ways to negotiate the emotional fall-out from the trauma of a mass shooting at a gay nightclub. In addition to the super-charged performances of Brett Dahl’s Persistent Myth production, what’s remarkable about Tough is the way the playwright has stepped up to doubts about the artistic expression, on stage or screen, of queer trauma in a homophobic/ transphobic world. Does queer art restore agency to the queer experience? Is there such a thing as “queer joy”? Tough Guy was brave enough to want to know. The 12thnight review is here.

Louise Casemore in Lucky Charm, Found Festival 2025. Photo by Brianne Jang

Lucky Charm. The most ingenious storytelling of the year happened in the atmospheric downstairs of a bungalow on a neighbourhood street. Louise Casemore’s strangely fascinating puzzle of a play (first developed at the Found Festival) is a séance, an invitation to lift the veil between the living and the world of the dead. It’s offered to us by the widow of the world’s most celebrated escape virtuoso, ironically like her late husband Harry Houdini a notable debunker of spiritualism. And somehow in the course of Max Rubin’s production, Bess Houdini’s own story as a Jazz Age player is unlocked, by our own memories. An intriguing conjuring of spirits, up close. Check out the 12thnight review here.

Dance Nation, SkirtsAfire Festival. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography

Dance Nation. The mainstage production at SkirtsAfire in 2025 was an insightful, funny, disturbing play by the American writer Clare Barron that took us into the fraught world of pre-teen dance-crazy 13-year-olds, onstage and off-, poised anxiously on the threshold between childhood idylls and grown-up complexities. The characters are played by adult actors, ages 20something to 50something, who range freely between their younger and current selves. Amanda Goldberg’s ensemble production, her first as the new festival artistic producer, captured the stresses, the dreams, the triumphs. See the 12thnight review here.

The tip of the iceberg, as I think of exciting evenings in the company of The Pink Unicorn, Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, The 39 Steps, and so many more.

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‘Twas the nights before Christmas and all through the house(s)… a big opening night in Edmonton

Posted on December 18, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Miracle on 34th Street The Musical, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Sue Temme.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

’Twas the nights before Christmas, and all through the house….

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Shows. Yes, it’s a big opening night tonight, gift-wrapped, on Edmonton stages:

•Kris Kringle is the guest of honour through Tuesday at the vintage Capitol Theatre in Fort Edmonton Park. In Miracle on 34th Street The Musical, a version of the classic 1947 Christmas movie by Meredith Willson of Music Man fame, Kris gets a gig as a Macy’s department store Santa. He has his work cut out for him overcoming skeptics, who have their doubts about his credentials, especially a Macy’s employee and her daughter, who have inured themselves to disappoint. Benjamin Smith directs the NUOVA Vocal Arts production, two dozen actors strong and starring Hal Kerbes, that runs tonight through Tuesday as part of the Fort’s Christmas Market. Tickets aren’t easy to come by (unless you’ve made special arrangements with a department store Santa near you). But check: they’re available at eventbrite.ca.

•Crystle Lightning and Henry Cloud Andrade, the ingenious creators of Bear Grease, their hit Indigenous take on that musical engraved in our collective DNA, have a devised a holiday sequel. Bear Grease: Shack Up For The Winter has a quick run (six performances) on the Citadel’s Shoctor stage tonight through Sunday. The production directed by Lightning stars Bryce Morin as Danny, Shannon Rodriguez Sweeney as Sandy, Tammy Rae Lamouche as Rezzo, Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820.

•Tonight through Saturday at the Varscona, in Nutcracker Burlesque you can have the fun of seeing a chestnut cracked by a new nutcracker. House of Hush reimagines The Nutcracker through the plume-framed lens of burlesque, in a script devised by Nikki Hulowski, who co-hosts the extravaganza with Rusty Strutz. Scarlett von Bomb choreographs the nine-member cast. Tickets: eventbrite.ca.

•The creatures of the Boreal Forest get festive in Enchanted Antlers: Furget Me Not, a new holiday show from Theatre Prospero, at the Varscona Saturday and Sunday. It invites audiences “to discover their inner ungulate” in an interactive story created by Jennifer Spencer, with music by Julie Golosky. It’s BYOA (bring your own antlers). Tickets: pay-what-you-can, varsconatheatre.com.

•And continuing: A Christmas Carol at the Citadel (tickets: citadeltheatre.com) through Dec. 24; Die Harsh The Christmas Musical at the Orange Hub through Dec. 28 (tickets: grindstonetheatre.ca); Girl Brain, Actually at the Roxy through Sunday(tickets: theatrenetwork.ca); Canada’s Ukrainian Nutcracker by Shumka, at the Jube Saturday and Sunday (tickets: ticketmaster.ca). And Rapid Fire Theatre’s inspired The Blank Who Stole Christmas  through Sunday at the Exchange Theatre. Tickets: rapidfiretheatre.com.

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A grand-scale folk ballet fantasy for the season: meet the stars of ‘Canada’s Ukrainian Nutcracker by Shumka’

Posted on December 15, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Leda Tarnasky and Nicolas Pacholok in ‘Canada’s Ukrainian Nutcracker by Shumka’. Photo by Ryan Parker.

‘Canada’s Ukrainian Nutcracker by Shumka’. Photo by Dodd’s Eye Media

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There are shows built into our holiday DNA. The frozen-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge stars in one of them, a classic ghost story cum tale of last-minute redemption (A Christmas Carol, now running at the Citadel). The other polestar of the seasonal galaxy is The Nutcracker, the indelible Christmas Eve coming-of-age fantasy that dances its visions of sugarplums onto stages annually as a classical ballet — OR in the case of the lavishly appointed, large-scale production that lights down on the Jube stage this weekend, a huge-cast Ukrainian folk ballet version of the magical 1892 classic.

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By now Canada’s Ukrainian Nutcracker by the Edmonton Ukrainian dance company Shumka is a tradition in the west of the country. This year the production directed by Tasha Orysiuk, Shumka’s artistic director has already played Victoria (accompanied by the Victoria Symphony), Medicine Hat, and Camrose. This weekend the cast of over 70 Shumka dancers (and choristers from the Kappella Kyrie Slavic Chamber Choir) will be home for Christmas, as the song has it.

Not only is the corps entirely from the Shumka company and school, the lead roles are for the first time occupied by Shumka dancers, too, instead of guest stars from Ukraine. At the centre of Nutcracker is the young girl Clara who finds herself under the Christmas tree in a magical realm of dolls, toys, and an army of mice, and the Nutcracker Prince with whom she falls in love, are played by Leda Tarnawsky and Nicolas Pacholok.

In addition to the famously aerobic physicality and style of Ukrainian dance — “really fun, high energy, high octane,” as Pacholok says — both dancers find “the intense focus on the story and the theatre of it” one of the most distinctive features of the Ukrainian Nutcracker. Unlike many Nutcrackers, where the story of Act I cedes to a virtuoso ballet showcase in Act II, “the story continues through the entire show,” says Tarnawsky. “You really get a chance to invest in these characters and their journey, their emotions and their stories.”

Leda Tarnawsky in ‘Canada’s Ukrainian Nutcracker by Shumka’. Photo by Ryan Parker

“A pretty cool way to tell the story,” she says of “Clara’s coming-of-age story, becoming a young woman and falling in love.” As Pacholok points out, the Prince, too, has “more to do in the second act,” where he and Clara take over some of the dance normally assigned to the Sugarplum Fairy and her Cavalier. “Which helps tie the story together.” And the production’s interest in characters, acting, storytelling set it apart from traditional, more dance-centric Nutcrackers.

“The choreography and (technical) level required are definitely a cut about what we’re used to in our corps dancing. But the corps choreography is quite demanding and explosive too!” Pacholok says. “That’s not reserved for us!”

A couple of times this past year the show’s original choreography team of Victor Litvynov (of the National Ballet of Ukraine) and John Pichlyk (the former Shumka artistic director) have worked with the corps, and with the leads, including Joshua Pacholok as Drosselmeier (Clara’s mysterious magus godfather), to make this year’s edition unique.

Nicolas Pacholok and Leda Tarnawsky in ‘Canada’s Ukrainian Nutcracker by Shumka’. Photo by Dodd’s Eye Media.

Both Pacholok and Tarnawsky bring to Shumka’s Nutcracker long histories with the company (which was recently inducted into the Canadian Dance Hall of Fame). Pacholok started dance training  age six, at the Shumka school, “and started taking it more seriously at 14 or 15.” He started in the company as an apprentice, then a full member. He remembers his “accidental” first role in the Mouse Battle “when someone injured their toe and couldn’t go in…. I was onstage for a few seconds, catching someone in a life and running back off.” He landed the story role of Fritz, Clara’s brother, in 2019 when it was vacated by its guest star occupant of many years.

Nicolas Pacholok in ‘Canada’s Ukrainian Nutcracker by Shumka’. Photo by Dodd’s Eye Media.

After eight and a half years with the company, Pacholok, a U of A mathematics grad, has taken his Shumka training into the wide world of ballet. Since January he’s been a trainee, on scholarship, with the Joffrey Ballet in New York. “The next push for me is exploring the professional ballet space. Who knows from there?” He adds, “But Shumka will always be a big part of my future down the road.”

Tarnawsky, now in her fourth year of civil engineering at the U of A, has been doing Ukrainian dance since the age of four. She grew up in the Ukrainian dance world. Her parents, both former dancers, met there (Darka Tarnawsky is an ex-executive director of Shumka). “Engineering is fun,” she laughs. “But my heart’s always been in the arts.” And she has the resumé to prove it, including gigs teaching Ukrainian dance, working for the Alberta Council for Ukrainian Arts, helping organize the Shumka Dance Festival…. “Busy, for sure!” as she says. But then, that’s true of a lot of Shumka dancers, “who work for long hours before rehearsals.”

Like Pacholok, Tarnawsky started in Nutcracker as “an accidental mouse, jumping in for someone….” Through the years, she’s been a corps dancer, and graduated to bigger roles. “The last time we had a big partnering dance,” says Pacholok, “was when Leda was one of the dolls and I was Fritz, Clara’s brother.”

Nicolas Pacholok and Leda Tarnawsky in ‘Canada’s Ukrainian Nutcracker by Shumka’. Photo by Dodd’s Eye Media.

Both Tarnawsky and Pacholok refer to their new roles as “dreams come true.” The former describes playing Clara as “exciting but nerve-wracking. I never expected it to be a possibility!”

What they both find particularly striking in the Ukrainian Nutcracker is, as Tarnawsky puts it, “the way the story continues through the entire show.” Ah, and there’s the music. The Tchaikovsky score that’s ringing in your head when you read this is woven with Ukrainian music, including Carol of the Bells, and a version of the signature Ukrainian Hopak happens at the end of Act II. The sustaining theme, as Pacholok puts it, is “the expression of joy through dance.” 

In the performing, says Tarnawsky, Ukrainian dance is a total immersion experience: “every single part of the body.” And the theatrical extravagance of the Shumka Nutcracker, including its deluxe costuming, says Pacholok, is “a way of bringing the audience into the story.”

PREVIEW

Canada’s Ukrainian Nutcracker

Presented by: Shumka

Directed by: Tasha Orysiuk

Choreographed by: Viktor Litvynov and John Pichlyk

Starring: Leda Tarnawsky, Nicolas, Pacholok, Joshua Pacholok, Annikka Dobko

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: Dec. 20 and 21

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca

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Yippee-ki-yay, you’ll get a kick out of Die Harsh: The Christmas Musical, a review

Posted on December 12, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Die Harsh: The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Cézanne Laurette

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The Christmas show is the natural home of the flashback, ’tis true. (I give you Scrooge’s night course in how to not be a relentless jerk).

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But it’s a special kind of Christmas show that opens with an amusingly truncated wartime tableau, gunshots, and a chorus of disaffected blonde Germanic henchmen who lament working a heist on Christmas Eve (no overtime). “I vish I could haff a normal Christmas.”

Normal? Ha!

Die Harsh: The Christmas Musical, back for a fourth Yuletide outing, is a loony, impressively ingenious double-parody of the quintessential blockbuster action thriller Die Hard and the quintessential Dickens ghost story A Christmas Carol. And it’s a marriage that’s damn funny, as I can testify from a return visit to the show — this year’s buffed-up edition directed by Sarah Dowling at the Orange Hub.   

The creation of resident Grindstone Theatre parodists Simon Abbott (music and lyrics) and Byron Martin (book and lyrics), who are the perpetrators of Hot Boy Summer and ThunderCats, Die Harsh comes with its own particular cross-branding of nostalgia.

It’s nerd fuel on all fronts. Take the score: Abbott and Martin are steeped in musical theatre; there are assorted references to Sweeney Todd, Annie, Les Mis, The Rocky Horror Show… The opening number is a spot-on amusingly choreographed James Bond pastiche with a German accent (“he just von’t … die harsh!”). And after that there are pure musical theatre numbers, power ballads, patter songs, rock, rap. Yup, the Ghost of Christmas Present (Alexis Hope) is a rapper. Hans Schmuber (David Findlay), the villainous, Scroogian leader of an international gang of German terrorists, sings his own take on Dr. Frank N Furter’s signature number: “ich bin ein sexy German terrorist.” The finale ensemble number is a lovely Christmas 11 o’clock number, “what is this feeling gaining way…? Christmas will never be the same”).

Evan Dowling in Die Harsh: The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Cézanne Laurette

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Speaking of heists, the set-up (and configuration of Camille Paris’s bi-level set, lighted by Scott Peters) is lifted from the blockbuster movie by smart and smart-ass budget theatre — which is part of the fun. Hans Schmuber and his gang, looking for a big haul, take corporate hostages in Origami Corp’s  L.A. skyscraper at the company Christmas Eve bash. And as ghosts arrive to take charge of Hans’s moral redemption, they use the elevator (an upgraded model from last year’s) that dominates the set. Expect the first when the elevator bell dings once.

Mhairi Berg, Evan Dowling, David Findlay, Alexis Hope in Die Harsh: The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Cézanne Laurette

The funniest prop is the tin foil vent in which NYPD cop John McWayne (Evan Dowling) hides out in Origami Tower when he arrives on the West Coast looking for his estranged wife Holly (Mhairi Berg). The second funniest is the cardboard limo in which the cool cat Ghost of Christmas Present (Alexis Hope) and Hans share a spliff with a very large teddy bear in the back seat.

To see a cast of six (extremely able-bodied) singer/dancers take on a zillion-dollar action thriller is to get a kick out of silly comic complication. The actors are in perpetual quick-change mode. Newcomers Alexis Hope and Beatrice Kwan hurl themselves nimbly into a ridiculous assortment of roles. Findlay is terrific as the suave, glinting villain, the “cunning Hun” with the showbiz gene and a line of Ebenezer dismissals: “I can’t afford to make idle henchmen happy.”

Mhairi Berg and Evan Dowling in Die Harsh: The Christmas Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo by Cézanne Laurette

And equally deadpan are Dowling, a hoot as the hard-ass Noo-Yawk cop/Elmer Fudd crossover, and Berg, a triple threat of remarkable comic versatility as a variety of plucky women including Holly, a news reporter, cops, orphans….  She shares a showstopper of an FBI tap number with Kwan (and you thought the FBI only tapped phones). Which makes Berg the only star of the season to wear both tap and ballet pointe shoes.

How this turns into Christmas Carol on Christmas morning is something you’ll have to see for yourself. Tiny Tim and Mr. Fezziwig have Die Harsh versions … but I’m not going to spoil their shameless entrances for you. Suffice to say that Martin and Abbott have great affection for music hall tradition, and its goofball arsenal of sight gags and mouldy jokes. Is Hans nothing but a common thief. “No, I’m an exceptional thief.”

Director Dowling has sharpened the edges of scenes that move both narratives forward, and also clarifying the spatial relationships between characters in inventively stylized theatrical ways.  Abbott himself leads the excellent band — Cooper Ray, Kessler Douglas, Curtis den Otter — from the keyboard on the roof of Origami Tower.

And they rock. Yippee-ki-yay, you’ll get a kick out of this exuberant Christmas special.

REVIEW

Die Harsh: The Christmas Musical

Theatre: Grindstone Theatre

Created by: Byron Martin and Simon Abbott

Directed by: Sarah Dowling (original director Byron Martin)

Starring: David Findlay, Evan Dowling, Mhairi Berg, Rain Matkin, Alexis Hope, Beatrice Kwan

Where: Orange Hub, 10045 156 St.

Running: through Dec. 28

Tickets: showpass.com

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What were their own favourite sketches in 8 years of Girl Brain? Ellie Heath reports back

Posted on December 10, 2025 by Liz Nicholls

Girl Brain, 2019: Ellie Heath, Caley Suliak, Alyson Dicey. Photo by Brianne Jang, bb ccollective photography

A Girl Brain postscript, from Ellie Heath

As Girl Brain prepares to open their finale show ‘Girl Brain, Actually’ at Theatre Network (Dec. 11 to 21) before their sabbatical, I wondered about their own favourite sketches in eight Girl Brain years of sketch comedy? Ellie Heath consulted with her cohorts Alyson Dicey and Caley Suliak. This is what she wrote….

Alyson’s Favourite Sketch: Magic School Bus

“Alyson wrote a parody of The Magic School Bus for one of our first shows. It’s an epic, cinematic, and way too technically complicated scene (which came to be Alyson’s specialty…).

In the scene, Miss Drizzle cheerfully drags her students on an educational “field trip” inside the body of an absent classmate, Donna—who’s staying home with mysterious “lady problems.” What starts as a goofy anatomy lesson about puberty quickly escalates into a chaotic emotional odyssey as they explore Donna’s firing neurons, budding romantic feelings, secret fears, and overwhelming teenage angst. The students are terrified while Miss Drizzle remains unnervingly upbeat, guiding them through hormonal chaos like it’s the world’s strangest science exhibit. In the end, they escape just as the metaphorical walls close in—learning that adolescence feels a lot like a haunted house full of emotions, confusion, and general “shit” coming at you.”

Caley’s Favourite Sketch: Lamp Mask

“Caley, as she often does, wrote a ‘weeping vag’ scene based verbatim on a real life experience. It was late at night, the character was at home doomscrolling, and after one too many glasses of white wine spritzers, she decided that a red light therapy mask from China would fix all of her problems. She entered in her card number, went to bed, and promptly forgot about her purchase for the next three weeks.

When the box arrived, she was surprised and thrilled to start her anti-aging journey. The packaging was gorgeous, but upon opening it, she discovered the mask itself was something straight out of a Star Wars nightmare gone wrong. It required three different cord types to make it work, rendering it nearly impossible to plug in anywhere in her apartment. After struggling for nearly an hour with different extension cords and outlets, she turned to the instructions, which were even more confusing…ex: “Step 5 – prohibit use of crowd, light allergic person. Use, or stop using.”

Dejected, she decided to chalk it up to a lesson learnt in online shopping. At least she hadn’t paid that much for it, right? Wrong. Tears welled in her eyes, as she checked the receipt. $278.

Lamp Mask has been used in many Girl Brain shows, and never for its intended purpose. It remains one of the most expensive Girl Brain props to date.”

Ellie’s Favourite Sketch: Herpes

“One of Ellie’s earliest sketches is Herpes. She wrote it shortly after receiving her own diagnosis, using comedy as a way to flip the script on the shame she initially felt. The scene centres on three women attempting to outdo each other with increasingly dramatic declarations of relationship commitment. Two friends go back and forth until they finally turn to the third woman, wondering why she hasn’t chimed in.

She calmly reveals that the only thing her boyfriend ever gave her was herpes. Instead of recoiling in horror, the friends are jealous, because, in their minds, she is now bound to her partner for life… courtesy of herpes.

Getting to perform the sketch with Alyson and Caley is always the cherry on top every single time it revisits the stage.”

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